I am really pleased to be able to tell you about the fruits of our labors over the last several months, a new software product we call Feed Library (BBL for now.) Over the coming days and weeks I will be posting lots more detail about it because there is a lot to it. Consider this the unveiling and opening salvo of information.

Background: Organizations are continuing to embrace the world of RSS, blogging and feeds as a new model for learning, sharing and distributing information. There are pilot projects going on all over where users, members of the organization, employees are being given aggregators or taught to use the ones they already have (in Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari etc.)

They are being shown how to use them to gather information and keep up with what’s going on. This comes from the realization that lots of mission critical and professionally useful information is available in more convenient and timely form through such feeds. The users eyes are popping when they see the power of this stuff. This is happening all around.

Invariably one of the very first questions that comes from these new users is: “This rss stuff is cool, but how can I find the good stuff? What do you recommend? How do we know what to look at?” That’s where BlogBridge:LIbrary comes in.

Here is a crucial point that many people will miss but is critical to understand BBL: BlogBridge:Library is a piece of software that you can install on your own server, inside your firewall. It’s not the content of the library (the books,) it’s the software to organize the library (the building.)

Feed Library (FL) creates a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the ‘store‘ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here’s the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.

Librarians from your own organization organize FL according to what makes sense to your own users. For example:

• a section for Marketing, Engineering, Human Resources and Manufacturing.
• Or perhaps in a different kind of organization, there would be sections for Biology, Medicine, Technology, Management, and Research.
• Or again a different kind of organization, there might be sections for Policy, Government, Public Relations, etc.

You get the idea: the organization of your FL reflects what’s of interest to your users.

There is a whole lot of flexibility built into FL.  Individual users can be given areas of library to manage, there is a place for biographical information about librarians, there is a built in announcements blog where you can communicate with your clients, you can completely change the look of the site to match your organizational web site, you can see what the most popular feeds are, and lots more. And of course, there’s RSS and OPML everywhere. So FL will play really nicely with your aggregators and related technology.

This post is already much too long and I know there are lots of questions that I have left unanswered. More will be posted in the coming days so please keep an eye out. If you can’t wait, email me directly at rps@blogbridge.com and I will be glad to answer any questions.

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