A selection of tools for setting up an ideas forum

I find the ideas based discussion forum to be a really useful tool for promoting discussions around a certain topic or for managing suggestions and ideas from a community. These sites are widely used by communities, corporations and government organisations. A couple of good examples are:

There are now a range of fairly easy to use tools that you can use to set up these kind of sites so I thought it might be useful to summarise them on this blog.

Uservoice  - example: JISCpress - there are free and paid versions of this site, the free version is limited in terms of how many people can participate in your forum and in terms of flexibility and downloading of the data stored on the site, but the design is good and it is easy to use.

Slinkset -  example: UK Uni Start-ups - this is a free site and seems to be very flexible. There is no option to download the data from the site.

Stackexchange - the software that powers Stackoverflow - this is free while it is in beta. Pricing details for when the beta phase ends are on the site. The ability to download your content on the site as a database is planned.

Ideascale - example: Open Austin - there are free and paid versions of Ideascale. The free version is unlimited in terms of how many people can participate on the forum but limited in terms of flexibility and data downloading.

I think these sites are really useful for focusing specific discussions around a certain topic or event and also for ongoing idea and suggestion management. I recommend seeding the site with a few ideas or questions as a blank slate is often intimidating for contributors.

Of course, as with all community focused websites, a community won’t spring up on its own, it requires a lot of work from a moderator or moderators to monitor and promote the site to ensure that it is useful and that it does not stagnate.

I have probably missed lots of tools, so if you have any suggestions you would like included please add them in the comments. I would also be interested to hear from people about their experiences of using these sites, what works and what doesn’t.

November 30, 2009 | Filed Under tools, web 2.0 | Leave a Comment 

Part 1 of 2: Report on #DepoST (Deposit Tool Show & Tell) Meeting 2009-12-10

NOTE TO READER: JISC IS CURRENTLY IN THE PROCESS OF DRAFTING A CALL FOR PROPOSALS TO FURTHER EMBED DEPOSIT TOOLS AND SOLUTIONS INTO THE AUTHORS DAY-TO-DAY WORKBENCH. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO ONE OF JISC’S MANY FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENT FEEDS FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS CALL.

PLEASE SEE PART 2 OF 2 ON THE EVALUATION (FEATURES AND FLOWS) OF THE ‘DEPOST TOOL MEETING’

Published by: David F. Flanders (JISC Programme Manager)

Just before I sat down to write this post, I quickly went back to have a look at the originalSWORD (Deposit API) Project to look up when the first draft specification was published, to my amazement version 1 was published *exactly* two years to the date of the “Deposit Tool Show & Tell” event: 12 October 2007. And quite significantly (as you’ll see below), there are well over twenty different applications and deposit tools built atop the SWORD Deposit API since that first 1.0 publication. So, CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY SWORD! A little tip of the hat to Rachael Heery who brought a bunch of us hackers to sit around a table to talk about how deposit could be improved, your focus and drive in this space is missed.

The show (and tell) -must of course- go on, accordingly here is agenda for the day along with the people who attended. The rest of the story is picked up by our blogger-on-the-day Bashera Kahn:

12 October 2009, London, UK. JISC held a one-day Barcamp at the University of London focusing on author deposit tools, ahead of the DSpace User Group Meeting at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

The Deposit Show & Tell event is one of the first steps in JISC’s plan to invest £300,000 in sustained improvements to author deposit tools. It followed the September 2009 JISC report into how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings, which provides an excellent contextual backdrop to the challenges facing the architects and users of repositories and deposit tools.

‘DepoST’, as it was tagged, brought together developers and stakeholders from across the UK and Europe who have already broken ground on creating and refining author deposit tools and interfaces.

Several lightning-fast rounds of demonstrations proved that the development space in this area is thriving, with a strong focus on making the deposit process quicker and easier for users authoring research content, from academics to students, librarians to archivists and curators.

JISC’s David F. Flanders stressed in his welcoming address the importance of adding improved ‘feedback loops’ to the deposit process, to provide authors with more information during and after the process than just ‘Okay’.

Flanders mentioned a few patterns he’d observed in the showcased tools which adopted workflows and interactions that would be familiar to users from commonplace computing or online experiences, such as:

David’s Slides on: The ‘Deposit Tool Show And Tell’ Event (Introduction to the Day and Overview of Deposit Tool Types for Author Publishing)

<–!DFF: The twenty some, short and fast (”lightning talk”) ’show and tell’ presentations followed with five minutes a piece to SHOW their app, with five minutes ‘question and TELL’ following:

Shown & Told:

(1) Julian Cheal, SUE/SIS Systems Developer, UKOLN

(2) Dave Tarrant, Postgraduate researcher, University of Southampton

(3) Pat McSweeney, ePrints project developer, University of Southampton

(4) Peter Sefton, eScholarship Tech Team Manager, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

(5) Richard Jones, Symplectic Limited

(6) Alex Strelnikov, UKOLN

(7) Jan Reichelt, Mendeley

(8) Ian Stuart, Software Engineer, EDINA

(9) Joe Lambert, University of Southampton

(10) Viv Cothey, Gloucestershire Archives

(11) Tim Brody, EPrints WebDav, University of Southampton

(12) Theo Andrew & Fred Howell, The Open Access Repository, EDINA

(13) Stuart Lewis, IT Innovations Analyst & Developer, University of Auckland Library

(14) Alex Wade, Director for Scholarly Communication, Microsoft External Research

(15) Seb Francois, University of Southampton

(16) Julian Tenney and Patrick Lockey, Xerte, University of Nottingham

(17) James Ballard & Richard Davis, University of London

(18) Dan Needham, University of Manchester & Alan Danskin, British Library

The second half of the day focused in on the FEATURES that each of the above tool provided to the end-user along with the various work(FLOWS) that depositing research content could take:

PLEASE SEE PART 2 OF 2 ON THE EVALUATION (FEATURES AND FLOWS) OF THE ‘DEPOST TOOL MEETING’

November 3, 2009 | Filed Under publisher, developer, depost, author, repository, developers, dev8d, deposit, tools | 2 Comments 

Guide to using some web 2.0 services in JISC projects - part 3 of 3

This is the final post in a 3 part series about using web 2 services in JISC projects. This final part briefly discusses using skype and dealing with meetings before moving on to general advice about IPR, publicising details and further information.

Part 1 of the series discusses using tags for projects, twitter and blogs.

Part 2 discusses social bookmarking, aggregation and note-taking.

The full document of all 3 parts can be downloaded from the JISC Information Environment repository.

Skype

Skype started off as a telephone service which ran over the network. It has now been extended to provide other services including instant messaging, video calls, file-sharing, screen-sharing. If you have a headset and a microphone it is a useful way to hold teleconferences with multiple participants.

It is also a useful way to get instant answers from contacts as you can see when people are online and available to be contacted to ask questions using the telephone service or the instant messaging service.

Skype FAQs

Q: Do you have to pay for Skype?
A: No – not for basic services. There are some functions that require payment. Details are on the skype site.

Q: How do I find out who is available using Skype?
A: Skype has a directory look-up service built in. It also has services whereby it uses your email list of contacts to see if any of your friends are Skype users.

Getting consensus – scheduling meetings, doing surveys

Doodle is a simple but very effective free website that you can use to do things such as agree a meeting date or do a simple survey. It is easy to set up a list of possible dates or options, and you then can email a URL to everyone, so that they can specify their preferences.

Publicising your project’s contact details

All publicity is good. Make it as easy as possible for people to discover your project and keep up to date with developments by making it easy for people to see what sources are available. List them on your project website and any publicity materials and put them in your email signature. Details that are useful to share include:

Further information

Of course it is good practice with using all of these services to read the terms and conditions first to make sure they align with how you want to use the service. There is a useful toolkit called web2rights which can help you navigate IPR in a web 2.0 world.

This is only a limited overview of some of the services available. A more comprehensive list can be found in a previous post on this blog.

There is a JISC project called web2practice being run by Netskills to produce guides to using web 2.0. Guides on:

can be found on the web2practice blog.

Feedback and the future of this guide

So that is a brief overview of some of the most useful services. Obviously there are glaring omissions from this guide and we would really appreciate hearing from you which web services you find useful in managing your projects and how you use them. We will gather feedback into an updated and more thorough guide in the future.

October 1, 2009 | Filed Under jiscpm, tools, web 2.0 | Leave a Comment 

“Good APIs”

What makes a “good” API”? Can we say anything about good practice in providing or using machine interfaces to third party services on the web? UKOLN have consulted widely and suggest, among other things, that providers of APIs should make it useful, keep it simple, follow standards and use consistent naming structures. For API users there is perhaps less obvious good practice, but it’s important to choose the API carefully (they explain what this might mean), to think about risks, and respect the API terms of use.
UKOLN are now asking developers to comment on these principles; do they seem right? Is it useful to document them? For whom? How?
If you’ve got views on this then here’s where to post comments: http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/good-apis-jisc/.

April 24, 2009 | Filed Under interface, developers, interoperability, tools, web 2.0, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

The Information Environment (and Virtual Research Environment) Call for Proposals November 2008

The JISC is calling for proposals relating to the ‘Information Environment’ and ‘Virtual Research Environments’. This blog post relates only to those elements of the Call relating to the Information Environment, that is Strands A1-A6:

There is also an accompanying briefing document which describes important background information, and outlines some requirements that are being placed on repositories that are involved in bids under these headings. The Call itself spells out the aims and intended scope of projects under these headings, so I won’t repeat it all here.

There will be a Briefing Day on 15th December 2008.

The purpose of this blog post is to be the anchor for an FAQ relating to Strands A1-A6 of the Call. If you have queries relating to these strands of the Call, you can contact the relevant JISC person as noted above and in the Call document, or you can add a comment to this blog post. Either way, if the query would be relevant to other bidders then our response will be via a further comment added to this blog post. In this way we hope to build up an FAQ that all potential bidders can access easily and quickly. We’d also welcome comments (or emails) on the use of the blog for this purpose.

December 4, 2008 | Filed Under sustainability, interoperability, research, preservation, tools, general, metadata, repositories, web 2.0 | 3 Comments 

Mashing thingISBN and library lookup using yahoo pipes courtesy of Mashed libraries 2008

I attended the Mashed libraries event organised by Owen Stephens and UKOLN on Thursday 27th. See Owen’s blog for an overview of the day. I am not a techie but I do love to mess around with software so I was expecting to be an interested observer rather than do any mashing myself. However the event was so good that even a tinkerer like me was able to put something useful together as a result.

Tony Hirst demonstrated how to use Yahoo Pipes to do a number of useful things. One of the things Tony showed was how to use LibraryThing’s ThingISBN api to look up alternative editions of a book using the ISBN. Tony goes into detail about this pipe on his blog.

I am a regular user of my local public library but the opac search experience is truly horrible; clunky, slow and restrictive. The fastest and most reliable way to search is by ISBN. However the problem with ISBN searching is that the opac covers 9 boroughs so there are bound to be alternative versions of most books and the opac is not clever enough to be able to detect this so I have to augment ISBN searches with painful title or author searches. ThereforeTony’s pipe offered a possible solution to my problem.

Tony’s pipe was designed to link the results for all the alternative ISBNs to Amazon so it was simple to tweak it to display links to my local library instead. My version of Tony’s pipe can be seen on my yahoo pipes page.

However it would be a bit of a pain to have to go to yahoo pipes every time I wanted to look up alternative ISBNs for a book so I tried to think of ways to make it more convenient. My first instinct was to try and make a netvibes widget that I could use to search for alternative ISBNs. However making a widget that accepted variable input in the ISBN field proved beyond me. Just as I was about to give up I thought of a different way.

I already use Jon Udell’s library lookup bookmarklet to scrape ISBNs from Amazon pages and search for them in my local library catalogue. Perhaps it was possible to use this with the pipe?

It was not only possible but incredibly simple. You can select the pipe to output alternative ISBNs in an RSS feed. When you do this, you get the following url: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6c6dc73754946fa278bbc1f76cddc469&_render=rss&isbn=0099469693

All I had to do was plug this url (minus the isbn number at the end) into the library lookup bookmarklet generator, choose Innovative from the vendor list, click the build button and drag the result to your browser toolbar. Now I have a bookmarklet that can scrape an ISBN from an Amazon record and look up all alternative versions of the book on my local library opac.

It is not perfect, it is ugly and it does not distinguish between ISBNs for books that the library holds and those that it does not. However, it is something that I will use on an almost daily basis and I am unreasonably pleased with myself. Thanks Tony, Owen and Mashed Libraries.

I find events like Mashed libraries incredibly useful and I always come away buzzing with ideas. JISC will be putting on an event for developers early next year. Look out for more news on this on the event blog at http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org

***Update***Thanks to Owen’s prompting on Twitter, I have now modified the pipe so that it only displays links to editions of the book that the library holds. This uses the content of the h1 tags on the opac pages to judge whether a book is held or a null result is returned and then filters out the null results. It is a rather inelegant solution and is very specific to the opac of my local public library but I imagine could be generalised if you were willing to mess about with it.  

November 28, 2008 | Filed Under mashlib08, libraries, tools, events | 2 Comments 

Grant Funding Opportunities

An update on funding opportunities …

This month, November 2008, we will be releasing a Call for projects for grant funding. Outline details are on the Grant Funding Roadmap. UK FE/HE institutions are eligible to bid, with some types of projects restricted to HEFCE- and HEFCW- funded institutions, due to funding streams.

We’re finalising the Call at the moment, but you won’t go far wrong if you start thinking about what you want to do in:
- implementing automated metadata and textmining
- starting up repositories for research data, research papers, learning materials
- networking and enhancing repositories
- preservation in relation to repositories
- short technical projects to improve repository services
- connections between services to support particular disciplines

Bidders will have until January to prepare proposals, and succesful projects will be expected to start by 1st April 2009.

For those of you most interested in supporting research, please note there will also be a Call for projects related to Virtual Research Environments.
If learning and teaching resources are of particular interest, in December there will also be a Call for the forthcoming HEA/JISC Open Educational Content programme.

Date for your diary: Monday 15th December will be a Briefing Day for anyone who would like to come and hear about the funding opportunities related to the Information Environment and Virtual Research Environment Calls. It will be in Central London, probably 10-4. Details will be released soon.

If you’re not based in UK FE/HE, you may be interested in the Funding Roadmap for Invitations to Tender. These are open to anyone, so if you think you have expertise relevant to the sort of issues reported on this blog, then tenders are very welcome.

We will announce the Call on this blog as soon as it is released.

November 10, 2008 | Filed Under sustainability, libraries, resource discovery, interoperability, records management, interface, technology, learning and teaching, shared services, preservation, general, web2.0, events, metadata, repositories, open access, tools, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Web tools for programme management

We recently had an internal JISC meeting where we discussed what web tools we use to help us with programme management. Lawrie Phipps and I prepared a list of the tools that we use or plan to use to help manage ourselves and our programmes. I thought it might be worth posting the list here. I’d be interested to hear of any tools that people are using that are not on this list. Apologies for the length:

Community building

Twitter http://twitter.com/  – won’t suit everyone but is very good for little snippets, observations and off the cuff chats that the web has not really replicated until now. Could be used to build communities and for lightweight communication between projects. A useful feature is the use of hash (#) tags, placing the # at the beginning of an event or project tag to aggregate comments.

Blogs – persuading projects to blog regularly is great for the programme manager, for a community of projects and for anyone interested in the project. Blogging is not natural to everyone so perhaps in some cases, blogging can be used to replace project reporting?

A Project Manager’s reflection on the issue of keeping a blog:

So is it worth it? Speaking personally and (for once) completely frankly, I’ve been quite enjoying writing, for several reasons. First, it has allowed me to do a bit of self-indulgent vanity publishing, something for which I criticise other bloggers but, hey, I’m a hypocrite! Second, the requirement to be reflective has made me think about various aspects of the project, which is no bad thing. Third, as it has turned out, I haven’t had to trouble my conscience by using buckets of whitewash to tell a positive story; the project really has been going pretty well.

Ning https://www.ning.com/ – easily build your own social network, a good place for people to get to know each other online, communities can be closed or open and communication can be public or private. Ning is also a useful tool to run before a workshop for participants to start thinking, and during the workshop for getting delegates to write up discussions/findings, this is especially useful in, for example, plenary sessions where sometimes some delegates may have a tendency to dominate.

Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ – I am not your friend, I don’t want to be poked, I can not be brought and sold as a pet, I am neither a werewolf hunter nor a vampire slayer, I don’t want a virtual pizza, if I hadn’t contacted you just after I left school what makes I think to talk to you 20 years later? FaceBook? Just say no!

That being said, some project staff are using facebook to some effect, but we need to be aware of issues such as IPR.

Jiscmail http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ – tried and trusted method of community building. Even with the plethora of web 2.0 tools available to projects, the most reliable way of reaching most of our academic community is through e-mail, the JISC Mail lists are simple and effective.

Current awareness

Delicious http://delicious.com/ – the most popular social bookmarking tool. A little limited in some ways and with an unattractive interface but lots of people use it and persuading projects to share bookmarks is a very useful thing to do as it highlights overlaps of interest and promotes serendipitous discovery of information. An important element when using it to share is to encourage the use of ‘notes’ when bookmarking.

Diigo http://www.diigo.com/ – a newer social bookmarking tool, allows you to be more specific about which part of a webpage is bookmarked, it also allows annotation of webpages. It supports creation of groups and preparation of web slideshows. However, not as many people use it already so barrier to participation may be higher.

Twine http://www.twine.com/ – a new social bookmarking tool, which permits bookmarking of any document and analyses bookmarks for common people, places and organizations. Also allows for creation of private groups.

RSS readers (google reader, netvibes etc) http://lifehacker.com/390619/best-rss-newsreaders  – like twitter, won’t suit everyone’s habits but if you  can find a reader that suits you and can get into the habit of building rss feeds into daily routine then it is a fantastic way to keep up to date with a potentially massive amount of information

Dipity http://www.dipity.com/ - a simple timeline builder. Could be useful in giving projects or a more general community an idea of the steps that led to now and a rough outline of programme timescales.

Crowdsourcing

Ideascale http://www.ideascale.com/ - a tool to source ideas from the community and to have ideas voted for and commented on. Worked very well for the IE team to solicit discussion and ideas from the repository community (http://jiscrepository.ideascale.com/) but plenty to be aware of here, including waning of user interest and expectations attached to voting. Also Dialogr http://www.dialogr.com/

Mechanical turk https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome- take advantage of a community that are willing to work for you on small tasks for micropayments. Here is a great description of a project that used mechanical turk http://waxy.org/2008/09/girl_turk/

Topcoder http://www.topcoder.com/ - tap into a large community of developers. The IE team are talking to topcoder about using their services for the developer community strand of the new programme.

mysociety.org http://www.mysociety.org/ - not really crowdsourcing but they build websites that utilise or support democracy and have worked for the government, bbc and google. Perhaps they could offer JISC something?

Collaborating

Google docs https://docs.google.com  – can be used for collaboration on documents in a team or in the community.

Confluence https://wiki.jisc.ac.uk/dashboard.action - wiki for collaboration and communication

Communicating

Skype http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/ - instant messaging, internet phone and conferencing tool

Jing http://www.jingproject.com/ - a screencasting tool. Could be used for projects to communicate developments to the community.

Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ - picture sharing

Youtube http://www.youtube.com/ - video sharing

BlipTV http://blip.tv/ – video sharing

Flowgram http://www.flowgram.com/ - a way to create tours through various websites and content (an alternative to powerpoint or an introduction to a certain area)

Jiscmail – essential for large and active communities

Annotate http://a.nnotate.com/ - provide annotated documents e.g. templates

Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ - great for sharing slideshows, provides nice widgets and embeddable flash players, not so great at being searched by google.

Bringing it all together

There is little point giving projects 6 different tools without some way of bringing them all together. Here are some suggestions for amalgamating content.

Netvibes http://www.netvibes.com, iGoogle http://www.google.com/ig, Pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/ – can amalgamate content with flexible widget based approach. If it has an rss feed it can be displayed on these pages. However it is much more flexible than just rss (see repository widget work http://www.netvibes.com/rwidgets#General, or the exemplary widgets produced by tfl http://www.tfl.gov.uk/widgets/). I have put together an example page to show some of the things it can do. http://www.netvibes.com/amcgregor#Prog_management, obviously this page is shareable so can be used by projects as well as programme managers.

Ning https://www.ning.com/ – widgets using content from other tools can be embedded in ning. This is likely to be more difficult but more flexible than the netvibes style approach.

Getting things done

Tools for managing personal information or workflow:

Zotero http://www.zotero.org/ - a free bibliographic management tool. Only suitable for personal use at the moment but social features coming soon.

Google calendar https://www.google.com/calendar/ - a calendar application which is extremely easy to use and displays calendars of other users very nicely.

Remember the milk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ – a to do list application that can be shared and can be used in a number of different applications (twitter, google calendar, blackberries and mobile phones).

Evernote http://evernote.com/ - a note taking application, includes ability to clip content from any application. Fully searchable. Can be easily used across computers and on mobile devices.

Outlook - task list, calendar all in one place and lots of people use it. Some useful plugins such as xobni http://www.xobni.com/ which takes advantage of the hidden social network in your inbox.

RSS readers - a way to manage information overload (see above)

Location and travel

Dopplr - http://www.dopplr.com/ - a social network for regular business travelers.

Have fire eagle http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ and related geo data tools and social networks got anything useful to offer us?

More complicated stuff

Yahoo pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ – loads of cool tools including a way to set up persistent searches across a range of resources http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=1b71cfefcc9933e084970aef476518ab (a nice explanation of how to set up a persistent google search taking advantage of the new rss feature: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/8HqjuPpekeY/how_to_use_the_new_google_web_feeds.php ) and to amalgamate whole lists of blogs into one rss feed http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2008/10/17/rsp-blog-directory-and-yahoo-pipes/.

Roll your own newsroom http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/rolling-your-own-newsroom.html  – a description of how an rss reader can be used to create a webpage of information relevant to colleagues. Could be used within JISC or within project community.

Notes

Tagging. It is important to think about tags at the start of programmes and projects so that searching across a range of applications is simple and effective.

It is very unlikely that simply advising projects to use a tool will work, the programme manager will need to devote some energy to promotion and provision of quality content to ensure that the resources are useful to projects. The best way to promote the use of a tool is to effectively use the tool.

November 6, 2008 | Filed Under tools, general, web 2.0 | 8 Comments 

Repository widgets

JISC funded a small piece of work to produce some repository related widgets that could be used on platforms such as Netvibes and iGoogle. ICO3 carried out the work for us and I am pleased to say that there are now a number of widgets available.

You can read about the widgets and add them to your netvibes and iGoogle page at: http://www.rwidgets.co.uk/wiki/doku.php

Or to see them in action, go to the netvibes universe:  http://www.netvibes.com/rwidgets#General

My favourite of these is the SherpaRoMEO widget, which works really well.

ICO3 will be doing some work to get community feedback on these widgets so if you are interested in helping ICO3 to review the widgets or if you just want to express an opinion, post a comment below or contact me directly http://www.jisc.ac.uk/contactus/staff/andrewmcgregor.aspx. I’d be really interested to hear your opinions and ideas.

The purpose of this work was to explore the possiblities of repository related widgets in this area, not to produce polished tools so I think that there is plenty of room for further development both of these widgets (I’d really like the sword one to have a drag and drop interface) and of other widgets related to repositories and the information environment.

October 17, 2008 | Filed Under shared services, tools, repositories | 14 Comments 

RSP blog directory and yahoo pipes

Last week while playing around with yahoo pipes, I found this useful tool: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ypEo0_zd2xGgEDTaJhOy0Q

If you enter a link to an opml file it will aggregate all the rss feeds from that file into one tidy rss feed with each item labelled with which blog it came from.

The RSP published a series of opml files for a whole load of repository related blogs. These are categorised by blog type, one example is the personal blogs: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/blogs/opml.php?type=personal. Pop this link into the yahoo pipe (the box that says ‘the opml file is located at’), enter the number of items you want to appear in your rss feed and you get a handy little rss feed showing all the latest blog postings from that section of the directory.

This has saved me an awful lot of real estate on my netvibes page.

There is an opml file for all the blogs in the directory but this didn’t work too well for me when I put it through the pipe.

October 17, 2008 | Filed Under tools, repositories | Leave a Comment 

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