BlogBridge, publisher of a most excellent aggregator (I moved to it a couple of weeks ago after two years with NewsGator) has another very interesting product for information professionals: its Feed Library. This is a place where specialists can share their links and feeds to key information sources in a very friendly and non-techie way.
Here's a partial screenshot - click on it to visit my own evolving experimental Feed Library:
As you may be able to see from the above, each feed shows a miniature representation of the feed source. Each segment can contain a maximum of sixteen feeds (optionally shown four at a time) and any of these can be sub-folders, although I've not shown any in the above image.
On each orange folder bar, you might be able to discern a blue OPML icon. This provides users with a link to the whole folder. And, underneath each individual feed, you might be able to see the orange RSS feed icon. Both make it so easy for users to transfer interesting links into their own aggregators.
Users can click on a page icon to visit its source. If they get in the habit of picking up their RSS feeds from the Feed Library page, this automatically increases the popularity rating of the feed which is then reflected in the top ten (or top 100) feeds shown in the right sidebar.
Multiple authors can contribute to the Feed Library and it's possible to control access by organisational membership. Different pricing models exist, starting at free. And you can either self-host or let BlogBridge do the hosting.
As a footnote, I should mention that Pito Salas, the man behind BlogBridge, has a long history in
professional software development and this really shows in the way Feed
Library and BlogBridge itself are being put together.
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