A full-page version of the Podcasting Professionals news radar is hosted on the PODHANDLE servers. To give you an idea here’s the reduced-size version:

Besides integrating external services, this news radar contains some
more goodies: firstly, users of Firefox and Internet Explorer 7
can add a Podcasting Professionals search plug-in to their drop-down list of search engines. More about this in the second part of my post.

Secondly, if you don’t like the custom color scheme, then you can instantly select any of the other thirteen Grazr themes.

Lastly, you can send feedback to me using email or Skype chat right from the Grazr panel.
The
Skype icon at the bottom of the news radar reflects
my online availability and instantly opens a chat session with me.
Needless to say I look forward to your reactions. I’ll conclude this
post by summing up the challenges I’m still facing developing advanced
Grazr applications.

The conception of this project
Before I start explaining what you can do with Podcasting
Professionals, I’d first like to thank Karin for inspiring me.
Throughout the development of the widget Karin has given me
very valuable feedback on its functionality, looks and usability.

Credit to Karin Hoegh
When
I met up with Danish podcasting consultant Karin Hoegh during my brief
stay in Copenhagen last August, she told me that as far as she knew
there was no reliable and up-to-date list of podcasting consultants
available yet. Such a list would be relevant to anybody professionally
involved with podcasting technology and consulting. Karin happens to be
co-founder of PODHANDLE, a web
service that allows unexperienced users to create podcasts and embed
them on their site in a straightforward and visually attractive way.

I asked Karin if she’d like me to help her create a list of
feeds from podcasting consultants and
easily convinced her to use Grazr to build the list. After refining the
scope of the project, Karin and I spent quite a few hours collecting
the feeds, defining relevant keywords and debating criteria
for list inclusion. More details about these criteria in Karin’s post about the project: Podcasting Consultants Use News Radar To Expand And Professionalize Their business.

Soon I decided to focus my efforts on the
Grazr stuff while Karin handled the feed management using BlogBridge
Feed Library. I’m very grateful to the BlogBridge people that they allow me to experiment with this web service to host my CleverClogs public reading lists.

News Radar Features
Every news radar I build starts with a
list of feeds. The one I’m presenting today contains the feeds from
over 50 podcasting consultants and professionals, supplemented with the
results from two highly focused Google Blog
Search queries. I merged these feeds into one new feed called Recent headlines.

Most people like the instant search functionality in Grazr. I’ve
taken this feature to the next level by providing links to services
that let you process the search results in your preferred way. What
each of these external services have in common is that they allow feed URLs as a keyword parameter. Simplified, such a URL would look something like this:

http://www.feedservice.com?feed=http://myfeed.xml

If you happen to know of other services that allow URL parameterization like this, then please let me know.

Here’s what you can do with your search results:

1. Grazr search and custom-keyword feeds
As usual, you can
search through the recent headlines
by keyword. Just click Search, provide your search word(s) and press
Enter. As soon as you run a query, you’ll
notice that there are three additional options available. The first one
is to simply display the filtered search results inside Grazr. Behind
the scenes, Grazr opens the recent-headlines feed and adds a keyword
filter to it. The underlying technology for this is provided by mySyndicaat, for several years in a row the most powerful newsmastering service on the market.

If you like the search results and would like to track them in your feed aggregator,
then right-click on the node with the orange RSS icon and copy the feed
URL to the clipboard. You can then pass this URL on to your RSS reader.

Please note that some of the more advanced features of this news radar have been disabled in August 2008 due to technical issues.

2. ZapTXT notifications
If the keyword search you created
is important to you, then you may want to explore more immediate
notification options, for example ZapTXT. This service notifies you of new search results via e-mail, instant
messaging, Skype or SMS. ZapTXT works independently of your operating
system, works with any e-mail client and supports Skype and all of the
major IM systems.

By clicking on the green ZapTXT badge in the Grazr panel you’ll summon the web service to create a
so-called ZapTask from the custom search that you just created. If
you’re not a ZapTXT user yet, then you’ll be prompted to create an
account. Just specify through which channels you want to receive your updates and you’re all set.

While implementing the ZapTXT integration, I teamed up with CEO Sameer
Patel and lead developer Paul Vaillant of ZapTXT. Both went out of
their way to make their service play nicely with Grazr. Sameer maintains the ZapTXT Blog.

3. Particls attention stream on your desktop
The third option, offered by
Particls, is primarily of interest to Windows users. Particls is a
desktop utility that offers relevant news items while you work. I’ve
written about Particls more than once on CleverClogs, but here’s a summary:

The default notification mechanisms used by Particls are a system tray notifier and a vertical
ticker bar that docks to the left-hand side of your screen. From your web-browsing behavior, from your bookmarks and
from various other interests Particls distills a personalized, granular
ranking scheme. This scheme is called an APML file, or attention
profile that is stored on your hard drive. From the many sources that
might be of interest to you, Particls selects the most relevant ones
and presents them to you while you work. The more important a news item, the more persistent its means of disrupting you.
Both in functionality and visual design Particls is the most
sophisticated personal-ranking tool I’ve evaluated in the past few
years.

As soon as you click on the orange Particls badge, a custom
installation package is built based on the search that you just created
in the Grazr panel. If you have Particls installed already, then it
will complement your existing attention profile with the data from the
new search. If you don’t have Particls installed, then of course the installation file will take care of that.

BlogRovR news fetcher
If
it’s part of your job or passion to track whether your podcasting peers
have or have not yet covered some new exciting service, product, event
or headline, and to quickly be informed of in-context news updates while you are browsing the web,
then have a look at BlogRovR. I’ve tried various ways to explain this
extraordinarily cool service, and this one seems to stick with people
well: once you enable BlogRovR, it will provide you with summaries of blog posts that discuss the page you are currently visiting, from people you determine as being authoritative.

In this news radar I’ve incorporated a custom version of BlogRovR
containing 50+ feeds from podcasting professionals. When you click on
the BlogRovR node in the widget, you’ll be prompted to install the
BlogRovR plug-in for Firefox and you’ll be guided through the
installation (browser restart required). If you already are a BlogRovR
user, then your BlogRovR subscriptions will be extended with a group of
Podcasting Professionals feeds.

Search plug-in
I’ve always been jealous of people who are
able to customize the behavior of Firefox, be it with an old-fashioned
extension, a bookmarklet, a Greasemonkey script or any other add-on. I
know enough about Javascript to do a decent amount of staring and studying
of someone else’s code in order to adapt it to my own needs and I’ve actually
gotten away with some RSS-related scripts I wrote in the past. I hadn’t
looked at search plug-ins until a couple of months back, however.

A search plug-in lets you add  a particular search engine to the
Search Bar in your browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer 7). In Firefox
you can put cursor focus on the Search Bar by pressing Ctrl-K. Most
people have Google and a couple of others listed among their preferred
search engines.

The search plug-in I’m presenting today demonstrates that the same
Search Bar technology that is used to search on the bigger search
engines can also be used on a much smaller scale: in this case to search through the posts from all podcasting professionals without having to visit the Grazr panel first.

Creating your own search plug-in isn’t that difficult. Visit searchplugins.net
and just fill in the text input fields on the Plugin Generator page. If you want to be credited as
the owner/creator of a search plugin, then sign up for an account so
that you can assign the plugins you created to your account. This also has the advantage that you can edit your plug-in at a later stage.
Searchplugins.net also provides you with the code that you need to
embed on your site to let people add your search plug-in to their
browser.

To install the Podcasting Professionals search plug-in, just click on the link with the PODHANDLE icon.

To do
Here’s a list of things I wasn’t able to resolve:

• Instantly show the search results of a query, instead of having to click on the “Show recent headlines, filtered” node.



• Make the feed names under the Full list of podcasting professionals
  indent, so that the entries align nicely to the right of the RSS icons.



• Make the feed names in the News Items panel consistent with the feed names from the Full list of podcasting professionals.

Challenges
Although I’d have liked to make you believe
otherwise, creating advanced news radars like Podcasting Professionals is truly complex.
As you may know, Grazr basically parses an OPML file and presents its
content in a web-based browsing panel. Most people these days think
that an OPML file is a list of feeds, but Grazr can handle much more
than that. I’ve included my own visual effects (an entirely new CSS
theme), links, textual paragraphs, background images, icons, javascript
code and I’ve integrated services from third-party vendors.

The complexity from this news radar is probably only visible if you’d study the underlying OPML file. Let me know if you’d like access to it.

What’s
struck me most is that although most vendors are extremely helpful,
relying on them in order to make the next step in the project can
sometimes be painstaking. All of the services that I use here,
BlogBridge Feed Library, mySyndicaat, ZapTXT, Particls, BlogRovR and of
course Grazr, are either free services altogether or their use has been granted to me for
free for this project (thanks guys). Free tools are nice, but it also
means getting timely support is increasingly difficult.

My biggest challenge of all is to find alternatives for each of the top-notch services I use, should they become unavailable for whatever reason. A clear example of this is mySyndicaat: a few months ago the owners of this outstanding newsmastering tool informed me that they’ll soon change their business model to that of a paid service. None of the other feed-splicing services currently available could replace mySyndicaat.

Read on if any of these catchwords appeal to you:

• lifestreams
• information overload
• personal relevance
• attention profile
• keyword monitoring
• importance-correlated disruption

I’d like to point out two remarks in today’s announcement on the Particls Blog that I definitely consider highlights: firstly it is now confirmed that a Particls version for OS X is in the pipeline. Secondly, bloggers and web site owners can share their Particls setup with a custom sidebar badge, such as this one:

Particls for OS X coming
The upcoming OS X version of Particls now officially being mentioned in a communique issued by Faraday Media is a real milestone. Ever since I got acquainted with the two creative minds behind Particls, Chris Saad and Ashley Angell, in February 2006—and also when I briefly met with Chris in person in San Francisco last December—the sensitive topic of Mac lovers feeling heavily neglected was frequently brought up.
"Ping me as soon as they make an OS X version available!", has probably been the most often heard reply from the tech journalists on my contact list when I would approach them with a brief but substantial update about Particls.

Ok, that said, what I haven’t managed to get hold of from the developers yet is an estimate release date for the OS X version, but I trust they’ll attract sufficient additional funding soon to make the first prototype available within a year from now. Until then Particls runs fine under Parallels Desktop for Mac.

Getting the download
Particls is now freely available for download from the Particls Download page. I suggest you get acquainted fast, because I’ll be shifting to fourth gear shortly.

CleverClogs focus
I figured that a couple of other tech news sites would likely do a perfect job offering an introduction to the core functionality of Particls (see Track Your Favorite Topics … on Digital Inspiration from a few days ago, glance through my Particls news radar for a live-updated list of reviews, or refer to the Particls FAQ), so I decided in this post I might as well focus primarily on the publisher aspects of the product. Please follow me to the Particls inTouch introductory page while I describe the technical, practical aspects of this new Particls partner program.

Particls inTouch installer packages
Particls inTouch lets you share your own customized version of the full Particls installer package on your website. There are two flavors of inTouch, a basic one that generates an installer from a single feed or from a set of feeds (OPML),  and an advanced one targeted at publishers obviously offering more granular control. I’ll describe both here.

inTouch Basic
inTouch Basic is the most simple way to offer your readers a Particls installer package: just type the web address of the website you’d like to track and copy the code from the box on your screen.

inTouch Basic also lets you enter the URL of a single RSS feed or from a set of RSS feeds, a so-called remotely hosted OPML file. Most online RSS aggregators allow you to create an OPML file and they’ll host it for you. The advantage of this is that any changes you make to your list of subscriptions is immediately reflected in the OPML file. Remotely hosted OPML files are often referred to as Reading Lists. If you are looking for high-quality OPML files around a certain topic, then browse the BlogBridge Topic Experts Guides. This library of OPML files offers tons of feeds on topics such as marketing, politics, online education and science & technology.

Here’s my inTouch Basic badge that simply tracks CleverClogs posts using Particls:

inTouch Partner
inTouch Partner offers publishers full control: after signing up for an account, they can choose which feeds to include with the package, which keywords to look out for, which ones to avoid, and they have the option to change the look and feel of all of the Particls screen elements, such as the logo and text color on the ticker and on the pop-ups. A personalized set-up file is generated and then hosted on the Particls servers so that your readers can download and install it. The inTouch user account allows Particls Partners to modify their settings later on.
My CleverClogs installer package, should you want to try it, is located at

and the underlying web address points to

http://intouch.particls.com/download/?mode=1&pid=1014

Creating a Particls inTouch Installer Package
To have Particls host an installer package on its server, a user account needs to be created through the Partnership Sign-up form.

After signing up, a rather straightforward edit form opens that lets you enter the details to create the package:

Just for the fun of it, I added a CleverClogs logo to my ticker bar by changing the following options in the Settings and Skins. I then followed the instructions to upload the Particls skin file to their server:

This is what my Particls ticker looks like now:

Creating your own branded version of Particls
I had no difficulties creating my own Particls badge. In fact, you could use any badge image as long as you make it point to the web address at which Particls stores the installer package.
In short, these are the steps once more:

1. Read the overview page of the Particls inTouch Partner program
2. Sign up for the service at the inTouch Admin Console
3. Create your custom installer package
4. Get the code for your badge
5. Insert the badge code into your blog

Ideas to improve Particls
It’s obvious I like Particls as it is very much already. Still, there are a couple of things I’d like the developers to pay attention to (!):

• Commit to releasing the OS X version and communicate about it
• Allow the Particls client to regularly poll a remote OPML and adjust the feed list accordingly
• Make it easier to quickly find back items that just scrolled off the screen
• Increase the font size of the ticker items
• Display the source of individual feed items in the alerts if not identical to the feed source (especially important for "River of News" feeds)
• Allow changing the URLs of feeds in the "Manage my feeds" panel

Particls News Radar
I’ve collected a couple of feeds related to Particls. Please feel free to use the comments section to suggest another feed.

“In a series of posts I discuss how to add Grazr feed browsing widgets to your website. This introductory post explains the most basic version of a Grazr application—one that displays a single feed or a list of feeds that you provide. Too simple? Scroll down for a summary of what I’ll cover in the next installment: how Grazrscript enables the option to create a feed based on a custom-keyword search among all of the feeds in your OPML. After that, check today’s hot news: Grazrscript talking Javascript as of today.”

Grazr widgets are popping up everwhere on the sidebars of people’s blogs, usually performing the task of a little browser displaying one or more feeds relating to the author’s interests. Creating such a Grazr is pretty straightforward: visit the Grazr Create a Widget page and provide the first box in the wizard with one of these types of URLs:

• an RSS feed, try it now: CleverClogs Incoming Links, on Grazr
• an OPML file with several feeds, try it: Marjolein’s Writings, the OPML, on Grazr
• a website with feed auto-discovery enabled, try: all feeds provided by CleverClogs, on Grazr

Assuming you clicked on the link in the third option, the Grazr configuration screen will look like this:

Do you see box 1, where I put the URL for my website? Because the source code of my website contains links to RSS feeds and to OPML files, Grazr is capable of detecting those and displaying them in a list. You can easily substitute your own blog URL there or use the URL of a feed or of an OPML file.

Default themes and views
As you can see, I’ve applied sateen_black, one of the many cool themes that were introduced by Grazr recently. Of course you can pick your own theme from the list. Maybe you’ve also noticed that all my Grazr widgets are based on the 3-pane view and that I prefer to display the address bar, revealing the URL of the feed or OPML I am showing. Although these choices are all directly available from the Grazr wizard interface, they are not the default settings. If you like my new settings too, then please feel free to adopt them by dragging this URL to your bookmarks toolbar: default Grazr widget configuration settings.

Grabbing the Grazr code
Embedding the Grazr on your web page is now just a matter of grabbing the piece of HTML that the Grazr wizard generates, displayed in the box with the green background, and inserting that piece of code into your blog.

CleverClogs Grazr template
If this all seems a piece of cake to you, then feel free to have a preview of what’s up in my next post: download the template that I have been using myself to create more advanced RSS applications, such as the Power 150 Kitchensink for Todd And, the Yahoo! Pipes News Radar for MasterNewMedia.org and the Grazr News Radar for Grazr.com. The template is a plain text file, located here: CleverClogs Grazr Template. If you study this file closely, you’ll see that you could create your own application by substituting several parameters inside the file. A few weeks ago James Corbett told me he successfully created his Irish Twittersphere Search Engine based on my template.

Summary of the next tutorial
A few weeks ago GrazrScript was pretty much a mystery to me. It took me a whole week to build Todd’s Power 150 Grazr application. Using this fairly new template, I can now create a full-fledged Grazr application in about one hour, including the option to offer feeds based on custom keyword searches across all feeds in an OPML.

In the next tutorial I’ll tell you for which third-party RSS services you need to sign up, which parameters you could change and give you some insider’s tips to get you started fast.

Hot off the presses: GrazrScript talking Javascript
As I just talked about this post to Mike Kowalchik, head developer with Grazr.com, he told me the stunning news that most likely today Grazr.com is going to release a new version of GrazrScript that allows the use of procedural code. Here’s the link to the official announcement: GrazrScript v1.2 Beta.

Because almost the entire JavaScript command language becomes available to Grazr application developers, this means very advanced RSS applications can be built with the new version. To name a few new capabilities, GrazrScript will now let you use variables, string manipulations, regular expressions, functions, loops, conditions and error handling. Read the GrazrScript tutorial chapter on Procedural Programming, then give the sweet ‘Hello World’ sample script a try.

Needless to say I’m very excited to be able to squeeze this bit of news in, just before my own post goes live. Obviously I’ll need some time to figure it all out myself—not a programmer anymore—but I’ll definitely devote one of the posts in this new Grazr Tutorial series to it. I’m also sure several of my diehard programming friends will take the new Grazr to its extremes in the mean time. Here’s Tom Morris’ description of the GrazrScript potential: New Grazr Launch (March 19th, 2007).

Congrats, guys.

And you, my readers, will you please let me know if indeed this first part of this post is correctly called a tutorial for beginners?

Some coverage in the blogosphere on GrazrScript:

“As far as I know OnePipe is the first solution to offer generic, on-the-fly feed filtering based on URL parameterization.”

OnePipe is a browser bookmarklet I created to filter any feed by topic. It’s simple to use: install the bookmarklet, navigate to any website whose feed you’d like to filter and click the OnePipe button. You’ll be prompted to enter any topic or word after which OnePipe will generate a custom feed that only contains those items that match your keywords. The exciting part about OnePipe is that it can be used over and over again.

Welcome, Lifehacker visitors. I’m very proud and grateful for Wendy Boswell’s announcement that OnePipe is now Download of the Day.

Before I explain the technical details let me illustrate OnePipe with a snapshot:

A typical use case: let’s assume I am visiting the FeedBurner blog Burning Questions. For the moment I’m really only interested in blog posts about their Headline Animator service. In fact, I would like to generate a feed based on just that custom keyword “Headline Animator“. With the OnePipe bookmarklet in place, I can just click the OnePipe button on my browser bookmarks toolbar, type in my topic. Next, a hyperlink pointing to the custom feed appears in a tiny rectangular pop-up in the top-left corner of the page. For convenience’s sake the hyperlinks that OnePipe produces automatically open the filtered feeds in a Grazr window.

Why the name OnePipe?
After processing the desired keyword, OnePipe calls upon the URL parameterization capabilities of Yahoo! Pipes to generate the feed. Look closely at the full URL processed by Grazr: there are really only a couple of parameters:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=dCunRCfP2xGZfglMOUVYtA&_render=rss&query=Headline Animator&feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2

1. a URL pointing to the Pipe I created (direct link: OnePipe : The CleverClogs Generic Feed Filter)
2. the “_render=rss” suffix to force the output to RSS
3. a query parameter
4. the URL of the feed that is being filtered.

What this means is that you could substitute any feed, alter the query and parse those with one and the same Pipe—hence the name OnePipe. If you’re curious what OnePipe does behind the scenes, then please feel free to take a peek, then clone and tweak it. Here’s the link that takes you directly to the source of OnePipe : The CleverClogs Generic Feed Filter.

Installing OnePipe
Drag this hyperlink OnePipe to your bookmarks toolbar. This will cause a button named OnePipe to become available on your toolbar. Open its properties if you want to see the underlying Javascript code. The current version is from 2007-03-13, 3:49 PM – GMT +1.

Grabbing your feed
OnePipe feeds are just feeds as any other. With the bookmarklet I offer an easy way to view feeds created with OnePipe. Of course you can use any other tool too: to subscribe to your newly created feed in
your feed reader, grab the entire URL off the Grazr address bar. Select the URL,
copy it to the clipboard and paste it into the dialog box that your feed
reader provides for new subscriptions. Let me know if you have any issues with this.

Where to take your feed
Apart from subscribing to a OnePipe feed in your feed reader, you could also consider the following possibilites. Start out by creating a filtered channel of highly relevant posts about a certain topic, about a person, or about an event.

• Receive a system tray alert or a sticky desktop message when a new feed item matches your filter, or display your channel as a running ticker on your system. To enable this, subscribe to your OnePipe feed in Touchstone.
• Have all Twitter posts from your “With Friends” page that mention @yourname, forwarded as SMS messages to your cell phone using Rasasa or ZapTXT. Just sign in to your account with any of these services, fill in the URL of your OnePipe feed and set your preferences.
• Receive the items in your OnePipe feed as instant-messaging notifications through your preferred IM system: for Skype there’s Anothr and, since fairly recent times, ZapTXT. For the other main IM systems, consider Rasasa (all systems) and Feed Crier (AIM and Jabber).
• Forward the items in your OnePipe feed to your email inbox, for example using FeedBlitz, R|Mail or Zookoda.
• Use your OnePipe feed as a building block to create a topic radar. To merge your OnePipe feed with other feeds, consider using newsmastering services such as mySyndicaat, Feed Digest and Feed Blendr.
• There are literally hundreds of RSS Tool Vendors—yes I track them myself. Excellent resources where RSS tools are discussed in depth are John Tropea’s Library clips, who’s not just thorough and smart, but always points to other relevant tools in the same category, and 3Spot’s incredibly comprehensive RSS Tools page.

Feed Auto-Discovery
As you may have noticed, OnePipe is capable of detecting all of the feeds offered on any web page you visit. You may know that the mechanism of recognizing feeds is usually referred to as feed auto-discovery. Most blog publishing services offer this capability automatically and you should be able to use the bookmarklet with most blogs and sites offering RSS feeds. The bookmarklet component of OnePipe is mostly an adaptation of the OPML Auto-Discovery bookmarklet that I published a couple of months ago.

The concept behind OnePipe
For me the exciting part about OnePipe is not so much the bookmarklet itself, but the generic feed filtering mechanism that I built for it using Yahoo! Pipes. Feed manipulation is an essential part of newsmastering, the techniques used to build feeds matching a particular topic, person or event. As far as I know OnePipe is the first solution to offer on-the-fly feed filtering based on URL parameterization. With other feed filtering services the source feed and sometimes the search query get obfuscated, hindering direct finetuning of the settings.

Room for improvement
These are some ideas I have to make OnePipe better:

• offer tag, category, author and title search capabilities (already in progress in Pipes)
• integrate with John Forsythe’s Feed Preview add-on for Firefox
• general debugging and fine-tuning

I’m very curious for your feedback on OnePipe. Moreover, if you’ve been able to successfully use OnePipe for a particular purpose, then please share your experience. David Tebbutt provided me with lots of useful input in this project. Thanks!

First Reactions:
Mike Kowalchik understands this is a proof of concept and there maybe some wrinkles to iron out. Indeed, Mike. It seems Pipes only searches through excerpts of feed items, and not the full feed.

Mike Gotta calls OnePipe innovative on his blog and suggests you give it a try. Thanks Mike!

James Corbett (through IM) points out that OnePipe could be especially useful to filter the noise from one’s Twitter Friends’ stream. He requested a Yahoo! Pipe that lets you create a feed that lists items that do not match certain keywords. Ok, James, here’s the AllButPipe bookmarklet, and the link to the Pipe that fuels it: AllButPipe : The CleverClogs “Exclude This” Feed Filter

Danish podcaster Karin Høgh (through IM) asks for instructions to add the bookmarklet to IE7. Yikes. Sometimes I forget I’m not in a Firefox-only world. What’s worse: the bookmarklet isn’t going to work in IE7 because its underlying Javascript code is tiny bit too long: 2880 characters instead of the allowed 250—more or less. Thanks Karin!

Phil Hollows of FeedBlitz (through IM) helpfully suggests to turn OnePipe into a server-hosted script. The advantage is that that might make it accessible for IE7 users, and it would give me version control. On the other hand, this is definitely beyond my scripting capabilities and the TypePad server would be accessed each time the script is called. I think I’ll leave that until I’ve had proper training in Javascript coding.

Chris Saad of Touchstone compares OnePipe to FeedBlendr and sees some similarities with his own product.

Seems I’ve got another fan down under! Better Communications blogger Lee Hopkins gives a fine example of how he might use OnePipe to track “Second Life” posts from Neville Hobson‘s blog. Lee is making a serious study of Second Life for his PhD, so I can fully imagine how OnePipe comes in handy there.

On his blog Knowledge Jolt with Jack, Jack Vinson calls OnePipe a “Cool Tool”.

I’m happy to see my German colleague and friend Siegfried Hirsch, who maintains a blog entirely focusing on RSS technology in German, also covered OnePipe. His story is here: OnePipe – Filtern von RSS-Feeds auf Knopfdruck

Quite a few people are visiting CleverClogs at the moment because of the mentions that Steve Rubel, Lars Trieloff and James Governor made of OnePipe on their blogs. Thanks so much.

The story has been on TechMeme for a while now.

If you’d like to digg this post, then feel free to click this button:

And as usual, a Grazr to let you track mentions of OnePipe:

"Keep reading, or if you can’t hold your horses, head straight for the meat of my latest achievement: an RSS-enabled Marketing Search Engine created using GrazrScript, a relatively new language to create web-based RSS applications …"

Next time I meet someone new on the web I should write down the whence, the where, the why and the how of the connection taking place. I do recall clearly that I took the initiative to connect to marketing and PR specialist Todd And about a week ago, but I’ve completely forgotten how I found out about his website in the first place. His attractive banner logo definitely must have prolonged my attention span:

Let’s forget (!) about my deteriorating memory, because what’s about to follow will hopefully blow your socks off.

Keep reading, or if you can’t hold your horses, head straight for the meat of my latest achievement: an RSS-enabled Marketing Search Engine created using GrazrScript, a language to create web-based RSS applications that was launched a few months ago by the Grazr development team. If you want to explore it yourself, I suggest you start with the GrazrScript Tutorial.

Background Story

I immediately noticed Todd has a rather remarkable and attractive blog layout that he self-hosts using WordPress: two sidebars on the left-hand side, the left-most one containing an intriguing link to what turns out to be an impressive, ranked list of 150+ US marketing blogs. Here’s a quick live peek of Todd’s Power 150 – Top Marketing Blogs page using Bitty Browser. You’ll immediately understand why it caught my eye: it has RSS written all over it.

There was just one thing blatantly missing from Todd’s Power 150 page: OPML awareness. "Wouldn’t it be cool if your list were browsable, discoverable and even … searchable?", I asked him on Skype. Todd quickly understood where I was heading. Our ideas matched perfectly and over the course of less than a week, with our time zones not exactly catalyzing effective communication, I helped Todd to display an advanced Grazr widget on a page we now nickname as the "Kitchen Sink". The sections in the remainder of my blog post discuss the functionality of this RSS application and some details on how we built it.

Search Engine Functionality

Todd’s Power 150 RSS-enabled marketing search engine lets you do the following:

• Search all listed marketing blogs by keyword
• Generate a custom keyword-feed from your search that you can add to your own RSS aggregator
• Browse all marketing blogs as a combined, River of News feed
• Browse all marketing blogs from an alphabetically ordered list
• Grab the URLs to the feeds and OPML files offered in the widget to import or subscribe to in your own feed reader
• Send feedback by e-mail

Details about the RSS Tools Used

Dynamic OPML file

I started out with the OPML file from the feed list that Todd maintains on web-based feed reader NewsGator Online. This OPML file is web-based, public and dynamic, meaning that when Todd adds, changes or removes a feed in NewsGator Online, his OPML file will reflect this update immediately. RSS specialists refer to such an OPML file as a "Reading List". The other components in the Power 150 search engine fully rely on the availability of this OPML. You can browse Todd’s OPML by clicking on "Full List of Marketing Blogs" in the Power 150 Grazr panel.

Combining into a ‘River of News’ feed

The next step was to create a River of News feed from this OPML file using a feed digesting service. I prefer mySyndicaat, an advanced newsmastering tool that I’ve found indispensable in multi-tier projects involving the merging of RSS feeds, OPML files and Reading Lists.

FeedBurner for Cleanliness and Transparancy

On my cue Todd created a FeedBurner version of the mySyndicaat output feed. This is the feed that we used for "The Power 150 – River of News" feed link in the Power 150 Grazr panel. Most of my RSS applications involve the use of FeedBurner: most people know it creates clean URLs that are easy to remember, that it renders a browser-friendly page when displayed as HTML and that it offers pretty neat feed analytics features. There’s another less talked about reason why I personally use FeedBurner a lot: if for some reason any RSS tool used in the previous steps of a project like this is no longer available, all I have to do is adjust the source feed of the FeedBurner feed and my application runs fine again.

ReFilter Feed Filtering through Parameterized URLs

ReFilter is not such a widely known RSS service. In this case I use it because it lets you filter feeds by providing keywords within the parameters of the original feed URL. Such URL parameterization is essential for vertical search engines like this marketing search engine, because we wanted to offer Todd’s readers the option to subscribe to a custom-keyword RSS feed using their own RSS aggregator. I only used a portion of ReFilter’s functionality: ReFilter’s also offers an advanced syntax for sophisticated feed filtering: you can filter by field, use boolean commands and combine several searches into one URL. ReFilter is open-source, is based on the MagPie RSS parser for PHP and was developed by Sam Deelie.

GrazrScript, Creating RSS Applications

I had played with Grazr widgets plentiful in the past, but never taken the plunge to fully explore its scripting language until this week. GrazrScript is a language that is still fully in development and I very much appreciate where the Grazr people are heading with this. As I wrote earlier, the best way to get started with this is how I did it too:

1. download the GrazrScript examples
2. study the GrazrScript tutorial
3. modify the sample applications using a text editor
4. upload one of these applications back to your own server (!)
5. try it out by entering the URL of your Grazr application on the Grazr.com configuration page

Credits

I’d like to point out—magna cum gratia—that head developer Mike Kowalchik from Grazr was of enormous help to get this project off the ground in such a short amount of time. No matter how we moved our goal posts, Mike offered great input. Mike created a branded Power 150 theme with a status bar logo and custom hyperlink icons that perfectly match Todd’s strong brand.

I’ve also had quite a few fruitful chat sessions this week with Giovanni Guardalben CEO of mySyndicaat, my preferred feed digesting service. Gianni was kind enough to tweak his servers so that I could configure the combined feed with all the bells and whistles we required for this project.

Lastly I’d like to mention how rewarding the collaboration on this project was with Todd. I look forward to working with him more and extending our friendship. And, Todd…: thank you so much for the wonderful new logo for CleverClogs. I truly like your design a lot.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick left a really nice comment and created a digg for it, so feel free to go visit:

By the time you read this, no doubt the counter is at 314

And you, readers? Would you care to tell me what you think of this ambitious project? If so, please feel free to leave a comment.

This morning, however, something showed up that did grab my attention: a project by Kent Brewster in which he demonstrates how useful it is that some major RSS-enabled web services have opened up their architecture. For a day-time job Kent works at Yahoo! in Silicon Valley, but from what I read on his side-projects page, he enjoys spending a lot of his spare time programming as well.

Kent blogs at Brewster’s Field Guide to Web 2.666, where you can find the details on his most recent brainchild in his blog post FeedFlinger: a nothing-but-net RSS aggregator.

Let’s look at a screenshot, as usual. Click on it to open a full-size version of the image:

So what does FeedFlinger let you do?
Quoting Kent’s blog post:

"FeedFlinger is a prototype nothing-but-net RSS explorer, mashing up Feedburner’s sweet tasty new JSON return for source material, two flavors of Yahoo! Search for search and term extraction, and del.icio.us for storing and sharing."

And in my words: the Find Me instant search box allows you to type in the name of a feed. In this implementation it’s the Yahoo! Search API that limits the search results to just FeedBurner feeds. Selected feeds get added to a list in the right-hand panel. I chose my own River of News feed and the FeedBurner blog Burning Door, for example. You can see that each feed in the collection is displayed with all its feed items.

Hover your mouse on any entry and a pop-up is shown with a summary of its contents. Then Yahoo!’s Term Extraction API comes into play, generating a list of terms ordered by frequency of occurrence. This keyword list is displayed in the top-left column, called Interesting Terms.

The final step is to bookmark your custom  collection of feeds, on del.icio.us of course.

A summary of FeedFlinger is listed on ProgrammableWeb in the category RSS mashups: FeedFlinger on ProgrammableWeb.

Final words: FeedFlinger is a work in progress, but definitely a fine one at that: Kent diligently documents the bugs he’s still working on, most importantly the lack of cross-browser compatibility. In real life I’m not to sure limiting feed search to just FeedBurner results is that useful, but that’s beside the point of Kent’s project: he clearly wants to demonstrate what’s currently possible.

Go have a look and leave a note here or on Kent Brewster’s blog entry to tell us what you think.

Here’s a Grazr about FeedFlinger, to finish off the icing on today’s cake:

A few weeks ago I described Touchstone’s functionality and the potential I see for it in a comment on Dave Winer’s blog:

"I’d vote for the talented guys behind Touchstone … basically scans your browsing history, your bookmarks, e-mail, documents and other stuff that characterizes your personal attention stream.

You then select the sources that are likely to produce information that might be of interest to you. It makes sense to use web feeds for this of course, or people could develop their own input adapter.

I appreciate this method of managing information overload because the Touchstone engine will only display bits of incoming information if they match your attention profile above the granular thresholds that you determine. The more important that information is to you, the more persistent and disruptive its presentation.

With lots of bloggers talking about handling information overload and attention management, I believe Touchstone provides a viable solution for a real pain.

Ties: the CEO’s a Skype buddy of mine and he once paid me dinner."

I’ve fought quite a few Touchstone alpha releases myself over the past few months and exposed several of my closest blogging friends to its bugs, so it’s not that I don’t know what Touchstone is about. What these Australians didn’t tell me so far though is that their new product apparently is capable of sending Flickr feeds to my Windows system tray—look at the enlarged version of the Touchstone screenshot that Chris put in his blog post:

Will the new Touchstone be able to offer streams of rich media to my desktop?

If Chris publishes a screenshot like this, it most likely means he and his development team, led by Ashley Angell, are very close to announcing the private beta. I’ve already Twittered in his direction about it this morning. He’s awfully quiet on Skype, so now all we can do is wait. If you haven’t signed up yet, then rush to the sidebar of the Touchstone website and fill in your e-mail address.

Update: Someone submitted this blog post to Digg (visit to vote) just now. It’s such fun to see my TypePad stats page being swarmed by Digg visitors:

First I bookmarked Leon’s post on del.icio.us (direct link to all bookmarks for Leon’s post), then I turned on coComment tracking so that I could follow the conversation. Still, I had some ideas of my own that would fit in nicely with Leon’s and I thought I’d submit a comment myself to add my own 2 cents to the story.

Unfortunately, Leon’s blog comment form seems to lack any basic kind of formatting so I decided I might as well devote an entire blog post to my take on increasing your subscriber base, although I realized all too well my subscriber count is at a mere 1% of his.

Summarizing Leon’s tips: use full feeds, give the RSS icon a prominent
position, provide consistent, high-quality content, offer email
subscriptions and make it easy for people to share your posts with their friends.

I’d like to a couple more tips to the mix that seemed to make a huge difference for me:

1. Use large, attractive feed icons, preferably the ones that by now have become the defacto standard. They are freely available for download from FeedIcons. Host the icons yourself.
2. Obvious to some: offer a browser-friendly version of your feed with FeedBurner and display the number of subscribers by embedding a FeedBurner FeedCount chicklet into your page, if you dare.
3. Let people browse your feeds live from your pages by embedding a piece of code in the sidebar of your site. Really it’s not that difficult. Pick any of the many excellent tools so diligently demonstrated by David Rothman on his current and comprehensive, hands-on review page here: RSS to Web Page: Tool Output Examples.
4. Make your feeds auto-discoverable and double-check that they are auto-discoverable indeed. Most blog hosting services take care of this already. If not: make sure the header of your pages contains code like this:

5. <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Blog Posts Feed" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Cleverclogs" />

6. Stick to a certain average posting frequency. To be totally honest I personally need to apply this principle to my own working discipline. When people first add your feed to their aggregator, the feed is likely to be included in a group called Probation or something similar. While your feed is there it has the attention from your subscriber. Your goal is to convince that reader to move your feed to a more permanent group, preferably the one named High Priority. So it’s ok if you don’t blog every day, as only a few people would be able to keep up anyway—just don’t drop the frequency to below once every two weeks. People lose interest or even get annoyed and bounce you off their list.
7. Validate your feeds. Paste your feed URLs at feed a validator, such as FeedValidator. Fix errors.
8. Consider offering email subscriptions through R|Mail. I’ve noticed a 20% increase since I signed up with Randy Morin’s service. Recipients are apparently very satisifed with how the posts are delivered. R|Mail is free.
9. Subscribe to your own feed, both as a feed and by email, so that you know what your subscribers are receiving. Open the email version through web mail: sometimes the plain-text version looks awful. Switch to a different RSS-to-email service if this happens.

The MuseStorm people themselves call their new service the MuseStorm Widget Syndication Service, as they proudly announced in yesterday’s blog post It’s alive! MuseStorm Widget Syndication Service launches.

Needless to say I signed up for the MuseStorm service straight away, following the feed configuration steps offered by the MuseStorm Flash wizard:

Within minutes I had produced a slick, animated-headlines version of the bookmarks that I keep in my del.icio.us RSSonate account:

Note that I resized the widget just to demonstrate that the feed widget can be widened. Several skins and other customizations are offered. Do you see the +sign in the bottom-left corner? It allows visitors of my site to copy the widget to their blog. You can also follow this link: RSSonate Feed Widget.

In addition to Google Gadget and Yahoo! Widget versions for the desktop, feed widget publishers can embed their code into any online web page. You don’t need access to your page templates: just embed the code into your sidebar or even in the body of a blog post.

Here’s a screenshot of the widget selector box:

Widget Analytics

The base MuseStorm service for publishing feed widgets is free. The Analytics module is charged at USD4 per feed per month, with the first two months free for all users. At this moment my own Analytics panel is rather boring because my panel wasn’t online until I published this post. As soon as people start clicking on any of the links inside the panel and the clickthrough numbers start showing up, I’ll upload another screenshot. This is what the MuseStorm Analytics Dashboard looks like:

And here’s a screenshot of the page where my dazzling metrics will appear:

For Developers

There is an extensive MuseStorm SDK section on the website for programmers who want to explore the MuseStorm API with its specific command set based on Javascript.

MuseStorm Roadmap

At this moment support for the Mac desktop is limited to the Yahoo! Widget. Mac Desktop is planned for release though, as well as support for mobile and IM widgets. Keep an eye on the MuseStorm blog, aptly titled Riding the Storm: it seems to me they’ve got some cool releases up their sleeves.

Impressions

I don’t know how I could have missed the MuseStorm gamma while doing research for web-based RSS tickers, but for me this beats everything I’ve tried so far—both in features and pricing. Would you do me a favor and try out the widget? Click on the links inside it, see how easy you find it copy the widget to your own web site and then let me know if you think I should replace FeedBurner’s Headline Animator with the MuseStorm one.

As it was about time to brush up my secondary blog RSS Tool Vendors, I decided to devote a blog post to my love for mySyndicaat. I hope you like it. Here it is: Getting Started with River of News Feeds: mySyndicaat.