I use MarsEdit to author my blog posts, then publish to Wordpress 2.2, and see some of my posts aggregated by some Planet sites.

Every now and then I need to make a minor change, and that seems to result in resyndication so that readers of the planet feed get duplicates.

Is there a trick in either MarsEdit or WordPress to identifying minor updates?

I haven’t yet figured out what tweaks are needed to my WP templates to make the feed exposed in the category-specific archives be the category-specific feed. It doesn’t look simple, as the category archives is really just a specialized search.

I haven’t touched AppleScript seriously since the late 80s I fear, but there’s got to be a way to hijack Pukka’s Mark as Flagged command, no?

• I’ve switched to Shrook as my aggregator. It’s the only one I found that could let me quickly reorganize my 300+ RSS feeds into groups. Key word being “quickly”. Most of the others I tried didn’t scale well from a UI point of view (Google Reader and Bloglines in particular). It has groups which can overlap (“Favorites” and “Inspiring” can both contain the same feed), and it has some sort of bayesian learning thing which I haven’t figured out yet. It also has a web-based online reading & synchronizing service, which I haven’t poked at either.
• I’ve upgraded to MarsEdit 2.0 (well, haven’t paid yet but I will). I’m not sure why.
• After figuring out the category support in MarsEdit, I upgraded WordPress to 2.2.3. Nothing broke as far as I can tell.

The other piece of software I’m enjoying these days is HiveMinder, after a recommendation from Zak. It’s related to RT, but it fits my brain much better than RT did. I particularly like the Instant Messaging interface. More on that later if I get around to it…

And I have to say that way too many blogs are basically unprintable. Simply too many of them are clearly never tested for printability (uh, I should test my own… phew, it’s a bit of a small font but at least the layout’s just fine).

So, if you have a blog, please print one of your own entries once in a while, and see what it’s like. Also, if you have a popular blog where people leave lots of comments, consider making it possible to print your words and not all the comments.

There, rant over, I feel better now.

At first, it seems like an awful lot of duplication — the core is basically a clone of del.icio.us. The biggest difference seems to be that it seems to think of URLs as handles to actual bibliographic entries, which are extracted at bookmarking time from the pages being bookmarked, and the bibliographic handle is the “primary key” (I wonder what happens if two URLs point to the same biblio entry). The analysis works on a few major sites so far, including pubmed and Amazon. Having the bibliographic data then lets them do integration with citation management software (like EndNote). If enough of one’s sources are found online, then I can certainly see that as being a useful tool — I spent way too much time entering LaTeX bibliographies over the years.

But is the new feature “worth” having a segregated social bookmarking service (and data pool) just for scientists?

First, will it work? Assuming that the system is bootstrapped, my guess is: probably. The social aspect of del.icio.us, i.e. the tag-sharing, link-exploring and folksonomy-building will probably work just fine in a “vertical” community such as scientists or lawyers (assuming a high enough degree of participation). The profession-specific shared bookmarking service could very well make folksonomy development go a tad faster, within well-defined communities with a shared jargon (although I feel that jargon semantics don’t carry across subfields, with one field’s definition of a term quite at odds with another’s). Paul Kedrosky will be happy to see another vertical search concept (if he doesn’t know about it already!).

Apart from the duplication of effort, which is only theoretically bad, one obvious downside of the verticalization of the tool is that people doing interdisciplinary work (e.g. scientific lawyers, aka patent lawyers) will probably suffer from the compartmentalization of the meta-data — but they’re used to it by now.

Most interesting to me is the notion that the folks at Nature may have figured out a possible new feature/concept for systems like del.icio.us. Maybe it’s worth considering the possibilities that follow from doing more in-depth analysis of the “stuff” being bookmarked, and extracting the key parts of the content of interest, as opposed to focusing (as technologists would naturally do) on the “simple bit”, i.e. the URL. After all, the URL isn’t what’s interesting — it’s the stuff in the page that is.

As an example, this morning I bookmarked the page on gawker that was my introduction to the Starbucks corporate anthem (warning, it’s depressing as hell). I bookmarked the page because “it was there” — but it would be nice for the system to know that what’s key about that page is the link to the MP3 file — not just the words that Gawker uses to introduce it. If others have bookmarked another page that happens to include the same link, del.icio.us wouldn’t let me know about it. A version of something like Connotea that knew about link structures might.

As my kids say, very instering.