Do you want to see ‘threading’ in BlogBridge
I came across a really interesting thread about an aggregator feature referred to as ‘threading’. Threading is a feature, available in SharpReader and RSS Bandit which displays a list of other, related, items, indented, under a certain item. Sounds like a very useful feature. Here’s what Jack Vinson says about it:
“Why I like threading in my reader
I came upon an interesting blog-based discussion rather late, as I have been busy with Thanksgiving and other activities. But when I came upon it, I had a good chunk of the blog discussion right at my fingertips, thanks to SharpReader’s threading feature.” (from Knowledge Jolt with Jack)
In BlogBridge we display the article content right with the article (at least by default.) The way threading would work in BlogBridge is that at the bottom of an Article there would be a collapse/expand control, which would reveal a list of links to other related articles.
What are related articles? The simplest definition would be that they have one or more links in common. One could imagine more elaborate notions of related article, but that would be a good start.
What do you think, BlogBridge users?
Technorati Tags: blogbridge
threading sounds great.
“What are related articles? The simplest definition would be that they have one or more links in common. One could imagine more elaborate notions of related article, but that would be a good start.”
in addition to using ‘links in common,’ what about using ‘tags in common’?
there ought to be a date range feature to make sure the related links are current.
Comment by Timothy Post — December 12, 2005 @ 9:27 pm
BlogBridge Treading
Pito Salas asks at the Blogbridge Weblog: Do you want to see ‘threading’ in BlogBridge . The answer is most certainly yes, but the more interesting question is the definition of related blog entries:
What are related articles? The simplest definiti
Trackback by Software Documentation Weblog — December 13, 2005 @ 4:35 am
Agreed about tags in common, and about the date cutoff.
Also, note that there can be multiple levels to this, but we think we want to display a simple flat list of related articles, ordered by ‘relevance’.
Relevance is some combination of how new the article is and how strong a match it is, and the rating of the feed it lives in… So a related article in a 5 star feed shows up above a 2 star feed.
It is also important that you be able to mark an article and all it’s related article ‘read’ in a single gesture.
How does that sound?
Comment by Pito Salas — December 13, 2005 @ 9:39 am
Pito:
I think you’re onto something here. The concept of relevance is also present in blogbridge’s dynamic opml reading lists.
Relevance is the result of good vetting. Since the opml reading lists indirectly use folksonomies, I think that the discussion of relevance in relation to threaded articles should also look towards them as well.
Therefore, perhaps the common denominator might focus on feeds in common to other users opml reading lists? Does the relevant article come from a feed which is common across similiarly configured reading lists?
I point to del.icio.us voyeuristic structure as a model. It too has a flat list.
Perhaps folks could “tag” there groups/folders within their reading list with key words? The first filter in the vetting process of matching articles might be for blogbridge’s software to look to those groups in other reading lists with the same tags.
I need to think some more about what the next filter would be. Very interesting topic.
BTW- assuming relevance can be understood, an autodiscovery feature for rss url subscription would be convenient.
Your thoughts?
Comment by Timothy Post — December 13, 2005 @ 9:30 pm
My vision for this would be some combination of traditional threading (A refers to B; B refers to C and D), as is done in SharpReader and RSSBandit, PLUS some kind of BlogBridge smartfeed.
For example, wouldn’t it be nice to have all the articles about Company X’s new feature grouped together — and have BlogBridge be smart about doing the grouping.
SharpReader is already close to using tags for threading, though it really uses the link within the body of the post (if two posts shared a link to the same tagspace). I could see using the category information in the web feed too.
Relevance is strongest if there is a direct link between items. Then if they share common tags. Then if there is a textual “match.” Of course the textual match is going to be difficult to do well.
Comment by Jack Vinson — December 14, 2005 @ 10:54 am
Rojo: functionality and attention data
I’ve decided to give Bloglines a break, and give Rojo a go.
Bloglines just haven’t been listening to their users like all good web 2.0 companies do…maybe they are concentrating on delivery and quality of results, because we hear the…
Trackback by Library clips — January 20, 2006 @ 1:08 am
I would kill for this feature in BlogBridge!
Comment by Manpreet Singh — February 8, 2006 @ 4:47 pm
I just tried this feature in SharpReader and it ABSOLUTELY ROCKS! I’d kill to have the same implemented in BlogBridge!
Comment by Manpreet Singh — February 8, 2006 @ 6:24 pm