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January 27, 2008

Sunday Web tools: R.I. blog aggregator, tweaks for music, mail, grandma

BlogNetNews Rhode Island launched this week -- it aggregates RSS feeds and displays headlines and the beginning of the latest posts, with links, for each blog. It started with a group of largely political blogs, but that About page says,

Those blogs that add BlogNetNews Rhode Island on their blogroll will get a permanent link on our front page as well.

Here's some of what BlogNetNews editor Dave Mastio emailed in response to a few questions I sent this morning.

I've been a journalist in DC for most of the last 13 years with USA Today, The Detroit News and The Washington Examiner, except for a stint as speechwriter for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Most recently I was an editorial writer for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. In my spare time and using money from my IRA, a talented college student and I started BlogNetNews with the Virginia site in July 2006. We've been expanding ever since.

While the BNN state sites focus on state and local public affairs and news, we're building city-based sites that take in all the local blogosphere.

...The geeky details: After some research, Tyler Abbott, BNN's programmer, decided to use open source (Wordpress blog plugin) Gregarious as the base for what we're doing. In the 18 months since we launched we have added tons of original programming on top....

I hand pick the blogs in BNN. As a start I check lefty blogs, technorati and google (also rightyblogs.com -- a joint site we've launched with RedState.com) for a starting list, then as I visit the individual blogs I cut and past their local blogrolls and visit all those sites. The result ends up as the starting list for the BNN site, but there is always room for more.

I've been fitfully tracking blog births and deaths in the Greater R.I. Blogs list, but BlogNetNews does only this, in daily detail, in a growing number of states and metro areas. When I asked him how Rhode Island came on his radar, Mastio said he's working through all 50 states. We were simply next.

"More voices heard" is a core potential of the Web, where every URL is equal. Letting these voices be found and heard is the hard part. BNN should be good for the Rhode Island infosphere.

Easier Web: Best Of January 2008 holds Smashing Magazine's picks of the month's most useful tools.

Not just for Web developers:

Easylistener
Easylistener is a Flash music player which can literally play any page on the web. Simply point it at your favorite music blog, RSS feed or playlist document and it will crawl that URL and start playing back any mp3s it finds.

The Alphabetizer
The tool puts just about any list in alphabetical order. Alphabetize words, songs, titles, email addresses, phrases, sentences. List sorter.

LetterMeLater : Send Scheduled Emails
LetterMeLater offers one feature that your email doesn’t have, ‘the ability to schedule when an email should be sent’. It allows you to send scheduled emails without leaving your main email program, regardless whether it’s a web based service (GMail) or a desktop client (Outlook).

Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English
Among other things, CommonCraft presents products and services in a simple format to make sense of complex ideas. Now you finally know how to explain RSS, Social Bookmarking and Social Networking to your grandmother.

Or to yourself. We all start somewhere, and the learning curve never ends. More at that link.

Paths: The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You At Wired, with a big fancy graphic that autozooms and centers for as long as you hold down your mouse button.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:04 PM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: Dave Mastio on January 27, 2008 3:42 PM