Less Infocrack, More Life
May 10th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
In the beginning was the word, then the page, then the web page. Then came the separation of content and presentation using stylesheets. Then RSS feeds and now pipes and mashups and microformats and more.
I never had time for RSS feeds until now. I am using FeedDemon. I’ve tried it before but it didn’t take, also Bloglines and various others, including Netvibes. I ended up using Google Reader, though not very regularly. FeedDemon is much faster. Of course, it’s still dumb. How nice it would be to have social networking tags prioritze the presentation, using also a record of past reading preferences. It’s coming. It must be!
Meanwhile, I’ve signed up for Microsoft’s Tagspace community. Surely, in the end these annotating communities must agree some protocols for exchanging or permitting access to data based upon the reputations of members? Some at Microsoft Research may be working on it. I’ve found one Microsoft Researcher’s digital footprints everywhere: del.icio.us, Furl, Simpy, Magnolia …you name it. I wonder if Bobreb has a Google Alert set up to let him know he’s been mentioned?
I rolled my first Yahoo pipe yesterday and cut my teeth on Grazr. The thing to do, of course, is pipe the output of the pipe to Feedburner, for those who want to be badgered. With new markup formats the content can be anything digital. Thus, shall feeds be recycled, and annotations have annotations, upon their backs to bite ‘em… and so on ad infinitum.
I have to wait for a London NW1 news map but for SE1 it’s here already. Do I really want to geotag my photos like a friend in Rome? I’m bookmarking his recommended software anyway. Someday cameras will do this when the picture is taken. Wait, some already do.
Meanwhile, kicking the email habit and having a better work-life balance is becoming an ever more popular idea as more people reach their email limits. This is uncommon sense, and overdue. However, I would like to see the author on reality TV doing the job of one his Indian MBAs at $4 an hour and helping him reduce his working week afterwards. It would make for some interesting reflections on our Flat world (Friedman’s is a must read book).
Thanks for trying Grazr. I see that you have linked to our preview.grazr.com site, which isn’t used that often. We only post things there when we have a major release to test. A much better link would be http://grazr.com. This is our real home page. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.
Fixed. Thanks!
Of course one doesn’t want to geotag all photos, but for some it is fun. Others, like ones taken in connection with work, it really adds useful information.
As to filtering feeds, I’m nowhere near as advanced as you. I use Vienna at home and google reader at work, and one thing about GR is that it monitors what you are reading and how often feeds are active, allowing you to prioritize a bit. But it doesn’t sort on any of those things, which would be valuable.
BobReb may not be subscribing to all mentions of his name in the blogosphere but at least one member of his team has…me. :-)
With regards to your comment about “reputation”, we agree that it is an area of great potential and need, for Microsoft technical professionals (and others:). We agree so much that we decided to spin up a project to focus on just that. In concert with the next release of Tagspace (exciting stuff…e.g., Web-wide tagging) we plan to deploy a new service, called Claimspace, that is squarely focused upon what I like to call the 5 R’s of Social Computing: Recognition, Ratings, Rewards, cRedibility, and Reputation. For more information about what we’re planning to do with Claimspace, check out http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2007/04/19/tagspace-meet-claimspace.aspx
No, but I do have one massively efficient social network. Like it or not, you’re part of it.