"Do I want to jump back in here and try and help steer this place? I don't think I can, and the situation is similar to the issues at ScienceBlogs. The corporate Overlords control everything, so I have little creative control other the words I put down, and those are necessarily constrained by The Rules. But...they're my words and I want more control." - AJCann from Bookmarklet

It's relevant to ask whether people who work at hosting companies feel like they're being watched regarding what sites they put up at that host. AFAIK, they don't. So why do people at Nature blogs feel this way? Maybe blogs should be independent? - Mr. Gunn from Android

@Mr Gunn or do like sciblogs.co.nz does: we were able to choose whether to build our blogs 'inside' or outside. For those of us that have our blogs outside, the content gets sucked into and reposted on sciblogs site with the sciblogs 'look'. I think it is a nice balance of 'independence' and 'aggregation'. - Kubke

Agreed. Aggregators are great, but you can have aggregators without a conflict of interest - those that provide pure hosting, for example. I think #pepsigate is an example of why this is valuable. - Mr. Gunn

Ok, since there is heaps being written about blogging/aggregation etc, here is an idea: What if we were to start an account (or a group) called e.g. science blogs in FF. How a blog gets fed into it could be decided for some sort of 'filtering' or 'quality control' (or not): for example, can the owner of the blog ask to be added, or should someone else nominate them, or does the blogger need x number of positive votes to get in there, and x number of negative votes get them out or whatever. It would essentially work as an aggregator, except that it would make use of the like feature of the blog to bring attention to individual posts. People not in FF would still be able to follow by pinching from the RSS into their own feeders. It might be a nice way of bringing back together all of the exiled SB blogs (and aggregate with others from other sites, or other independent blogs). Any thoughts? - Kubke

Nice idea. My problem is that the way FF aggregates RSS feeds is poor - title and link only, no images, no text. This makes it an unattractive solution, but I fully support the principle. OTOH, I'm not in favour of setting up another destination (such as a BuddyPress site) - aggregation needs to happen within existing networks, not split attention. - AJCann

I agree with the ff issue with rss, but if my blog were to be aggregated I might make the effort to provide full title and first paragraph in the comments. (but no big deal if I don't). It would be up to the blogger to make that effort. One nice thing of FF is being able to pull it into wherever you want. - Kubke

True, but few people would bother to annotate the FF page. For sustainability, aggregation should be an automated process, not aggregation + manual editing. - AJCann

So you think it might be worthwhile doing but it in a place that shows more info? Do you know of one? - Kubke

OK, give it a try. The catchy title of the FF group is? However, I'd like to use the science tag from my blog rather than the base feed so I can filter content appropriately. - AJCann

OK, added 2 blogs in, invited you both (AJ and Neil). Let me know what you think. - Kubke

Well, one may see that as an incentive to make titles more informative? :-) - Björn Brembs

Or very attractive. Where is the group? I haven't had an invitation yet. - AJCann

Good point Björn, but this sort of formatting http://www.facebook.com/Microbi... (forget the sidebars, just the article summaries) is much more attractive than the standard FF RSS aggregation. - AJCann

Made AJCann and Neil admins, invited Bjoern (let me know if you want me to add/remove admin) - Kubke

OK, I'm in. - AJCann

Just a note that if you use 'custom RSS' rather than blog import you can get the first paragraph in automatically, particularly if there is an abstract element in the RSS feed - Cameron Neylon from twhirl

Thanks Cameron, I am inviting you and customising a few to see how it works - Kubke

Still can't get custom RSS to work for Blogger tags, works fine for WordPress. - AJCann

this is what cameron's look like on custom rss http://feeds.feedburner.com/Science... - Kubke

OK, done transferign all existing feeds into custom feeds. The only one that doesn't seem to work is AJCann's. (anyone has an idea). Right now it is closed, any of the members can invite others, and I have been making you admins as you popped in (can remove you from that role if you want). So, also any of you can make any other an admin (I think) and change the settings of the group. I have to do laundy and pack to go stalk intelligent people in California. - Kubke

@AJCann: here are example RSS feeds for tagged posts in my blog: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs... - Egon Willighagen

e.g. one of your labels: http://scienceoftheinvisible.b... - Egon Willighagen

Let me know whenever the group is public. will like to join! - Sandeep Gautam

BTW, ResearchBlogging has done a very good job of aggregating peer-reviewed research; cant we extend the same concept / have a parallel diluted version of ResearchBlogging , say ScienceBlogging , which has equally rigorous inclusion criteria, but does not necessarily needs the posts to be peer-reviewed (only the blogger, herself, to be peer-reviewed:-) ; having all the good science blog feeds aggregated with an editors pick feed to highlight weekly good stuff should take care of the value that traditional blogging platforms have provided and still keeping the platform independent enough. I volunteer to help with this aggreagting project if there is suff interest. - Sandeep Gautam

@Sandeep Research Blogging is great, but there is a lot of blogging that does not go in there. The problem with trying to set up something like research blogging is... well... trying to set up and host something like research blogging! A FF group tha taggregates blots would automatically move posts to the top based on likes and comments of the readers. The community would eventually end up doing what the editors do in RB. I am having trouble keeping up with updating all of the blog moves, I imagine I am not the only one. - Kubke

We've been thinking about doing something like what Sandeep suggests at ResearchBlogging. The nice thing about that is that we already have a huge database of blogs and their RSS addresses, and they are already roughly categorized. The difficulty would be getting bloggers to tag individual posts when they don't fit into the broad categories they have chosen for the blogs (and, of course, administering the whole thing). - Dave Munger

The problem with I see with a friendfeed group would be managing the huge flow of information. I would guess that you'd be easily talking about hundreds of posts per day. Can the FF group organize all this by category? - Dave Munger

There are no sub-groupings in FF groups, but the architecture of FF is designed to filter large amounts of information. Personally, I'm not convinced FF is the best solution to this, but it might be the best available at present? We are looking for alternatives here. - AJCann

@Dave not sure you can do that but one could create 'groups' (blogs of Neuroscience, Blogs of microbiology, etc). Also remember that you can always opt of not having the group feed come into your home page, and just go open it at your leisure. What got me frustrated with all this #pepsigate was the idea of thousands of people changing each RSS feed by hand. That is a lot of wasted time! - Kubke

I agree FF is a 'dirty' solution but one that has some advantages in my view: commenting and likes (which move the good blogs up) the best of week/best of day feature and that you can opt out of bringing it into your home page, easy updates when URLs change, and being able to import into the group the odd blogpost that may be of interest (but not worth aggregating as a whole). What sucks is the mess and the lack of categories/tagging. - Kubke

Okay folks, here's a group for you. This is all the anthropology feeds from ResearchBlogging.org that were in blogger or wordpress (since I had easier access to their RSS feeds). Would something like this be useful? http://friendfeed.com/science... - Dave Munger

Yes, lets start with blog feeds that are already present in ResearchBlogging feed/DB and add them to diff FF groups- built around subjects like anthropology/psychology/neuroscience etc . for now this can be a valuable seed DB (BTW, no pun on seed here:-) with which to start and we can then decide on more rigorous exclusion/inclusion criteria as we go. - Sandeep Gautam

Here's a more extended blog post with my thoughts about setting up a system on FriendFeed http://wordmunger.com/?p=1378 - Dave Munger

I made the group public (I am off in a few hours on a trip) and posted this message http://friendfeed.com/blogs-a... . Lets see how the experiment works. If it doesn't the group can be destroyed :). I also pointed to the RSS and FB feeds at the bottom of the page (on the description) for those that aren't in FF. - Kubke

Oh right (duh!) the group http://friendfeed.com/blogs-a... - Kubke