your thoughts on. It's not explicitly part of AOL Journals, but it is
Journals-related; it's the new My AOL beta:
On the surface, it looks like a pretty standard news customization page. However, the key difference is that it is built on feeds. And guess what? Your blogs, and the blogs of your friends, also use feeds.
Which means you can use this tool to manage not just news headlines,
but as a one-stop shop to view the feeds of all your friends' blogs --
without having to download a separate program.
Right now, it's
very news-centric, but we're trying to see how it can be used to keep
you connected with your friends' blogs. So it would be useful if you
play around with it and tell us what you think.
First, let me back up a step.
A
feed is just a generic term for an information broadcast. For example,
a newspaper might get a news feed off the Associated Press wire, which
they would then format as needed and print in the newspaper.
Blogs, including AOL Journals, also have feeds associated with them. Two of the most common feeds used by blogs include Atom and RSS
(or Really Simple Syndication). Blog feeds are a way to label content,
like saying "this is the headline, this part is the body, here are the
comments" etc.
Typically, you subscribe to a blog's feed by using a feed reader program
(of which there are dozens). The point of using a feed reader is that
you can organize different feeds from blogs and Web sites of all kinds,
and present the information in the way that you want.
This saves a lot of clicking.
It
kind of acts like a Journals Alert, but it's a little more unified
experience. Say you want to watch 7 Journals -- instead of subscribing
to 7 different Alerts, if you used a feed reader, you would have all 7
Journals (plus whatever other blogs or news providers you wanted) in a
single view, with the new stuff flagged, so you could browse easily,
and then get more information on the stuff you're interested in.
So, now, here's how you might use the My AOL beta with AOL Journals.
1. Go to the My AOL beta. (Keep this page handy.)
2.
Then, go to a Journal that you want to subscribe to. Scroll all the way
to the bottom, where you should see a link that says "Get the Feed
(Atom/RSS)"
3. Click "Get the Feed (Atom/RSS)", and a window will pop up:
4. With your mouse, copy either the Atom or RSS feed (either of the bolded URLs -- it doesn't matter). For example, for Magic Smoke, the RSS feed URL would be: http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/rss.xml
5.Go back to the My AOL beta page. Find at the bottom, where it says
"Add a Feed", then paste the feed URL you just copied in the box and
press Add:
6. It will let you give it a title and category (the default category is "Miscellaneous"); click "Add Feed" when you're done.
7. From there, if you click "Miscellaneous" in the sidebar, it should
expand and you should see the feed you just added. Click the name of
the feed, and it should show up in the middle of the page.
After
that, you should see a listing of the first 5 blog headlines, along
with the time it was posted. If you click the headline, it will expand
and show you the entry, and if you click the more link, it will take
you to the blog.
Like I said, right now it's missing some
features and it's very news-centric; for example, it will
show you embedded photos, but not comments.
Also, be warned that it's a
beta product, and that currently, the preferences are stored in a
cookie on your Web browser (so if you clear your cookies, you will lose
your customizations) -- they're working on a more portable version that
will save your preferences so that you can access away from your
computer, etc.
Anyway, please give it a try and let me know what you think. Thanks -- Joe
8 comments:
Not sure I totally understand, but I fixed it all up LOL
~ Julie~ http://journals.aol.com/joolsinwa/randommusingsofmymind
Sounds promising. Thanks! - Karen
Sounds good...I'll wait until it becomes a permanent feature though.
can you comment in a journal from the feed? judi
Sounds pretty much the same as Bloglines.com.
-Paul
I'm using it everyday! Not with AOL Journals yet, but I more than likely will add some J-land feeds once the feed reader gets out of beta. I already discovered that it stores feed options in a cookie the hard way. Once that goes away I'll be more confident to add lots more feeds to it.
What would be really cool is if I could with one click add all the URLs in my "Other Journals" lists to feed reader. Or just have feed reader fetch them as part of the preset catagories. You could offer feeds from the editors blogs and even the weekly picks as feeds in the preset catagories.
It's a neat little tool.
There's a certain comfort in being too stupid to worry about this stuff...or so they tell me.
OK, I'm with the program now! Set-up was easy enough, I added yours as the first custom feed, so I'll let you know.
Jimmy
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