Social Media

The American blogosphere is corrupt. Google Plus is an excellent product. It provides it’s users with an elegant amount of control as to who sees which post and whom it can be shared with. It provides groups and communities. It allows you to create your own circles. In Essence Google Plus is an extraordinarily flexible space where community building should be encouraged. Why does the American Startuposphere and blogosphere hate Google so much? Samsung has benefited from Android. We as private individuals have gained a lot through Gmail and google’s search engine. Google reader was really popular for a very long time in web terms.

Django Django - WOR from Jim Demuth on Vimeo. A well told, well edited short documentary about the people who drive the wall of death.

On the 27th of September CERN invited twelve Social media users to a tweetup. I was among those twelve. We had the rare opportunity to go down and see the tunnels where the LHC carries out it’s experiements. We met with World Wide Web pioneers and we got to listen to interesting experimental and theoretical scientists. This weekend anyone in the area can go to CERN and speak with the scientists in person and see the tools being used for the experiments we have heard so much about over the years. [gallery ids=“1872,1873,1874,1875,1876,1877,1878,1879,1880,1881,1882,1883,1884,1885,1886,1887,1888,1889,1890,1892,1893,1894,1895,1896,1897,1898,1899,1900,1901,1902,1891”]

Bitcoin Explained from Duncan Elms on Vimeo.

Vimeo On Demand: Sell your work, your way from Vimeo Staff on Vimeo.

Equipment is going down in price and information on how to produce good quality content is spreading. As a result of both these trends people like Vimeo and youtube can take advantage of the shift. Applying to work for mainstream media is no longer a must. What you do need to find are the right people with the right motivation to work alongside you. Once that is done the next steps are simpler.

TAKE MY PICTURE from GARAGE Magazine on Vimeo.

This short feature would benefit from interviews with the photographers rather than commentators commenting. How do the photographers think about their craft. How do those who are photographed view what is taking place. Why do they do it.

Francine - Mar 0, 2013

Just had to let you know I probably wouldn’t have seen this post had it not been in my Google Reder. Though I don’t use it as much anymore to keep up with news sites, but it’s still the place I go to keep track of friends’ and acquaintances’ blogs and do targeted research. I, too, used Zite for a while, but haven’t in a while. Now I use Flipboard to bring together lots of different information sources and discover new content, and while it’s one of my favorite iPhone/iPad apps, there still isn’t something comparable I’ve found to use on my laptop. And, I still use Flipboard to read my Google Reader feeds on mobile.

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.

Connecting (Full Film) from Bassett & Partners on Vimeo.

A look at interactive design and the future of tech

Feedly is an application that takes google reader’s feeds and displays them in a more appealing manner. The browsing experience is more enjoyable as a result. The first item is displays on a splash page as ou see on the left. Flick to the right and you get a list of articles. This list fits articles to fill the screen. You must flick to the right to get to the next article. Click on the article and the text goes full screen. You can  then bookmark articles, like them or share. Sharing is the standard tweet, mail, copy url, open in browser and mobilize. Feedly navigation is done via the bottom left corner of the screen as you see in the image to the right. Click on this and you get a list of feeds you have subscribed to. This is the google reader list. Reading of feeds can be either by individual rss feed or by category. The number of unread posts is visible to the right. Active feeds can be read individually.   One of the most interesting features of feedly is it’s ability to auto-generate smart lists of interesting blog posts according to popularity/buzz, whether they were saved for later, essentials, latest and more. Buzz allows you to see which of the posts are most interesting according to popularity within the RSS feeds you and your contacts are subscribed to. There is no ability to comment on articles at this moment in time and integration into google buzz is not possible yet. As a result you can quickly skim through articles but should you want to offer an opinion you will have to resort to another app. Everything that Feedly offered to it’s users on computers and laptops is now available to it’s users via the mobile application. As a result your user experience will be the same across both platforms. With the iPhone version of this product you can read all articles while on the move, on trains in cars, or when waiting for a queue to move forward.