Clippings! Another NewsGator Feature

Brad Feld's comment about locations, and Mack Male's comment on my last post got me thinking... what other really cool features do we have in NewsGator that aren't well known. 

I didn't have to think hard to find another.  That feature is Clippings and how you can share them.  (Actually, that's a lie...  a group of us have been thinking about how to make this feature more public for a few weeks now... and you'll see a really cool way that makes this easier from Nick Bradbury really soon :-).

In NewsGator Online, Inbox and NewsGator Desktop, you can "Clip" posts that you find interesting.  You can clip them to either your "My Clippings" folder, or you can create subfolders so that you can categorize your clippings.

The really cool thing is that each of your clipping folders has an RSS Feed associated with it that others can subscribe to.  So instead of having just one RSS feed for all the posts you find interesting, you can have as many as you want!

So lets say your friends Bill and Jane only care about the posts about bands that you find interesting.  Your co-workers Jim and Brian think the posts you find about  your job interesting, but they don't really care about your musical tastes.  Mark and Jen only like the posts you find funny and could care less about the rest.  Bob on the other hand is a real fan and wants to know about everything you find (beware of Bob... he may be stalking you ;-)

To keep all these people happy, here's what you do...

1. In NewsGator Online or in Inbox, create subfolders to your "My Clippings" folder - we'll call them "music", "work" and "funny".
2. In NewsGator Online, click one of your new subfolders.  At the bottom of the page, you'll see an option to make that folder public and what the URL is to that folder's RSS Feed.  You can use the URL from your "My Clippings" folder for a feed that contains all of your clippings.
3. Give the right feed URL to the right people... or make them all available and let people decide what they want to subscribe to.
4. As you use Inbox, NewsGator Desktop or NewsGator Online and find interesting posts, you can decide which category they fall into and clip them accordingly.

Now anyone interested can see the same posts that you find interesting!  NewsGator Enterprise Server actually takes this collaboration 4 or 5 steps further... I won't go into how, but you can see more here.

You can get more detailed instructions of how to do this with this KB Article:
INF: How to let other people view "My Clippings"

You can also put your clippings on your blog.  This KB explains how to do that:
INF: How to get "My Clippings" onto your webpage

We've also got another way to do this that I wrote about last weekend which will be available really soon.  I've been testing it myself... you can see a preview on my blog on the right, under "NewsGator Buzz".

So now that you know that clippings and sharing them are there... how can we make it easier to use?  Leave a comment!