The Hindu : Business : Bloglines: new features

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jul 19, 2004

Business

Business

Bloglines: new features

THE ONLINE news aggregation service, Bloglines, which celebrated its one-year anniversary recently, has unveiled some new innovative services. NetSpeak takes a look at them.

Desktop based news aggregators (like AmphetaDesk — http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/) let us subscribe/read news feeds through a user-friendly interface from our desktop. As the desktop aggregator software is installed on our machine, obviously, this type of solution fails if we move over to a different machine. As mentioned in an earlier issue of this column, if you want to read your favourite news feeds from anywhere on the Net, anytime, the best solution is to enlist the service of an on-line news aggregator (like Bloglines — http://www.bloglines.com).

In fact, the concept of a web-based news aggregation service is gaining tremendous acceptance among netizens and the current popularity enjoyed by the on-line news aggregation service, Bloglines, is an excellent indicator of this emerging trend. This free on-line news aggregation service lets you subscribe to news feeds of your choice, then periodically scans the feeds' sources and downloads the ones that have new content. If you have not used it yet, go ahead, register with it and subscribe to your favourite news feeds by providing their URLs.

Bloglines, which was started almost one year back, has become a major force in the `news aggregation tools' segment and as a token of its success, recently they have introduced a few additional services. Now, let us have a look at some of them.

ClipBlogs

While going through an interesting article you may prefer to post it on to your blog (if you have one) directly from the browser. Bloglines new feature, `ClipBlogs,' has been developed with this purpose in mind. This feature allows you to create your own blog that can be easily populated from the Bloglines' interface.

If you come across an interesting feed content while on Bloglines and want to store it for future reference or share it with others, just click on the option `Clip/Blog this.' Immediately this entry will be pasted on to your Bloglines blog. You can either keep the blog private or make it public so that others can access it.

Another feature worth a little attention is the `Bloglines Directory' service. This feature enables you to view all the news feeds indexed by Bloglines in alphabetical order. Apart from getting details of feeds indexed by the service, the `Directory' tool can also be used to list out feeds used by other users of the service. This will be a very useful resource, as it helps a user easily discover feeds read by other users with similar interests.

Yet another valuable service available at Bloglines is `Bloglines Top Links' (http://www.bloglines.com/toplinks) tool that lists out "the most popular feed and blog articles.'' With the options such as the `Top Gaining Links' and `Top Declining Links,' the service can also be used to spot topic trends on the blog world. A notable highlight of this feature is that RSS-feeds for these pages (`Top Links'/Top Gaining Links/Top Declining Links) are also available. This feature will enable a user to read those pages through Bloglines or some other news aggregator.

Personal portal software

Net has become a part of our daily life and many of us regularly visit a multitude of web sites/blogs and use several other Net services- web-based e-mail, on-line weather service and the like. A generic interface that helps us view the contents from our favourite sites without having to visit each one of them separately and that lets us access the various Net services directly from our browser would help us quite a lot. The free software, Surfpack (http://www.surfpack.com), which can be used to assemble all your favourite services into a single web page, will be useful for building such an interface.

Surfpack, which comes with a ready-made web page equipped with many built in features allows you to edit the page's content (using the `Edit' option at the page header) in "whatever way, form or shape you might like.'' That is, you can add/delete any number of service modules to be presented on the home page and get them displayed in any order you prefer. As the page lies on your desktop, it gets loaded very fast and you can access it anytime by loading the browser with the URL: http://localhost:8171/. One drawback of this software is that it works properly only with IE. As per its site (http://www.surfpack.com/requirements.html), Surfpack's versions compatible with Mozilla and Opera are under development.

List of start-up programs

Automatic loading of some unwanted programs during the booting stage is one of the reasons attributed to the poor performance of a Windows PC. One tool that can be used to prevent the machine from loading unwanted programs is the utility `Msconfig.exe' that comes along with Windows.

Apart from `msconfig,' as we have already seen, special utilities like `autoruns' (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/autoruns.shtml) can also be used for this purpose. But while disabling such junks, we may come across programs whose real functions are not very clear to us. Some of these programs may be useful and might create problems if you eliminate them. The comprehensive start-up programs-list available here: http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php, will come quite handy to deal with such situations The details of all possible programs are listed here.

A few weeks ago NetSpeak mentioned the service Findory.com that learns about your interests by monitoring the articles you read and then alters its front page based on this feedback. Recently they have started an additional service called Blogory, which can be used to get a customised page with blog postings tailored to your tastes/interests. Access the service (http://www.findory.com/cgi-bin/blogory.cgi), go through some of the blog entries that interest you and when you access it next time, you will find the site's home page altered with more blog articles that are relevant to your requirements. Apart from the services mentioned above, Findory also hosts RSS feeds (http://www.findory.com/cgi-bin/news. cgi?rss=1) for personalised and unpersonalised headlines.

J. Murali

Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in

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