Blern Blog

Today a public version of your user profile was made available on Blern. Now you can view a public profile of any Blern user by visiting a URL of the form:

http://blern.com/user/email@address.com/

You can also substitute the Blern user ID in place of the email address: For example, you can view my public profile at http://blern.com/user/1024/. You can also see a link to your own profile by visiting your My Account page and following the link at the top.

Admittedly, this feature in-and-of-itself is not terribly useful or interesting; however it begins to pave the way for you, the user, to have better access your own data about yourself. How does it do that, you ask?

One key aspect of this is the ability to see the articles marked as “Show More”, “Show Less” and “Hidden” for any user whose profile is public. This can be viewed by appending ’showmore/’, ’showless/’ or ‘hidden/’ to the end of the user profile URL. For example, my own list of hidden URLs is at http://blern.com/user/1024/hidden/.

For those of you who lifestream, this is one more way for you to share information about yourself.

What about privacy, you ask? Fear not. I have been mindful of this and have taken pains to ensure that only limited demographic data is available–that which is available on other sites with public profiles (gender and country of residence). In addition, all users have the option of marking their account as private from their My Account page, ensuring that none of this information is available.

One of the best ways to train Blern on what you like and don’t like is to use Blern to subscribe to and read the RSS feeds you already get today. By reading the feeds you already enjoy in Blern, you have the and buttons right at your fingertips.

However, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that (for now) Blern doesn’t have the greatest feed reader out there. What if you don’t want to switch feed readers, but still want to train Blern to give you accurate recommendations?

The answer is simple: Have your reader pull your favorite RSS feeds from Blern, rather than from the source. By reading feeds from Blern in your existing feed reader, you get to see all the articles from your favorite feeds in the reader you like, while still getting the and buttons to help Blern learn about you while you read.

How do you do this? There’s two ways, and both are easy…

The simplest way is to subscribe to all of your feeds in your Blern account and pulling a single, aggregated feed of all articles from those subscriptions. You can do this by importing an OPML file of feeds you currently subscribe to. Or, you can search for feeds on Blern and subscribe to them with the Subscribe link on the feed page.

Your single, aggregated feed can be added to your RSS reader as:

http://blern.com/myfeeds/rss/youremail@domain.com/

Each feed on Blern also has its own RSS URL. So if you’d rather get a separate RSS URL for each feed you subscribe to, you can add the unique feed RSS URL from Blern to your existing feed reader.

Can’t find a feed you want to subscribe to on Blern? Simply submit it to Blern and start getting it right away.

Whichever method you choose, reading these feeds through Blern’s feeds will always show the article in the Blern site so that you can use the and buttons. Continue to use those buttons to train Blern on what you like and get accurate recommendations targeted to what you like.

Be sure to add these recommendations to your feed reader by adding the RSS URL for your recommendations to your feed reader:

http://blern.com/myrecommendations/rss/youremail@domain.com/

Don’t forget, you can have Blern learn what you like automatically if you are a Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious, or AttenTV user, too!

Are you an avid RSS user? Did you know you can get virtually all content on Blern via RSS? As a registered user of blern you can already get a daily email with your personal recommendations. But through RSS you can get much more. Just look for the RSS icon anywhere on the Blern site to get an RSS feed of the content. Here’s a list of all the content you can get from Blern via RSS:

• Most Recommended - The most recommended articles Blern has to offered, taken from the aggregate personal recommendations of all Blern users.
• Most Popular - The articles that users most often “like” by clicking the “Show More” button .
• Buzzwords - Words generating “Buzz” in the news and blog communities. Each word linked in the feed takes you to a list of articles on Blern containing that word.
• Individual Buzzword Feeds - Each individual Buzzword has its own RSS feed as well. You can click a Buzzword to get a link to its RSS feed. Or, you can create the URL for the feed yourself as: http://feed.blern.com/buzzword/word/.

All of the above feeds don’t require a user account and are completely unpersonalized.

You can have each of the feeds above exclude articles that you’ve already marked with the “Show More,” “Show Less,” and “Hide” buttons by attaching your email address to the end.

For example, the feed for Most Popular is at

http://feed.blern.com/mostpopular/rss/

but if you want it to exclude the articles you’ve already marked, use

http://feed.blern.com/mostpopular/rss/youremail@domain.com/

These feeds listed below are all personalized for you and require you to add your email address to the end, like the example above:

• My Recommendations - News and blog articles recommended for you:

http://feed.blern.com/myrecommendations/rss/youremail@domain.com/

• My Feeds - Articles from your Blern feeds you’ve subscribed to in your Blern account:

http://feed.blern.com/myfeeds/rss/youremail@domain.com/

• My Buzzwords - Articles from Buzzwords you’ve subscribed to on Blern:

http://feed.blern.com/mybuzzwords/rss/youremail@domain.com/