Comments for Blog These

Comment from Mark on 2003-01-28

2003-01-28T20:57:37Z

Nah, Radio already does all that, has for over a year now. I want to cut out the drudgery of actually going out and finding new content.

Then again, if I'd already written such a script, would you be able to tell the difference?

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Comment from Mark on 2003-01-28

2003-01-28T21:05:56Z

MT bookmarklets and MozBlog do it too, separate from an aggregator. But they only work on stuff you've already found, which means that weblogs tend to get stuck in a rut, quoting the same people over and over (because the software makes it easy to quote people in your subscription list, but difficult to quote anyone else).

Why can't it auto-find other people talking about the same link (via "track this" and "citations" links at Blogdex and Daypop, or similar things at Technorati), auto-download them, and do a diff to see if they're adding anything original to the conversation.

Plus, all of the current tools suck at excerpting quotes. At best they just regurgitate the excerpt posted by the author, which itself may have been auto-generated (exceedingly poorly) by their publishing software. The rest don't even do that.

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Comment from Brad Choate on 2003-01-28

2003-01-28T22:51:48Z

Those tools can do it 'one at a time', but not as I have described. Being able to cull multiple quotations together from multiple sources. And I realize current tools suck at excerpting quotes. That's what a human editor is for. So you highlight the portion you wish to quote, click 'Add' and repeat. Then click 'Blog These' to create a post that uses all the selections you made. The pre-composed entry would be edited further to annotate as desired.

And yes, I think I would notice if a fully automated script were being used to do this kind of thing. It would also make for dull reading. When someone cites a source, the purpose should be for further discussion. So a citation should usually be followed with a response. Simple regurgitation -- even through complex means -- doesn't interest me.

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Comment from Mike Krus on 2003-01-28

2003-01-29T00:35:34Z

NewsIsFree does that. You can register any number of blogs which support the Blogger API, and post any number of items directly to one or more of them.]]>

Comment from Brad Choate on 2003-01-28

2003-01-29T00:48:20Z

That's cool, Mike -- and while I use and appreciate NewsIsFree, I prefer it as a syndication service. I read a number of sites now through RSS that I couldn't before. But my client is Syndirella. Using the web to read RSS is a little clumsy and slow, even over broadband. The speed at which I can scan through headlines in Syndirella is dizzying by comparison.]]>