Frederick Giasson

I am glad to finally put online a new option of Talk Digger: the RSS feed generator. With that new option, you have the possibility to generate a RSS feed and follow the evolution of a discussion around a specific URL within your favorite feed reader.

What is interesting with that new feature is that you can have access to all the power of Talk Digger from anywhere. The only thing you need is that that “anywhere” support RSS feeds in someway. So you can now easily access to Talk Digger’s searches from your mobile phone or PDA; the only thing you need is a feed reader.

From the How does it work? information page:

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This option give you the possibility to have access to the results of a Talk Digger search via a RSS feed. If you go to the RSS feeds generator page, you will be able to generate a custom feed that will fill your exact needs.

How to use it?

1. Go to the RSS feeds generator page
2. Put the URL you want to search for into the edit box at the left of the “Generate RSS feed” button
3. Two type of information are included into the RSS feed for each search engine
4. Results number. This is the total of results returned by the search engine
5. Results content. This is the news items that the search engine had recently indexed into his database
6. Check the boxes you want to include into your Talk Digger search feed. For example, if you only need the results number and the results content of Technorati, then you only have to check the two boxes at the right of the Technorati line and leave the others unchecked
7. Press the “Generate RSS feed” button when you selected all the options you wanted to include into your RSS search feed
8. Copy the new link that will appears at the bottom of the RSS feed generator
9. Add this new feed (the generated link) into your favorite RSS reader

How does it work?

Once you subscribed to the generated RSS feed, all the new results will appear into your favorite RSS reader.

• If you have selected the “Results number” option, the number of results returned by a search engine will appear as a single, new item into the feed
• If you have selected the “Results content” option, each new results found by the search engine will appear as a single, new, item into the feed

Updating these feeds could be sometime slow. The rapidity of updates depends on the quality of the search engines services at that time. The fact is that each time you refresh a Talk Digger search RSS feed, a request to each search engine is send, and then Talk Digger wait for the answers. If the search engines are slow, then Talk Digger will be too.

When you create a Talk Digger search feed, you can build one feed that will search all search engines at once, or you can build one separate feed for each search engine. What is the difference? The rapidity of the requests. You will see the results much faster if you build a separate feed for each search engine because Talk Digger will not have to wait until receiving the results from all search engines to create the RSS feed. The problem with that method is that you need to subscribe to more RSS feeds.

Sometimes, the search engines could be too slow to answer to a Talk Digger requests. If it happens, Talk Digger only omits to add the results from these search engines. It is the reason why some results are sometime missing. However, do not worry, when the connection between Talk Digger’s server and the search engine’s will be better, the results will be available and then included into the RSS feed the next time you will request an update of that RSS feed.

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If you find a bug, a glitch, or have a new idea to increase the power of that new feature, please leave a comment on that post.

Technorati: talkdigger | rss | feed | seo | search | icerocket | bloglines | technorati | blogpulse | pubsub | talkdigger | msnsearch | google | blogdigger |

Today, Jack Brewster from the NewsGator support team sent me the default FeedDemon’s style modified to implement Talk Digger. If you are using FeedDemon and choose to use that new style, all the feeds’ items will have a “TalkDigger” link attached to them. If you click on that link, you will be redirected to Talk Digger and instantly start a search for that specific post.

The idea is really attractive. You are reading an article, you like it, then you need to know what other people have to say about it. Directly from your feed reader, in that case FeedDemon, you click on a single link and you see all the articles that talk about it.

How can you implement Talk Digger into your FeedDemon?

1. You download that FeedDemon style

2. You put that style file into the FeedDemon’s style folder

3. You open FeedDemon and select the new style called “TalkDigger”

4. To use it, you simply have to click on the “Talk Digger” link in the top right corner of every feed item

What it looks like?

How to implement it into your current style?

If you would like to implement Talk Digger in the style you are currently using, then you can easily do it that way:

1. Find and edit the file of the style you are currently using (it is located into the FeedDemon’s style folder)

2. Find the item template into that file ( starting with that like <xsl:template match="item"> )

3. Into that item, you can add that code to it. It will implement TalkDigger to that style.

<a href="http://www.talkdigger.com/index.php?surl= {$itemlink}">TalkDigger</a>

I hope that you will find that new Talk Digger’s trick useful. If you have any new idea of how to use Talk Digger, please leave a comment to share it with other users.

Technorati: feeddemon | talkdigger | rss | atom | feeds | tips | tricks |

The Blogsphere could be seen as a place, an environment, where blogs are connected one between the other. But, I will enlarge that definition, the Blogsphere is the set of web sites where an interaction between the author of the site and his readers could interact and develop discussions.

Then, Talk Digger is a tool that helps you to find these discussions, join them, and follow their evolution in the Blogsphere. This is a simple idea, but how interesting.

Some days ago, Ivan A. Illyn explicated that fact on a comment he leaved on my post: Talk Digger: who is linking to you. He said:

Correct (Imho) slogan & positioning TalkDigger is: “Join discussion everywhere” – something like that.

• You go on any web page
• You like it
• You push Bookmarklet and go discuss or read opinion commenter’s!

Even if you don’t have your own blog – you’ll find similar minded people anyway.

This is New web-surfing method!

And he is right. This little idea is really attractive. It explicit the fact that every Internet users could be interested in using Talk Digger, and any search engine that have the feature to know who is linking to a specific URL. The specific act of searching these back-links is an act for socialization; it tells that that person want to know what another person think about a specific thing.

Without knowing it, I developed a tool that tries to explicit a fact that I wrote about in a previous post: The Blogsphere is becoming a huge distributed discussion forum.

Finally:

• If you want to start discussion in the Blogsphere, then wrote something and ping search engines with tools like King Ping
• If you want to search and join a discussion around a specific web site / web page / blog / blog post / whatever that is an URL, then go to that page and click on the Talk Digger’s bookmarklet, and check who is talking about it
• If you want to follow the discussions around that URL, then go back to Talk Digger once a day and check his evolution. Note: do not forget, a discussion is so beautiful with comments from everybody; then, comments and add you knowledge to it, it is always more than appreciated by all parties

Technorati: Talkdigger | network | discussion | bookmarklet | social | comments | find | search |