Directory

Just a quick notice that two of our topic experts, Michael Kolowich and Bill Ives have updated their respective Expert guides. The Digital TV & Video Production guide, by Michael Kolowich, covers the full chain of the video production and distribution process. You’ll find a rich and interesting set of pointers to blogs and other sources by an expert in the field.

And secondly, our Enterprise 2.0 guide by Bill Ives has also been thoroughly updated with new sources and information from the best people writing about how web 2.0 tools and models are being deployed inside the enterprise. It includes writers such as AndrewMcAfee, Stowe Boyd, John Hagel, and Dion Hinchcliffe.

We are always working with our Experts to keep their lists up to date and relevant, as we are looking for new Experts to expand our coverage. If you have ideas for new topics that we should offer - particularly if you can recommend a recognized expert in the field, please, let us know!

We just released BlogBridge 6.3 as our next ‘weekly’ release. One major new thing there, for users of our Publisher edition, is customizable Post to Blog templates. In addition to the built-in Full, Brief and Minimal templates, now you can create any number of additional templates.

The Post to Blog feature closes the loop for prolific micro publishers, making it super easy to use material that you find while reading with BlogBridge, as the basis for your own blog posts. It is a rich and powerful feature.

You tell BlogBridge about the blog to which you want to post. When you read something that inspires you to want to write to your blog, just type “b” (or click the Post to Blog command) and up comes a little blog post editor, pre-populated with whatever you were reading, which you can then edit further and post to the blog.

New with 6.3 is that you can create a template for the blog posts that are created. You can have many of them, for example: “News item”, “Tech note”, “Remaindered Links” and so on, each with custom html.Â

The screen displayed shows how you create and edit your new templates. Note the use of a series of special variables, where BlogBridge fills in key information from the article that you are quoting.

Second, sign up for a trial account. All subscriptions have an automatic 30 day trial period during which you can get your subscription cost refunded. To see this new feature in action, you need ‘publisher’ level which costs $25/3 months.

If you are new to BlogBridge, you should know that the majority of our functionality is in fact free of charge. You can sign up for a free account. For $5/3 months you get major increases in capacity - we call this the ‘basic’ edition, and for $25/3 months you can get a ‘publisher’ edition.

Continuing my introduction of features that are new for 6.3 (and I acknowledge right up front, require a Publisher level subscription) is Sentiment Analysis.

Now in my title I put the word Analysis in “quotes” because true analysis requires a level of language dependent natural language processing which so far is beyond our grasp. But we think what we have is a good, powerful, practical and understandable capability.

The point is simple: we classify all articles as having either positive or negative sentiment. In other words are they saying nice positive encouraging happy things, or evil sucky, mean spirited and depressing things?Â

[To have a sense of why this is not something you can do with perfection, even if you are an intelligent human, tell me whether this sentence is positive or negative: “The King is dead! Long live the king!” See, it’s not obvious ]

Articles are marked with a pretty little colored red dot if they are deemed negative and an pretty little green dot if they are positive.

And finally, and most useful, you can write SmartFeeds to pick out positive and negative articles, meaning there’s a new condition that you can include, combining with other conditions, to select for positive or negative sentiment.

So how does all this work? Well you just turn it on, of course, and you are in business. The command can be found on the Tools menu, Settings submenu, Sentiment Analysis. Just click the checkbox and press OK.

If you are not reading English language blogs then you most certainly will have to tune it, and you might want to anyway, by choosing Advanced… from the Sentiments dialog box.

You will see a list of words that we have chosen to correspond to positivity and a set of words that we have chosen to mean negativity. You are welcome of course to change those around to include your own sense of what words are most useful there.

So there you have it. BlogBridge Sentiment Analysis. We hope you like it. Please let us know what you think. We are very proud of it!

As mentioned above, it is one of the various power features that are offered to our Publisher level subscribers. I know everyone would rather have it as part of the basic product, but please understand that we also need to make some money on this project and the best way we know how to do that is to keep on adding value so our users are glad to support our work.

Second, sign up for a trial account. All subscriptions have an automatic 30 day trial period during which you can get your subscription cost refunded. To see this new feature in action, you need ‘publisher’ level which costs $25/3 months.

It is common to come across a blogger who thinks just like you do, or who covers a topic you are interested in as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to easily learn what other sources that blogger reads and admires? The best way to know that they respect another blog is that they link to it, right? So now, with BlogBridge 6.3 that information is a single click away.

We call it “Discover other blogs”. Here’s how it works:Â At any time when reading a blog, if it looks like there’s some interesting topics being referenced, just click the Discover Other Blogs command (on the Feeds menu, or the right-click menu.) That’s all there is to it.

Magically you will see links in the articles get highlighted, some red and some green.

A green highlight means this is a link to some blog that you are already subscribed Â to. Not too exciting, just move along.

But, a red highlight means that the author is referencing another blog that you don’t currently know. If you mouse hover over the link you see a cool infobox telling you what we know about this blog: particularly what the title of the blog is and also how many other blogs link to it (a good indicator of how good it is.)Â

A simple right click on the link lets you subscribe to the feed so you can start watching it and decide whether it’s a keeper or not.Â

This is delivers an end-to-end answer: read a blog, see a referenced blog and it’s readership, and if it looks good, subscribe to it. All in just a couple of clicks. The circle of life.

(Those of us worried about information overload might then follow with a “delete” of the previous blog that actually wasn’t all that good after all!)

Over the last week there were two very positive mentions of our Feed Library product which I would like to share with you.

First of all, on the always excellent App Gap blog, Bill Ives covers BlogBridge Feed Libraries, from the perspective of Enterprise 2.0. He says:

“The BlogBridge Feed Libraries can be the â€™web content directoriesâ€™ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their RSS Aggregators. The experts within your firm can place in the Feed Library the blogs and other sites that they feel will best address the issues that employees face as they deal with the topic cover by the Feed Library.
For example, one firm might have Feed Libraries on Marketing, Engineering, Human Resources and Manufacturing. Another might cover Biology, Medicine, Technology, Management, and Research. A bioresearch firm might have different libraries for subsets of Biology. It puts your experts in control of the recommendations for web reading. At the same time individuals can customize it with their own additions for their individual RSS feed lists.” (from BlogBridge Feed Libraries for Enterprise 2.0)

You should read the whole article, as it covers the product very nicely and from a broad perspective.

In a related post, Robert Brekman follows Bill’s post up, saying that he likes the concept:

“I recently came across a post that caught my eye that presents an interesting solution for serious researchers and for enterprise use of feeds that can help with this.” (from Intelligent Agent)

Also here are some thoughts about how BlogBridge itself could be used very effectively for this purpose, “Reputation Monitoring”:

Robin Good has a great new article on his blog about a topic near and dear to our heart: “News Aggregation and News Mastering.” As usual with his writing, there’s a nice step by step exposition of a topic that can quickly get confusing for beginners.

From there, Robin goes step by step through the procedure and process that you can use to be a newsmaster, why you might do it and how. You really should read the whole article. Along the way there’s also a very nice plug for BlogBridge:

We are always updating this collection, sometimes with objective topical collections, and sometimes with opinionated collections. For example, what follows are pointers to some great collections developed by the great magazine Vanity Fair: These are in the spirit of “Best Of”: in fact there are four:

Top > Scripting News Directory > Tim Post's Tomorrow > web2.0 > BlogBridge Expert Guides updates. Just a quick notice that two of our topic experts, Michael Kolowich and Bill Ives have updated their respective Expert guides. The Digital TV & Video Production guide, by Michael Kolowich, covers the full chain of the video production and distribution process. You’ll find a rich and interesting set of pointers to blogs and other sources by an expert in the field. And secondly, our Enterprise 2.0 guide by Bill Ives has also been thoroughly updated with new sources and information from the best people writing about how web 2.0 tools and models are being deployed inside the enterprise. It includes writers such as AndrewMcAfee, Stowe Boyd, John Hagel, and Dion Hinchcliffe. We are always working with our Experts to keep their lists up to date and relevant, as we are looking for new Experts to expand our coverage. If you have ideas for new topics that we should offer - particularly if you can recommend a recognized expert in the field, please, let us know! Post to Blog - now with customizable templates. We just released BlogBridge 6.3 as our next ‘weekly’ release. One major new thing there, for users of our Publisher edition, is customizable Post to Blog templates. In addition to the built-in Full, Brief and Minimal templates, now you can create any number of additional templates. Let me explain. The Post to Blog feature closes the loop for prolific micro publishers, making it super easy to use material that you find while reading with BlogBridge, as the basis for your own blog posts. It is a rich and powerful feature. You tell BlogBridge about the blog to which you want to post. When you read something that inspires you to want to write to your blog, just type “b” (or click the Post to Blog command) and up comes a little blog post editor, pre-populated with whatever you were reading, which you can then edit further and post to the blog. This feature exists in a simple form for all “basic” edition users, and in a much more advanced form for “publishing” edition users.Â New with 6.3 is that you can create a template for the blog posts that are created. You can have many of them, for example: “News item”, “Tech note”, “Remaindered Links” and so on, each with custom html.Â The screen displayed shows how you create and edit your new templates. Note the use of a series of special variables, where BlogBridge fills in key information from the article that you are quoting. Check it out, and let us know what you think!Â N.B: First you have to be running the latest ‘weekly’ development release. You can get it by clicking on this link, on Mac, Windows and Linux. Read here about the two different release types. Second, sign up for a trial account. All subscriptions have an automatic 30 day trial period during which you can get your subscription cost refunded. To see this new feature in action, you need ‘publisher’ level which costs $25/3 months. If you are new to BlogBridge, you should know that the majority of our functionality is in fact free of charge. You can sign up for a free account. For $5/3 months you get major increases in capacity - we call this the ‘basic’ edition, and for $25/3 months you can get a ‘publisher’ edition. 6.3 Weekly Development. BB - PTB: Added templates engine with an editor to the “Post To Blog” feature BB - Core: Added Sentiments Analysis feature (Publishing level) BB - Core: Improved reliability of feeds parsing BB - Core: Fixed minor navigation issues BB - Core: Fixed odd behavior of the Cleanup Wizard when a guide is selected BB - Core: Added “Discover other blogs” command to feeds and articles BB - Core: Improved image caching performance BB - OPML: Updated OPML export dialog with an extended export option BB - GUI: Replaced colors in drop-downs with nicer pastel versions BB - GUI: Fixed the layout of the reports dialog when showing long feed / guide names BB - GUI: Improved rendering of aligned images and images inside links BB - Net: Repopulating own del.icio.us tags on “Get Others Tags” New for 6.3, Sentiment â€śanalysisâ€ť. Continuing my introduction of features that are new for 6.3 (and I acknowledge right up front, require a Publisher level subscription) is Sentiment Analysis. Now in my title I put the word Analysis in “quotes” because true analysis requires a level of language dependent natural language processing which so far is beyond our grasp. But we think what we have is a good, powerful, practical and understandable capability. The point is simple: we classify all articles as having either positive or negative sentiment. In other words are they saying nice positive encouraging happy things, or evil sucky, mean spirited and depressing things?Â [To have a sense of why this is not something you can do with perfection, even if you are an intelligent human, tell me whether this sentence is positive or negative: “The King is dead! Long live the king!” See, it’s not obvious ] Articles are marked with a pretty little colored red dot if they are deemed negative and an pretty little green dot if they are positive. Also there is a filter for showing only positive or only negative articles. And finally, and most useful, you can write SmartFeeds to pick out positive and negative articles, meaning there’s a new condition that you can include, combining with other conditions, to select for positive or negative sentiment. So how does all this work? Well you just turn it on, of course, and you are in business. The command can be found on the Tools menu, Settings submenu, Sentiment Analysis. Just click the checkbox and press OK. If you are not reading English language blogs then you most certainly will have to tune it, and you might want to anyway, by choosing Advanced… from the Sentiments dialog box. You will see a list of words that we have chosen to correspond to positivity and a set of words that we have chosen to mean negativity. You are welcome of course to change those around to include your own sense of what words are most useful there. So there you have it. BlogBridge Sentiment Analysis. We hope you like it. Please let us know what you think. We are very proud of it! As mentioned above, it is one of the various power features that are offered to our Publisher level subscribers. I know everyone would rather have it as part of the basic product, but please understand that we also need to make some money on this project and the best way we know how to do that is to keep on adding value so our users are glad to support our work. N.B: First you have to be running the latest ‘weekly’ development release. You can get it by clicking on this link, on Mac, Windows and Linux. Read here about the two different release types. Second, sign up for a trial account. All subscriptions have an automatic 30 day trial period during which you can get your subscription cost refunded. To see this new feature in action, you need ‘publisher’ level which costs $25/3 months. If you are new to BlogBridge, you should know that the majority of our functionality is in fact free of charge. You can sign up for a free account. For $5/3 months you get major increases in capacity - we call this the ‘basic’ edition, and for $25/3 months you can get a ‘publisher’ edition. Â Discovering feeds as you read blogs. It is common to come across a blogger who thinks just like you do, or who covers a topic you are interested in as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to easily learn what other sources that blogger reads and admires? The best way to know that they respect another blog is that they link to it, right? So now, with BlogBridge 6.3 that information is a single click away. We call it “Discover other blogs”. Here’s how it works:Â At any time when reading a blog, if it looks like there’s some interesting topics being referenced, just click the Discover Other Blogs command (on the Feeds menu, or the right-click menu.) That’s all there is to it. Magically you will see links in the articles get highlighted, some red and some green. A green highlight means this is a link to some blog that you are already subscribed Â to. Not too exciting, just move along. But, a red highlight means that the author is referencing another blog that you don’t currently know. If you mouse hover over the link you see a cool infobox telling you what we know about this blog: particularly what the title of the blog is and also how many other blogs link to it (a good indicator of how good it is.)Â A simple right click on the link lets you subscribe to the feed so you can start watching it and decide whether it’s a keeper or not.Â This is delivers an end-to-end answer: read a blog, see a referenced blog and it’s readership, and if it looks good, subscribe to it. All in just a couple of clicks. The circle of life. (Those of us worried about information overload might then follow with a “delete” of the previous blog that actually wasn’t all that good after all!) This is another new BlogBridge 6.3 feature. BlogBridge 6.3 is still a weekly development release, so to play with this capability you need to get the weekly development release, which you can learn about here and download here. Â Â People are noticing BlogBridge Feed Library. Over the last week there were two very positive mentions of our Feed Library product which I would like to share with you. First of all, on the always excellent App Gap blog, Bill Ives covers BlogBridge Feed Libraries, from the perspective of Enterprise 2.0. He says: “The BlogBridge Feed Libraries can be the â€™web content directoriesâ€™ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their RSS Aggregators. The experts within your firm can place in the Feed Library the blogs and other sites that they feel will best address the issues that employees face as they deal with the topic cover by the Feed Library. For example, one firm might have Feed Libraries on Marketing, Engineering, Human Resources and Manufacturing. Another might cover Biology, Medicine, Technology, Management, and Research. A bioresearch firm might have different libraries for subsets of Biology. It puts your experts in control of the recommendations for web reading. At the same time individuals can customize it with their own additions for their individual RSS feed lists.” (from BlogBridge Feed Libraries for Enterprise 2.0) You should read the whole article, as it covers the product very nicely and from a broad perspective. In a related post, Robert Brekman follows Bill’s post up, saying that he likes the concept: “I recently came across a post that caught my eye that presents an interesting solution for serious researchers and for enterprise use of feeds that can help with this.” (from Intelligent Agent) Feedback in the blogosphere - How Comcast is handling it. Here’s an interesting story about how Comcast is following a broad collection of blogs, forums, and other social media and trying to get on top of customer gripes posted there: “From a sparse desk dominated by two computer screens in the new Comcast Center here, Mr. Eliason uses readily available online tools to monitor public comments on blogs, message boards and social networks for any mention of Comcast, the nationâ€™s largest cable company. When he sees a complaint like Mr. Dilbeckâ€™s, he contacts the source to try to defuse the problem.” (from Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company’s Ear) I applaud this but it is a dicey proposition which can backfire: “Still, others agree with Mr. Dilbeck, the University of Washington student, that the online outreach is annoying. â€śComcast Is Watching Us,â€ť declared a blog called Contempt for the World in February, when Mr. Eliason started wading into the comment sections of blogs.” (from Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company’s Ear) I wrote recently in my own personal blog about the risks and challenges: When hearing the people and effort that this client had deployed to try to respond to this, and how helpless they felt, i did feel sympathy. Once a thread about your company, or your product, or yourself, starts up, and gets interesting, it gathers a crowd, maybe because they agree, but just as easily because the attacker is funny or outrageous or clever in an evil way. (from Asymmetrical conflict in the blogosphere) Also here are some thoughts about how BlogBridge itself could be used very effectively for this purpose, “Reputation Monitoring”: “Iâ€™ve been following the topic of reputation monitoring for a little while now, because BlogBridge is an ideal and powerful tool to use in the service of Reputation monitoring and management. Hereâ€™s an interesting liveblog of a panel about Reputation Monitoring and Management at WebmasterWorld by Tamar Weinberg of techpedia fame.” (from BlogBridge Blog) Great piece about News Aggregation and Re-Publishing. Robin Good has a great new article on his blog about a topic near and dear to our heart: “News Aggregation and News Mastering.” As usual with his writing, there’s a nice step by step exposition of a topic that can quickly get confusing for beginners. I believe Robin himself originally coined the term newsmastering: “What Is NewsMastering? Newsmastering is the process by which a human being identifies, aggregates, hand-picks, edits and republishes a highly-focused, thematic news via RSS. Newsmastering allows dedicated news editors (newsmasters) to remix and contextualize the existing tsunami of breaking news for very specific audiences in one thousand and more ways.” (from What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars?) From there, Robin goes step by step through the procedure and process that you can use to be a newsmaster, why you might do it and how. You really should read the whole article. Along the way there’s also a very nice plug for BlogBridge: “Blogbridge is a great cross-platform open-source RSS feed reader, aggregator and publisher. It can hook up directly to your existing blog publishing system to create a seamless bridge between your news production and your more traditional site publishing chores. BlogBridge has a cool interface, many valuable features and great support.” (from RSS News Aggregation and Re-Publishing for beginners) New stuff in our library! â€” UPDATED. *Updated August 20, 2008* As you may know, BlogBridge offers a large, comprehensive, human-edited collections of blogs and feeds. This library is available from right inside BlogBridge (click “Add Giude” and then “Suggest”) or directly from our web site, even for non-BlogBridge users: BlogBridge Topic Guides We are always updating this collection, sometimes with objective topical collections, and sometimes with opinionated collections. For example, what follows are pointers to some great collections developed by the great magazine Vanity Fair: These are in the spirit of “Best Of”: in fact there are four: Vanity Fair’s Best “Serious” News Blogs Vanity Fair’s Best “Scurrilous” News Blogs Vanity Fair’s Best “Serious” Opinion Blogs Vanity Fair’s Best “Scurrilous” Opinion Blogs Watch this space for those links to become active in the next hours! 6.5 Final. API to add new PTB blog types with plug-ins Fixed Firefox3 support on Windows Added German translation Little fixes and performance improvements
12/3/2008; 5:51:20 PM Eastern. Refresh.