New ESBN features
I was off-line most of the weekend, celebrating Angela’s birthday with both of our families, so I hadn’t noticed until I grabbed the copy/paste code for that last entry that ESBN.org had added some features. Obviously the “rate this content” is new, and given the close race between thumbs up and thumbs down my posts have gotten, I must be a pretty mediocre blogger, which isn’t very surprising to me. It’d be nice if there was more than just thumbs up/thumbs down, but I guess if you have more to say than that, you could leave a comment! On the whole though, it’s a little too “LiveJournal” for my tastes. I think I’ll be leaving that out in the future. You can still follow the ESBN link if you want to rate it, I can’t stop you from going there, but I don’t think I want all that on my page.
The other features they’ve added include sharing your content, much like other services you can go to one page and see a list of all the recent stuff I’ve published using ESBN’s regardless of what site I’ve posted it to. There’s even an RSS feed that accomplishes the same thing, which is a very interesting idea.
As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to follow sources more than memes, because I’ve come to trust the people I read on a regular basis. Wouldn’t it be cool to take someone who maybe devotes his time to a number of group sites and have one RSS feed that just gives you everything that person publishes, no matter where it is? There’s a great idea in there, assuming you can put aside the legal entanglements of who owns what on group blogs or professional IT sites, which is far from easy. I don’t know that anyone aside from my wife would want to track both of my blogs in one feed, but it’d be nice to have a tool to do that, wouldn’t it?
It’d also work a whole lot better if the feed was full-text. Heck, a first step toward that would be to drop the “character limit” that exists now just in trying to create an ESBN from a blog entry. I had to excerpt that long post last week to create one, bet I have to with this one too. That kills any chance of getting full text to begin with. It’s promising, but not quite ready for prime time yet.
ESBN 93349-060227-850624-64
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Hi Mike,
Chris here from ESBN.ORG. We have had several requests to add rating to our ESBN IDs so that bloggers can poll their audience from any blog or content.
Perhaps we deployed this feature too soon without thinking the UI all the way through. We will soon be adding offering the rating (and the barcode) as an option to the author.
Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Chris Matthieu
Mike,
I wanted to let you know that we just finished making the ESBN rating feature optional. You can now select the rating checkbox to make include the thumbs in your ESBN ID.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Oh I can see where a lot of people would want the ratings, heck it makes for an easy yes/no poll tool for that matter. I just think having it display on every entry might clutter things up a bit much for my tastes so I left that part of the copy/paste code out. Not a big deal, but even better if I can just choose to not have it show at all.
New FF extension and Apple OSX Widget now makes the barcode and rating feature optional when content is submitted through these tools. Both versions are respectively pending Mozilla and Apple approval.