Archive for the ‘Structured Blogging’ Category
Promising Services
I wrote in the past that the challenge for data aggregator services, like Travbuddy.com, is to collect the data directly from Blogs and not to be depended on the users to submit data directly to the service provider. Recently I was exposed to two interesting approaches to handle this challenge: The first one, uPress, is a plugin to Wordpress by Asaf Arkin that allow you to create listing naturally in your blog post. I like this plugin for it simplicity and for its usefulness as demonstration of structure blogging. The following screenshot can demonstrate the simplicity of this plugin.
The second interesting approach represent by the new company edgeio.com which collecting listing by crawling RSS feeds looking for the tag word listing. Obviously edgio.com offers more than that, but the idea in it base is wonderfully simple and useful.
“ edgeio constantly monitors RSS enabled websites - today we are monitoring more than 25 million sites! Any item tagged "listing" and included in an RSS feed will be published on the edgeio website and through the edgeio network. Here’s how it works:
1. We monitor every RSS feed looking for posts having the tag "listing". Using Ping Servers this process happens within seconds of new content being published. Click here to see how Ping Servers work and which Ping Servers edgeio supports.
2. New items found with the "listing" tag are automatically added to edgeio where they can be discovered using search or by navigating our real-time taxonomy. The edgeio taxonomy leverages all tags used to describe an item and a concept called Clustered Tagging. Click here to learn more about edgeio’s taxonomy and clustered tagging.
3. Using trackbacks and comments, publishers are notified when their items are added to edgeio. Click here to learn more about trackbacks. 4. Publishers can claim their blogs using the edgeio website. Once claimed, items can be enhanced by adding additional tags, including metadata like price, and specifying where the item is located. Click here to learn more about claiming blogs. 5. Content published through edgeio is automatically made available to our partners through an open set of APIs. This provides even more exposure to publishers. 6. Users who discover an item on edgeio can contact the publisher via email. edgeio creates an anonymous email address for each item in order to protect publishers from spam. Click here to learn more about anonymous emails.”
Managing The Content Flood
How do you manage the flood of content? Never in my life was I exposed to so much content about so many interesting things. How do you evaluate it? How do you filter? How often do you read each one of the different feeds? I actually have no answers, at least not good ones. But I’ll try to describe here some methods I developed and what tools I wish I had.
The way I gather content feeds, and in the definition of content feeds I include any source of information delivered via RSS – Blogs, newspapers etc, is viral. While reading one source I will pick, through links and recommendations, additional sources which I will add to my blogroll. Every content feed then will stay for a while until my periodic clean up session – when I’m evaluating the feed and make a decision if to delete it from my list. Although this approach is time consuming it allows me to explore many options and to develop by my own judgment list of trusted and credited content feeds.
Although I tried, and keep trying, many types of RSS readers I couldn’t find any that was better the Sage . Sage is extremely simple and acts as a sidebar in my Firefox . Since my content consuming and browsing are basically the same activity I have no reason to separate them. Any other reader is either too separated from the browser or not as real time as I want it (see for example Google’s Reader and Bloglines ). However, Sage is extremely simple and offers no way to aggregate posts or filter them.
One application that came close second to Sage is BlogBridge . BlogBridge offers the grouping and filtering I would like dealing with large amount of content feed. However after trying blogbridge for two days I decided to not use it since jump between my content application and the browser was too much of a hassle. If blogbridge will combine browser in the application (and mozilla is my preferred one) I’ll be happy to give it another try.
My requirement from my content application is very simple: make my life easier, not more complicated. My top most requirement are: It is necessary for this application to be embedded with browser and It should provide sophisticated filtering; for example when I’m at work and I have 10 minutes at noon I would like to see only what I consider hot news, in the morning I would like to read essays or more in depth content etc.
In the meantime I’m drowning.
Structured Blogging
Yesterday I wrote about extracting relevant data from the blogs, in today’s post I’ll write about initiative that is going to make that much easier. Structure Blogging dealing with tagging the information posted on blogs in
From the user perspective Structure Blogging will enable more flexibility in the design of the blogs forms. The user will be able to add specific field to different categories or to apply different styles to each category. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The real abilities laying in what search engine and aggregators can do with this XML. Categorizing in this model will allow specific services to collect and analyze content from blogs in very efficient way. The guys from companies like Travbuddy, for example, can use it to gather content about Trips and sites around the world and process it with useful service.
I looked at site of a company that is experimenting with Structure Blogging. They are trying to build the blogs for corporations as well as individual and making cool things with the flexible user interfaces and with what they call datablogging. I mostly like the ROI analysis, this only demonstrate that some people learn the lesson of Bubble 1.0. I’ll follow the progress reger.com making with great interest.
Technorati Tags: Structure Blogging , Web 2.0, Reger, Travbuddy, ROI, Bubble