Blogging

Please welcome blogger Bob Walsh to Webware. Walsh has worked as a reporter for UPI, as a software developer, and now consults with start-ups and independent software vendors. He also writes at 47hats.com. –Rafe Needleman

Yes, you can pick your friends.

Users of Google’s RSS reader got a new social networking feature today: the capability to selectively pick and choose who of your Gmail/Gtalk friends get first crack at the items you want to share.

Back in May, Google turned on the capability for users to share RSS picks with all their Google contacts from GReader, but it was an all-or-nothing choice. The new feature lets you create a custom Friends list for the RSS items you want to share. Friends lists are the meat and potatoes of social networks.

There still is a static public URL for the GReader items you decide to share, assuming someone knows it. If part of your job description is finding posts that matter to your company or organization, GReader’s new sharing feature is tailor-made for it.

The new GReader feature goes head-to-head with FriendFeed’s RSS social-networking style. Sharing “the news” with people you know is natural; this new feature makes it just that much easier to do online.

See also: Official Google post on the new feature.

Read the original here:
Google Reader gets more social networky

If you’ve accumulated hundreds or thousands of RSS feeds in your favorite reader you might be looking for a way to sort through them all. Of many solutions out there Google Reader offers just a few ways to weed out lame feeds either by tracking inactivity, or integrating tags for the sake or sorting. These tools are helpful, but far from a solution to save you from having to go through all your content to get to the good stuff.

Enter AidRSS, a ridiculously simple story sorter that uses PostRank, a rating system that measures how good a post is by things like the number of user comments, traffic and promotion on social news tools. All of this statistical analysis is applied to each story, giving it a score from 1 to 10.

The tool will let you sort which stories and feeds you want to view. You can pick from good to best, which will simply hide any posts that fall outside the threshold. You can also group together these stories based on the source, which will clump them together for easy perusal.

Adding AideRSS to Google Reader requires installing a plug-in. There are two flavors, on basic Firefox extension, and an add-on for the hacktacular Greasemonkey. Both have identical functionality.

One of the only downsides of relying on PostRank is that it simply doesn’t work for every blog post. Some of items found on friends blogs or random RSS feeds that received low PostRank were very good, so simply ignoring them does not work. Mainstream content on the other hand gets at least a baseline rank.

Another thing to note is that it will noticeably slow down Google Reader performance if you’ve got PostRank turned on (note: there’s a toggle switch). You can still read and open any feed quickly, but it will have to pull in the ratings each time you open a feed from the source list, which can take a while.

To see it in action check out the video below.

[Spotted on Delicious]

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AideRSS ranks and sorts your RSS feeds

It can be called an obsession, but reading blogs and articles is just part of blogging. You spend tons of time on the web reading what people have to say on every topic imaginable, looking for trends, news, valuable information, and posting comments and linking back to your blogs along the way. As […]

The rest is here:
Must have blog tool: Google Reader

Love RSS feeds but generally unhappy about the structured systems that let you browse them? You might like Feedly, a very nontraditional approach to viewing your favorite feeds that ends up feeling a lot like portal news sites of yore, but with a tight-knit social network built in to help you discover and share new content with friends.

The service, which is currently Firefox-only (how convenient) and requires you to install a small browser plug-in, will slurp up your bookmarks, social networking log-ins, news preferences and an entire OPML file and will organize it on to various news pages. The result is something some have coined as Yahoo 2.0 with each area of interest set up as its own news section–complete with top stories that change throughout the day.

You can read entire articles and feeds without having to visit the source site. For the purists there’s also a simple button you can click to bring up each article in a light boxed window on top of the feed. In fact there are several ways to view content, either with large thumbnails and abstracts, or just headlines. My personal favorite is the thumbnail view, which doesn’t even tell you what the article is until you mouse over it, but will grab graphics from the post and present it on a large grid. Users with big screens will love this.

You can do a host of things from any story of feed you're on, including opening it up in a little light box above the page.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

To me it feels like a very early attempt at helping people categorize the mess that can become a list of bookmarks and feeds in excess of 200 sites–something most are unlikely to have. To that end Feedly’s organization is one of its strong-suits. You can go in and tweak your feeds or services at any time. It’ll also help you out with a feature called “spring cleaning” which will highlight feeds that haven’t been updated in a while–something I really wish Google Reader would do. You can then nix these feeds or simply turn them off with a simple switch. They’re even color coded with yellow, orange and red to mark the severity of the deadness. Nice.

I’m a little wary of the fact that Feedly requires you to install a browser plug-in, but for now it makes sense: once installed you get special contextual menus for content you’re viewing in Feedly. This includes a highlighter that lets you make small annotations and special options to tweak or share that feed with others. It even taps into other sites like Twitter in case you want to share what you’re reading there. My hope is that they find a workaround so that you’ll be able to access all of this from any browser, anywhere without problems.

Personally I find more value in Google Reader’s tightly organized system of viewing feeds, which resembled something a little closer to an e-mail in box, but I can see how people who like to view hot news on a single page would flock to this product. Also, the privacy and user transparency needs some work, because from the very onset you’re sharing what you’re annotating, along with feeds that you subscribe to with everyone else. It also automatically subscribes you to a grouping of feeds in Google Reader, something which is now being turned off after user complaints.

Below is a screenshot of what the service looks like once you’ve pumped it full of feeds. There’s also the three-minute demo provided by creator Edwin Khodabakchian.

Get all your news from feeds and more on one page with Feedly.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

feedly guided tour from Edwin Khodabakchian on Vimeo.

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Feedly launches a news site made just for you