As it usually happens with the new ideas, somebody else had it too, and, most importantly, made it real before I had even started coding (actually, I had, but just a few lines). In a short while, a second similar aggregator appeared and, today, we are fortunate to have ReadBurner and RssMeme.

The two services, both dear to me,  have a lot in common with one notable exception: RssMeme employs a kind of spider to find and aggregate shared items  while ReadBurner is an opt in service.

In due course, other feed readers were added as sources: Bloglines, Netvibes, Newgator etc. and RssMeme went  a bit further querying known services to find out whether an article had been bookmarked in any way.

The idea that what one shares through his feed reader is actually a vote or a recommendation is pretty solid, and, once a big number of sharers is reached, the power of statistics comes to play: the articles that emerge to the top are the ones that people truly feel are important. Isn't this the essence of social bookmarking? And isn't it also true that this essence is actually gamed in the digg like sites by a rather small group of people, despite the huge influx of traffic these sites enjoy?

One short  visit to Readburner or RssMeme reveals though, that the articles that rise to the top, have been shared by such a small number of people that, with  equal diggs, they would never see the light of day in digg.

Which leads to the conclusion that either the people who share are not that many, or they have not been included in the two aggregators yet.

Speaking of numbers, how many people really use Google Reader? I tried to google the question but came with no answer. I tried to google also the 'google reader market share', but came with no recent data either.

Without an idea of how many people use feed readers and share, it is  pretty hard to make any predictions or recommendations. Yet, if we assume that it is only because it is too early  (less than a year) that the sharing culture hasn't spread and that it, eventually, will, we can fantasize one implication:

Some clever engineer will think of incorporating the share-votes into digg: a little bit of matching (is the sharer a digg user, and has the shared post been dugg already etc) and there you go.

But would that be a good thing?

Yes, it would. Because it would instill the democratic element of Readburner/RssMeme into digg. And, democracy is a good thing, isn't it?

Related articles by Zemanta

• A Directory of Google Reader Shared Pages?
• Google Reader comes to its sharing senses, lets users pick friends

Here is a little nice one.

Problem:

Readburner is a service that aggregates all blogposts shared in NewsGator Online, Google Reader and Netvibes.

By counting the number of shares, it creates a popularity list. In effect, this is a truly democratical social bookmarking system, without the hickups of Digg and its likes.

Readburner provides its users with some nice widgets in the form of little chicklets, that display essential statistical measures.

The chicklets come in three flavors:

• Item of a specific user (i.e. his share page) registed with Readburner.
• Items authored by someone.
• Items of a specific source (say, a blog with many authors).

Readburner provides some javascript code that allows anyone to generate the chicklets for his part.

Now, I wanted to put such a readburner chicklet in my sidebar, but I stumbled on the usual wordpress.com problem: no javascript allowed.

Solution:

Since javascript is not allowed, we have to find a way of displaying the chicklet through pure html.

Let's see what a chicklet is composed of:

• an image (the colored rectangle of the chicklet)
• a number (the counted items)
• a link (the link to the relevant page in readburner)

As a matter of fact, the number is in the image, so we have to find just two things: the image url and the link url.

• User.

( The number here is my number from the google reader shared items url http://www.google.com/reader/shared/11232096483858520222.

You have to figure out yours, and replace this one):

The required urls are of the following type:

Image: http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?user=11232096483858520222

Link: http://readburner.com/u/11232096483858520222

and the actual html code should be:

<a href="http://readburner.com/u/11232096483858520222"  target="_blank" title="">

<img src="http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?user=11232096483858520222" alt=""/>

</a>

which produces:

• Author:

Image: http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?author=Nikos%20Anagnostou

Link: http://readburner.com/u/Nikos Anagnostou

and the actual html code should be:

<a href="http://readburner.com/u/Nikos Anagnostou" target="_blank" title="">

<img src="http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?author=Nikos%20Anagnostou" alt=""/>

</a>

which produces:

• Source:

Image: http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?source=webtropic

Link: http://readburner.com/source/webtropic

and the actual html code should be:

<a href="http://readburner.com/source/webtropic" target="_blank" title="">

<img src="http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?source=webtropic" alt=""/>

</a>

which produces:

To figure out the proper links for yourselves, first of course you have to add your shared items url in readburner. Then replace your name, blog name or user id in the above code and paste it in a text widget in wordpress.

As I said, I am using Google Reader. The other services might have some slight variations in the url schemes, I did not bother to check. Please do for yourselves.

Good luck and ..happy sharing!

Anyway, I'm going to start with one of my pet RSS projects, because if ever I needed help with a project, it was this one. No yahoo pipes-esque inspiration yet, and I've been working on this for a lot longer... In a nutshell, the library is getting cut; people think everything is on google, no-one knows who those folk in specs and dowdy cardigans are anymore, blah blah blah. It's hardly ground breaking news. So, we at the library make the obvious connection and decide that we need to start reaching out to people rather than wait for them to come to us. One of the librarians, who has been there for eons, states that in the past, when she received interesting emails she used to send them to interested people, a la SDI. Did they teach SDI at library school anymore? I have no idea what SDI is, and am trying to visualise the trusty acronym dictionary in my head in the vain hope that that might help me. It doesn't. Bearing in mind I had only been at my job for less than two months, I decide to risk a cautious no. Right answer and full explanation ensues. (FYI, it's Selective Dissemination of Information...right.) So she explains, and RSS immediately springs to mind. I had probably been indulging in some illicit feed reading moments before... Why don't we start to build this up, with proper distribution lists of interested specialists (as I know about 4 people in the Bank. Knowledge Management indeed) and draw in more content with RSS? Library colleagues were a little hazy about RSS but that led to some ego boosting teaching opportunities and being known as the RSS guru, so it worked well for me... But anyway, this was last July, and I haven't been able to move on from this basic idea yet. Basically, I set up distribution lists in most wonderful Outlook of joy (...), entitled "Health" or "Environment" for example. I set up RSS feeds for as many different providers who might provide interesting and worthwhile content that our patrons would like to see. I scan Bloglines twice a day, copy, paste and send the information to the patron distribution lists. It works. People are happy as they get new material which has been vetted by a librarian. We've expanded the service to include new journals and books. And we're happy as we're reaching people for sure, rather than just providing a RSS feed and hoping people sign up.

BUT- its not very cool. It was half cool maybe in 2004, but we're in 2008. It's very time consuming. It's not automated. But I think it could be!! From the SLA listserv, it seems that no-on has much more of an idea than we do. There're a couple of services: Ozmosys is one fr'instance, but although everyone wanted to know more about services, no-one seemed very happy with any of the solutions.

I'm fairly happy with the basic layer of the service- ie the groups of specialists and the information we're receiving, though it would be good to expand this. The alerts are very relevant too, as they're handpicked. Some of the ideas that I have been pondering in order to improve this involve:

• The Specialist Locater that the workplace may eventually crack on with sometime this millennium, (extract the tags/info that people add about themselves and their interests) (more about this later),
• OR somehow tag all the relevant information by publishing it in a blog (Bloglines has this feature to publish, but no tagging, sadly) and then extracting an RSS feed filtered by tag and sending it automatically to the distribution lists. (hmm, in my dreams?! Not sure about presentation issues...)
• OR as yet some other inspired solution!

I've been scouring the web for information about similar problems- and will write later about AideRSS, Readburner, and the like. Well, I will when I've read about them; the blog is really making me get my thoughts in order which is F.A.B!

I also wanna thank the ReadBurner team. The energy and passion they're putting in is amazing and their future plans are too. Congrats guys!

My personal goal is to end my freelance work till the end of June and after that to jump fully back into the startup world. I will then continue to help out with ReadBurner but I also have plenty of new cool ideas (I recently had to turn down two invitations to YCombinator interviews due to this damn contract work I'm bound to).

Anyway. Have fun with the all new ReadBurner and don't forget to burn your Linkblog.

Was ist ReadBurner?

ReadBurner analysiert Google Reader Shared Items-Feeds, die von den ReadBurner-Besucher/innen eingetragen werden können. Heraus kommt in etwa eine elitäre Version von Digg. Das "mitstimmen" erfordert nämlich einen Account bei Google Reader und ein Abonnement des Blogs, der ein bestimmtes Thema aufgebracht hat.

Vom Layout erinnert ReadBurner an eine Mischung aus Digg und Techmeme - man sieht, wie viele "Shares" ein Blog-Post erhalten hat (siehe Digg) und sieht rechts eine Liste an populären Posts der letzten Woche (siehe Digg), zu jedem Post werden wenn möglich ähnliche Posts angezeigt (siehe Techmeme).

Problem: Kommentar-Silos

Ein kleines Feature ist es aber, das die US-Blogosphere in den letzten Tagen auf Trab gehalten hat: Integrierte Kommentare mit Disqus. (Disqus ist ein zentraler Kommentar-Service, der in Blogs integriert werden kann und so die Kommentar-Silos aufzubrechen versucht.) Die meisten Blogs ermöglichen auf ihren Blog-Seiten Kommentare, ein wesentlicher Grund, die Blog-Websites überhaupt noch zu besuchen.

Dezentrale Kommentare auf Aggregator-Services erzeugen für die Blogger zwei Probleme:

1. Es wird schwieriger und aufwendiger, den Kommentaren zu einem Blog zu folgen. Digg, ReadBurner, FriendFeed, sie alle bieten Kommentar-Funktionen an, alle in ihren eigenen Silos. (So sehr Disqus nämlich versucht, diese Silos aufzubrechen, bekommen ein Blog-Eintrag bei ReadBurner und im Original-Blog nämlich zwei separate Kommentar-Seiten.) Keine der Seiten ist bisher in der Lage, diese Kommentare an eine zentrale Stelle zurück zu posten. Interessant wäre es, wenn Disqus wenigstens den Aggregatoren erlauben würde, Kommentare zurück zum Original-Post zu schicken, wenn diese Disqus verwenden. FriendFeed könnte die Disqus-API nützen, um das gleiche zu tun.
   Immerhin: Disqus kündigt an, die verschiedenen Kommentar-Stränge zusammenfügen zu wollen.
2. Die Blogs verlieren einen Teil ihrer Besucher/innen. Vor allem kommerzielle Blogs leben aber von Werbeeinschaltungen, vor allem auf ihren Websites. Nur wenige Blogs vermarkten bisher ihre Blogs auch im RSS-Feed. Das Blog-Geschäftsmodell steht erst am Anfang, noch gab es außer Weblogs, Inc. noch keine wesentlichen Exits, niemand weiß, ob es die überhaupt geben wird. Mit der Dezentralisierung der Kommentare wird das noch schwieriger.

Ich bin gespannt, ob ReadBurner diese Diskussion weiter anstacheln wird - ich bin sicher, dass die meisten kommerziellen Blog-Netzwerke (zB Techcrunch, GigaOm, PaidContent, Read/WriteWeb, Mashable oder Silicon Alley Insider) intern heftig diskutieren, wie sie dieser Schwierigkeit begegnen können.

Zu guter Letzt:

• Written by Sebastian Moser
• Shared by Sebastian Moser

1. "Mein" Projekt Presentify hat einen Blog. Das wird eine interessante Sache - die meisten unserer Mitglieder sind keine Google Reader-süchtigen Nerds. Wie wird das als Kommunikationsmittel angenommen? Unter anderem bitten wir um Feedback für Presentify 2.0.
2. Wordpress 2.5 ist toll. Der neue Administrations-Bereich ist viel übersichtlicher als früher. Die Jungs von Wordpress haben eine tolle Arbeit geleistet. Ich bin übrigens froh, dass mein Blog bei Wordpress.com gehostet ist. Da muss ich mich um nichts selbst kümmern!
3. FriendFeed wird immer mehr zum fixen Bestandteil meines Web-Alltags. Es ersetzt für mich Techmeme und ist insofern besser, da ich bei FriendFeed den Teil der "A-List-Blogger" abonniert habe, der mich tatsächlich interessiert und ich zusätzlich meine Freunde dabei hab.
4. Alexander Marktl's ReadBurner (zur Zeit offline) wurde von einigen Leuten rund um Mashable gekauft und wird zur Zeit einer Generalüberholung unterzogen, bevor der Service wieder online geht. (Interview mit Austrianstartups.com)
5. Mein Blog hat wieder einmal ein neues Design. Das ist eindeutig besser als das alte.

I can tell you one thing, Louis: These guys are really into this RSS sharing thing and love that product. We are currently collecting lots of cool ideas and I'm really looking forward to the re-launch.

From what I've seen so far - with this new formed team ReadBurner has more than ever the chance to evolve into a mass appealing web site, mainly based on innovation and (hopefully) with the support of all you bloggers and users out there.

The buyers include Adam Ostrow (editor in chief at Mashable), Drew Olanoff (former technology evangelist at Pluggd)  and Eric Kerr (creator of TinyLoad).

Drew and Adam contacted me last week, 1 day after I officially announced to close  ReadBurner. I got tons of mails to keep up the project and also a few requests of people who wanted to acquire ReadBurner. After some email discussions and phone calls, I decided to go with Drew, Adam and Eric because they understand and like the concept of sharing items through Google Reader as much as I do. Moreover they obviously have the skills and the resources to build a compelling web product.

The best part for me: I'm not leaving ReadBurner, they asked me to stay on their board of Advisers! I think ReadBurner now has a real bright future and I'm very excited.

Read the official announcement on Mashable.
Visit ReadBurner

The reason is that I just don't have time to keep the site up and running, because of some freelance projects that I cannot drop out.

I really want to thank all of you guys for supporting me, giving me feedback and visiting ReadBurner. It's been very exiting to run a website that got so much Buzz from the blogosphere in such a short period of time.

If you are still interested in the idea of ReadBurner I suggest you to try out RSSmeme which is a very well done clone of ReadBurner developed by Benjamin Golub.

ReadBurner.com
Just in case somebody is interested in buying the domain ReadBurner.com or the technology, I'm open for offers (it got tons of referals). Contact me: alexander.marktl@gmail.com

Check out the original article and some screenshots on Mashable.

If you're deciding between this and FriendFeed which I just blogged about, why not go with both and see which you prefer in the long run? I'll be uniquefrequency on both.

Suspicions have been confirmed with this article from ReadWriteWeb (once again picked up by Readburner, have I convinced you of its usefulness yet?), which says

There are now 15,422 apps on the Facebook platform -- how many of them are truly useful? Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the novelty has worn off and users are finally starting to demand more of the applications they install.

The article also has statistics about the number of Facebook app users at their peak, and now:

There have been criticisms of Facebook in recent weeks: Marketing Pilgrim discusses a partnership between Facebook and the Wall Street Journal signalling desperation from either/both parties, and Jaffe Juice #101 has a comment on how disappointing it is that Facebook is not engaging the new media enough moving forward.

Applications are seriously beginning to rub some people the wrong way, and Facebook isn't exactly providing the innovation that people want,  but I don't think that's making people tired of Facebook, or making them want to jump aboard the next new platform when it occurs.

Personally I think even with most apps stripped away, the Facebook interface is still superior to Friendster (for sure), and at least for network externality reasons, more popular here than MySpace. There are statistics to prove that MySpace is still dominant, but given that it never really caught on in Singapore, it's not that relevant.

It would be great to hear what people here think, and maybe get a general idea of how the social networking scene is like in Singapore, and then publish some thoughts on that. My guess on where it's going is the more frivolous applications (Grow a plant, hatch an egg?) will slowly die off, and the real social applications like iLike and Feedheads will gain popularity, as users begin to realise that Facebook can and should act not just as a Friendster clone, but a place to share information and interests in one central space.

I've been up for about an hour, and I've already added three new additions to my Google Reader feeds, namely SquirrelNet, MediaShift (thanks to a Feedhead post by Prof. Netzley who shared a great post on How Google & Wiki have changed our lives) and Louisgray.com, referred to by Mike. No wonder it's taking me longer and longer to check my feeds every day!

Anyway, on Louisgray, there's an interesting article about AssetBar, which looks like a competitor to Google Reader, with a social element built in. Basically while you can share feeds in Google Reader, you don't know what someone else might be thinking about it, other than the person liked it enough to share it. AssetBar changes that by allowing users to rate articles and comment on them as well. I haven't had the time to try it yet, but hopefully I will soon and see if the whole commenting thing turns up anything interesting.

Another article that got pushed to my feed is Newbie's Guide To Twitter from Webware, which has guides to Facebook, Flickr and Google Reader too. Definitely a must-visit for newcomers to Web2.0 like myself

In other news, I'm really upset about the bandwidth limitation for Flickr. (100mb a month, and that's not space, that's bandwidth). I'm not annoyed enough to stop using it because I really like the sharing options, but I'm doing some research on other sites like Photobucket, Webshots, Picasa and maybe even Shutterfly. Let me know if you have opinions on these or any other photo-hosting sites.