The Social Software Weblog

Grazr raising money, taking on a partner

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-10T13:55:00+00:00

Mike Kowalchik's very cool project Grazr, a mini OPML browser and apparently much more soon, has been quietly raising funds and has now partnered with OPML geek Adam Green of Darwinian Web. Here's the Grazr announcement. I think this is great, as there is so much that can be done with this little tool already.

I use Grazr for my blogroll on my personal site, saving huge space with a more interesting, dynamic display of my favorite feeds live. I also add it to the end of interviews I do with people, providing a preview of an OPML file containing their feeds and other related feeds. Mathew Ingram of Toronto's Globe and Mail uses Grazr on his personal blog to preview the writings of participants in this month's conference in Canada about Web 2.0, Mesh. Lots of potential here, and I'm glad to see the project is getting support. Hopefully this won't be another cool tool that dies on the vine.

Here's an example of a Grazr implementation. Click around inside it, the left border will move you up a level.

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Share your OMPL file

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-08T12:07:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS, OPML

Dave Winer launched a neat looking new online community today for people to upload and share their OPML files, or list of RSS feeds they are subscribed to. There's a top 100 list (so far this blog is #70, thanks!) so you can see what other geeks like to read. There appears to be a recommendation engine, feed/file management and goodness knows what else. I think it looks great. Sharing OPML files is something I've been thinking about for awhile. Some times I fantasize about starting a blog just for sharing OPML files of my favorite feeds on a wide variety of topics.

Neat things here: you can see who subscribes to any given RSS feed and how many feeds they are subscribed to. Todd Cochrane is nuts (1000+ feeds), but Danny Ayers is nutser (2000+). There's some folks who know how to not get overwhelmed by feeds.

One word of caution: if you have, say, a puppy kicking fetish and you've subscribed to a search feed for your name plus the words "kicks puppies" (just to check if anyone knows) then you might want to take that feed out of the OPML file you share on Winer's site. Or maybe not, kicking puppies is nothing to be ashamed of - right? Right?

I've made a post off-site on seven ways you can use Share Your OPML.

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Filter an OPML file for keywords and IM me with results? It's on its way!

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-30T13:08:00+00:00

Filed under: email, IM, RSS, OPML, reputation

I couldn't be more excited about the work being done over at ZapTXT, a great service that filters your selected RSS feeds for keywords and will send you an IM, email or SMS whenever new results appear. Now the service is answering the call of users who want to filter multiple RSS feeds bundled into an OPML file all for the same query without having to repeat set-up for each feed filtered. No idea when that feature will be available, but that's what the good folks at ZapTXT are working on.

Will this pull them ahead of competitors in the space like immedi.at and Rasasa? We'll see!

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Where are the women in tech? They live in an OPML file.

Barb Dybwad — 2006-01-27T13:45:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS, OPML

Marshall Kirkpatrick reports on a nice collection of feeds by women tech bloggers that Anne Zelenka took the time to put together. Sweet.

Marshall asks if there's a way "you could create unique channels within this glob of feeds like "give me a feed of items containing the word 'RSS' or 'environmentalism' across all of these feeds'" -- there is if you have the good fortune to be using NetNewsWire on a Mac (now owned by Newsgator). You can create a Smart List that will aggregate any items out of your feed collection that contain term X. I believe Shrook has this functionality as well. Anybody have equivalent solution for the Windows folks?

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