Trusted Sources and Suprglu

So today is a sad day as I’ve decided to drop Alan Levine and Tim Lauer from my Bloglines blogroll. (Sorry guys.) Their blog feeds have just become, I dunno, so one-dimensional. Sure, they’re both writing about great stuff and linking to cool tools. But I just feels like I’m missing something…

The fix? Now I’m subscribed to Tim and Alan’s SuprGlu sites. In one feed, I get their blog posts, any links they post to del.icio.us, their Flickr photos and more. And actually, while the feed uptake is a little slower, I’m liking this a lot more. These are people whose ideas and links I trust, and I love being able to follow their practice and beyond the blog more deeply and easily. In fact, I’d love it if more of my nucleus of trusted teachers would do the same.

And btw, here’s my Suprglu page and feed in case you’re interested. (The way I’ve been del.icio.us-ing lately, you might be.)

C’mon…you didn’t think I be so silly as to totally drop Tim and Alan, did you?

(As an aside, believe it or not, it took me until this morning to subscribe to Stephen’s Edu-RSS feed. And I really wish I could wrap my brain around the whole concept of what he’s trying to do with it.)

Bosko Milekic says

January 5, 2006 at 7:22 am

Some time ago, I also realized that there is value in following people’s trails, beyond just reading blogs, in some cases; the way this came about is that I noticed that my “realm” of trust was segmented. My feed subscriptions are in fact also segmented:

1. At the lowest layer, there are my “trusted publications.”

2. At the highest layer, there are the “people I trust and who’s opinions/thoughts I value regarding a particular topic.”

In the case of (1), the feed<->trust relationship is pretty much one for one, in that I subscribe to one feed for the given “publication.” An example of this is subscribing to the macrumours RSS feed, or equivalent.

In the case of (2), the situation is completely reversed. I often have to dig around to find a person’s blog feed(s), delicious feed, Flickr feed, etc. etc.

At first, Suprglu helped. However, I still hated the fact that I could only get ONE RSS feed for EVERYTHING (in Suprglu), and not have any control over what I’m tracking. It’s either I subscribe to a person’s dispersed feeds separately, or I subscribed to their Suprglu feed but risked having to deal with even things I really didn’t care about.

I thought about this problem a lot.

Eventually, I wrote (and with a couple of other guys, quietly launched) Peoplefeeds.com — similar to Suprglu, you aggregate _your_ content from various different sources; but the difference (for now), and I believe this is key, is how others can subscribe to it. They can, like in Suprglu, subscribe to everything. But they can also subscribe to only a particular tag, or to several individual tags. Or to several individual tags ONLY WITHIN your blog(s), or ONLY WITHIN your bookmarks. If they also are signed into Peoplefeeds, instead of having to spend a lot of time individually subscribing to everything, they can simply add any of another person’s tags to their “watchlist.” Then the watchlist functionality in Peoplefeeds will automatically create a single personalized RSS feed _for each person tracked_, consisting of a spliced version of entries, with duplicates removed, of all the content matching the tags being tracked, and only the tags being tracked. To make things even simpler, you can download the OPML of your watchlist, so syncing your feed reader to your watchlist is, almost, a completely effortless task.

To give you a concrete idea, here’s an example. Here’s my profile:
http://peoplefeeds.com/bosko

Here’s my watchlist:
http://peoplefeeds.com/bosko/watchlist
(notice personalized (for me) RSS for each person, and OPML of watchlist).

Additionally, you can search all your stuff (and put up the search bar for your stuff as well as your tagcloud, or subset of it, on your blog — so you don’t have to redirect others to your peoplefeeds profile, but merely integrate your blog with it).

Of course, this is not the be-all end-all of what we’re trying to accomplish. But for now, it gives you some idea of the direction.

Cheers,
Bosko

Comments

John Blake says

January 4, 2006 at 5:52 am

Here is mine http://blakej.suprglu.com/ I agree, it is the best for getting an idea of what folks are really into… I am in class, and my students are getting ready to start working on a new podcast, gotta run…
Christopher Harris says

January 4, 2006 at 7:39 am

Will, I think you are on to something. I have been playing around with SuprGlu for a while, but I was using it more in a personal sense of a “public aggregator” where I could send people to view feeds from a select number of really key sources. As we build up more and more of a presence online though, and especially when that presence is RSS-based as with del.icio.us or other tools, SuprGlu becomes more of an identity aggregator. http://infomancy.suprglu.com
Bosko Milekic says

January 5, 2006 at 7:22 am

Some time ago, I also realized that there is value in following people’s trails, beyond just reading blogs, in some cases; the way this came about is that I noticed that my “realm” of trust was segmented. My feed subscriptions are in fact also segmented:

1. At the lowest layer, there are my “trusted publications.”

2. At the highest layer, there are the “people I trust and who’s opinions/thoughts I value regarding a particular topic.”

In the case of (1), the feed<->trust relationship is pretty much one for one, in that I subscribe to one feed for the given “publication.” An example of this is subscribing to the macrumours RSS feed, or equivalent.

In the case of (2), the situation is completely reversed. I often have to dig around to find a person’s blog feed(s), delicious feed, Flickr feed, etc. etc.

At first, Suprglu helped. However, I still hated the fact that I could only get ONE RSS feed for EVERYTHING (in Suprglu), and not have any control over what I’m tracking. It’s either I subscribe to a person’s dispersed feeds separately, or I subscribed to their Suprglu feed but risked having to deal with even things I really didn’t care about.

I thought about this problem a lot.

Eventually, I wrote (and with a couple of other guys, quietly launched) Peoplefeeds.com — similar to Suprglu, you aggregate _your_ content from various different sources; but the difference (for now), and I believe this is key, is how others can subscribe to it. They can, like in Suprglu, subscribe to everything. But they can also subscribe to only a particular tag, or to several individual tags. Or to several individual tags ONLY WITHIN your blog(s), or ONLY WITHIN your bookmarks. If they also are signed into Peoplefeeds, instead of having to spend a lot of time individually subscribing to everything, they can simply add any of another person’s tags to their “watchlist.” Then the watchlist functionality in Peoplefeeds will automatically create a single personalized RSS feed _for each person tracked_, consisting of a spliced version of entries, with duplicates removed, of all the content matching the tags being tracked, and only the tags being tracked. To make things even simpler, you can download the OPML of your watchlist, so syncing your feed reader to your watchlist is, almost, a completely effortless task.

To give you a concrete idea, here’s an example. Here’s my profile:
http://peoplefeeds.com/bosko

Here’s my watchlist:
http://peoplefeeds.com/bosko/watchlist
(notice personalized (for me) RSS for each person, and OPML of watchlist).

Additionally, you can search all your stuff (and put up the search bar for your stuff as well as your tagcloud, or subset of it, on your blog — so you don’t have to redirect others to your peoplefeeds profile, but merely integrate your blog with it).

Of course, this is not the be-all end-all of what we’re trying to accomplish. But for now, it gives you some idea of the direction.

Cheers,
Bosko