Keeping up with your favorite blogs can be somewhat of a chore. Robert Scoble talks about following over 700 feeds each day. But if you find that many feeds overwhelming, limiting yourself to a few blogs seems like the only option. Activeweave, however, has a solution.
Instead of searching your feed for relevant content, their Blogrovr browser plugin serves you blog posts related to the content you’re viewing. SphereIt has a similar technology that embedded with posts, like on this blog. The plugin was spun off from an earlier project from Activeweave called Stickis. The posts are taken from your favorite blogs and populate a sidebar in your browser. Today they released a new version of the plugin with an improved algorithm, personalized suggestions, and Google reader integration.
Blogrovr’s updated algorithm has significantly improved the quality and number of stories that show up. Their algorithm pulls in stories from blogs on my OPML feed and seems pretty on target. A look at one of the recent blog posts on the Skype outage shows how I get results related to Skype and the outage, even though there are not direct links between the stories. It’s not a destination like Techmeme for the tech blogosphere, but Blogrovr can scale to a large variety of blog topics.
The new version also supports blog discovery by recommending new blog posts that are highly related to what you’re reading, even if they’re not on your feed list.
The best feature enhancement has been the Google reader integration. Blogrovr now delivers blog posts related to what post you’re reading in Google reader, in real time. It’s still a bit slow in refreshing content, but a useful companion for Google reader.
Just installed it and have been playing around with it for a few minutes. It is fairly slow. I don’t see me keeping it for long. It just seems to annoying. It is cool that it integrates with Google Reader but overall I am sure I will ditch it.
Nick: thanks for checking out and reporting on these new features! While we’re constantly busy tweaking “the algorithm” (don’t blame us for the road-side billboards though!) we’re particularly excited about this latest release: the Google Reader integration and the blog suggestion features we just rolled out both aim at bringing you tighter, contextually relevant stories everywhere you go, essentially making possible a deeper, multi-faceted browsing model.
Blake: I’m glad you’re trying us out. As BlogRovR’s CTO I worry the minute I hear comments about speed. Here’s what I think may be happening: when we serve relevant posts from your selected blogs out on the “greater web”, we typically and consistently bring back those results *faster* than the underlying page even loads, so generally we’ve only received praise about our performance. See if that bears out as you browse around, and let me know otherwise (jean at blogrovr dot com).
But when we’re looking up relevant posts on top of your current Reader story, we’re going for a much finer granularity: sub-page, story level context. And since the current story can change very quickly, say when you scroll up and down the page, we’ve actually introduced a short delay to let you settle down on a story before fetching the related posts. This is to avoid a feeling of hectic responsiveness. Your feedback gives me hints as to how we could improve things, though: thanks.
New and improved? If something is new how can it be improved?
cbmeeks
http://www.signaldev.com
Cool! I have been using the BlogRovR add-on since June. Like it. Helps me stay on top of the blogs I don’t really have time to read, since it their posts to me wherever I browse when relevant. When it has nothing to say, it just goes silent: fast and non-intrusive.
I like the new Google reader bit, where they drill down to each blog post I read.
Anyway, if you want to efficiently keep track of many blogs and discover, BlogRovr is definitely a good tool have .
hi
please……
There’s no product brought to my attention over the last few months that has struck a cord with me as much as BlogRovR. I visit a page of a new Web 2.0 start-up, for example through a pointer from one of the public chat rooms I participate in, and instantly BlogRovR tells me who has covered it.
Imagine using this with a list of feeds from expert groups on marketing, SEO, PR, creative thinking, Internet technology, social media, education or innovation. When any of your peers has said anything about the page you’re visiting, you’ll know about it. It can’t get any better than that: in-context and timely. The new features announced here today only make the experience richer.
That said, there are still a few items on my wish list:
1. I’d like my subscription bundles to stay intact, so that I can add and remove them in one go instead of having to tick off subscriptions one by one.
2. I’d like BlogRovR to synchronize with lists of feeds (remotely hosted OPML files, also called reading lists) that I maintain on the web. If a feed gets added or removed from that list, I want BlogRovR to follow along.
3. I’d like BlogRovR to analyze my subscriptions, compare them with those of my peers and suggest complementary ones.
Highly recommended.
The moment a new thing comes up, it is rapidly improved before it becomes old.I think that’s how.
Question… do people really want to learn about other blogs that are saying the same thing or do they want to learn about new stories?
Aydin.
May be a good tool but the name isn’t very smart. Put out some money and get blogrover.com otherwise you’ll be driving a lot of traffic to blogrover.com for as long as you don’t own that domain name. Leanr from the mistake of flickr.com. Check out flicker.com!
700 blogs? I think I’d vomit.
As of 8-18-2007 @ 17:42 CDT:
I have Blogrovr open and it is fetching my 89 selected blogs. I also have Tech Crunch - Blogrovr Blog Recommendations: New And Improved, Mashable - BlogRovR Launches New Release with Personalization Tools and Google Reader open in tabs (So something has changed, according to those articles.) I have looked at the Blogrovr screens, including help, which goes to the faqs (No Solution there?). My Blogrovr tray is showing 13, 45, 0, and 2 entries, respectively for these items.
In an effort to limit the details, the point is I have Blogrovr version 1.1.440 currently in Firefox. I am aware that it is now supposed to react with Google Reader somehow, but those 2 entries in my tray on Google Reader do not change as I read. I have the tray auto preview in the drop down menu set to always.
Am I missing something basic that has caused me to miss any differences in Blogrovr’s behavior or capabilities?
For something new, if I find instructions in the nature of examples with steps to follow, it is more likely to be obvious whether or not there is any issue for support. If everyone else that uses Blogrovr “gets it”, then I would very much appreciate a clue.
I use Blogrovr and Google Reader every day and I really like them both.
I am trying to make this long story shorter. Have I demonstrated that I made a serious effort to learn a new thing and I am bewildered by not being able to figure out whether or not there is something I am supposed to do in order to implement it? Is this a beginner’s lament?
The website I listed for this comment is a blog as I do not have a website to contact.
Nice plugin.
James, Thanks for the feedback. The version with the new enhancements which is out is 1.1.441; just go to Tools>Add-Ons>Update and install the latest. Then, when you open a story in Google reader, presto, you’ll get the same BlogRovR results you would have if you’d gone to the permalink of the story.
We haven’t put anything about this in the FAQ yet as I didn’t think of any question that would come up now that this works!
Thanks for the feedback. Always happy to help, just message us at info at blogrovr dot com.
Marjoleine, thanks for your feedback and suggestions, now and in the past! Your observations are great and they’re on our list of things to do. Some of this is in the works.
My mistake, folks, the Mozilla version number which turns on the Google Reader intergration for BlogRovR is 1.1.440, not 441 as I just wrote.
HiFiveZ, Jeremy, thanks for the kudos.
David, that’s why we want BlogRovR to bring you stories from the the 700, not you have to read them all at once.
Basicity, we had to make a decision as to whether the spend big bucks on making improvements for uses or paying off people sitting on normally spelled url’s. We came down on the side of the users.
Aydin, with BlogRovR YOU get to choose the blogs you want to hear from, which in most cases, as you point out, would be the bloggers who tend to add not just parrot the conversation. That’s what’s great about “personalization;” that one gets to choose what one things is a valuable source to pay attention to, rather than just the recording of a vast echo chamber of identical and reprinted material which would come from a unfiltered search.
@ Marc. Believe me, you are already “paying” the people at blogrover.com and you don’t even know it. Now you know. And you will continue to “pay” blogrover.com until you down that domain yourself!
isn’t it sphere.com not sphereit.com ?