June 26, 2006
BlogBridge Library
Last week, I managed to get a trial user account on the new BlogBridge Library, which I briefly posted about here when the demo was launched.
The BlogBridge Library provides you with a space to manage feeds using a metaphor I described previously as akin to a bookshelf. What really appeals to me is how this sort of display might be useful in managing the display of contents feeds from online journals. In use, I imagine myself to be stood in the library by the journals collection, leafing through print journals, scanning their contents lists and perhaps flicking through an abstract or two...
Each shelf display 4 titles at a time, with up to 4 sets of 4 titles being supported on the bookshelf at any one time.
One feature that might be useful here would be the ability to choose the image that should be displayed as the bookshelf graphic. (At the moment, the image is an image of the webpage that hosts the target feed, obtained as an Alexa site thumbnail image.)
For collections containing more than 4 x 4 = 16 titles, clicking through the bookshelf title bar reveals all the titles on the bookshelf:
The above shelf image (i.e. the singlerow of 4 titles) shows the result of importing an OPML file of feeds live from the web (from here, in this case) into the BBLibrary.
Although you can see an OPML feed of the uploaded feeds is available, feeds from the individual journals are not, which I take to be a bug, as this other bookshelf (representing an upload of an OPML fiel from my hard drive, generated by my course OPML generator) suggests:
Nested folders on a shelf are also supported, as this OPML list of Nature Publishing Group journal feeds (see here) demonstrates:
Clicking throught the bookshelf title bar takes you to a 'sub' bookshelf containing shelves for each nested bundle of feeds:
One thing that would be neat here would be for the system to generate a separate OPML file for each shelf in this collection, and provide a link to this file both from these 'sub'bookshelfs, but also from the folder view.
Again, I think there may be a minor bug in the sysitem here becuase some folders do also carry OPML feed links for their contents as both this folder view shows:
and it's correpsonding sub-bookshelf rack:
One thing I'd quite like to see is a preview of the contents of each feed (something I believe may be on the way...).
In terms of design, the approach followed in Netvibes for previewing feeds may be reusable here. For example, here's a Netvibes feed title preview, along with a description (Journal abstract?) preview:
Netvibes also lets you look at the whole description text in feedreader style panel:
but I believe that the intention of the BlogBridge Library folks is not to move into feedreader territory, although feed previews are very much on their to do list.
Form a library point of view, wether than being able to click through from a feed item link to a feed reader view of that item, it would be neat to be able to configure my view of the bookshelf to let me click straight through to the full text of a journal article via an inserted libezproxy link...
Posted by ajh59 at June 26, 2006 09:29 PM