Blern Blog

The WordPress plugin for Blern now supports displaying Blern’s Buzzworthy articles. Check out the updated version here.

Yet another service supported by Blern. Want your recommendations improved by the pages you bookmark at Furl? Tack your Furl account onto your Blern account on the My Account page.

Things keep on truckin’ along here. Now Blern learns more about you from your Pownce account. Got a Pownce account? Update your Blern account here.

Friendfeed is a new lifestreaming tool that has gotten a lot of notoriety lately, namely because it’s a pretty cool tool and also because the founders were bigwigs at Google.

Well, for those of you who are enjoying Friendfeed, Blern can now learn even more about you by analyzing what’s in your Friendfeed. Just update your Blern profile on your My Account page.

Blern now offers a WordPress plugin for your blog! The “Blern Users Also Liked” plugin allows you to display a list of articles on your blog that were enjoyed by Blern users who also enjoyed the current post.

In WordPress plugin speak: This plugin creates a new TemplateTag allowing users to put a widget on their blog that displays a listing of other news articles and blog posts. That list of articles is created by Blern.com using information about users who indicated that they liked the article currently being displayed and contains other articles those users liked.

For example, Blern will look over the history of users who indicated they liked the article currently being viewed. It will then look at the history of other articles those users also liked. It then compiles that information to display a list of articles that were most commonly liked by the users who liked the current article.

You can see an example of this feature in action at the bottom of this post. Or in the sidebar on the right side of the main Blern blog site.

Download it here.

Blern now allows you to associate your personal blog with your Blern profile. This allows Blern to learn even more about you by analyzing your blog posts. In addition, when people view your Blern public profile, they can click on over to your blog and get even better acquainted with you.

So if you have a personal blog, update it by going to http://blern.com/myaccount/.

Fear not, Blern devotees. Although things are relatively quiet here on the blog, a number of “behind the scenes” improvements have been getting attention, such as ways to improve the accuracy of your recommendations and new methods for detecting and incorporating new RSS feeds–the current total of “active” feeds is nearly at 10,000 (if this seems low, consider that I review the content and appropriateness of every feed that’s made “active” in the system).

I’ve been reluctant to try turning Blern into a social networking site, which seems to be all the rage in every Web 2.0 site out there. However, I’m beginning to see some applications where it might make sense to have some “social” features. Rather than build a new social network, I’d rather leverage technologies out there so I’ll be looking at things like OpenSocial and Facebook integration, where it makes sense.

Specifically, I’m thinking about a feature that would allow you to gauge how closely your interests align with those of your friends and discover people who have similar interests to you. I’m laying the groundwork to incorporate some more “traditional” features in Web 2.0 sites (such as integrating an address book for sharing articles). This foundation should allow me to then take the next step of autodiscovering the interests of your friends and then measuring the similarity between them, yourself and possibly others.

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.

The updates just keep on comin’. Blern now integrates with WordPress and LiveJournal to learn about you. If you’ve got a WordPress or LiveJournal account, update it on the My Account page.

Got an idea of someplace on the ‘net that Blern could learn about you? Let us know!

Blern has one more way to learn about the things you like: Pandora. If you’re a Pandora user, you can now have Blern get even more familiar with your likes by linking your Pandora account to your Blern account. You can do that on the My Account page after you log in.

Want a preview of some of the other ways Blern will be able to learn about you? How about LiveJournal and Twitter? Got an idea of someplace on the ‘net that Blern could learn about you? Let us know!