Alan Levine posts that he's moving the source code for the most excellent Feed2JS tool to Google Code. If you haven't played with it before, Feed2JS was one of the first and best tools to take RSS feeds and provide you with javascript that allows you to embed those feeds within a standard web page. An oldie, but still goodie.
Ha! My Google rank's going to go up with a headline like that! Dave Pattern of the University of Huddersfield recently launched a new library blog-monitoring tool called HotStuff 2.0. HotStuff 2.0 monitors the RSS feeds of over 800 library related blogs, and analyzes the content
in an attempt to discover new and/or interesting topics... a daily blog post is generated using a single word that has seen a marked increase in usage over the last few days. A “Word Wheel” image shows the strength of the links between that word and other words that have also recently seen an increase in usage. This can sometimes help to put to the words into context, but mostly it’s just an excuse for some eye candy!
Just for fun, every day the last 3 blog posts from each blog are analysed to give a “Hot or Not” score. Points are gained for using words that haven’t been used frequently in the past, but lost for using words that are declining in popularity. You can see the current scores on the Hot or Not page!
Some fun and interesting stuff to be found by poking around. Today's word of the day is "stewardship":
You may recall that last year I discussed some options I was considering for commercialization of this blog. I have gotten one $25 payment from Newstex in the last year, so my content's obviously trickling out there somehow. Just got a notice that I'm now available in the Amazon Kindle store, where you can now subscribe to me for $.99 per month! I didn't set the price, and obviously I don't suggest you pay to receive my content when you can get it here for free. But I guess if you live and die by your Kindle you now have the option. :-)
I missed this when it was first "announced", but apparently the first RSS to email utility that I fell in love with is no more. About a year and a half ago, NBC purchased Rmail and rebranded it as SendMeRSS. Apparently NBC just stopped supporting it; the SendMeRSS website is down, and Randy Charles Morin, the original developer of Rmail, is reporting that NBC is threatening legal action against him for pointing out the fact that they're no longer supporting SendMeRSS. Seems a little heavy-handed, eh? Interestingly, in his post from August 24, 2008 Randy points to a library blog that detailed some of the problems being experienced with the now defunct product. Scarily, that blog no longer exists, though of course you can still read about the problems (and here) on Google's cache. Pittland simply ceased to exist after the last August 1, 2008 post. Wonder if I'll be next? ;-)
Since it was one of the first RSS to email options I offered on this site I suspect there may be a few folks either receiving (or not) content from me via that channel. I'd be really interested to hear whether you're still getting stuff from me, or NBC, or ? I know it's a long shot, kinda like "raise your hand if you're not here", but it's worth a shot :-)
Saw a mention of AideRSS go by on Twitter the other day, and just tried it out. The idea is great - give
AideRSS a blog URL and it purports to sift through all the posts and then offer separate feeds to you so you can subscribe to only the "best post" the "great", "good" or all the posts (the naked feed, if you will). Supposedly it's a way to deal with overload, by only getting the best of the posts from the bloggers you want to follow. Sounds great, right?
Maybe, but IMHO they've got some work to do on their algorithms. With someting like this I like to compare myself to someone I know is a "better" blogger. In this case I picked Meredith at Information Wants to be Free. Yeah, we blog differently, but AideRSS appears to place a lot of weight on how many links and how much of a conversation a given blog post has. In that case Meredith definitely blows me away. And yet, here are the screenshots of her blog and mine. Take a look at the highlighted sections. Any rhyme or reason there? Look how many posts, saves and comments her posts have, and she doesn't even get a "best posts" category! Maybe they're placing way more weight on # of recent posts than they should? (click for bigger versions)
By all means go give it a try - maybe it'll be useful to you.
