Feeds and RSS are the contemporary fabric of the Web. For my morning news I’m getting used to visiting reddit or digg. But the new blogsnow is really beautiful. With a neat & simple interface, blogsnow lets me know which news (from the most accessed blogs) are fit to read in a quick scan. Then it also remembers the last (many) links I visite, so I can trace back the most interesting items later. Again, it’s very simple, but engaging. I like the fact it is open to whatever sort of news it happens to be on the spot, thus it is a sort of a privileged door to the blogosphere and to the world. I believe in serendipity… through wasy like this we can discover precious gems.
Then there is netvibes: but I cannot read it every day! Too many feeds! However, netvibes gives me a look into my universe of feeds. I choose the feeds to incorporate, and watch them unfold dynamically. I prefer netvibes to bloglines in that the former has a much more powerful graphical look: small panels with a feed each, and they can be moved across as one wishes. I may also create tabs and put a series of feeds under each tab. For instance, a tab for my general-reading feeds, another for media related feeds, etc.
However good may it be, netvibes doesn’t provide features to publish one’s own feeds digest (or mashup). So, I looked around, and found a few very interesting services that allow one to define the series of feeds to use, and produce a widget-like feed-of -feeds. I wrote about these meta-feeds in a previous post, and I’m still using a couple of them (for instance, try the digest at my digest page JRNL, which was created with Feedraider, a very good tool).
But today I just found a new website, Feevy , born out of a company called Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas, a Spanish consulting and young startup which works in the analysis of social networks. Feevy does something like a feeds digest widget for blogs and the like, so I can insert it within this very blog. See to believe! Furthermore, Feevy updates the digest according to the most frequently updated blog posts, so the digests changes over time.
So I exported an OPML file (a special XML file which describes feeds) from netvibes with all the feeds I am subscribed to and uploaded it to Feevy, which then did the rest. A few minutes ago I inserted the tiny code Feevy gave me in this blog’s sidebar, and voilá. It’s a nice effect, isn’t it.