I have always been fascinated by easy ways to aggregate content to populate a website but have not found something to quickly share links without filling out a form. There are tons of ways to post to social news sites but what if you want to roll content into your own site. Solutions like parsing the RSS feed from Google Reader shared items work, but the content has to be from within a walled garden. Often the things I want to share I find in a non-linear way, just clicking around, and adding it to my site requires filling out the form and writing a post for Wordpress. Really all I want to say was, I way here, at this time, click if you want.
I found the site Instapaper.com after seeing Jim Louderback Twitter to check out Popsiren. Looks like a fine content for the female demographic I suppose, not really my style but it delivered a pretty useful link. Instapaper, is a service created by Marco, that really helped me kill a pain and inspired me to roll a similar interface into future systems. Instapaper lets you use a bookmarklet that simply captures the site your currently on to an RSS feed. You create an account and use the bookmarklet to populate the site and therefore an RSS feed with a link list.
Once you have an RSS feed, you can parse it however you want. In my case, the brand new Now Reading widget on the sidebar. The One-Click solution to linking makes it a no brainer to getting content to a central location. This amount of elegance really has to be commended and is inspiring. Instapaper is a winner in my book. By removing the resistance of creating content you can create Click Casts for your own page or site. Click Casts are unique from sharing items using a service, because generally you can’t reuse the links you create. As well, it allows you to advise your audience as to what you’ve been upto online in a sort of new way.
Instapaper’s fricitonless functionality is missing from many bookmarklet content creation solutions for both CMS and groupware. I will work out the bugs of my RSS parser for my Now Reading Click Cast, hopefully I will be able to release a wordpress plugin that isn’t reliant upon a middleman solution (sorry Instapaper, but I don’t want to use your service in a way you didn’t intend).
Check out the Now Reading Section of the left.
If you want to add this type of functionality to your site now. You can grab an instapaper account and simplepie’s rss code. There is a plugin available for Wordpress. Use Simplepie’s php to parse the RSS feed provided on Instapaper’s site. That’s it, you have a click cast… go out and click to share. Aswell, using something like a Twitterfeed you can broadcasts your ClickCasts via Twitter. Call it the Scrobbling of surfing.
The possibilities are not quite but approaching infinite. I guess you could call it a Mashup to innovate the link.
