phil ringnalda

Even though I can hear Sam muttering digital magpie in my ear, I still think there may be some reasons why Blog Browsers are more than just a shiny new toy for me to play with. We just have to figure out why. Here’s what has occurred to me so far:

• PalmBlogBrowser: when you find a new weblog you like, grab their archives in RSS, (probably massage it a bit), and stick in in your handheld to read through sometime when you’re caught offline.
• Search on your own terms: if you just want to see every entry with the word “foo” in it (assuming that it isn’t “John’s Foo Weblog”), then most people’s site search will do you just fine. But if you want to find that thing that Mark posted on BoingBoing in March 2001, or everything I posted on RSS, RDF and blogging tech between March 20th and May 5th, you’re out of luck. With a Blog Browser and a good feed, you should be able to filter by author, select multiple categories, limit by your choice of date…
• Integrating RSS feeds and archives: most RSS readers don’t do anything at all with things like authors and categories, because they don’t really know what to do with them. An integrated aggregator/blog browser that knows where to find a feed’s RSS archives could link an item’s author to all the posts by that author, starting you out in the current month’s worth, or link the category to everything in that category.
• Your private search engine: once you’ve got a copy of all your favorite weblogs archives, you can find out every time someone has mentioned “hotels las vegas” without all the crap that Google will give you for a hypercompetitive keyword set like that.
• (Look at how it shines and glistens in the sun! Pretty!)

Blog Browsers:

• Download Brent’s Blog Browser for Mac OS X
• Phillip Pearson’s BlogGazer for Windows

Blog archives in RSS that I’m sure they don’t mind you browsing:

• Mine generated by Movable Type (may be in flux, static, or broken while I play around with MT -> RSS archives)
• Dave’s Handsome Radio Blog from Radio
• Python Community Server : Development blog generated by bzero
• Mark Gardner’s “nobody really knows yet whether this ought to work or not” variation generated by Blogger