FAQ: Feed Library

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

“Feed Library 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.

BlogBridge’s Feed Library (BBL) is a software product that we announced on June 8th. 

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

Let’s take a look at the major features of BBL. As you can see there are many interesting capabilities, all of which will be available in the first release. And we have even more coolness in the plan.

• Categories and subcategories - All the feeds, reading lists and podcasts are organized in a fully customizable multi-level category structure. Each category can have a distinct owner to whom control has been delegated by the librarian.
• Cross Listing - As not everything wants to fit in a hierarchy, any category can be cross listed elsewhere in the library in one or more other categories.
• Built in announcements blog with rss feed - As we hope a customer’s Feed Library will be an active and dynamic place, we have provided a blog where the librarians can post announcements and other information for the visitors.
• All categories and subcategories available as OPML Reading Lists - OPML is generated dynamically to allow any capable aggregator to subscribe to all the feeds in a certain category and stay up to date with any changes made there by the librarian.
• Comprehensive user management - User profiles contain their name, email, photo and access level. Access levels are: “Administrator”, “Librarian”, “Author” and “Reader”
• Bulk import of account info for enterprise integration - BBL allows the administrator to bulk add a large number of accounts to facilitate deployment inside organizations.
• Organizations - Each user can be the member of some organization. Organizations are defined by the librarians.
• Recommendations - The librarian can assign some folder to contain recommended feeds for each organization. When a user logs in, they are shown whatever recommendations exist for them.
• Top 10 and Top 100 List - BBL automatically monitors the number of users looking at any feed and dynamically compute a Top 10 and Top 100 list, each of which is available as an OPML Reading List.
• Tree and List display of categories - Librarians can choose to display the contents of a category in either a tree or list display.
• Ajax animation and asynchronous display of user interface - This is just coool!
• And those are just the major features

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.

BlogBridge’s Feed Library (BBL) is a software product that we announced on June 8th.

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

At this moment we have about a dozen trials going on with people all over the world. It looks like we are getting a lot of interest from people in academia and other non-profit organizations, and they tend to have roles in library-like organizations. Surprise surprise

By the way, if you are interested in playing with Feed Library, please send us an email requesting a trial. Or you can just check out the
Feed Library “Playpen” which is a free for al where anyone can be a librarian and add content. Every night though, we reset it back to an initial state.

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.

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