A couple of months ago, I had a sudden, fleeting vision of a visual paradigm for consuming web feeds. I mentioned this to Rok, but I never got that vision back. Now, a Canadian company, Serence, has come up with a visual RSS/Atom consumption paradigm beyond anything I could have imagined. (See image at bottom.)

Serence has come up with the KlipFolio(tm) RSS Dashboard, a completely configurable, rollable, scrollable, skinnable, minimizable web feeds panel. Brilliant. You have to see it for yourself to understand what a great application this is. (Actually, they are at V3.0 beta, so I guess this app has been around for a while.)

Each rectangle (in the image below) represents a "Klip(tm)", which is essentially a web feed with a bit of extra info. These rectangles can be manually resized, and also resize automatically when your mouse cursor hovers over them. The larger window that automatically appears upon hover shows the headlines for that feed. When you hover over one item, another rectangle shows up with that item's feed "description" (item body, whether full-text or partial). Clicking on an item brings up a web browser with the full story.

Despite the "RSS" in the product name, Serence makes no bones about being able to handle several syndication formats (RSS, Atom, RDF). And their .klip and .food formats are simply XML code wrappers around your feed URLs, with some extra Klip information. You can use their free API download to create your own Klips, then promote them free on Serence's KlipFarm(tm) website, as well as publishing a special Klip/ KlipFolio graphic button or banner on your own websites and blogs - similar to what you would do with services like Feedburner.

KlipFolio currently only runs on Windows 2000 and XP. For you Mac users, a MacOS version is in the works. While KlipFolio dashboard and KlipFarm are free, they do offer services based on monthly fees, including Klip Positioning, Bundling, and Statistics.

Oh, and by the way, KlipFolio handles double-byte languages, and currently already supports 37 languages - more than any other feed reader that I'm aware of. I'll be talking about creating your own Klips in future posts.

Links: Serence KlipFolio 3.0 beta, KlipFolio 2.6. (If you're comfortable with it, I recommend the 3.0 beta, as it has better memory usage.)

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