A Personal Blog
Archive for March, 2004
UC Blogging Survey
Mar 15th
Contribute to the knowledge of bloggers. Take the Blogging Survey. I did. That should be motivation enough ;-)
Bloglines It Is!
Mar 15th
A couple of weeks ago, I began demo’ing Bloglines. Previously I’d been a religious SharpReader. The biggest issue with SharpReader was that I couldn’t synchronize my home and work reading lists.
Enter, Bloglines. When I first started using it I wasn’t incredibly impressed. I felt it missed some features I was used to seeing, and generally changed my workflow in a way that I didn’t appreciate. But, after 3 weeks of using it, I can happily say that I’m, well, happy.
Here are a few of the key things I like:
1. Easy to subscribe to new feeds 2. Easy to find new feeds (the Recommended, as well as New and Top feed listings have unearthed probably 25% of the 300 feeds that I currently read) 3. Ability to use your Bloglines reading list as a blogroll. For me this was really key as I was sick of maintaining two of them 4. There IS the ability to see all blogs you’re reading, and the new posts in a cumulative fashion (click on the folder icon) 5. It’s web-based. No software, no sync’ing
Basically I’ve ended up splitting my feeds into 2 main folders. The reads I know are of high quality and that I look forward to reading go in one, and the rest go in another. This means that I now spend LESS time keeping an eye on my feeds than I used to, because I only read the larger “less preferred” list once a day.
This also means that I can now watch far more feeds far more effectively. I’m only watching about 50 feeds actively, and the other 250 or so I only check when I want to.
I figure that doing things this way I can easily watch upwards of 500 feeds.
At that point, I expect I’ll need to create a third folder: super posters. Sites that have a very high volume of new posts. Newspapers, Wired, Robert Scoble, that kind of thing. Because they produce such a high volume, I want to be “prepared” to read those.
I figure I can go up to about 750 feeds doing things that way.
Once I reach that point we’ll see how it goes.
Either way, I’m very, very happy with my Bloglines experience. I’m more productive, more informed and I’ve met some great people as a result of the extra 200-300 feeds I now read.
So thanks Bloglines!
Wiki's More Accurate Than Print Media?
Mar 15th
Many people won’t be all that familiar with the concept of Wiki’s, however I will let Jeff Doolittle do the job of explaining what they are and how they have become an incredible source of up-to-the-minute and accurate information. Perhaps accurate enough to topple the Encyclopedia industry, or at least contribute to it.
In his post last week about Wiki’s, Jeff asks a great question:
How do you know you can trust what you read from a particular website? What incentive does the publisher have to provide you with accurate information?
According to Jeff, the Internet has the incentive to be a more accurate form of media than traditional media outlets. One of the most trusted on-line sources is quickly becoming the WikiPedia, an on-line encyclopedia edited by thousands of volunteers:
Like all information transfer, we want to know we can trust the source. Trust begins when agreements are made and kept. Trust grows as knowledge of the keeping of agreements spreads in the public consciousness. A good example of this process is the Wikipedia. Wikipedia defines itself as “a free content encyclopedia which includes almanac-like and gazetteer-like information. Free means free to use, free to edit, and free to copy and redistribute.”
Read more about Jeff’s take on accuracy, trust and the future of Wiki’s in general at his blog.
Good Blog Business World Review
Mar 15th
If you haven’t already, Blog Business World is well worth checking out. It’s one of my daily reads, and has been for quite some time. Wayne is one of those “I’ll publish when I have really good stuff to contribute, and it’ll always be worth reading” types of bloggers.
A recent review in Small Business Trends supports this.
Well done Wayne!
Stopping Interview Jitters
Mar 15th
Another great post from Canadian Headhunter: Interview Jitters – Beta Blockers & Performance Anxiety.
People can, theoretically, be trained to relax during interviews. But interviewing is not something most people do on a regular basis so most will never have enough motivation, let alone the opportunity to undergo such training.
Therefore, I would like to put some focus on the idea of using some form of medication to help people through this significant process which might have very little to do with their ability to perform the actual jobs they are interviewing for.
I can just tell this is going to be one of those blogs where I have to read every single post… I hate such high quality blogs ;-)
