November 01, 2005
Putting 'Add To ...' Links On Your Weblog Pages
One of the most exciting developments in the world of personal, configurable portals...those My Yahoo, My AOL, and even RSS Aggregators like Bloglines or Newsgator Online services...is the ability to really personalize the news and information on them by choosing ANY RSS FEED and putting it on your page. You no longer are limited to channels of content from sources the portal wants you to look at, but you can troll the websites and weblogs all across the web, find those little white-on-orange RSS buttons, right-click to copy the URL/short-cut, and paste it into the 'Add Content' or similar form on your portal...voila, you have subscribed to that content and it begins to show in your portal.
Historical note, when Netscape and Dave Winer were coming up with RSS 5 years ago or more, this is what Netscape did with it with their My Netscape portal...it has taken all of the other 'My' pages this long to open up their business models to let us customers have what we want.
For those of us sharing our knowledge, experience, and whimsy on the web, one way to make it easier for potential readers / community members to see our stuff (official terminology) on their particular 'My..' page is to add easy subscription buttons...usually looking like 'Add to My ...'...to our websites and weblogs. Until someone builds a service that takes one RSS feed URL and produces all of the 'Add to My...' buttons for us, here is a list of all the relevant places on the web where you can 'Create 'Add To My...' Button' for the various portals and RSS readers.
