Stylefeeder is the first new development in blogging tools in more than three years!
September 18th, 2006
Stylefeeder has become a blogging tool! The Stylefeeder widget is simply the best tool for doing social bookmarking of items on the web–quicker than delicious, more visual, more intuitive.
The idea of Stylefeeder is that individuals be enabled to become online style leaders. They create a fantasy shopping list of links to cool stuff on the web. Their list includes images of the items, as well as other useful info. Their fantasy shopping list is fun for others to peruse, and expresses their deepest fantasies about the style in which they would like to live.
Those of us who have been using the tool are finding it a terrific way to blog. For example, super-tool-maker Tom Morris went over to the office the other day, and was wowed by the potential of the stylefeeder widget.
The ever responsive and speedy Phil has now added an expansive “comment” field that lets a person make a blog entry. This is in addition to the tagging option.
Why is this important? Because it helps move bloggging from “blabber to publish” toward “read the web, note interesting things, identify and share them, and annotate one’s selections.”
Interestingly, this “read, tag, annotate” paradigm of blogging is the approach developed by the most valuable and popular bloggers in the world. People like Dave Winer find stuff for the rest of us. And it is what the meme engines like Memerandum attempt, with limited success, to replicate.
Let’s face it, the blogging tool world has been dead for three years. The paradigm has stayed the same: I open up an editor, blab, publisy, and hope that you read. If I want to make links to other things in the web, the process is very difficult. The work flow dictated by blogging tools is write first, highlight a word, insert a link. Or write first, upload an image (in the process choosing whether the assumed pre-existing text will flow around the image to the right or the left.). Ugh. This promotes writing, as in this post, and discourages linking.
Yet the most valuable bloggers are those who do hunting and gathering and sharing and annotating. Those who do round ups each day. Dave Winer, Glenn Reynolds, and so on. They primarily point to things, and then comment. Here is a parody of A-list bloggers, an accurate one, by the way, that describes their behavior. A-list bloggers create annotated bibliographies of the best of the web, and expecially the bloggosphere.
At the Dean campaign Dave Winer made a tool that helped blog this way. He took a river of news aggregator–like one that I have used in his Userland Radio–and set it up so that each item had a little click box. If you clicked a box, or several boxes, these items would be sent to your blog and could become the basis for comments. Thus one could link to and comment on dozens of items in the space of a small amount of time. This process, run by members of the blogging team, resulted in “Channel Dean”–an RSS-feed with a high volume of selected articles of value to the extended Dean community.
Stylefeeder now allows the easy selection of items from any source on the web, which means that one can range freely and widely to explore both old and new domains. So in this sense it is more free than what Dave made.
On the other hand, Dave is now popularizing river of news aggregators, and these rivers can become rich sources for fishing. The widespread use of Stylefeeder fishing gear, trolling rivers of news, might just rock the web.
Oh yes, there is one more thing that mashup creators might mull over: Stylefeeder has OPML and RSS outputs.