Arktan Blog

We got lot of requests to support Topic Channels for Flickr. We now support them based on Flickr Tags.

We also got some complaints about “automatically” creating a channel based on a BlogSpot label or a Twitter #tag. Hence we have changed the behavior such that you now have to first create a new channel manually on Arktan before tagged Blogs, Tweets or Pictures will be added to the “Topic Channel”.

Arktan has allowed the ability to aggregate content from multiple websites and then segment it into Arktan channels right from the beginning. So far an Arktan channel has allowed the ability to mix content at the granularity of Websites or feeds. This in itself has turned out to be useful for a wide variety of cases. For example you could add your photos and videos into a Multimedia channel or your bookmarks from Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon into a Bookmarks channel.

However this segmentation hasn’t been possible at the granularity of individual content items from a parent site e.g. adding tweets or blog posts on different subjects into different channels.

We have now added a powerful new feature which allows you to automatically add individual tweets or blog posts into a particular Arktan channel. This allows you to create fine grained “topic channels”. For example you may want to create a biking channel with biking tweets and biking blog posts. You can do this automatically as long as you tag your tweets with #biking on Twitter and label your blogs posts on Blogspot with “biking”. Arktan automatically creates a biking channel and adds only the individual blog posts and tweets to it.

Another example would be a technical subject such as Java. Say you wish to collect all your Java related tweets and blog posts in one place. You could tag the Java tweets with #Java and label the blog posts with “Java”. Arktan will automatically create a channel called Java.

Now you can share this channel with your friends. They could use a RSS reader to get updates to this channel. They could also get updates to this channel in their mailbox. Or you could embed this channel on another site using the embed channel feature under “share”.

Also note that your entire Twitter feed and/or Blogspot feed continues to be added to the channel that you originally added the Website feed to while signing up or using the “Post Content” button. This may have been to a channel such as “MicroBlog” for Twitter or “Blog” for Blogspot feeds.

Ofcourse you can always mark any of your channels as Private or control who sees them using the privacy controls on Arktan.

We will be extending this feature to other websites going forward.