Newsflashr

At last month’s North Shore Web Geek Meetup, I met Gal Arav, the creator of Newsflashr (and formerly creator of InstantBull):

Newsflashr

Newsflashr aggregates feeds from a large number of news sources, and lets you scan the headlines from those feeds as a tag cloud (what are the interesting terms which appear frequently in the headlines in those feeds) as well as in a list sorted by Alexa rank.

It’s the kind of site you can spend a lot of time in, if you’re a news junkie, playing around with different sorting options and looking for trends in the data.

Here’s the tag cloud, for example of the “elections 08” topic as I am writing this post:

Tag Cloud for Election 08

You can also switch into feed view, in which case you’re arranging feeds on a grid, as you might in something like pageflakes or netvibes.

Worth a look if you’re a news junkie or just obsessed with the upcoming election.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Pass

I don’t normally cross-promote heavily across the multiple places I blog, but this one seemed worthwhile.

From my blog at Optaros.com: “Enterprise 2.0 Free Conference Pass

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this June, I will be moderating a panel on Open Source Platforms.

The panel will be Thursday, June 12th, at 8:30am.

Here’s the session description:

Community and collaboration pervade open source. It’s no surprise therefore that there are a number of open source platforms which are not only capable of delivering Enterprise 2.0, but are delivering it with innovation, flexibility, and agility. This session covers several, including (but not limited to) Alfresco, Drupal, and Ringside Networks.
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Babbledog

Babbledog

Last week’s Berkman Thursday Blog Group was an update on Babbledog – Jessica, one of the folks who does QA/testing on the site, walked us through the existing features and some stuff that’s still in alpha/beta phase.

It’s an interesting site – a cross between Digg or Reddit (in that you can post new stories/topics which folks can vote up or down) but also a kind of recommendations engine which pulls in lots of back end feeds and suggests stories to you based on your expressed preferences (answers to a quiz about what you are and are not interested in) as well as your implicit preferences (what you post, read, comment on, etc).
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