As a follow-up to yesterday's post exploring the possibilities of Technorati's new "personal tags," I have doctored up an existing tag-maker bookmarklet (thanks, Fritz) to add a Technorati username. Ran into a problem including the bookmarklet direct in blogger, so it is hosted on Geocities. From the Geocities page, drag the bookmarklet link to your browser's links bar. You may find the bookmarklet too long for the bar. If so, try running it in blummy.

This is a bookmarklet that points to material from your personal account, so you'll need to edit it to include your username. Right click the bookmarklet on your toolbar, scroll through the "properties" until you see the word "username" (no quotes) and replace it with your technorati signon.

This will generate technorati tags, with the rel=tag attribute, but with an additional modifier in the URL ?user=username to pull search results only from your claimed blogs.

As Tor points out in the comments on yesterday's post, this isn't going to be much use to you if you have multiple claimed blogs... but if you've only got one, this might substitute for categories quite nicely. Please try it out, & hit the comments to let me know how it is working for you.

One more thing. I sort of missed a big thing out of my how-to the other day because I didn't see it & understand it 'til much later. In my blurb on profile cards I noted the "recommendation plaques"

In a great "find related blogs" move, each profile card also includes a number of small "preview plaques" (that's what they should call them, too!) for sites that Kinja considers to be related. They're calling these suggested relatives "kin". Plaques with a lilac header are ones that you already sub to. Plaques with a grey header are related sites that you might not have found yet, and that might be great additions to your digest. The presentation of traffic stats and related blogs on these pages strikes me as a great step forward, a powerful new feature, and a reason to choose kinja as your reader of choice. Check out the profile card for Freshblog.

Well hey, way down at the bottom of the profile page there, is an OPML logo, & you can export the Kinja "kin" recommendations as OPML and sub to all of them in one easy move. Pretty slick.

John at Library Clips points out that, with the addition of in-profile tag clouds, Technorati is only one step away from bypassing Del.icio.us entirely & allowing categories without bookmarking.

Technorati has a tag cloud for your profile, clicking on a tag from here will list your posts within that tag…so the next step is to put a tag cloud on your blog. This way people can browse your blog by tag…even though it takes them to a page outside your blog, who cares, it is good enough for now…only if Technorati would provide this code…anybody listening.

John points out that Technorati Tag URL's can now be made to point to a specific user account by including the username.... This is worth experimenting with. Here's a set of generic non-del.icio.us technorati tags to which I have manually appended the extra code ?user=jrfj44:



Let's see what happens when we publish & click!! UPDATE: Looks like it works great. Will try to amend the technorati tagging bookmarklet & offer it as a tool asap.

What I find most interesting about this is that each service, starting from different and distinct missions, & with distinct tools, seems to be creeping in terms of services offered, & that the overlap is beginning. Will 2006 be the year of the comprehensive blog support site? A single service / brand that offers tagging, social bookmarking, search, inbound tracking, and perhaps a Firefox easy-posting add-on? I think there's room here for one service to stake a claim as "blog-support service #1", at least 'til the next trend comes along & moves the goalposts.... Thoughts?

Zoli Erdos has revived the "tracking the whole conversation" theme that is pervasive in our corner of the blogosphere (do spheres have corners?) There is plenty going on in this regard.

To begin with, Stephen at Singpolyma has been doing some great work with both ends of the comment. First, Commentosphere continues to develop, and offer a way for us to bookmark comments that we write on other people's blogs into a central location. The latest inroads there, aside from a possible name-change, involve the development of an interface that will import more data from the source comment and require less in the way of manual transfer. The more information that the service grabs, (and the less it "interrupts" the flow of reading, commenting & posting) the more likely it is to be used, I think. The comprehensive import function will require blog owners to add a script to their sites, enabling the cross-posting of all comments to commentosphere. In a sense, then, this becomes a re-sorter / indexer of available comments, & instead of presenting them chronologically by post as on the source blog, Commentosphere would file them by author, or tag, or whatever.

In addition to enabling the manipulation of the comments that you leave on other blogs, Stephen has also developed a Blogger Comment Syndication Service to allow the output of a comprehensive comment feed from a blogger blog. See the Singpolyma Tech Blog:

For blogs that are set up per the instructions, comments are archived by the service as they come in, the service being notified of new comments via email, thus enabling the service to include new comments to old posts in the feed (unlike the Farrago Recent Comments Hack, which only shows new comments to posts on the main page).

These tools will integrate a user's comments into the stream of their activity in the blogosphere. The next level of tools being developed for blogs seem to be designed to bind sites together more tightly, and to draw information that is peripheral in terms of "virtual geography" into a more visible and accessible location. This is an interesting process, of which more in the coming weeks, I think... For my own ten cents... I wonder if we'll reach a point at which blogs no longer have sites, and authors simply publish feeds that are selectively grabbed & formatted to suit the reader. Then this will truly be a feedosphere....

A Consuming Experience:

The free "Keep Current Time" userscript by Jasper of Browservulsel for Firefox and Greasemonkey users has been updated so that the "Post and Comment Options" on the Create Post page, which Blogger recently hid away, will always be visible when you're posting.

Filed in: greasemonkey, blogger-hacks, blogging, blogtech

Proliferating the new icons, Matt Brett brings us Feedicons.com:

The package on the new site has some new goodies. A couple new formats (EPS and PDF) as well as some pre-saved image formats (PNG, JPG and GIF) are included. An SVG version is on it’s way. I’ve created one and sent it out to a couple people to test before it’s included. There’s also legacy versions of the AI and EPS formats that go back to Illustrator 10. If there are other formats you’d like to see, or sizes for that matter, feel free to suggest them.

Filed in: feeds, readers, icons, graphics, webtech

I have taken some advice from Google Blogoscoped: "I hope that when people adopt the new icon they still put the word “Feed” or similar next to it, or else we end up with mystery meat navigation."

Thus the new icon makes an appearance in the freshblog sidebar, with some explanatory text to keep it company. Messy, I know, and probably to be revised, but the new graphic is there, at least.

Filed in: feeds, readers, webtech, blogtech, graphics

Web Comments is a slick Firefox extension showing blog backlinks to the website you're viewing. It was only a short time before splogs started linking to popular websites so that they'll show up in Web Comments. At Google I see backlinks from a religious apologist, an AdSense site that clumsily scrapes news with no theme that I can detect and another scraper AdSense site with VOIP advertising.

Yahoo has several links from SEO sites. They're not talking about Yahoo; I believe they're linking to Yahoo purely for the purpose of getting seen in Web Comments. In this image, I've highlighted the spammy backlinks.


I'm seeing similar results at other popular websites. Web Comments is enabling a new kind of spamvertising. It's a kind of site-specific AdWords campaign except you don't pay for the clicks. It's kind of ironic that Google is the company that created and promoted this extension.

The Blog Herald:

the plugin will be updated to include the ability to post Technorati tags according to Nick Wilson.

Hopefully we'll have the ability to change the URL's in the tag links? Then this will be a powerful tool for the tags & categories method. Let's see how the new feature works out, & whether we can adapt it for our purposes.

Update: The default URL points to technorati, & there doesn't seem to be an easy way to switch it yet. Have posted to the forums asking for that, & received a somewhat favorable reply. Interesting.....

Filed in: technorati, tags, tagging, firefox, performancing

In a comment thread on Micropersuasion about the usefulness of mail to rss conversion services, Shantanuo has proposed another method for hacking together a comment feed.

If you are using Blogger.com, go to Settings - Comments - and type your rss open email address in the field called "Comment Notification Address". Or create a google group for the purpose and add your_blog_name@googlegroups.com email address. Each public google group apart from archiving posts, publish a number of feeds to choose from like RSS, Atom (15 or 50 messages).

So you can repost your comments in your own little Google Group and then offer the feed as a comment feed. I wonder if it formats more neatly than the mailbucket method? If you try it, let me know how it works for you.

Filed in: comment-feed, feeds, blogger-hacks

So, Kinja's new features. I have some time to play today & have spent it exploring what's new.

Upsides, of which there are many:

Profile Cards. This is (at least in my mind) a work of genius. Not only can you syndicate a site's content using Kinja, but you can now view traffic information, analyze links, track inbounds, see the site on the wayback machine, translate the site, and label the site with tags, all from the profile.



In a great "find related blogs" move, each profile card also includes a number of small "preview plaques" (that's what they should call them, too!) for sites that Kinja considers to be related. They're calling these suggested relatives "kin". Plaques with a lilac header are ones that you already sub to. Plaques with a grey header are related sites that you might not have found yet, and that might be great additions to your digest. The presentation of traffic stats and related blogs on these pages strikes me as a great step forward, a powerful new feature, and a reason to choose kinja as your reader of choice. Check out the profile card for Freshblog.

There's more to this upgrade than the profile card, though.

The Kinja front page is now a v. clean search box with an alphabetical list of hot topics to pre-select if you're so inclined. All the functions are available from a window-top toolbar, with links to your digest, profile, tools and site help. Let's tour the options:

In tools, to begin with, you can manage your favorites from a new window made up of site preview plaques These show title, favicon & site description, & when clicked, go to the site's profile card. You can filter your subscriptions to display only those that have new posts from the past hour, day, week, or that post "infrequently." From the bottom of the page you can export your subs as an OPML file, which will open in a new window.

Back to the tools menu: There's a new Kinja Bookmarklet (added to my Blummy toolbox) which now has two functions. First, you can use it to display the Kinja profile card for any site that is indexed. It will also prompt you to add the site to your digest. I have yet to try it, having never successfully used the previous incarnation of the bookmarklet, but I'm optimistic that the made-over version will get the job done.

Add favorites looks pretty much unchanged, which is fine with me. The form is a "five at a time" URL input form, & will add sites to your digest. The advantage of Kinja over some other readers, especially if you're just getting your feet wet in the world of feeds and readers, is that they use autodiscovery tags to find the feed, and so you can input the site URL rather than having to mess about to find the feed URL.

Sharing is an option that allows you to hide either your whole digest or material marked with selected tags from public view.

Import provides a means to bring in an OPML file of subs, and also provides a brief guide to OPML syntax in case you're techy enough to edit or build your own file.

There's help available for the new features, as well as for the service in general. As I said, I think the profile cards are inspired, and I'm glad Kinja is back.

Filed in: kinja, readers, rss, feeds, tags, tagging, webtech, blogtech

Darren Rowse at Problogger asks 'when is a clipmark a copyright violation?: "I don’t mind excerpts of my content being reproduced but to have a full page reproduced goes too far. This is why I have partial RSS feeds. To set up a service that has at it’s heart the reproduction of others work seems to me to be an unwise move - I can just imagine the legal fights they will have on their hands."

See especially the comments for related issues, and for feedback from Clipmarks founder Eric Goldstein. When is a public bookmark an unauthorised reproduction? Good (and sticky) question!!

Filed in: clipmarks, feeds, readers, bookmarking,

Chris Pirillo: "We are now letting you... anybody design Gada.be with CSS. Submissions will be added to a site-wide, dynamic style-switcher that will let Gada.be users see Gada.be their way - literally! Here's what to do: Download the Gada.be design template and use your favorite CSS editor to whip up a spiffy new look for our site. We'd recommend TopStyle for Windows. Send your changes to css@gada.be. Wait for your (qualifying) submission to be added to the list. Once added, all visitors will have the option to see and use it immediately.Get traffic - with full name recognition and a link back to your Web site."

Filed in: gada.be, css, webtech, design, search

Just as I was reaching my threshold for being ticked off & seriously contemplating a permanent flip to Google Reader, Kinja is back and they're back strong, with an extreme makeover and some great new features. (Please forgive the reproduction of the entire list... I'm a fan, not a plagiarist!)

What new features are available in this release of Kinja?

• Users may search for sites and view a "profile" card that contains information about the weblog, including the most recent entries.
• Bookmarklet finds the closest site match and displays the profile card page.
• Related sites, or "kin" of a site are discovered by link analysis and displayed on the site "profile" page.
• Users may view site "mentions," a digest of entries that link to a site.
• Registered users may tag weblogs, and share tag-based digests.
• Algorithmically determined "topic" digests replace the "editor's" digests.
• Related topics are suggested for sites and favorites.
• When available, a thumbnail of the first image for an entry is displayed.
• Favicons replace the manually created, or user submitted icons on digest pages.
• RSS and Atom feeds are available for all digest pages.
• OPML output is provided for all "favorites" pages.
• OPML import now supports the standard 'rssUrl' attribute.
• "Confirm" screen displays closest match to existing sites in Kinja when site URLs are added through direct input or OPML.
• Registered users may specify their time zone.
• Limited (OK. Very limited.) support for languages other than English is added for registered users.
• Fully searchable and context-sensitive help is available.

This is great, esp the tagging, and the profile cards, which allow easy access to inbounds, traffic graphs, & other site info for the sites that you subscribe to. And hey, how cool is it that now there's a single feed of my digest. Holy cow. It was worth the downtime, guys.... I'm in.

Jasper reports that he's modified the Browservulsel tag-adder script so that it will now paste tags into the compose side of the window as well as the edit posts side. Awesome. The longer we go, the more integrated the tools get. Spectacular.

Search Engine Herald: "All keywords [shortcuts] are customized by you. There is a few preset shortcuts just to give you an idea of it’s capabities: !my will take you to http://my.yahoo.com !mysp will take you to http://www.myspace.com/

you can also customize searches by adding variables: !news britney - will run a search on yahoo news for the term britney."

Pretty cool way of shortcutting all your frequent searches!

Filed in: search, yahoo, webtech

Micropersuasion on the standard feed button: "Now that Mozilla and Microsoft have standardized on this icon, I see little need to use the old XML or RSS orange buttons any longer. One reason is that this icon is how the coming wave of new RSS users will recognize feeds. Another is that it's truly global. The symbol works in every language."

It's like the Red Cross, but for Feeds...

In response to an eminently sensible comment from Wayne, here's the image, familiar to anyone who got into last week's couple of posts about live bookmarks:



Filed in: rss, feeds, blogtech, images, graphics

Technorati's new widgets introduced and analysed at Problogger: "David Sifry has announced a few new interesting features over at Technorati including charts to help you track the interest in keywords, improved extracts, scoped search based on related tags and enhanced profile information. There’s some helpful little updates there that will make Technorati more useable and useful."

One caveat from my perspective. The summary of the inbounds to a given blog that links here, which is what I was using to estimate the weight / significance of new links, is gone. Not a huge deal, but still....

Filed in: technorati, blogtech, webtech

Performancing are moving beyond tips & tricks & into tools, & reaching beyond the problogging community to offer up a great looking Firefox extension that is useful to any blogger w/ Firefox 1.5. As they say at Performancing:

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

Performancing for Firefox is for Firefox 1.5 and above only. We've made use of a number of cool new features within Firefox 1.5, so you'll need that version of Firefox to try it.

Have to give that a try & see how it compares to BlogThis!, & the BlogThis utility in Google Reader.

Via Problogger

Filed in: performancing, firefox, webtech, blogtech, extensions

8pm Eastern, & they seem to be back up. The sidebar at Freshblog is back to normal, the tools are all back in place with appropriately pulled content, and everything seems OK again. See the del.icio.us blog:

Update: We are back up! Now working on tag intersections, the search engine, and the inbox. Yahoo! has started helping out, so I hope to provide a higher level of service as soon as possible.

Filed in: del.icio.us, categories, blogtech

Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion points to some interesting new toys for us to play with: "Backbase has a whole bunch of AJAX web applications that you can test drive. One notable entry here is their RSS Reader.... Take a look at the AJAXy front end they tacked on to Yahoo! Search. You can really get a good sense for how AJAX technologies are revolutionizing the web as we know it."

Filed in: ajax, webtech, readers

Collision Detection: "I'm inside Asheron's Call 2, an online game that is scheduled to die in two weeks. It never acquired enough players to make it self-sufficient, so the game's owner -- Turbine -- is going to do something that only happens rarely in the world of online play: On Dec. 30, it'll flip the power off on the remaining servers, and an entire world will blink out of existence."

Enough to make me want to go explore before the environment becomes extinct....

Filed in: games, webtech, virtual_reality

For updates on the del.icio.us scenario, see the del.icio.us blog. Hopefully they'll be back soon. (though as Fritz points out below, this isn't the end of the world for Freshblog.

Love some of the comments on the blog, esp. a couple along the lines of "I have 6 windows open and need to bookmark this stuff...." What's the word for a Del.icio.us addict?

Hmm. Browser bookmarks as a temporary stopgap? Pen? Paper?

Anyway... Best of luck getting it all up & working asap.

Filed in: del.icio.us, tagging, categories, blogger-hacks

Dave Winer has a more extensive post detailing his vision for interoperability, automatic backup, and user-centered hosting. His suggestion that "the user [should] be in full control of his or her content. Users should insist on this level of support from vendors, or take their business to vendors who provide it" squares with the Nielsen top ten blogging mistakes list and emphasises the leap of faith involved in taking "your" stuff and mounting it on "their" technology. Both a practical and philosophical question.

For the short term, The Social Customer Manifesto presents a how-to for bloggers looking to back up TypePad content to a locally hosted file. via Problogger.

Filed in: webtech, blogtech, blogging

Julie at No Fancy Name takes you through the enhanced feed features of Feedflare, complete with screenshots and the repeated use of the verb "embiggen," which always makes me smile:

FeedFlare came about after the FeedBurner folks sat around thinking about "the importance of the feed item and the ability to leverage the structure of the feed to build a bridge between web services and the content item." Basically, this means you can select some stuff that will appear in the feed footer that makes it easier to see items/perform actions which are becoming more and more integrated with the whole blogging experience. The first release of FeedFlare includes communication between your feed and email actions, del.icio.us and Technorati links, and Creative Commons, as well as comment counts for WordPress feeds.

See the whole post for "Blogging in a Snap" style screenshots and arrowed captions.

Filed in: feedburner, feedflare, feeds, rss

del.icio.us reported a weekend power failure took down their data center and wiped out their data. Del.icio.us provides a useful, versatile service used by Freshblog and many thousands of other blogs and websites.

This outage isn't critical to Freshblog. You can't see categories or tag clouds right now, but in the short term that isn't a huge loss. Are there any websites or blogs for which del.icio.us is mission critical? Has this single point of failure completely crippled the function of any website out there?