A bit like Snap Preview... but for Feeds

Snap took a lot of criticism recently for their Snap Preview Anywhere plugin and while the implementation might not have been ideal I think the idea itself wasn't a bad one and I can certainly see how it might be useful for a particular online audience.

What I would find more useful however than a web page preview is a feed item preview. How many times have you been reading a blog post (e.g., in your aggregator) that quotes from and links to an interesting looking post by someone you've never heard of? If, like me, you're always on the lookout for interesting new blogs but at the same time already inundated with feeds, you need to make a quick judgment call on all new sources of information.

You may be wondering if this quotation is representative of the blogger's usual style, quality of writing and subject area. If so it might be worth subscribing. If by hovering over the link you could see a pop-up window listing the blogger's most recent 10 posts you could immediately get a mental picture of what area she covers. And then drill down into the posts to check the overall quality.

That's what I normally do anyway when evaluating a new blog except I have to do it manually by visiting the webpage and blocking out all the sidebar noise, then scrolling... scrolling... scrolling... to assimilate the post titles. It would be so much more convenient if I could glean the same information from a user invoked popup preview.

That was the idea I put to the lads at Grazr* and before long Mike Kowalchik was back with a solution - his Grazr Preview bookmarklet. Drag that link to your Bookmarks Toolbar and you have immediate access to the functionality I described above. Operation is, you're on a page. You click the bookmarklet... then any link you "shift-click" on will launch a grazr preview window. Nice one Mike !!

*I'm an advisor to Grazr Corp.