So many blogs, so little time. If you feel like the blogosphere is passing you by, check out Regator, a new app that culls the Web's best posts.
An offshoot of the eponymous Web service, Regator (agg-regator, get it?) differs from traditional RSS feed readers in that it doesn't rely on you to choose the blogs you want to follow.
Instead, the app employs "qualified human editors" to bring you "topical, well-written, frequently updated, and relevant" posts. In other words, the cream of the blogosphere crop, at least according to these guys.
You can browse the posts any number of ways, starting with "popular" items from the Web at large or looking within a couple dozen specific topics (from Academics to "What the?").
Regator also provides a full directory of more than 500 topics, so you can really drill into the areas that interest you most. (Beekeeping? Check. Museums? Check.)
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Google updated the iPhone version of its Reader product Monday. For the first time, mobile users will be able to star items for later and browse through items in a large list similar to the desktop version of the Web app. To view stories, users simply need to click on the headlines and the story will expand. In previous iterations, clicking a headline would take you to a new page, requiring users to click back before expanding another story.
One thing you can't do is expand several stories at once, meaning mobile users will need to have access to a data connection to continue to open up additional stories, something social news site Digg has managed to get around in its iPhone app by loading up the front page and its story briefs as a single page in Safari. It's a lifesaver if you're going through some dodgy reception areas or read stories on a commute that involves underground tunnels.
Users who navigate to Google Reader on their phones will still head to the older version, a move chosen by Google since the new version is still in "beta." To get there on your iPhone just head to http://www.google.com/reader/i/
Below are two screens showing Google's Reader. The one on the left is the old version, while the one on the right is the new version with in-line starring and story expansion.
The old version of Google Reader for iPhone (left) doesn't let you star items or open them in-line. The new version (right) lets you star and expand items without loading a new page. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
vTap, one of my personal favorites for video search, has a new feature that I think video junkies will find immensely useful. It's a new recommendation service that will pull in videos related to whatever keywords you give it, and maintain them in a simple feed that's updated constantly. As a user you can keep tabs on new videos that pop-up on the feed either through vTap's site, on your mobile phone, or social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.
Search terms can now be added to your feed as keywords. You'll get matching items added to your feed as they are published.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Best of all is that adding keywords to your feed is natural. Since the service revolves around search, you can simply add the query or any of the results to your feed list with one click. It also pulls in videos from people you might be tracking on user generated video networks such as YouTube, Dailymotion, and Veoh.
The easiest way to build a feed very quickly is the Facebook application. There's absolutely zero work required since all the data of what you're into is already in your profile. It grabs books, movies, TV shows, and music and turn them into video keywords that can be toggled on and off. If your friends have the application installed they'll be able to see and adopt your interests as well, making the experience a little more viral.
The MySpace implementation is a little more flashy, and shows what your friends are into by approaching each of their related video tastes like a filmstrip that you can browse in a two-paned viewer. The application uses the OpenSocial architecture as well, meaning that eventually you'll get the added benefit of data portability from your friends on other services.
Another service that's been experimenting with video feed recommendations is Meefedia, which Harrison checked out earlier this month. There's also FaveBot (review), which tacks on blog posts, podcasts, music files, and all sorts of other Web media. Of course the difficulty in any of these is finding the time and a good place to absorb and manage the content, which is what I think vTap has done well with its two prong attack of desktop and mobile clients.
If you're looking for another way to read Web content on your mobile phone, there's a new solution called Mippin that will let you browse and sort through popular Web feeds about as easily as you can using a desktop RSS browser. The service was created to tackle the problem of so many sites not offering a "mobile" version for cell phone users.
Browse your feeds by favicon, or the top stories voted on by the Mippin community.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Mippin serves a variety of feeds, which can be browsed and sorted by genre. You can also search by URL, and the service will do its best to convert the content into something resembling a story, with images in the right places. Unlike Google Reader's stark text approach, Mippin goes a little more visual, taking whatever pictures are on a post and adding them as a thumbnail next to the headline. It's a pleasing effect, and makes browsing headlines a little more enjoyable--similar to what Reddit Media has done on its site. The service supports itself through small text ads that bookend some of the feed directories and stories, but you won't find any annoying banners, click-through links, or story interruptions.
The real draw to the site is its directory, which is truly massive. There's page after page of links to good content. You can save the feeds you like to your "My Mippin" section, and share any particular story via e-mail or SMS. There's also an option to send it to Twitter, which unfortunately sends the Mippin-ized version of the story instead of its original link. In addition to its directory, the service also keeps track of what stories and feeds are getting the most play, and promotes them on the start page. You can also vote on a site's feed as being good or bad. The highest ranked sites have their own separate listing from the categories section, complete with a percentage of how many readers liked the feed.
Is Mippin that much better than Google Reader mobile when it comes to feeds? I'm not completely sold. While Mippin makes browsing a little more appealing, Google Reader still trumps Mippin by showing you what you haven't read, along with quick snippets of the article to help you decide whether to click on it. Google Reader also gives you a few more sharing options, depending on what the origin site offers, and shows you are any story comments. Nonetheless, I'm digging Mippin's approach--it's very fresh, clean, and useful, if you're looking to get some reading done on the go.
See also: Mowster, Bloglines Mobile, NextBlast ,NewsGator Mobile
[via Blognation]
Facebook has several layers of functionality that make it worth using, but my favorite is the once-controversial news feed. Why? I simply don't have time to check each of my friend's profiles for what's new, and the feed does a pretty great job at that without all the legwork or annoying e-mail notifications. FriendFeed is a new service that takes the idea of a news feed and extends it beyond the social network into other social services you're a part of. There are more than 20 to pick and choose from, including social news services like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, along with microblogs like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.
Keep track of all the feeds for all your friends with FriendFeed.
(Credit: CNET Networks)By adding all these services to your FriendFeed, you're essentially creating another social networking profile--but this is a little different. It's almost like a digital identity, or your very own "about" page of services you use. Others can then easily subscribe to your FriendFeed and get the benefit of all of your online activity in one place. Likewise you can subscribe to theirs with one click, and track all the online activity they've made publicly available.
So what's the big deal about this service? It's really not a new idea--other services like Readr, Spokeo, Jaiku (which is incidentally one of the included feeds) let you do this with all sorts of social feeds, and 8hands, which we looked at back in late April, does it on your desktop with IM to boot. There's also the recently launched Plaxo Pulse (review), which adds some contact management into the mix as well. So to answer my original question, the most exciting part is the group of folks behind it, which consists of four ex-Google employees who have worked on big projects like Google Maps, Groups, and Gmail. That and it's super simple to use--you just need to copy and paste a few URLs, and plug in your username.
For widget junkies, there are two ways to extend your FriendFeed master feed to other platforms, including a Facebook app (which beats installing apps for each social service), along with a Javascript version you can embed on any old blog or Web site.
The service is in private beta with plans to open up to everyone in the "next month or so."
Yesterday Google rolled out video alerts to its Google Alerts service. If you've never used Alerts, it's a handy way to get Web content updates delivered straight to your e-mail inbox based on keywords. In the case of the new video search, Google will deliver links to videos it's indexed. So how is this helpful? Say you're a big video fan, and you dig seeing those Diet Coke and Mentos videos online. There are always some crazy teenagers out in the suburbs doing new things with them, and that equates to a lot of new videos. Setting up a Google Alert for all the videos of said activity will pass along any new items as they come.
What makes Google Alerts really interesting is its flexibility. Besides videos, you can set it up to scour the Internet in general, blogs, and Google Groups. There's also a comprehensive option that will do all of the above. To keep your inbox from overflowing, you can set up the frequency of alerts, too. There's a simple drop down to select once a day, once a week, and an as-it-happens option that will send you notifications the second Google finds it. Although a word to the wise: You might want to use a spam e-mail account if you've got more than one alert going for a popular topic.
If you're a news junkie, or a fan of using RSS readers, you're likely to prefer using your current system to subscribe to blogs and other news feeds. Luckily for you there's a neat way to take your Google Alert and use it as an RSS feed to simply plug in to your RSS reader. To replicate how this works and put it into your RSS reader, you can do this with a combination of Google's services:
- Web: On Google news, just enter a search term. On the left-hand menu you'll see a link for the RSS feed. Just grab that and plug it into your RSS reader. It will automatically update in your feed reader every time there's new content.
- Blogs: Just like Web search, you'll find the RSS feed link on the left. Copy, paste, and you're done.
- Google Video: Google video search uses the same method. Just do a search, and you'll see an RSS feed logo on the top right, a little bit below where you'd log in. Take it and drop it into your reader.
Interestingly enough there's no RSS feed for Google Groups searches, so you're stuck with an alert. On a related note, if you're a Gmail user and want to keep your alerts super organized, you can set up filters and auto-labeling, which will automatically categorize and index your incoming alerts--keeping them from cluttering your inbox.
Finally, more important than adding feeds is editing and deleting them. You can manage this from your Google account under Alerts. Got tips of your own? Share them in the TalkBack.
Google has added a handy search box to its popular Reader service. The new box sits snack dab on the top of the Google Reader screen and lets you search through any entries from your subscribed blogs. There's a handy drop down menu to sort what types of items you want to search though, including read and starred items, along with your folders and subscriptions.
This is a helpful addition to people who want to sort their news. While jumping from feed to feed in Google reader isn't tough, there really hasn't been a way to sort types of stories short of tagging and sorting them manually.
Hopefully this isn't the only nice surprise from Google today. We're expecting more news out of the Mountainview-based company later today.
You can now search through your hundreds of Google Reader feeds
(Credit: Official Google Blog)
Many bloggers put a "blogroll," a list of other blogs they like, on the sidebars of their pages. Blogrolls help the bloggers who create them feel like they're in a club with writers they like. Reciprocal blogrolling makes everyone feel all warm and fuzzy. But blogrolls aren't very functional, since static lists of links quickly become invisible to readers.
Lists of dynamic content are different. That's why Webware recently launched a news ticker (see the right-hand sidebar). It pulls related--even competitive--content from blogs we respect. We think it's useful, and we also think all site publishers, from retailers to highly focused bloggers, would do readers a service by offering something similar.
We use a Newsgator product, customized for CNET, to do this, but it's not the only solution. I also tried out two other services that anyone can plug into their sites: MineKey and RollSense. These services select content that's automatically custom-tailored to each site visitor. Google Reader and RSSMixer (review) are other options, without the fancy automatic story selection.
Minekey's auto-populated item list. Scroll down for the live version.
Both MineKey and RollSense let you feed in a list of blogs you like or respect, and then they create embeddable widgets that display items from those blogs that they think your readers will like. Based on what individuals click on, the list is further refined over time.
Of the two products, MineKey is simpler and easier to set up, and by default it makes more attractive widgets. If a user logs in, it will also give the person a history of what they've clicked on, which is useful. MineKey gives publishers detailed reports on what users are clicking on.
RollSense offers publishers more capabilities, including the option to turn off the personalization feature, which you may want to do if you your goal is just to keep readers up to date on the latest stories from your blogroll. You can then filter stories by keywords. RollSense also offers "packs," or pre-built blog collections, on specific topics. Like MineKey, it also creates reports, but they're not as useful.
How do they perform? Both need time to zero in on user preferences before they begin to deliver their best recommendations, but my quick testing shows that MineKey is better at automatically selecting content, although it doesn't seem to give enough weight to new items. But RollSense offers the control freak more influence over what is displayed. See for yourself. I've embedded both widgets in this blog (you may have to skip to the next page, depending on where you're seeing this), and fed them both three feeds: Webware, Crave, and News.com.
As I said, Google Reader and RSS Mixer are also options, although they don't have the automatic content selection of MineKey and RollSense. On Google, if you "share" posts from your feeds, you can display that list as a widget on any other site. Go to the "Your shared items" page to get the code. Google Reader doesn't automatically populate the widget; you have to manually select items to share them. But doing so is wicked fast, so if you want to maintain ultimate control over your news ticker, Google's the way to go. For just a river of items from feeds you select, see our writeup on RSSMixer.
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RSS Mixer is a service for combining several RSS feeds together to create a master feed. The result contains all the feeds you've added, and makes it easy to plug it into a feed reader or share with others using a single URL. I gave the service a spin earlier today and it does just what it advertises, if not a little more.
Your feeds show up as snippets of content when viewed on the iPhone.
(Credit: CNET Networks)In addition to building your own RSS feeds, there are tools for you or others to keep track of them, including a widget for Apple's Dashboard, and an embeddable version for blogs and Web sites, which I've inserted after the break. For iPhone users, there's also a short link you can pass around that's optimized for the iPhone's resolution and touch screen. It's very simple to use, and friendly on the eyes and fingers.
RSS Mixer is by no means the first service to let you blend together RSS feeds. In fact, FeedBite, FeedJumbler, and Feedshake can handle this function quite easily, and have been around a little longer. What sets RSS Mixer apart is the way you can share your feeds with others--as each feed gets its own page with the last 25 posts, links to each included feed, and easy ways to share the contents of that feed with others. All of these feeds and pages end up in a massive user directory which can be browsed and sorted by creation date and popularity.
The one thing that RSS Mixer is really missing is a way to register and manage your user-created feeds. Once you've made a custom feed, there's no way to go in and remove specific sites or to keep track of which ones you've made. Given the fact this is Version 0.1 and a prototype, I'm willing to cut RSS Mixer some slack, but having to find my created feed a few hours later without even a search tool was unnecessarily hard.
Related: SplashCast launches MyPodcastNetwork
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Pageflakes has just updated their service this morning with a handful of new features. The company is calling this latest release "Blizzard." Users now get their own profile page and can link up with other Pageflakes users as friends. They can also browse through users by interest, based on items they've put together on their customized Pagecasts. The goal is to make the service feel like less of a solitary experience and make it easier to share user-created Pagecasts.
Also new is the option to completely customize a page. There are themes and simple color arrangements for users to pick from, and a tool to create your own. In the same vein, there are now media pages from third-party content providers and sponsors, nearly identical to what competitor Netvibes rolled out with their Universes feature in mid-April. Pageflakes is launching this feature with themed content pages from CNN, AOL, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post, among others.
To help users find content to add to their pages, Pageflakes has also redone their widget gallery, which they call "flakes." There are about a quarter of a million widgets, which is about twice that of Netvibes.
The Blizzard release also opens up the door to users of Apple's Safari browser, who up until now have been unable to access the site. However, there's no news on whether an iPhone-friendly version of the start page service is in the works. To see more shots of the new features, click the read more link below.
Previous Pageflakes coverage:
Pageflakes community gets traction
Roundup: single page aggregators
Pageflakes CEO wants to take on Yahoo
Start here: Pageflakes meets the metagators
Pageflakes now has partnered sites with sponsored content. In this case it's news and stories from the Washington Post.
(Credit: Pageflakes.com)... Read more
