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  • 2 min read

[BlogBridge Tip] New Weekly Build Available

We just put up a new weekly build of BlogBridge with many new features. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

  • Community Fields. Right click on a Feed, and choose Feed Properties. Click on the community tab, where you will see our initial pair of fields, Country and Tags. What's interesting is that whatever you set for these two fields will be seen by all other users. If you know the country where this feed originates you can set it. And if you feel like tagging (classifying) this feed you can do it too.

  • Discover Other Feeds(on the Tools menu) is greatly enhanced (and there is more to come!) First of all, some people are not sure what this discovery business is about, so a quick intro. It's kind of one of the raisons d'etre of BlogBridge - helping you discover other feeds that you might find useful. There are several strategies, the first two which are available in this release. In both cases BlogBridge will analyze articles in feeds, looking for references to other feeds, on the assumption that if you like this feed, chances are good that you'd be interested in feeds that this one refers to. You can either analyze one particular feed, or all the feeds in a certain guide. The process runs in background. Whenever an interesting feed is discovered, BlogBridge can either tell you proactively or simply add the discovered feed to a list (Tools/Show Discovered Feeds…)

  • Look and feel. We've given the whole application some more polish, especially on Mac OS X. The most visible change is in the toolbar and icons available.

Those are only some of the enhancements that you will find in the latest weekly release. Check it out! p.s. If you are not sure which one you are running, you can refer to the title bar. You will either see "BlogBridge Weekly" or "BlogBridge Beta". And if you click on the preceding two links you will get the corresponding applications.

  • 1 min read

VCs and Aggregators

An interesting article in News.Com:

As the number of blogs, news services and other syndicated sources of online information balloons, a new crop of start-ups has emerged promising to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

Very relevant to BlogBridge, of course.

  • 1 min read

Learning from others – Making choices

Dave Winer makes a point which I totally agree with: it is important to learn from what has come before - or more more provocatively - to steal good ideas wherever you can find them. And secondly that the only way to do that is to make it a point of being very familiar with other products, other approaches. As a designer of software I certainly believe in that. In fact,I have lived that over and over again: Improv learned from 1-2-3, eRoom learned from Lotus Notes, etc. And similarly, BlogBridge has begged, borrowed and stolen from all sorts of other applications, including NetFlix, Del.icio.us, Wiki's, numerous email clients and on and on. And not by accident but by conciously studying what others have done. That said, there are certain design choices which you can't straddle: they are fundamental - you have to pick. To bring it home with an example, many people far prefer web based aggregators (like Bloglines) over client based aggregators (like BlogBridge.) Each brings their advantages and will appeal to a certain subset of users, and this is important : they will be a turn-off for another subset of users. As a designer you have to make such choices while knowing that you will alienate some of the users you would hope to get, but counting on the fact that there is enough diversity in taste and work style to allow more than one model succeed.

  • 2 min read

Social Networks and RSS Aggregators

Dave Winer says that there's a bit of buzz about social networks and RSS aggregators. I haven't seen it myself, but I am glad to see it brought up, because it's one of the things that's evolving nicely in BlogBridge and will be available in the next weekly build. What do I mean by "Social Networks and RSS Aggregators"? Briefly, here's what we are doing with in in BlogBridge:

  • Any Feed being accessed through BlogBridge can be given a rating (one through five stars) by a user.

  • Also, the user can attach one or more Tags to the Feed.

  • Also, the user can indicate, if they happen to know, where the country of origin for that feed is.

The companion (free) BlogBridge Service receives this information, and collates and aggregates it in useful ways:

  • For example, the Country of Origin set by one user is visible (wiki- like) by all other users, the assumption being simply that people won't hack this, but if they happen to know that the blog comes for example from Iran, they can share that with the rest. This is a useful way to share factual, but not easily ascertained information.

  • The tags users assign to a certain feed are also shared (del.icio.us- like) with all other users. The natural way of slicing and dicing will allow a user to see for example all feeds that the BlogBridge community has assigned the 'International' tag or the 'Secuirity' tag. This is a useful way to discover feeds that you would be interested in.

  • Finally the stars rating of a feed will be used to help users figure out (c ollaborative-filtering-like) which feeds are good and not so good.

We're not pretending we are curing cancer here, but there are some cool ideas that we are experimenting with which may or may not lead to something really useful. FWIW.

  • 2 min read

Switcher’s Log, Part 3: What I miss from my PC Days

In the continuing saga of the switch from Windows XP to Mac OS X, here is where we find our hero…. I have more or less gotten all the applications I use over onto the Mac. Almost all of them. I will be forced to leave behind Microsoft Money, X1 and Plaxo. Of all the stuff I ran on the PC, those are the only three that I miss. And in each case I can get by. Microsoft Money - well there's Quicken for Mac, which is analogous. But transferring the data over seems like it will be a huge mess costing time, frustration and in the end producing an unsatisfactory result. X1 - My wonderful desktop search. I already miss it. My only consolation is that the next release of OS X will include something called "SpotLight" which is supposed to be totally amazing and will change my life. Plaxo - Who would have thunk? But this business of typing and maintaining people's contact information by hand can become pretty tiresome. I'd settle for a Mac version of GetAnagram.com, but that of course doesn't exist. Thinking about what software exists and doesn't exist on Mac, and why, can be sobering. I don't know the figures, but let's say that Mac accounts for 5 or so percent of the PC Installed base. Put that way, it makes you feel like your brandy new shiny new computer has moved you to a small, underpopulated corner of the computing universe where the buses don't run. Will GetAnagram or Plaxo ever have a Mac OS X version? Not likely. What computer will I be using 10 years from now?

  • 1 min read

I used to have comments enabled on this blog until I got overrun by link spam. With comments my readers could post responses to my Blog musings. I've since turned of commenting on this site. What is link spam? Suddenly one day you realize that some of your Blog articles have a very long list of random comments attached to them, each including a link to some random site. Who does this? Link Spammers. Why do they do it? To drive up the page rank of PPR Sites. (PPR? Pills, Porn and Casinos). Here is one link spammers story.

  • 1 min read

Too much information!

It's one thing to be interested in blogs so you can read and learn and become aware of new ideas. But when it comes to joining into the discussions, watch out! No it's more than the well known problem of following discussion threads across blogs. It's just the ridiculous amount of stuff that gets written on any hot topic (like Folksonomies, for example.) If you want to contribute a half- intelligent idea to the debate, the number of links to follow and essays to read is very intimidating, and certainly the odds of uttering an original thought approach zero. So I'll stop here.

  • 1 min read

Tags, Meta Tags, Meta Data, Yada Yada

It is of course impossible to keep up with the avalanche of discussion about the topic of tags, folksonomies , tagonomies. David Weinberger points to a (beautifully designed : love those pictures!) essay on the topic from burningbird with lots of good quotes and pointers to other essays. Wow, a lot to read! In my mind the crucial thing about this new approach classification is that it gets around the achilles heel of the traditional approach of meta tagging or controlled vocabularies, which is, that most people just don 't do it. There are some special circumstances when a fixed list (or hierarchy) of categories or topics or tags will work for most people. But in the majority of cases, a fixed list of categories to apply to some item of information just causes frustration ("the category I am looking for isn't there") or confusion ("What does tag X even mean?") The end result is that information just gets mis-tagged or is left un-tagged. This is where so called folksonomies are so superior. Yes, often information will get misclassified. Whether this is so often as to render the whole system useless is an open question, which Technorati Tags, Del.icio.us and others will help us discover. p.s: One of the dangers to commenting on this discussion is that it is basically impossible to read all the essays and follow all the links and so you risk repeating what was already said. I believe that Clay Shirky has made essentially the same point. At least I am in good company.