BB Library

Just a quick notice that two of our topic experts, Michael Kolowich and Bill Ives have updated their respective Expert guides. The Digital TV & Video Production guide, by Michael Kolowich, covers the full chain of the video production and distribution process. You’ll find a rich and interesting set of pointers to blogs and other sources by an expert in the field.

And secondly, our Enterprise 2.0 guide by Bill Ives has also been thoroughly updated with new sources and information from the best people writing about how web 2.0 tools and models are being deployed inside the enterprise. It includes writers such as AndrewMcAfee, Stowe Boyd, John Hagel, and Dion Hinchcliffe.

We are always working with our Experts to keep their lists up to date and relevant, as we are looking for new Experts to expand our coverage. If you have ideas for new topics that we should offer - particularly if you can recommend a recognized expert in the field, please, let us know!

I just came across another detailed post commenting about BlogBridge and our expert guides, and I thought it would be of general interest, and at the same time it gives me a chance to explain some interesting things about BlogBridge and our Expert Guides.
The blog is “Sim’s Learning Collections”, where Ray Sims covers individual and organizational learning and other interesting topics, including some of this about BlogBridge:

“[snip…] … the reader looked so much better than Newzie (history) that for the second time this month I absorbed the disruption of changing my day-to-day feed reader, this time to BlogBridge. [snip…]” (from Hello New Friend Redux (Feedreader)

You should read the post though because Ray has a list of positives and negatives about BlogBridge, and I agree with every one of them.

What I want to talk about here are Ray’s comments about our Expert Topic Guides. To paraphrase from the post:

• The Expert Topic Guides are a good idea, and an “excellent idea for a newbie to a topic to get going with a core selection.
• But, the fact that they are a single person’s opinion means that if you are at that person’s mercy.
• Ray suggest some ways to have more community involvement in defining or changing or rating the expert guides.

All three are fair points. Here’s the scoop:

The idea of using human experts instead of some bot is as follows: The world of blogs is not at all uniform in its coverage, and in fact many many blogs are about a whole bunch of relatively unrelated topics that while they are very good, they aren’t focused enough for a collection like ours.

So our belief is that for now (like the very early days of Yahoo) what is needed are people with some kind of ‘right to an opinion’ to help us find the best content in each topic. So I stick by the view that this is a worthwhile approach.

But this is a fair point: some of our experts update their list much more often than others. Some of them are just more credible experts. And in some topics (e.g. branding) are sliced very thin (”The Future of Branding” and “Branding Strategy”)

It also makes good sense to allow the users of the information to give feedback, for example: Thumbs up/down on a guide or an expert, a way to suggest a new feed for an expert Guide, and even a way to suggest a new, better guide on a topic, or to suggest a new topic to cover. These are all excellent ideas which we will be pursuing.

We are always working hard to recruit new Topic Experts, and so we are constantly expanding. Sometimes we find someone who has real expertise in something related but not identical to one we already have. We tend to bring them into the tent because for now, more is better.

So in summary:

• We believe in having expert guides with human faces curating our lists.
• It is true that we have focused more on bringing new faces into the tent than on refining, improving and assessing the ones we already have.
• We can and will do better in allowing community feedback about both our content and our experts.

As I mentioned the other day, we are going for more better expert guides. This time it’s my pleasure to tell you that D’Arcy Norman, an expert and quite prolific blogger, has agreed to curate our Expert Guide on “Edublogs.”

D’Arcy is a software developer at the Learning Commons, which is a service department at The University of Calgary. His current primary role is as a software developer on the Pachyderm project, but he also gets to spend some time playing with new technologies to support teaching and learning - including, but not limited to weblogs, wikis, podcasting, rss, and a few others.

Here’s a link to D’Arcy’s own blog, and a link to his BlogBridge Expert Guide on Edublogs! As you can see, D’Arcy thinks it’s cool to be a Topic Expert, and while he might not be comfortable being called an expert, anyone who is mentioned 440,000 times in Google must be something

Oh, and D’Arcy, I too would love to have you do a screencast of how you use BlogBridge.

Technorati Tags: feedlibrary, education

First of all, BlogBridge:Library (BBL) is fully independent of BlogBridge. It will work for anyone, no matter what aggregator they use, or even if they don’t use an aggregator at all.

Period.

BlogBridge can use a private instance of BBL

In the BlogBridge aggregator, there are several features that provide ’suggestions’ for Feeds to subscribe to, Reading Lists to subscribe to, and Feeds to put in a new Guide. In each case, BlogBridge can be set up to use your own customized (organizational) instance of BlogBridge:Library, and so you get to decide what suggestions are offered to your users: they will be the ones in your BlogBridge:Library.

Using BlogBridge to manage BBL

Of course you can manage BBL from it’s web based interface. But if you are a BlogBridge user, you can publish a Guide as a Reading List, and in turn use that Reading List to populate a folder in BBL. The effect of this is that you can simply drag and drop your feeds to manage the Guide, and in turn the folder in BBL. A lot simpler.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, blogbridgelibrary

Feed Library (FL) is a software product that we announced on June 8th.

“BlogBridge’s 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.” (from BlogBridge Library announcement)

We envision two major scenarios for FL, internal (inside the firewall) and public (outside the firewall.) The basic mission for FL remains the same, but each scenario has some specific characteristics to consider.

Scenario 1: A company or organization who wants to get their users into taking advantage of the world of blog and feed content out there. It would like to offer them a nicely organized set of feeds and reading lists so they don’t have to chase around to find the good stuff. Typically this would be inside the firewall because the customer considers this information confidential.

Scenario 2: The organization wants to provide such a directory or library publicly, for example a non profit, a newspaper, a small business. Again they would be interested if they needed a way to show off a fairly large set of feeds, reading lists and podcasts in a nicely searchable and browsable web site (or section of their web site.)

Note: We provide just the software to do this, the customer would typically be providing the content. We will run on just about any server that can host a web site.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, library, blogbridgelibrary

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 BlogBridge: 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.)

BlogBridge:Library (BBL) 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 BBL 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 BBL reflects what’s of interest to your users.

There is a whole lot of flexibility built into BBL.  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 BBL 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.

Technorati Tags: enterprise, library