Grazing with Grazr
Yesterday’s post continues to push me to check out more tools that are out there in the ether. 
Jim Storer or Mzinga mentioned Grazr in his comment to the discussion, I of course spent the next 45 minutes over at Grazr.
I would describe Grazr as an easy-to-use tool that allows you to collect feeds from several different places, put them all in one place, and then share it very easily with other people either directly through Twitter, Facebook, your blog and more. I tried out a bunch of different collections of feeds for each of my clients. Now I do this within Google Reader today, building folders for each and collecting feeds to monitor discussions. I can share this a bit with folks, but not by simply showing folks one particular folder and I’ve also found the blog widget builder for my shared Google Reader items to be difficult.
Grazr however has a very easy tool for sharing your collection of feeds, and here it is for my client TalkShoe:
Easy enough to create and share on my blog…but that is NOT why I’m excited. What I can now do is post this to our internal Wiki and the entire team can quickly get updated on the client. Anyone can edit and add to the collection to make sure we aren’t missing anything or simply download it as OPML and put it in their feed reader of choice. Very helpful for an agency, particularly when adding new folks to a team.
It is also helpful when tracking conversations concerning a singular event, say the Mzinga/Prospero merger and subsequent TwitterConference (this is what Jim has posted and what sparked this post):
Do you use Grazr? How?
/kff
March 5th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Great follow on… thanks for the mention. One other way I use Grazr is to create feeds based on keywords in del.icio.us. If you get your team to use a common (and distinct) tagging taxonomy, it can become pretty powerful to roll up collective browsing into a nice, dynamic dashboard.
Jim (@jstorerj)
March 5th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I “found” Grazr last fall when I was searching for an RSS reader and turned Jim onto it when he was the operational manager for the Catalyze community.
We use Grazr to bring in external blogs and RSS feeds of external content. Here are links to the two Grazr widgets in our community:
http://www.mycatalyze.org/Blogs/CatalyzeBlogsFeedRoom/tabid/1301/Default.aspx
http://www.mycatalyze.org/tabid/2158/Default.aspx
Tom Humbarger (@tomhumbarger)
Community Manager
Catalyze
March 5th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I don’t know what Tom’s talking about… never met him in my life.
jk… Tom deserves a lot of credit for getting out there and finding some of this stuff. Now if we could get him to share his insights more via Twitter we’d be getting somewhere.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Thanks for the mention! It’s really quite heartening to find people who are using our services in some of the ways we’d originally envisioned. We’ve got a lot of new stuff we’re about to roll out, hopefully you find even more that you can do with us.
I’m always keen to follow threads like this discussing applications of Grazr. If you have any wish-list items or general feedback I’d love to hear it. PR is one of the areas we hope we can provide some really unique functionality in the near future.
Mike Kowalchik
CTO Grazr Corp.
March 6th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Mike, thanks for stopping by. I spent more time with Grazr last night setting up different searches and reading others, great stuff.
Tom, thanks for the links, love the use of the Grazr widget within a community. We do a lot of work with Ning, I’m wondering if I can add the Grazr widget into those? I’ll have to look into that.
Jim, my next step will be to try out the tagging method, that could be a challenge to get a group to do, but certainly something I’d love to do for myself and this blog.
Thanks all for continuing the conversation, it is enlightening.
/kff