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HCI & Tech & VC 20 Sep 2006 05:11 pm

Grazr Blogroll

I decided to implement my blogroll using Grazr. If you don’t know what Grazr is, it’s essentially a feed reader widget that can be embedded in HTML. Just play with my blogroll for 5 minutes, and you’ll understand what Grazr can do.
Most of my readers are reading via RSS, so this change means nothing to them because they never see my blogroll, but it’s a significant decision for me because of the importance I place on blogrolls in general.

I had a professor in college, Terry Winograd, who said that when he picked up a book or a paper with which he was unfamiliar, the first thing he did was flip to the Bibliography or Sources Cited section. That’s because he wanted to figure out of the author was in his social network or not. It’s a great metric for Terry to determine if a given author is worth spending time reading.

I feel similarly about blogrolls. If I don’t recognize a single blog in the blogroll then it’s unlikely that this blog falls within my social network and my realm of expertise. That’s not to say I won’t read the blog (though occasionally I won’t), but it lets me know where my common ground is with the blogger and whether or not the blogger and I agree that certain people are important and worth reading regularly.

So, given the importance I place on blogrolls, I am now using Grazr for the following reasons:

  1. It takes up less screen real-estate than my old blogroll.
  2. It’s a clean, tight, snappy UI.
  3. It’s organized better. My old blogroll was ordered alphabetically; whereas, Grazr is categorized by my bloglines categories.
  4. If I update my OPML on Bloglines, my Grazr automatically updates.
  5. Users can customize their Grazr view on my widget to their liking, even pop the widget in a new windows.
  6. Users can view other people’s posts directly in my Grazr widget.

Basically, it’s a blogroll on steroids.

What are my gripes so far?

  1. My users now cannot click-through to a blog they like from my blogroll.
  2. Viewing posts is a bit of a strain in the 180 pixels I gave the widget to work with.
  3. The widget does not expand and contract when there is significant blank space in the bottom of the widget.

Let me know what you think of the new Grazr blogroll.

Comments (1)

One Response to “Grazr Blogroll”

  1. on 21 Sep 2006 at 6:12 am 1.James Corbett said …

    Andrew, thanks for trying out Grazr (I’m an advisor to the company).

    “1. My users now cannot click-through to a blog they like from my blogroll.”

    Well we may not have made it obvious enough, so this feedback is valuable, but users can actually click through to the blog by clicking on the hash (#) symbol beside any feed item link.

    ” 2. Viewing posts is a bit of a strain in the 180 pixels I gave the widget to work with.”

    That’s what the Launch icon in the top right corner is for – click on that icon to open Grazr in a new window and then maximize as normal :)

    Thanks again for the feedback.