|

NewsRack

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

For a while I have been looking for an external feedreader for reading the items collecting and stagnating in google reader. Yesterday I came across Newsrack and what I like is that it syncs instantly with the online version. As a result I can read the feeds on the macbook air when I am at home and out and about or I can read the feeds in browser when I am at work.

Look at the sync tab in the settings and you can select to sync starred, shared and shared by friends articles according to All/week/month/3 months. As a result you control how many items come in. You can select how quickly read articles are deleted. On the laptop I have set this to immediately after reading. As long as I have the articles online I’m happy.

Sharing is to all the usual places, e-mail, twitter, instapaper, readitlater, delicious and of course google reader. In this case memorise the shortcut commands and you can do this without bothering with the mouse.

Scrolling through articles is easy. Left and right goes from the feed view to the article and vice versa. The down key lets you go through the articles, click the right arrow and you can read the article. This allows for a rapid feedreading process.

The weakness I have has to do with the way keywords are dealt with. I would like an option to hide them from the RSS feed view. I just want to see the actual feeds, not all the sub themes. I hope they give us the option of choice in future versions.

I have only used the application for a few hours but so far I am happy with it. It’s not free but it’s only a tiny bit more expensive than a coke in Geneva’s old town.

Similar Posts

I miss the old twitter.

Byrichard

Over a year ago I started using twitter and it had great promise. The public timeline was so slow that I would refresh it and there would be no new comment for minutes at a time. The service would auto refresh from the website and the community was small. The @ feature didn’t exist and no one I knew was using it.

Over a period of weeks and months more and more people started to use it and following was all web based without any api. Eventually people would begin using the @ symbol to direct comments to specific people and with the increase in traffic so the auto refresh broke, and was later removed.

Later still Api support was finally offered. We would get thousands of SMS a month and the term twitter bukake was coined. It was used to describe the act of suddenly getting twenty to a hundred SMS at a time as you emerged from the tube. After a while in Europe this was limited to 250 tweets a week.

Then it died. No more tweets would get to our phones and twitter would no longer have the appeal that it had at first.

It went from being one of the most interesting and innovative and interesting ways to communicate between people in various countries to something that everyone would imitate and equal.

That’s why I’m so disappointed that there are no SMS, that’s why I think that the twitter managment have really missed a great opportunity. I’m glossing over the months of failwhales and server crashes.

I miss the old twitter.

|

Socialising and Networking

Byrichard

After university, I estimated that I got to know of at least 600 people. I was on campus every day and I was out almost all the time. Whether it was in the edit suites, the library or the bar. I used to sit indoors with the bags as a non-smoker but within weeks I dressed for the English winter and started to stand outside, warmly dressed.


I went from being a solitary person looking after a table and belongings to short ten to fifteen-minute conversations with several dozen people a night. Such a process is a good way of getting to know people and to learn of projects that you want to work on.


That’s why you go to the edit suites, radio studios and other places. You have the opportunity to chat with people and to learn more about their projects and about technologies that you may not play with for your profession. That’s also when people asked me for help with editing. “How do I do this?”, “How do you do that?”, “Can we work together on that project”.


In post-university life it’s much harder to meet people and socialise like this. On the one hand, the pool of people is much larger. You’re dealing with thousands of people, rather than hundreds. You also need to find places where there are groups to connect with.


For a while, social media filled this role. So does work where you’re in the real world rather than the virtual. I see office life as virtual because when you’re working in an office you’re not meeting people in person. You don’t have the same opportunities for friendships.


Recently I’ve been volunteering at Geneva-based events to meet new people and see interesting projects. It’s a series of events where we’re needed for three or four hours every few days. It’s great if you want free access to an event but I find that it lowers the chance to meet people.


The best events to volunteer for or participate in are those where people are present for the entire time of the event. You meet them at the stands, you meet them at the drinks and other events, and you meet them in the evening. It’s a way of becoming a close group, even if just for a week. It did result in follow up projects.


Growing your network: Finding rockstars from Building Professional Relationships by Skyler Logsdon


I would love to work where I’m in the real world, meeting people and collaborating with a number of teams in person rather than by e-mail or over the phone. In a recent contract, an entire unit came to my end of contract drinks. That doesn’t happen every time.

Jaiku is moving to the Google App engine

Byrichard

Jaiku is about as old as twitter but rather than expand and get two million users it was bought by google some months ago. This weekend the service has been unavailable and the reason for this is that they’re moving from the old finnish server to the google App engine.

Pat pointed me to this blog post. Now all is clear. The question is how soon will it be until Jaiku is opened up for the masses to start using it? Will it be when Android comes out? Time will show us.

Out of my comfort zone – A day of trying new things.
| | | | |

Out of my comfort zone – A day of trying new things.

Byrichard

I was out of my comfort zone for a day last week and enjoyed it. This involved trying improv theatre for the first time. Vinyasa Tango Yoga and Bollywood dancing. I tried all of these things within the framework of the Refugee Cultural Festival that took place between last week and this week. I was assigned to the room where these activities took place and took the opportunity to try everything.

Improv Theatre

As an introvert I am usually happy to observe rather than participate in such activities. In most circumstances I would be there with a camera filming the event. I chose not to hide behind the camera this time. We were outdoors and we played a few games. Improv theatre isn’t just about acting. It’s about grown ups being playful and creative as a group. This is comfortable. This is fun. It’s fun enough for me to have changed my Sunday plans from hiking to trying this once again. I’m going to be out of my comfort zone but change is good.

Vinyasa Tango Yoga

I have seen and read about yoga in a multitude of places and I have had a desire to try it for a while now. I almost tried it two years ago but chickened out. This time not only did I try Yoga but I enjoyed it. Aside from the instructor I was the only guy in the group. As I am not as flexible or experienced as the others there are certain moves where I suffered and others that I really enjoyed. I train for endurance so I had to fight that instinct during this session.

Aside from never trying Yoga before I found doing yoga moves with a partner interesting. I had never thought about how you can synchronise breathing through feeling a person through your back. You feel the inflation and deflation. It’s interesting. It’s also interesting to balance using each others’ bodies.

The point of these exercises with partners is to get used to feel of their body and to grow a deeper physical connection so that it may be used in dancing. I felt really good after the experience.

Bollywood Dancing and Free Hugs

I never considered trying Bollywood dancing. If it had not been for the fact that I was in that room when the event was taking place and had I not been in such an open frame of mind after the improv and yoga I would probably have been like the photographers. “Put down your cameras and join us” is a sentence that is so frequently said to me. “Stop living your life through a lens”. This time I participated.

I mention the free hugs because a few of us, volunteers, headed down to the lake for a continuation of the event and some of them had participated in the free hugs event. They wanted to continue giving free hugs at the lake side so I joined in. It’s amusing to see people say “thank you” after being given a hug. What’s even more amusing is that we had joked about “Free hugs for a sausage” and how it could be taken the wrong way. Ironically within minutes of that conversation two of us were giving free hugs to people with barbecues going and they offered us wine, beer, sausages and more. We laughed as the recipients were offering them. “We have too many, have some”.

I enjoyed Improv theatre and Yoga enough to want to try them again. In fact I am planning to try improv theatre again this weekend. As it’s about playing, rather than acting, it entertains me. It is good to break the routine and do new things and to meet new people.

 

| | | |

The Demise of Google reader

Byrichard

Google Reader was a great tool because it made gathering and sharing content from specific sources intuitive and easy. It provided us with one place from which to do most things. Today Google have announced that they are pulling the plug on Google reader.

In my eyes Google reader had become obsolete four years ago. That’s when I moved to services like Feedly, zite and others. Each of these services was more interesting because it took our feeds but used algorithms to make relevant content discovery faster and more intuitive.

Feedly was fun for a while but eventually I stopped using it in favour of zite. Zite was excellent until they decided to downgrade the user experience to a pinterest like interface. I don’t want the kindergarten treatment when searching for information. I want headers, I want a line or two of content and I want to have a lot of information displayed in a small space. Zite fell out of the useful apps category and was deleted from the ipad and iphone as a result.

The next project I’m looking at is Scoopinion. They have a plugin which tracks which news sources you visit and which articles you read. Based on your browising habits it recommends future articles. So far it estimates that I have spent 22hrs reading news over the past month or two with over 980 articles. By this logic it should be good at recommending stories that I would enjoy but it is too tabloid at the moment. This is probably due to the relatively small user base as this is a new project by developers in Finland.

I love content aggregators that study my habits and give recommendations based on this. It makes the surfing experience more enjoyable. You also don’t suffer from RSS burn out.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.