One of the new features that I’m most excited about is the ability to watch video from any web page. Here’s a Grazr displaying YouTube videos:

So it’s as simple as that. You can browse YouTube from any web site with a Grazr! In addition to video, we used the homepage to showcase many other types of content. You can listen to podcasts, read news headlines, and create mashups without programming. Basically, anything you can model in RSS you can display using Grazr…in multiple views including the default slider view, the outline view, and the 3-pane view. Each of these views are better suited to certain types of content.

Grazr is unique in the way that it is shared: if you find one on a web site you can get a copy of it immediately by pressing “Get a Free Copy for your Page”. I’m really excited by this feature. When you decide to get one, you are taken to the Grazr build screen, which is technically complicated but conceptually simple: the activity is to build your own Grazr. This page is one that we had to get right in order for the service to be successful: it needs to be simple to build one of these.

Mike, Adam, and the rest of the Grazr folks are pushing the envelope here. They’re building Grazr on the back of RSS, OPML, and other aggregation formats in order to provide an easy way to share and view feeds. And sharing, as we all know, is the way to grow in an attention economy.

Adam Green’s OPML Camp is slated for May 20th in Cambridge, MA. It looks like a great event, and further solidifies Boston as a burgeoning place for techies. Unfortunately, I can’t go because of family reasons…but I hope everyone has fun.

Speaking of OPML, have you shared yours yet?

Speaking of sharing, Del.icio.us now has a Don’t Share feature. I’m using it more than I thought I would.

The Ugly Design Debate took a turn for the better this past week over on Jason Santa Maria’s site. Jason articulated the argument very well, and the comments stayed civil and enlightening. I particularly like Christopher Fahey’s comment (#53) in which he points out that we’re mostly talking about style preferences (which are as varied as the New England weather). In the end, I don’t think anybody is really arguing for ugly design, but rather for unpretentious design. I used the example of your favorite local diner…none of them are pretty, and that’s partly why we like them.

Want AJAX tutorials? Max Kiesler has aggregated a ton of them. Nice!

Ryan Carson has a brilliant idea for web apps. Charge more money.

Here are a couple posts I wrote recently for Brain Sparks:

• Google and Microsoft Understand the Power of the Default
• The NYTimes Most Popular Page
• The Challenges of Moving to Horizontal Navigation

Jeff Croft has a great writeup on how he used Django, a Python framework, to build his site. Not everyone is crazy about frameworks, however, as Eric Meyer wrote recently. As a programmer, I can say that if you were migrating toward MVC anyway, then the frameworks coming out now are great and will be an easy switch. If MVC means nothing to you, and you’re not used to building web apps, then you’re probably going to nod alot when reading Eric’s post. I’m happy that he was able to use the word flummox.

Finally, Bokardo has a bunch of new readers and I just wanted to say Welcome. I also want to say Thank You to my existing readers. We’re starting to amp up the discussion here, and that’s great. Feel free to drop me a line anytime, and please let me know how I can improve.

OPML podcast (58 min 13MB .mp3)

We talked about the new OPML 2.0 Draft, namespaces, and structured blogging. Adam talked at length about what the new spec means for the development community, while John spoke about the creative ways in which OPML is being used. I learned a lot about how OPML might be used as a container format for some of the interesting activity in and around other structured formats.

As always, Alex has written up a set of great notes.

“We now know how OPML is being used, and where the problems are, and I think are ready to produce a frozen and extensible format and spec.”

Yep, we do know how OPML is being used. Information grazing is a big part of it.

One lens through which to look at the recent innovation in the memetracker space is frustration. If you look at where the frustration is in how we track memes (ideas), you can get a decent picture of where the innovation is going. If you want to predict the future, find the frustration!

Like an antelope eating grass on the Kalahari, grazing is eating small quantities of food at frequent but irregular intervals (Apple Dashboard dictionary). Recently, the term grazing has been adopted to describe our efforts at finding information on the Web. The following is a very general picture of the four types of “grazing” we’ve gone through, or are going through now. Each level had it’s own share of frustration, which led (or is leading) directly to the next level.

Site Grazing

Site grazing is typing in URLs to see if there is any new content. The URLs often come from a list of bookmarks or memory. This difficulty was noticed early on in the blogging world by Rebecca Blood, who says that even as early as 1999 it was too difficult to read all blogs:

“At this point, the bandwagon jumping began. More and more people began publishing their own weblogs. I began mine in April of 1999. Suddenly it became difficult to read every weblog every day, or even to keep track of all the new ones that were appearing.”

The frustration with site grazing is what led to the popularity of RSS, as it immediately relieved the need to visit sites over and over without knowing if something was new.

Feed Grazing

Feed grazing is what most of us do in our feed readers: checking a bunch of feeds to see if there is anything new. Usually the reader notifies us of new content, by either starring the content or sorting it based on newness, or both.

In my feed reader, Shrook, the feeds that have been updated more recently are presented first. The feeds that haven’t been updated are pushed to the bottom. Whereas site grazing is a bunch of HTML urls, feed grazing is a bunch of RSS urls. So feed grazing works at the feed level. A feed list is often called a Reading List, and is captured in an OPML file. Here is my reading list.

The frustration with feed grazing is that we soon have too many feeds, and many of the feeds overlap content. Ironically, however, we still want to add more feeds if they are relevant to us, and so we prune our feed list over time.

Grazing Lists: These are a variation of feed grazing, and where the term “grazing” came into play via James Corbett. (obviously, I think that grazing is a great term to describe all of these levels) Anyway, a grazing list is a dynamically updated feed list like the one that Adam Green has created out of the tech.memeorandum site. In this paradigm, you subscribe to a Reading List that dynamically changes over time, so that you never know what feeds will be on it.

The frustration with grazing lists is that it is unclear as to why feeds are in the list. Is it because the feeds themselves are about the hot topics of the day, or because they happened to have one good post in them? Adam, on the other hand, likes to use them to discover interesting feeds.

Post Grazing

I would say post grazing is getting nearer our end goal. It is grazing for the latest, most interesting posts, regardless of what feed they come from. Right now, there are a few services out there putting out feeds with which we can post-graze, such as tech.memeorandum, Tailrank, and Findory. As I was telling Kevin Burton of Tailrank the other day, I’m completely in awe of folks who create these services: Gabe, Kevin, and Greg, in this case.

Each of these services offers different levels of relevance, and clustering. As far as I can tell, the service that provides the best solution along these lines will certainly gain a strong following, at least from the tech bloggers I read.

Relevance Relevance is the make or break of these services. Many of them use a link-counting method to find the most talked-about content, often combining that with some measure of authority to present the most relevant information.

Clustering Clustering is extremely important because otherwise the content becomes an echo chamber. It is very useful to have related posts clustered so that we don’t see the same news over and over. Just this morning I read that Google bought Measuremap in about 85 different places. Enough!

To use an analogy from offline, post grazing is similar to reading a big-time paper, which filters news from various news organization (Reuters, AP, etc) in addition to their own content. They are getting those stories that are of the most interest and providing a one-stop place to read them.

When you move from one paper to another, however, you realize that there are different filters, and that each has it’s own strengths and weaknesses. For example, Fox News is a completely different filter than is NPR. So there is a level of editorial as well. So then another frustration sets in, you don’t know what editorial is being applied to the filter you’re looking at. Instead, we want news that is filtered by ourselves, or based on our needs.

Personalized Post Grazing

I think this is the golden path. This is when we get post-level news recommended to us based on our personal preferences and reading behavior. The three services I mentioned above are moving in this direction, but as this comment thread on Scoble’s site shows, they are not quite there yet. (this is a *great* thread, if you consider how it might change the way that we read news). (hat tip – Father Richard)

So, in addition to working at the post-level, this works at the personal level. Combine what the group has found to be valuable to what the person has found valuable in the past, and you get a great sense of what might be valuable to the person in the future.

The Evolution of Grazing

However, there may still be frustrations at the personal post level as well. One is our changing tastes. What if we track tech news for years and then find ourselves burnt out, and yearning for a different kind of news? What if we don’t feel that we’re discovering enough diversity in our personal recommendations…what if we feel like we’re missing out? With every level that we reach, we’re happy for only a short period of time. We will continue to want increased efficiency, and increased denseness of information.

“And while you don’t need BlogBridge to do this, we do make it brain-dead-simple. A single checkbox enables the publishing of your Guide (Reading List) to the web. No OPML, no scripting, no FTP, no nuttin.

So in the fun and excitement of Semantic Web and OPML name spaces, and dynamic, meta-dynamic, and hyper-dynamic reading lists, it’s easy to lose sight of the universal appeal of sharing ones enthusiasm.”

Reading List Podcast with Adam Green and Danny Ayers (11MB .mp3 – Alex’s notes)

We talked about reading lists, dynamic reading lists, and feed grazing. In addition, both Danny and Adam talked at length about the Semantic Web, and how we seem to be building toward it with formats like RSS and OPML.

It’s a solid introduction to this interesting development in feed reading. Enjoy!

“There are plenty of RSS aggregators that allow you to import OPML files as a quick way of subscribing to a large number of feeds, but these are basically a static form of subscription. BlogBridge, on the other hand, is able to stay in synch with the original OPML.”

I’ve been using Blogbridge for a few days now, after talking about them with Adam over sushi, and I can say that dynamic OPML reading lists are really cool. However, because they are OPML they are working at the feed level, and at this point I think I’m more interested in the post level.

Adam has set up a dynamic OPML reading list of Tech.memeorandum created from an hourly check-in of the popular meme tracker site. So, every hour the OPML updates to show all the blogs that have bubbled to the homepage of memeorandum. So this is totally cool.

However, the blogs got there because of some really interesting post, because they’re somehow related to the top stories of the day. In other words, the blogs themselves may or may not be interesting to me other than their one, attention-getting post. So OPML might not be the best solution at this level. So the question is: are reading lists dynamic? Or is it simply news headlines that are?

Going forward, my guess is that we’ll be more interested in the post-level relevance, as opposed to feed-level relevance. Or, perhaps that’s easy for me to say because I already feel like I have enough feeds to read (about 200). But I think it makes sense that way, because we read many, many more individual posts than we acquire new feeds, and we’re more interested in the relevance of the information than what feed they come from. Acquiring new feeds is slow, reading the news is not.

• Part 1 mp3 and Notes
• Part 2 (13:26 – 12.3MB mp3)

Because of technical difficulties, we had to seriously edit the podcast. The original was over twice as long! As a result, this podcast is a series of conversations, sometimes with no transitions to set up context. (We tried using a multiple Skype setup, and it just didn’t work well.) So, I’ve provided a set of timed notes so that you know when you hit a new section.

• 0:00: Lists: “one of the holes in our structured blogging thing”
• 0:42: OPML: “technically OPML isn’t typed”
• 1:25: “I believe there is another step, the next notch of functionality that will enable folks to do things they couldn’t do before”
• 2:15: The Compatibility Box Approach
• 3:10: “We’re trying to make a better world here”
• 3:30: On Subscribing and the Future of Structured Blogging
• 5:48: What does an Structured Blogging Aggregator find when it hits a site?
• 6:54: “If we had it Paul Kedrosky‘s way, all tools vendors would stand still and do nothing”
• 7:11: “This is the next era of blogging”
• 8:03: “Structured Blogging will be a non-profit”
• 9:03: “It’s a different approach to standards-building”
• 9:31: Users making schemas: “It’s completely out of control at that point”
• 9:36: On Macromedia and Adobe mating
• 11:52: Reger.com’s new OPML feature
• 12:24: Marc’s response to Greg Yardley
• 13:04: Marc’s citizen journalism concern
• 13:17: On censorship (a random overdub that makes funny sense)

Let us know what you think!

Also, Doug Martin sends word that his new product is ready for tire kicking. It’s called LookLater, and is a bookmarking tool. He’s currently trying to get the word out, so I’m helping him along a bit. Looks interesting.

Pieter Overbeeke wants folks to check out OPMLManager.com, a tool to help you maintain your OPML file. I’m not quite there yet, but you early adopters might find something useful.

Finally, Alex Bard says that his company, Goowy, is growing fast. They provide traditional web services including web mail, contacts, calendar, games, widgets and more. Looks like another player in the Web-based Office space…

BTW: I don’t normally advertise for free. And since I’m getting more and more requests it’s getting hard to keep up. If you are interested in advertising for pennies in the burgeoning Bokardosphere, let me know. I’ve got some ideas about that…

“How will this affect normal folks in the future”?

So our hope in publishing this is to start an open, inclusive discussion about attention. Feel free to add comments to help that along…

Here are the podcasts, as well as Alex’s extremely helpful notes.

Part 1 (notes)

Part 2 (notes)

For those unfamiliar with Alex, he’s been blogging lately about OPML, Attention, and empowering people. His post on OPML sampling is a good example of his insight into these topics.

Here’s the podcast: Attention: Part 1 (45min 43MB)

Seth Goldstein, a cofounder (along with Gillmor) of AttentionTrust, writes today that his /ROOT Markets is the solution to the inefficient attention markets, and how the securitization of Internet leads will open up the Attention market for consumers. He also says that with pay-per-click, the risk of online advertising shifts from the publisher to the advertiser, where it belongs. Now, he says, we just need to care.

Then there’s Alex Barnett, who in his open letter to Chris Law and Paul Martino, shows concern for their attention aggregator: WSFinder. WSFinder is a recommendations web service that enables a website to easily implement a “People who liked this (song, book, group) also liked the following…” function. Paul responds with good news.

Not so long ago attention became my prom queen, when I realized that it is the finite resource that I have to give to a market of ever-increasing information. In order to make attention more efficient, I need better answers in the form of helpful systems, like recommendation systems, and I need them yesterday.

Now everybody wants in. The Wall Street Journal reports that advertising on sites like MSN, AOL, and Yahoo are getting to the level of Super Bowl television ads. That’s how much one day’s attention is worth on these sites. And it’s every day of the year, on multiple networks, not just the one silly enough to bone up billions for one game. (via Paul Kedrosky)

Apparently, TV isn’t where the action is anymore. Sure, you could let ABC define how you live your life and watch Lost at 9pm on Wednesdays, or you could cuddle up on the iTunes couch and watch it when you want.

Let’s not forget Skype getting bought out by eBay, or MySpace, Murdoch. Flickr, Yahoo. Bloglines, Ask Jeeves. They got their return on attention in a big way.

They’re wearing really nice dresses to the prom. You got a date yet?

I’m excited to join, as the premise is that if you like one of the blogs within the workgroup, you’ll like the others, too. Some of the others include sites that I’ve been reading/linking to for a while now, like ReadWriteWeb, Techcrunch, and Scripting News. In addition, however, I’ve been introduced to new sites that provide high quality content, such as Podtech.net and WeBreakStuff.

Podtech, a podcasting site, even put up a podcast of the founders of the Workgroup explaining their rationale, which is an excellent introduction to the workgroup.

Podcast of Web 2.0 Workgroup Founders

Right now, the result of joining is a sharing of attention. People reading the other blogs might find Bokardo a welcome addition to their Web 2.0 reading list. Likewise, the current readers of Bokardo might find the other workgroup sites worth reading.

In the future, I’ll be posting on the efforts of the workgroup to further the Web 2.0 discussion. One of the interesting things being worked on is a OPML feed containing the sites from the workgroup. Download the OPML file, upload it into your feed reader of choice, and you’re instantly subscribed to the Web 2.0 Workgroup.

Happy Reading.