I came across a quick post from Benjamin Golub in his blog about SUP (no Wikipedia page yet, anyone want to write one?), a protocol developed by FriendFeed and described in their blog. 

Benjamin created a small YouTube video showing how SUP works.

Benjamin Golub demonstrates SUP

So naturally, I now have a bit of SUP-envy, since I run a WordPress blog and not my own home made cloud-based blog platform like Ben.  Which means my next step was to perform a Google search for ‘WordPress’ and ‘SUP’.  To my great surprise, a small SUP plugin has already been written!

Enter WP SUP, a small plugin that does exactly what’s necessary, which is to say add a bit of code to the RSS feed to make it SUP-enabled, and ping FriendFeed when the feed is updated.

Done and done.  Thanks Derek van Vliet!  Everybody go friend him immediately on FriendFeed.  Thanks!

WP SUP home page

Update: Feedburner seems to be stripping the SUP information out of the RSS feed header.  I’m looking in to it, along with Josh Haley and Benjamin Golub

I installed the MediaRSS WordPress plugin today.  Hopefully that will mean that the picture that I included will show up in FriendFeed and other places that support Media RSS extensions.

Media RSS extensions allow one to describe different types of media, such as embedded music and video clips, directly in an RSS stream.  These extensions are technically optional, so traditional RSS parsers can safely ignore them.

Yesterday, I saw a breaking news blog entry relating to Outbrain and Disqus. It’s a very small update in the Outbrain widget that detects if Disqus is being used and asks if the person rating an article would like to leave a Disqus comment as well.

Although the integration isn’t huge, it did catch my attention and I decided to install Outbrain on my blog. Outbrain is a plug-in content rating system that also provides recommendations automatically at the end of each article where it is installed. There is no special logins needed to rate an article, just click on the number of stars you think the article deserves and your rating is recorded.

The install was very quick and easy, with one odd hiccup. The hiccup came when I was instructed to paste in a unique activation code for my blog in to the plugin’s control panel.  After hitting the button to attempt activation, I eventually got a ‘timeout’ error. I tried the same steps several times with no joy. 

Eventually, however, I noticed that my blog management page on the Outbrain web site apparently decided I was activated, and allowed the plugin to operate normally. It was all very mysterious and I never actually got the confirmation through the control panel as I should.  But knock on wood, I am up and running.

As you can see in my screenshot, I rated my own article to see if the Disqus integration was working. However, it didn’t ask me to leave a comment.  (I subsequently figured out the ‘comment’ link only appears on the single post page, after the Disqus module loads.)

There are a number of great blogs that I follow that are now using the Outbrain plugin, such as Louis Gray, CenterNetworks, WinExtra, The Inquisitr, and VentureBeat.

Tonight, I got a SMS message from Disqus on Twitter.  The tweet was pretty succinct:

Disqus for WordPress 2.03 released.: This release includes trackback/pingback and pagination support as we.. http://tinyurl.com/5z98kh

That was enough for me!  Disqus’ lack of PingBack support in WordPress was really something that I missed, as you can probably tell from this article’s title.  So, without wasting another minute, I followed the link to the blog entry, and downloaded the new version of the plugin, 2.03.

And, I’m happy to report that it does indeed support trackback and pingback support!  I’ve included a screenshot below.

Disqus TrackBacks

Thanks for your hard work, Disqus team!

I noticed today while browsing my river on Feedly that it ‘enhanced’ one of my del.icio.us bookmarks with commentary from Digg on the same article.  As far as I can tell, it did not find the Digg entry based on the URL, but rather on the title of the article.  Very cool!  Also, the list of other recent del.icio.us bookmarks in the column on the right.

You may have noticed that the URL in question is actually one from Diigo.  I actually have my Diigo annotations being pushed to del.icio.us automatically. Also, not in this screenshot is a link to the original Digg article at the bottom of the comment thread.

I haven’t seen anyone in my immediate circle of social media followers reporting on this, so here is a small update on Diigo, a relatively new social bookmarking site with a lot of features.

Diigo tries enable a lot of ways of using its service and related features.  You can use it exactly like del.icio.us to bookmark and tag web sites you may want to search for later.  But you can also use it to share interesting bookmarks with your friends, discuss content with like-minded folks, and also leave comments on sites that Diigo users can read later!

The feature they are testing out applies to their groups feature.  Now, if you are a member of a particular group in Diigo, you can give certain URLs a thumbs-up if you think it is especially helpful.  They are holding off on deploying this feature site-wide until they can make a determination how game-able the feature is.

Groups are similar to a web forum, but centered more around site bookmarks that are collected to provide a resource for the group.  There are groups for all sorts of things, from social media to cooking.  Some groups are extremely active, and others are simple collection points for related URLs.

This is the group thread that alerted me to the thumbs feature.  Here is another article about Diigo where thumbs are mentioned.