One more stray

Sorry…I just had to pile on to my last post and, yes, this one is related.

I mentioned FeedReader and a few questions arose about why not iGoogle and what about this one and that one. While I would love to quell things by saying it was just a convenient name of one tool, but I can’t. iGoogle? Yeah, I’ve tried and it is okay. As if often the case, I judge many products and services by how far I can get under the hood and what I find when I get there. iGoogle has a plethora of garbage widgets and, for those that work, the lack of customization beyond the little boundaries of that widget are simply weak. How about some particulars? Blogs and RSS feeds – let’s start there. Pick an RSS reader – you have “thin” ones, “tabbed” one, “striped” ones, blah, blah, blah. That’s nice…nicely boring and generally useless. How many feeds can you have? Well, if you use one of those tabbed widgets that actually works (that would be about 1 of 3), you are limited to 5-7 feeds. Oh, stack the same widget up multiple times and, yes, the sky is the limit, but that’s hardly an elegant solution. For anyone wondering what else there might be, how about Twitter. Oh sure, iGoogle has a widget – in a box, by itself, not itegrated with any of the other who-knows-how-many widget boxes you have lumped together in iGoogle. Sorry…no passing grade on that one, but thanks for playing.

Why is it that tools such as FeedReader will be the default choice for the true RSS-junkie power user vice the iGoogles of the world?
1. Pick your own feeds from the very start – no defaults, no assumptions, no one-size-fits-all mentality
2. Set your own preferred update frequency
3. Categorization and nesting of feed categories
4. Ability to “star” or “flag” any content for later use
5. Extensible XML-coded opensearch capabilities
6. Semantic custom searches
7. Text, pics, vids, etc…it’s all just content and it’s all welcome
8. Twitter plays here and BIG TIME. How about the ability to “follow” somebody without actually following them? FeedReader can. How about listening in on a specific topic (semantics required), but you don’t know all the people involved and thus can’t “follow” them all? FeedReader can. Yeah, chew on that bone for a few…talk about some interesting possibilities.
9. Automatically logs/stores the content – even if an original post is changed or deleted, you still have it.
10. Share your OMPL file.
11. Free with no signup, no email address to give away…just free.

Double digits already?! Ah, that’s enough for now. Anyway, if you haven’t seen fit to break out into the free and clear and run unencumbered across the vast XML landscape, you really should.

If you have never seen Feedreader, here is a screen capture of one of my installs.  Note the current content: a Twitter message being automatically fed from a breaking news RSS feed from Gazetteonline.com. 

Feedreader screen capture

 

Bringing in part of the electronic herd

Image via Wikipedia

Who today doesn’t find themselves swimming in an ocean of information dotted with established islands reached by only some of the waves of content? We all find ourselves being swamped by the waves of email, websites, RSS feeds, tweets, nugdes, pokes, invites, etc.. My own personal routine involves an overly customized fat-client RSS reader, Facebook, Twhirl, Yammer, Outlook, Blackbird and WordPress (freebie version)…each day, often all day long. If that environment doesn’t make me ADD, nothing will. I’m always on the lookout for ways to aggregate content/information/sources. I’ve enjoyed the convenience of some the Facebook integration. I’ve enjoyed more the ability to take my FeedReader client and ingest all my favorite RSS feeds (news, blogs, etc.) and also add in semantic search feeds from a host of sources to include a custom .osrc file for Twitter that allows me to filter through public Twitter to pull tweets from select people or tweets on defined search parameters. That is quickly becoming one of my vital cowhands in wrangling up the electronic herd.

Today, our team began the work for piping our online news RSS feeds through TwitterFeed to custom-created bots on Twitter. Don’t yell at me…I’m not creating spam engines. Twitter users already know they have to follow somebody to get any tweets, so a person would have to make the choice of following one of the Gazette Communications Twitter bots.

I have to end with a great, but not entirely unrelated quote from our High Priest of Webism, the Earl of Electrons, the Duke of WWW, Mr. Tom Altman, “I get really dumb when the Internet goes down.” Thanks, Tom.