taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Alex Payne writing about “Fever”, a new link-blog aggregator app:

Fever’s proposition is straightforward: supply it with the feeds you always want to read, and supplement those with feeds that you only want to read the juicy bits of. Fever will then show you a sort of personal Techmeme or Google News, pulling together stories that reference common URLs.

Fever is commercial software, costing $30. Alternatively, I’ve been doing something very similar for the past few years using SpicyLinks, which is free (if a great deal less pretty on the UI end).

It’s nice to see the idea getting some polish, though. ;)

Alex does raise an interesting point towards the end:

Fever is just fine for floating good techie content to the top, but poor for most any other subject. I’d love it if Fever could find me good posts from the set of minimal techno or cocktail blogs I subscribe to, but link blogs — and, indeed, linking outside one’s own site — just aren’t as prevalent in those communities.

True.

Tags: aggregation, atom, blogs, feeds, fever, link-blogs, Links, rss, techmeme

• Twitter API Rate Limiting : ‘Clients are allowed 70 requests per 60 sixty minute time period, starting from their first request. This is enough to make just over one request per minute, per hour, which should meet the needs of most applications.’ Fingers crossed this can be lifted for twit.ie
  (tags: aggregation rate-limiting api http twitter twit.ie)

• Pipes: BBC AOD filter : select a BBC radio show, get an RSS feed of “Audio on Demand” RealAMRadio files as they are posted. (”radio4″ works as the station ID for that station)
  (tags: bbc radio4 radio realaudio via:hublog)

• Work at Home . . . for a Criminal? : good round-up of how those “work at home” scam spams work
  (tags: work spam scams fraud teleworking telecommuting)

Tags: aggregation, api, bbc, fraud, http, radio, radio4, rate-limiting, realaudio, scams, spam, telecommuting, teleworking, twit.ie, twitter, via:hublog, work

Hey, some Planet Antispam updates. I’ve upgraded to Planet 2.0, and that seems to have solved some of the wierdness with consuming Atom feeds.

Also, there are two new antispam weblogs added to the subscription list:

• Terry Zink from Microsoft

• Nik Clayton, who blogs about mail and, occasionally, spam

Welcome guys!

(btw, if you’re wondering what happened to the music post — I moved it over here, to the mp3 blog where it was supposed to be posted in the first place, duh ;)

Tags: aggregation, antispam, planet, planet-antispam, weblogs

Ross Mayfield:

Every time I see Gabe Rivera of TechMeme, I ask for the same thing — MeMeme. Give me TechMeme where the core index is based on who I read, about 150 people at any given time, to show me what my friends are interested in.

Funnily eough, that is exactly why I wrote SpicyLinks!

It works pretty well — in fact, nowadays I don’t really bother reading slashdot, Digg, Reddit, et al, particularly frequently, because I know that all the really interesting stuff will be at the top of my newsreader in the SpicyLinks feed.

Anyway, I’ve been calling SpicyLinks a ’summarizing aggregator’, but the discussion that arose from Ross’ posting inspired me. A little bit of hacking has come up with an interesting twist: take a del.icio.us social network, a CGI script called deliciousnetwork2opml.cgi, and 15 minutes hacking on SpicyLinks to support inclusion of OPML via a remote URI, and hey presto — it’s now a social-network summarising aggregator. ;)

Tags: aggregation, delicious, hacks, link-blogs, rss, social-networking, software, spicylinks

Cool — del.icio.us just added a feature whereby you can now see who has you in their network, and, of course, you can further view their networks and see who’s in them.

This’d be great to produce social-network graphs, although I daresay Joshua mightn’t be so keen on the spidering load. ;) I’ve optimistically requested some form of dump, anyway.

The social networking aspect of link collection and link-blogging via del.icio.us is emerging nicely; I’m keen to see what’s next in the pipeline.

A few interesting things:

• Almost everyone who’s using del.icio.us seriously for link collection — ie. applying some quality control thresholds, and bothering to write one-line descriptions, at least — has filled out their ‘network’ by now.

• It’d be useful to have “groups”, so that we can now assert things like “jm, boogah, n0wak, negatendo, tweebiscuit, leonardr, muckster and torrez form a group”. I’m sure that’d provide useful info, although could probably be inferred anyway. (People are attempting to hack it by using a shared tag on all their postings, like the “irishblogs” tag, but that’s an awful misuse of tagging in my opinion ;)

• Also, it’ll be interesting to see what’ll happen once Google Co-op figures out a way to incorporate the del.icio.us network data. To be honest, I’m very surprised it wasn’t already in there — it seems like a no-brainer… maybe some Y!/G corporate rivalry is getting in the way.

Anyway, in the meantime it’s producing lots of good fodder for my SpicyLinks feed.

SpicyLinks is an implementation of something that I mentioned in a comment on this weblog entry, regarding future methods of reading weblogs; in essence, it’s an automated blog aggregation summariser. It reads other people’s link-blogs, so I don’t have to, and reports the stuff that proves popular in my personal collection of sources.
(Credit where due: HotLinks provided much of the inspiration, but doesn’t support personalisation, hence the reimplementation.)

SpicyLinks is similar to Populicious, but that app really misses the point, in my opinion. I don’t particularly want to know what everyone is pointing at; I want to know what a selected set of trusted sources (with good taste!) are pointing at.

This aggregation is pretty similar to the del.icio.us ‘network’ feed, but with much lower volume, and a higher signal/noise ratio, attained by dropping the ‘one-off’ items that only one person is pointing at. Initially, that may seem like a major failure, since you miss the ‘fresh bits’ — but as long as you’ve got the right people in your source network, it actually works very well.

It’d be great if this was one of the features implemented in the del.icio.us ‘network’ system…

Tags: aggregation, atom, delicious, feeds, hotlinks, link-blogs, Links, populicious, rss, social-networks, spicylinks, weblogs

peoplefeeds is cool.

I’ve been looking for something to can aggregate my Flickr, Wordpress blog, and del.icio.us feeds into one venue where I can look up items by tag, in a single page-load.

Suprglu was my leading contender, although they weren’t there yet since they didn’t seem to support importing my blog posts with tags preserved — pretty much everything wound up tagged as “uncategorized“. disappointing. :( so I was waiting for them to fix that.

This post by Richard MacManus pointed at another couple of options; 43Things and Peoplefeeds. I hadn’t actually noticed that 43Things was doing this kind of aggregation too; unfortunately as far as I can see, they doesn’t support tag preservation and browsing, so there goes my desired feature. shame.

However, Peoplefeeds was right on target, offering a ‘Unified Tagspace’ and a ‘Search All-Personal-Content’ mechanism. It works nicely, too. Here’s my personal aggregator, combining my Flickr feed, my weblog feed, and my del.icio.us feed into one — and with a unified tag-space; here’s my ‘hiking’ tag, hitting all 3 feeds. Perfect.

One other use for this — I’ve forgotten why I was looking for one of these, but I know I did want one ;) — it can be used to make a “private planet“. If you have 3 or 4 feeds that you need to combine into one, this provides a very easy way to do that; just set up a userid at Peoplefeeds for that purpose.

Tags: aggregation, feeds, peoplefeeds, rss, tags, web

Planet Antispam now has a better URL — http://planet.spam.abuse.net/ . Much better!

Tags: aggregation, antispam, community, planet, planet-antispam, rss, web