The Last Podcast Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

Shared Feeds, RSSmeme and Ecosystems

<rant>

If the beginning of this year is any indication for what is still to come, it seems like 2008 is going to be the year of the linkblogs.

When Scoble started pimping his linkblog in pretty much every single one of his posts earlier last year, I really didn’t get it. Today, I am not only subscribed to lots and lots of them, I also use a number of different services that expose those linkblogs to me, including ReadBurner, Shared Reader, and friendfeed.

Because linkblogs have suddenly gotten a lot more exposure, I find myself hitting ‘Shift-S’ in Google Reader a lot more often. Actually, the reason I use Google Reader more than FeedDemon, which is superior in many ways, is the easy way of exposing my linkblog. Sharing a post has suddenly become a lot like voting for a story on Digg or reddit.

Because of this, a new cottage industry of services tracking linkblogs has cropped up in the last few weeks. Both Shared Reader and ReadBurner are relatively distinct from each other, but RSSmeme, which was released today isn’t much more than a clone of ReadBurner. Indeed, it was seeded by scraping ReadBurner’s list of linkblogs.

I love it when ecosystems start to grow up around what are essentially really simple ideas like linkblogs or twitter. I am just beta testing an app that also uses shared feeds, but has a completely different feel to it than all the earlier apps and is trying some innovative new things. Can’t write about it yet, but I think a lot of you will use it once it is released.

Lots of innovation is still possible around linkblogs and it should be interesting to see what the community will come up with.

</rant>

It is definitely shaping up to be interesting here. I can’t figure out why Google can’t turn this feature on and kind of make it a backpage “Google News”/Digg/TechMeme-like engine.

Having been part of the story for ReadBurner, SharedReader and RSSMeme, I definitely see different motivations for each of the developers, and only ReadBurner seems to be “clean” in my book. In fact, the only issues he’s ever had with the system were because it grew too fast, again… partially my fault as he wasn’t ready to go live yet.

I look forward to talking about more feature-rich offerings soon as well.

It’s not very obvious, but you can actually created a “link blog” feed with FeedDemon. For details, see http://blogs.newsgator.com/product_news/2008/01/share-your-clip.html

RSSmeme does have differences from the others; but you have to look for them.

Author pages/feeds, source pages/feeds, tag pages/feeds, and (most importantly) search pages/feeds.

You can get an RSS feed for your searches; something I heard many people had asked for from ReadBurner.

@louisgray I have no “unclean” motives for making the site. It took me under 24 hours to do and I did it see if it could be done; and it could be.

I don’t know how ReadBurner is setup internally; but historically PHP projects (mine included) become very unwieldy as you add more and more features; slowing you down considerably. I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to continue to add as many features as you and I want.

For example:

http://www.rssmeme.com/search/?q=rssmeme+readburner+sharedreader and the feed is http://www.rssmeme.com/feeds/search/rssmeme/readburner/sharedreader/

View your similar users: http://www.rssmeme.com/user/116/similar/

Adding user search so you can find yourself too.

Now you can search for users too…basically I’m trying to say that there is room for innovation and I’m trying to be different that ReadBurner.

Benjamin – thanks for your comments (and sorry for my slow reply).

I was harsh in my early evaluation, but the new stuff you are now doing is very interesting and goes beyond ReadBurner. I’ll be writing some more things about linkblogs tonight and will talk about the changes you have made.

No problem; here is a tip of what’s coming: soon I’ll be doing something similar to how I find related users but with related stories. It will show you the stories that people who shared a story also shared (is that confusing? it’ll make sense when you see it in action)

I just finished the similar stories feature: http://benjamingolub.com/2008/02/07/rssmeme-similar-stories/

You can see the link next to the permalink for every story. The algorithm isn’t perfect but I’ll be working on it.

I just added filters for time since the story was published and minimum number of shares. This also has it’s own RSS feed and I made it more prominent that EVERY page has a custom RSS feed.

I think all that ReadBurner has now is language filtering…