A Feed Is Born

Some notes and feedback on rollSense

by Juned on July 22nd, 2007

2 or 3 Things released rollSense. Billed as the “Google AdSense of Content”, rollSense uses 2or3’s other application BlastFeed to provide targeted, important content from selected snd trusted sources. rollSense is potentially important for bloggers or web publishers because it is a means to provide related and trusted content available to the reader. You can check out rollSense by registering here.

Last weekend, I tried rollSense on two of my blogs and here is my experience and feedback on rollSense.

How to set-up rollSense

rollSense uses a aggregates or collects several weebfeeds into one called a channel and this channel makes a list of articles available to one’s reader. The setting up of a channel is a simple five step process and can be done within a few minutes. The steps are provided in an outline that can easily be found on rollSense’s website. Here are the five steps as can be seen on the site.

1. provide the url of your blog
2. select the sources you trust. If you don’t have a blogroll or an OPML, you can select one of our prepackaged feed bundles. You will be able to add or remove sources at any time
3. if you don’t select any sources then recomended articles may come from any source known by rollSense
4. customize the look and feel of your channel widget
5. deploy the widget into your blog

It is recommended to place the rollSense widget in the sidebar, although it can be placed also in the single post page of the blog. It takes only a few minutes to set-up a channel and the channel’s widget - which is also customisable.

When placed in the sidebar the widget will always appear as with th heading “Latest in the blogroll” and feature all of the latest posts or articles from all feeds in the channel. The number of feeds shown can be adjusted at the settings. Once a reader goes to the post itself the heading in the addRoll widget changes to “Recommended from Blogroll” and will display posts or articles that are somewhat related to the post. It was interesting to note that rollSense use the word Recommended rather than Related. Brilliant choice of word Recommended is not as limiting as Related.

So what is rollSense good for?

After setting up two rollSense channels I can see several uses:

First, Personal blogs can use it to aggregate picture feeds, podcasts, and other blog posts always on the sidebar or on the page. And it also allows the blogger to feature post from the blogs of his friend and webfeeds is RSS and Atom format.

Second, rollSense seems to work best in niche blogs and blog networks. One can just drop webfeeds from websites and blogs of friends and trusted sources. rollSense informs the reader of the latest posts from the other blogs (on the homepage) and comes up with a list of possible related topic on the single post page -which saves the reader time.

Content is one of the important component of rollSense

One of the critical part in the setting up of the channel is the selection sources. And the application provides several means to add sources. First, is a bundled webfeed that is automatically placed when none is specified. Second, is to manually add webfeed upon webfeed. Third, is to import the OPML from your newsreader. One can use any or all of these methods for filling up the channel with resources.

But, what does rollSense bring to the table for us?

1) It provides us a means to aggregate our content or content via webfeeds on our blog.
2) The content provided per post is focused, meaning it is always or nearly related to the topic of the post.
3) It adds value to a blog’s content:It automatically points out possible related topics from a set of webfeeds determined by the blogger.
4) It also provides the blog a means to promote other blogs

What could be improved?

Added customability would be a plus: (i) The option to change the heading of the widget table. (ii) To bring more filters to the channel top further narrow down the results.

Overall:

I think its another application that can be used by blogs to aggregate and add value to their content. At the homepage it quickly updates the reader as to all the lates posts available. And at the single post page it provides a list of posts that have similar topics. In the end rollSense works by making the task of navigating through the blog easier and gives the reader a preview of possible related posts. However, It should be noted that rollSense can only be effective in doing these things is highly dependent on the choice of webfeeds one places inside the channel.

Share This

Related Stories

rollSense
Bloggino and RSS
Google Reader new feature is share and share
Evernote for IPhone released
Apple and RSS

POSTED IN: RSS