We’ve already had the ability to use the following spin APIs with our automation module: The Best Spinner, SpinRewriter, ContentBoss, BlogSense’s Internal Spinner(free).

Now these services has been included in our personal Spin API, which allows BlogSense users to leverage our spinning solutions outside of BlogSense’s automated campaigns.  For example, we can take a single article and paste it into our API section, select our service, press spin, and a spun version of that article will be produced.

A MORE ADVANCED USE OF THE BLOGSENSE SPIN API MODULE…

This same manual spin area can be accessed and operated programmatically (like an API service), which allows us to leverage all our 3^rd party spin APIs from one script on the fly. This API mode can be accessed in a POST/Response manner using PHP’s CURL.  This is for programmers who would like to, for whatever reason, use the BlogSense Spin API for spinning rather than using the 3^rd  party’s API for spinning.

———-

The BlogSense Spin API can be accessed from within your BlogSense administration area by navigating to:

Toolbox->Miscellaneous Tools->Internal Spinner Tools->Access BlogSense’s Internal Spinner

Screenshot of the manual spinning section:

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In some cases, RSS feeds can be composed of content from many different sources. A perfect example is an RSS feed generated from someone’s facebook wall posts, or an RSS feed containing public Google+ posts published by a single user. The items in these feeds will contain user comments ass well as attached youtube links, vimeo links, attachment descriptions and more!

In order to make BlogSense even more flexible we have added in the ability to attempt to auto-extract content from remote sources just like the major internet players do. Let’s show an example of how it works:

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• BlogSense Internal Spinner (free & included)
• The Best Spinner
• ContentBoss
• SpinRewriter

ContentBoss – Legible, Unique, Praised, Senior.

ContentBoss is one of the oldest content modification services on the market. They provide a monthly rate service and most professionals I’ve talked to say they provide a sturdy rewriting system that helps preserve readability while restructuring the language content enough to make it post-panda worthy.  They say it’s a great service and does it’s job well (better than most others) and yet they also said it was expensive ( at the time they used it ) because users were charged at a high per-spin rate. But it seems that since talking to my collegues ContentBoss has switched from a per-spin payment process to a monthly access system similiar to it’s competitors, which looks to me to be priced similarly as well. That’s a good sign.

This new spin service is now added to BlogSense and verified to work. You can head to the ContentBoss website to order your login credentials.

SpinRewriter – A Champion of Youth & Talent.

The other new service offered by BlogSense is SpinRewriter , who I have taken pleasure in monitoring closely over the last month since it’s launch date.  If you visit the Hatnohat forums you can see that they keep an active improvement schedule and aspire to be the best in readibility & uniqueness. Without a doubt it will become a major innovator and competitor to ContentBoss and The Best Spinner.

Right now SpinRewriter has a young API, and it’s program director Aaron is currently working with me to ensure that HTML elements are not affected when content is spun. If you are looking to signup now for use with BlogSense then I recommend holding off. But it very well might become the best service selection in the future!

A Most Lazy Conclusion…

If you are interested in content modification then I recommend checking out all three services, comparing prices, reading reviews, and selecting the one you feel most comfortable with. Each will have it’s own advantage, it’s up to you to research and find the one that suits you!

ALSO! If you’re a member or have been a member of either one of these services please feel free to leave us you insight in the commenting area! Cheers!

Updated BlogSense Spin Settings Area:

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Atwell Publishing, 1301 29th St South #11, Birmingham, AL 35205, USASimilar Posts:

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This shortcode can be a replacement for stripping images,links, and any other html element from a block of text.

Here’s an example of how we would use it:

[cleanhtml:<more><ul><li><ol><pre><div><table><tr><td><i><b><p><span><u><font><tbody><h1><h2><h3><h4><center><blockquote><font><li><ul><object><embed><br><small><label>]%postbody%[/cleanhtml]

If you notice, <img> is not present. The shortcode above is telling blogsense to include all of the html elements defined and removed the ones that are not included. In our case the shortcode above is removing any images found within the content sourced by a campaign.

What are some case examples of when we would use this technique?

This shortcode was created to help a customer strip all images except the very first image. BlogSense provides %image_1% and %image_2% tokens that represent the URL of the first and second image discovered in the post body. The customer could use these tokens to setup an image in his template and then use the [cleanhtml] shortcode to remove all other images from the content he has sourced.

This will help him get rid of annoying buttons and advertisements. BlogSense naturally strips javascript from imported content, but in theory this shortcode would also be able to removed javascript and object embeds as well.

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Curation: The act of curating, of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts; The act of curing or healing; The manual updating of information in a database - en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curation

How do we curate?

Content Curation

In today’s internet, everyone is a content curator. We dig through the mountains of content to find share-worthy gems, and then we share them on blogs, forums, facebook, youtube, linkedin, twitter, foursquare, digg, tumblr, mirc, chat clients, email, etc.  This  process of collecting, filtering, refining, and re-distributing is what we have come to call “content curation”.

Reader Curation

To share content we need to have readers right?  We need to have friends, subscribers, followers, or linked accounts in order to content share. It stands to say that if we can collect, organize, and share content, then we also have the ability to collect, organize, and target readers.  For example, with Twitter we might search for people who are tweeting about a related topic and then engage them to follow you  (via introductions, replies on their topics, @mentions, etc).  Most internet users  voluntarily tag themselves with information that can identify their interests.  Targeting these readers and organizing them into your content delivery systems is the other side of curation, reader curation.

Tools to help with Creation

GOOGLE READER

Before Google Reader fully integrated with Google+ they had a share setting that would allow us to send articles we read “with an attached note” to a customized public RSS feed. We could use this reader platform to follow all our blogs, sort through the crap, select the gold, and then use the shared items RSS feed to redistribute the hand selected content to the blog/platform of our choice using RSS importing. It was very powerful stuff!

We can still use google reader to curate content to Google+, which is still a very powerful feature for building readership, but we’ve lost the capability to use RSS to export to other platforms. For those who want to revive this capability, keep your eyes on the HiveMined Reader alternative.

BLOGSENSE AUTOMATION TOOLS  - For curating content with the WordPress CMS.

BlogSense automation is the parent software of this blog, and provides automation tools & solutions to self hosted WordPress blogs.  Features that make BlogSense good at content curation are , like an RSS reader, you can store a wide variety of RSS feeds and then use filtering methods to block unwanted articles or use the direct importing mode to import select articles and add commentary to the articles you would like to pass onto your readers before publishing.

BlogSense also allows the user to post content to the ‘draft’ or ’pending review’ publish status for review before publishing, while additionally offering the option to have articles emailed to you email for manual approval before publishing.

Tweet Adder – For Curating Twitter Followers

Tweet Adder does not curate content, but instead curates readers (followers). With this tool you can use keyword based automated searches to pick twitter users out of the collective pool and arrange to make content with them, promoting a potential follow. One time I made a quick video introducing the Tweet Adder interface: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhB5y7tC420

TUBE TOOLBOX – For currating Youtube subscribers

This software is similar to Tweet Adder in the since that it uses automation to connect with users through keyword searches. You can use keywords related to whatever topic you think worthy, and harvest user accounts that turn up in the results, and then use Tube Toolbox to auto-friend these people, share a video with them, message them, suggest them to subscribe to your channel, etc.

What are the different types of curation models for content?

There are a couple of different types of curation models and each has it’s own level of internet respect. You could even say that these models could be ranked in order of superiority.

The first and weakest model is called the summary & link based curation model.  It consists of a editor hand selecting and re-distributing articles in tact with the original summary and a link to the original source.

The second model is a little strong and it’s the excerpt + editorial commenting + link to the original article. This model consists an editor hand selecting content and then using it as a platform for writing your own editorial content. This is by far a stronger model then the prior own. It adds a personality to your blog and increases the chances of retaining readership loyalty.

The third model is the strongest and at the same time most professional model employed to date. It is the journalistic curation approach aka 90%+ original content.  Usually the results of a complete re-summarization of a topic inspired by a hand selected article, providing editorial content and possibly, but not necessarily, citing the inspiring content source.  This model usually emerges when a reporting firm has the money, talent, and readership to power the model.

Many popular sites such as TechCrunch , started out at level two content curation to end up at level three.  Most reporting agencies (both local and internet based) operate at level three.  Many small reporting/curation still exist at level two and experience loyal readers and have no aspirations to move into level three. Most all of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc accounts operate successfully at the level two curation. Some distribution channels  provide the full article written by a third party. This can be through guest posting or permission based posting (with links back to the original content).

So you see, this is the current paradigm my mind sits at concerning content curation. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to add some more tools for both content and reader curation services.

Feel free to comment and improve!

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Hello!

Over the last month, anyone working with the translation features of BlogSense may have noticed that campaigns were halted because of the inability to translate content.

The news related to this phenomenon is that Google has disabled their free API based translation service in favor for a paid translation service.

It is our intention to eventually offer the option to either use Bing’s free service or Google’s paid service, but for now we have introduced Bing’s API based service to restore translation features back to BlogSense users.

Which service is better? I have no clue and have done zero case studies. One would think that because of weath & pride, Google would produce a superior translation service, but hey, Microsoft is a pretty altruistic and powerful company as well. It just might be that Bing’s service is superior!

API limitations and throttling

BlogSense does provide an application ID for global use, but there are use limitations available to each APIKey. It might be prudent to grab your own APIKey from Bing.com. BlogSense provides a settings area within the Automation->Global Settings area where you can paste in and overwrite the default api key with your personal api key.

Screen Shots

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It will also help with general flexibility.

New Sorting Options:

• By Relevance
• By Publish-Date
• By Rating
• By ViewCount

Hope you enjoy this new feature.

Note: BlogSenseWp is an automation solutions utility for WordPress. It could be said that this plugin focuses on the “autoblogging” industry, but autoblogging just a buzz word. We truly focus on wordpress automation strategies and techniques.

This particular article highlights an improvement to our Videos Module, which is, to-date, WordPress’s most flexible automated youtube video delivery service. With it we can target keywords as well as individual user accounts.

BlogSense provides a wide variety of automated publishing patterns, ranging from 1 every minute to 1 every 10 days. With the video module we can also use the video’s publish date as the WordPress publish date.

BlogSense also has extensive auto-categorization features worth looking into.

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The shortcode looks like this:

{customsource:http://www.amazines.com:%keyword%:1:<div><p><span><font><br><ul><ol><li><b><strong><i><u><table><img><a>}

and the parameters can be defined as so:

p1: Defines the shortcode

p2: Defines URL to pool results from.

p3: Defines the keyword to search the url for results.

p4: Limits how many content items are returned from source.

p5: Defines the HTML tags to preserve.

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We could choose to share the article alone, or choose to share the article with a personal note that would be placed in blockquotes above the content and this allowed Google Reader a content re-syndication distribution system because of the following…

A very strong feature of the share button was that each item shared was sent to an RSS feed available to the user. These highly unique RSS feeds could be taken outside of Google Reader and be used to power a wide range of different content delivery services such as newsgroups, newsletters, news sections of forums, blogs, micro-blogs, essentially any and every known social platform on the internet that can be integrated with RSS re-distribution. And it was great, powerful, and helpful.

But let me further build the value of how helpful it was. Individuals could use the Google Reader Platform to curate topics and inform subsets of people keeping them people informed with only the most quality hand selected topics which then were optionally commented on providing more insight by the content curator. It was extremely powerful for building community and increasing the exposure of the content sources being shared. It was a continuous win for the internet overall. 

The quiet after sunset, followed by the howl of wild animals

It’s to be said that this culture has been temporarily muted with the introduction of the new Google Reader, possibly to pave the way for new ways of curation, but at this point we are not certain.  If I may, I’d like to make some recommendations on how to restore and even excel the past capabilities of Google Reader, hopefully further tightening co-operation between the two giant Google services.

What I believe in short is that a new version of the labeling and content sharing features (with RSS feed generation) should be implemented

Just like Google Plus’s circle system, we could use our labels to organize our content into public (or private) RSS feeds. This would allow for a more accurate curation of multiple topics that could be used to benefit content seeding. 

Google could organize the labels under the “send to” button with the option to leave a note being the default process. For times when the curator does not want to contribute commentary the not area could be left blank (Just like if we pressed “Share” instead of “Share with a Note” in the old Reader layout). 

In addition to labels, one option under the “sent to” button would be a button to share directly with Google+, following with the same “add a note” system except then we can choose our circles instead of our labels. 

It’s a rough draft, but you can see this would effectively bring in a lot of Google+’s structural features into Google Reader’s domain. 

With the presence of labeling and RSS feeds, Google+ users could list their public feeds in their profiles for others to subscribe to them. 

A future consideration would be to restore some of the micro-social network features for those subscribing to other reader’s RSS feeds, such as commenting within reader with notifications of new comments. Just like in Google+. 

Then, Google Plus should take a lesson from Google Reader’s new awesomeness and offer RSS feeds (private or public) for each user’s circle that can display, optionally, 1) Our own contributions to the circle or 2) A mashup of all contributions from users circled in a particular circle. …That way we could syndicate our own Google+ contributions in unique ways, and we could even use Google Reader to monitor our circles if we choose. 

It’s an option that many Readers would appreciate and it would rise Google Reader to the klout-gaining-standard it could achieve. A worthy brother of Google Plus. 

If you use Google Reader and would like to see new changes or would like comment on some of the changes suggested here in this article, say so. This is a public thread hopefully we can generate some good feedback. Similar Posts:

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