BlogRovr is an interesting new way of getting blog information, on the go while you're surfing the Web. It is a download plugin for Firefox 2.0, which works cross-platform on Windows, Mac and Linux. There's no IE plugin for now, but support for IE6 and IE7 is coming soon (a couple of weeks away). BlogRovr is basically a personalized vertical search engine for every page you visit - processed in real-time. How it works is that once you've downloaded BlogRovr, when you surf the Web BlogRovr is busy working in the background 'fetching' related blog stories for you. Keeping with the canine theme, the BlogRovr blog says that BlogRovr is "your best friend for keeping your finger on the pulse of the blogosphere."
BlogRovr is the latest product from Activeweave, the company behind online social annotation app Stickis. In fact BlogRovr uses the same backend technology as Stickis. The main use case for BlogRovr is for people to see what their favorite bloggers have to say about anything they're browsing. In their blog, CEO Marc Meyer explains that BlogRovr is complementary to RSS Readers, because "RovR tells you about content from your blogs when and where you’re most likely to be interested in it."
I downloaded BlogRovr as a Firefox plugin on a Windows machine. It starts off by giving you pre-selected bundles of blogs to choose from, in various categories. I chose the "Science and Technology" bundle, of which Read/WriteWeb is featured. You can add new blogs to your bundles, individually or as a group via OPML - for example I added the Web 2.0 Workgroup OPML file to my BlogRovr page. The software will also offer to fetch blogs you’ve recently visited and, once you have it installed, you can add blogs via the Rovr toolbar menu.
OK, so you have a set of feeds - then what does BlogRovr do exactly? Basically the software 'sits' at the bottom of your sidebar (see bottom-right of the screenshot above). To your left you will see a larger version of BlogRovr in sit mode.
Then when you browse to a web page and click BlogRovr, it will display - in a roll-out tray - relevant pages from your bundle of chosen bloggers. For example my post on Yahoo Mail API had two relevant articles, one by Alex Barnett - which when clicked popped up as a preview. BlogRovr also provides tags to show the topics.
BlogRovr is another way to find niche content that is relevant to you, so in that respect it's similar to 'memetrackers' like Techmeme or vertical search engines. BlogRovr is a unique way of giving you related content, one I haven't come across before. Check it out and let us know what you think.
Disclosure: BlogRovr became a R/WW sponsor in April 2007.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: BlogRovr Fetches Content From Your Favorite Blogs.
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Does BlogRovr only find content on blogs, or any site with a feed or what?
Posted by: Megan Taylor | March 29, 2007 10:08 PMHave you tried it? I am a little concerned about my computers performance, with all the things he does in the background...
Posted by: Zep | March 29, 2007 11:12 PMLet me answer your questions folks:
#1 Any site with a feed, or any feed you add to rovr will be fetched from.
#2 All this searching is done on blogrovr's servers, not your machine; there's nothing that takes up time on your local machine.
Enjoy, and drop us a line at feedback@blogrovr.com with any questions.
Posted by: marc meyer | March 29, 2007 11:25 PMMarc Meyer
it seems like a very interesting toy for a geek )
still i find that subscription management really sucks. and this limit for 100 feeds in OPML.. wtf?
Posted by: saman | March 30, 2007 5:52 AMok guys, sorry -)
Posted by: saman | March 30, 2007 6:06 AMno limits to be there hehe
thanks saman, i think the page numbers below for pagination to your next N hundred may look a bit small?
As for subscription management, well, it isn't intended to manage your subscriptions really. You can add or delete a subscription wherever you see a post from it or from any website with a feed, so it is easy to decide to stop rovr from fetching a feed you've gotten tired of.
Posted by: marc meyer | March 30, 2007 9:01 AMRovr isn't a feed reader like google reader. It is very lightweight to have feeds fetched from, and change ones mind when one doesn't care for the content anymore.
Thanks!
It gives me great pleasure to become BlogRovr use, a good opportunity to save time and effort.
Posted by: mondo di modo | March 31, 2007 5:01 AMI've been trying blogrovr for a couple of days and the #1 distraction is that it gums up your browser. My whole browser experience started getting inexplicable delays.
This is an architectural issue with browsers I believe -- that they can only run one javascript thing at once. Whether this affects extensions (sorry 'add ons') I'm not sure but I had to disable BlogRovr because of this delay (5s or so, quite often, with 8MB broadband and 2GHz dual CPU laptop / 2GB RAM).
Posted by: Julian | April 3, 2007 7:30 AMi've been using blogrovr for a few days and haven't seen any performance problems??? outlook on the other hand...
Posted by: fred belpinto | April 3, 2007 5:00 PMHi Julian,
Posted by: Jean Sini | April 5, 2007 9:13 PMI'd like to follow up on the perceived performance issues you mentioned. We've been doing extended testing on the add-on, and haven't noticed any significant cost - most of the time, the posts from your selected bloggers, if any, for the page you're navigating to, come back while the page is still loading. But if you experience any significant slow-down when BlogRovr is enabled vs. disabled, please send me (jean, blogrovr dot com) as much info as you feel comfortable sharing: details about your browser versions, other add-ons, what tabs are open where, etc. We'll look right into it.
No comments about Outlook ;-)