The Quest For The Perfect Feedreader Continues

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Maitri

Ever since Google killed existing features in Google Reader and began catering it to their new (mediocre) Google+ Social Media Extravaganza experience, I’ve been on the hunt for ONE quick and easy way by which to deliver media from around the web to a single archival list which I can then share here and elsewhere. The pattern that emerges from my investigation is one of inconsistency between platforms sprayed with a philosophy of We’re A Startup Waiting To Be Bought as opposed to Let’s Help You Share Information. Some of the avenues I tested and results in a convenient spreadsheet format:

The bottom line is that old Google Reader would update items in your carefully-compiled list of feeds, allow you to share your picks to Google Shared Items whether on a desktop, iPhone or iPad all through the same Google account and then give you the ability to publish that list to a page or the sidebar of your blog. SIGH. After this bit of research, the interim workaround I propose is to share these items in delicious and, if you use WordPress like me, can activate a seriously ugly delicious widget via a plugin called WP Delicious Sidebar, which then displays your items of choice in the sidebar. Doing this also serves to archive your links (with tags, if you so desire) in one place.

As I mention in the spreadsheet, Zite has potential but it is available only for iPad and doesn’t show every single item in a feed. As I mentioned to Patrix (who helpfully suggested that I sign up for HiveMined), I don’t want guesses at what I might want to read. I want to see every single item in every single feed to which I signed up, and the suggestions are lagniappe!

If you have any bright ideas or know of apps I’ve overlooked here, please let me know in the comments. Just remember that solutions have to work on desktop, iPhone and iPad and should not require having to turn around three times, pat your tummy and rub your head for five minutes, sing a song and tapdance before getting a piece of information from my screen to yours.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way, Google (Reader)

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Maitri

Yesterday, Google released the overhaul of its feedreader, Reader, which features increased integration with Google’s relatively new answer to Facebook, Google+. If you like auto-spamming your Facebook or Google+ timeline with links to articles minus context or, in general, do not think of the internet as a space in which to share information in a thoughtful and meaningful way, stop reading now. If you are tired of another company’s sorry attempt at imitating Facebook in the absence of a proper platform and especially don’t want it interfering with great features that work for you and your community of friends, colleagues and readers, keep going. Even better, if you work at Google or know someone who does*, there are a few suggestions below that I would like implemented to make the internet a happy and safe place for information sharing once again.

I use Reader to:

- quickly access and read the latest blog posts and online magazine articles from feeds that I have bookmarked in the reader,

- organize these feeds into the folders of Geology, Geophysics, New Orleans, Science, Science Blogs, Technology and Visualization; share links to individual folders (bundles) with interested parties;

- share specific blog posts or articles either on Shared Items or by publishing them to this blog inside the Recommended Reading sidebar widget (simple list of hyperlinked titles of shared items) ALL IN ONE CLICK and

- share and DISCUSS items inside Reader with a specific group of WILLING followers who can passively join my Followers list and I theirs.

Now:

- access is really slow with increased load times; furthermore, the feed refreshes and displays the latest set of posts while you’re still reading previous ones,

- folders are still there and users can still create and share bundles,

- you +1 (instead of share) a post which then goes to a +1 page on your Google+ profile (complete with a Buzz tab that we are warned will be going away in a few weeks). Note that you not only have to create a non-pseudonymous Google+ profile in order to share Reader items, but also have to point your friends, colleagues and readers to the location of the +1 page, and

- once you’ve publicly +1ed the Reader item of interest, you have the option (which works on a PC desktop, works for crap on a PC laptop and not at all on an iPad) to create a post on Google+ to let your Circles know that you, Google+ user, have shared yet another article which is going to take up more of their screen real estate than is really warranted.

This, i.e. what used to be feedreader + Twitter + del.icio.us + publishable outside of Google space + all self-contained in terms of size and community,

has become this for archival:

along with this for sharing and discussion:

Instead of going from my blog to the article, the pathway has now become my blog –> my Google+ +1 list –> the article or my blog –> my Google+ stream –> the article. Archival? That’s right out the window.

Because all we need are more gates and gatekeepers between us and the information.

The Official Google Reader Blog explains these changes: “Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall. So starting today we’ll be turning off friending, following, shared items and comments in favor of similar Google+ functionality.”

I don’t understand why Google has to cancel one set of features in favor of another, unless it is to force users into Google+. Some argue that the social integration with G+ is something that they look forward to, which is great, but why not host a +1 button for G+ users as well as a Share button for those who do not want to utilize Google products socially?

Which brings us to the fundamental difference between the two: signal to noise. As I said on a G+ post this morning to which not a soul responded (probably because it drowned in the sea of re-re-re-re-re-shares of Rick Perry’s “drunk” speech – QED):

Along with the tremendous amount of white space, the signal-to-noise ratio of content is already very low at Google+ which is why I also don’t hang out at Facebook much other than to comment on other folks’ posts (when I find them in the noise there) or to make short throwaway posts myself. Now, folks sharing their Reader items here without context makes it even more noisy and unreadable.

Congratulations, Google, you have succeeded in sacrificing internet meaning – content in context – for more internet clutter in a silly attempt to reproduce Facebook, and in the process really pissed off a bunch of scientists, bloggers and internet users who, until yesterday, happily utilized Reader as a staple of simple, one-click, high signal-to-noise sharing and discussion. You just can’t have this in Plus.

Garrett Guillotte sums up for me:

Even if every Reader feature made it to Plus — and shit no they haven’t, and it doesn’t look like they will — the entire concept, culture and process is completely different. You can’t remotely replicate the closed, tight, context- and content-first communities of Reader in Plus. You can’t efficiently or effectively share, excerpt, annotate or discuss a 3,500-word longform news article on Plus alone without opening at least two other tabs.

Some suggestions for Google:

1) Please help us publish our +1s outside of Google+ via a “shared feed.” All you have to do is build a “Share This On Your Blog” embed utility into the +1 page.

2) Please replace the “Note In Reader” bookmarklet with a +1 bookmarklet. What if I want to +1 an article published on a website that doesn’t use +1 buttons? And, no, they’re all not going to add the +1 button to their websites/pages, just like they didn’t “Facebook This” or “Tweet This.” Give it up.

3) Can we go back to refreshing feeds as we did two days ago? I would really appreciate the page not cutting to all white and then repopulating itself with new material, all while I am in the middle of reading something.

4) Please don’t let this become your version of what Yahoo! did to GeoCities.

Functionality over mediocrity. Tremendous usefulness over killing useful features. These should be internet mantras. Ultimately, there is just no need for another Facebook, which is itself far from perfect (and, in fact, on the quest to completely confuse the hell out of its users). But, a utility that can be Facebook, feedreader, Twitter and Pinboard/delicious to many and in the doses that they want? Now THERE is a gamechanger.

Who do you want to be, Google? Figure that out first.

==
* The guy who engineered the Google+ Circles model and I went to the same high school years apart. And what am I going to say? “Hey, fix this or I’ll stuff you in your locker.” We were a bunch of nerds who would have all been stuffed in lockers in a normal high school and we didn’t even lock our lockers.

***

Related:

Brian Shih | Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? “The closest analogue might be if Twitter made it so that 3rd party clients could use the Retweet functionality to push Retweets to a user’s stream — but only allowed you to consume Retweets on twitter.com.”

Official VatulBlog Response To WeinerGate

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Maitri

This is what I tweet to my friends.

Because my opinion matters somehow. Well, it did to the LA Times blog, where I am quoted only three tweets down from Steve Martin Yes That Steve Martin.

Here it is: Get over it, you frustrated, misprioritizing tensionball of a nation just waiting to burst. I really don’t care if former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford “hiked the Appalachian trail” or if Anthony Weiner eWeinered. They are representatives of the people, not gods. Judge their politics. What is wrong with this world? The French think Dominique Strauss-Douche is some sort of entitled hero because he forced himself on a woman (and one so much weaker than him on the socioeconomic scale), while we Americans clutch our aprons at the slightest whiff of consensual sexual activity.

Have at John Edwards. He broke laws. Newt Gingrich – complete misogynistic asshole, but he hasn’t done anything illegal, although his actions do make me question his opinion of women. Arnold Schwarzenegger? That’s something to be sorted out among Maria Shriver, baby mama, baby and him. Public Official does not mean your personal life ought to be splayed out there for everyone in the United States of Stepford to have a conniption over. If they are representatives of us, then let’s treat them like we would our own fallible selves and let them sort their lives out in private.

I completely disagree with the notion that a person who cheats on and lies to his or her spouse would do the same to the public. These are separate realms. But, come at it from this angle: They’re politicians; they lie all the time and about more important stuff. Where’s this outrage when they prevaricate on The War On Terror, Wall St. bailouts and public healthcare? Policy lies kill and steal from many, while a politician who runs around on his or her spouse or tweets his schlong maybe burns our retinae and thus steals five minutes or so from our lives.

Just hope and pray that that place from which you source your morality doesn’t come to bite you in the behind if, heaven forbid, you should ever flub up. And don’t you dare think you’re a better human being because you’re faithful to your spouse but gleefully bless sending young people to die in foreign lands daily, in the name of our so-called freedoms.

But, most importantly, I am never using the Direct Message feature on Twitter again.

Give Me Ideas For A New Professional Women Geoscientists’ Network

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Maitri

I belong to a professional geophysical society whose executive committee has proposed the formation of a women’s network. Similar networks are American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ PROWESS committee and Society of Professional Engineers’ Women’s Network.

Why bother? Who’s going to fulfill your energy requirements, for starters? Consider it a staffing problem.

A large hurdle for geoscience is the growing inability to attract and retain excellent scientists, in general, but women, in particular. If the requirements and perception of women scientists are not acknowledge and acted upon soon, we stand to lose valuable professionals to other more attractive but perhaps not as fulfilling professions. The continuing double standards for women with family and the identifiers used to describe women scientists need addressing, especially in the male-dominated field of geophysics. Women can use mathematics and physics to address the world’s energy needs just as well as men can (some even more so) but refer to us as “sympathetic and nurturing team players” as if that’s a bad thing or “on the mommy track” and see how far that gets us. More critically, how does it grow the profession?

You don’t believe that this happens today? Forget the men (and women) who think women who wish to raise families while working have no place in the workplace and check this: Just a couple of days ago, I had to dispatch a guy who joked that the name of our proposed professional society should include a “snarky reference to Mother Earth, periods and emotionalism” and continued with “Gaian Cretaceous chocolate-bingers.” Why are menstruation, our feelings and pink sparkles the first things to come to professional male minds about professional women, when the known reality is that we, too, are … hold on … professionals who do not operate on these terms when at work?

This is the overt bullshit we’re up against, along with the stealthy and unspoken kind.

Many young female geoscientists have already benefited from the sense of community created by women in the sciences, both through professional and online networks. As they move beyond school and into the workforce, they hope to keep those ties strong. Furthermore, women currently in the geophysical workforce can continue to provide support and growth opportunities to one another.

So, this is my query. In the year 2010, armed with the learnings of various women’s societies to date, research into women’s issues and online tools such as Twitter, Facebook [insert obligatory "Yuk!"] and forums, what would the must-haves of your science-focused women’s professional network be?

Here are some suggestions that have come in so far:

Include networking strategies explicitly to identify and support mentoring connections.
Partner with an established network.
Encourage the mingling of academics and industry professionals.
(This one’s mine.) Encourage social media less for recruiting and more for actual conversation like in the geo~~blog~~twitosphere. It’s so much more organic and honest, i.e. what we really need, when it isn’t formal and enforced.

What else? I’m all ears. Oh, and don’t say the network needs women. It’s been done to death and many of the folks proposing the group are actually men. There are male feminists, remember?

This Week In The Fight For Digital Culture

Posted on February 26, 2010 by Maitri

Much in the way of interesting and infuriating has gone on this week in the areas of intellectual property, privacy, digital rights, open source and Googlization. A lot of it comes down to the rights of citizens and businesses in a networked society both parties helped create, the crucial need to protect the public domain, where innovation lies and the golden rule: he who has the gold (in this case, money and political power) makes the rules.

IP ALLIANCE TO OPEN SOURCE: YOU’RE PYRATES. ME: YARRRR! Like anti-healthcare legislators who take money from insurance companies, the US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance and its friends in congress should not have any say in determining the future of copyright and intellectual property, and how other countries set their own IP laws. Instead, the IP Alliance wants the United States to consider a Pirate or Enemy Of The State any nation that uses and encourages free/open-source software. Indonesia is the latest nation on the Alliance’s 301 watchlist for having the audacity to give “preference to free/open-source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government.”

That’s Apache, Blender, GNU packages, Linux packages, Perl, Python, Ruby, Thunderbird and WordPress, for starters. While I fully agree with Cory Doctorow that “this is like crack dealers campaigning against having a laugh with friends because happiness reduces the need for intoxicants,” what angers me about it is the sheer hypocrisy of the IP Alliance and the businesses it represents. Any technologist or R&D person will tell you that an astonishing number of these same companies use free/open-source software to maximize their technology budgets, innovate using these free tools and then slap patents and all kinds of proprietary-IP stickers on their final products. You think I’m kidding? The Recording Industry Association of America website runs on Apache and PHP. *facepalm*

No, kids, Walt Disney did not invent Cinderella and Snow White. Just like Disney built its fortune by copyrighting works in the public domain, the IP Alliance fosters this unethical business model: Build on or monetize free or cheap ideas and technologies that have come before, and then shut off these alternatives by buying yourself several congresspeople. (And people wonder why the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision was so dastardly and wrong.) When the technology world clamors for automation, standardization and interoperability, i.e. different systems of different capabilities playing together more efficiently, is not the time to make useless noise against open standards and technologies. During a recession when innovation is key, charging $1000/lb for a sack of shit top dollar for clunky, mediocre products and enforcing these as preferred solutions with political bribery, in lieu of free, shared and open source technologies, is stupid and tantamount to the communism Real Americans so fervently dread.

SPYCAMGATE Schools spy on kids through webcams. This shocker made it into the mainstream news, so I’m sure all of you know about the class action lawsuit filed against Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District and associated offenders by now. What you probably don’t know is that this is not an isolated incident. In the PBS Frontline Digital Nation documentary, which aired earlier this month, a Bronx school administrator boasts that he regularly monitors students remotely through their school-issued laptops. Parents: This is an egregious violation of privacy, especially using property purchased with your taxes. Take this opportunity to check your kids’ equipment, know your rights and read Cory Doctorow’s Creative-Commons-published Little Brother before he is thrown in the brig with the Indonesians.

PLEASE ROB ME & SCRUB MY KITCHEN FLOOR WHILE YOU’RE AT IT Despite being an IT professional or perhaps exactly because of it, my husband has no social media accounts. He can be contacted solely via email, phone or the occasional private IM. D’s rationale is that there is enough information about him out there, should someone choose to search hard enough or pay enough, that he doesn’t need to feed the beast. Conversely, Twitter Queen (someone at work actually called me this today) here is still not afraid that someone is going to rob my house when I’m gone and tweet from the road because they have to a) know where I live and b) say hello to aforementioned big, burly husband if he happens to be home. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. You’ll just have to find out. Big, burly Neighbors 1 and 2 and crazy hunter dude with shotgun may be around, too, so take your chances.

Patrix comes closest to pointing this out, but if you are smart about what social media outlets you pick, employ the highest privacy settings and don’t declare your street address or UTM coordinates, you can tell the whole world you’re leaving your jewelry and electronics on the back porch and are going away for a month and folks will not be able to use social media to locate your home. Unless they bribe your crappy friends, in which case you’re screwed anyway and it’s not Twitter’s or FourSquare’s fault.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR GOOGLE Google’s Top Executives Defied Italy’s Privacy Laws Except this time, I’m on Google’s side. They did not act quickly enough to pull down a YouTube video that showed kids bullying an autistic/handicapped boy, which violates Italy’s privacy laws, but this may be the only chance for justice for the assaulted child. Should the kid’s guardians sue, the video may be thrown out as evidence for being fruit of the poisoned tree (assuming Italy does assault lawsuits & has similar legal code). This is a tough one: Do we allow Google to flout international laws in humanitarian ca(u)ses, but complain loudly that we don’t want a large corporation in our business when it comes to our email and Buzz? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

BOOK Tarleton Gillespie, law-technology-media-culture professor and blogger, was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on February 23rd to speak about the politics of online media platforms. I wasn’t able to attend but am waiting on responses from friends who did attend. Gillespie’s book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture nicely sums up the fight for digital culture and the links in this post. From the Wired Shut website:

… the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology …

… this approach to digital copyright depends on new kinds of alliances among content and technology industries, legislators, regulators, and the courts, and is changing the relationship between law and technology in the process. The [print,] film and music industries are deploying copyright in order to funnel digital culture into increasingly commercial patterns that threaten to undermine the democratic potential of a network society.

That’s it for This Week In The Fight For Digital Culture. Keep thinking. Keep fighting.

“A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”

Posted on May 5, 2009 by Maitri

While reading about Metcalfe’s Law, I stumbled across this vintage Clay Shirky talk on group dynamics of social media. With the exception of the Project Gutenberg discussion list (where I’m a lurker and which is its own brand of strange), what he said in 2003 still holds true for every single community forum, listserv and user group to which I have ever belonged.

You’re sitting at a party, you decide “I don’t like this; I don’t want to be here.” And then you don’t leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about. And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.

This effect is so steady it’s sometimes called the paradox of groups. It’s obvious that there are no groups without members. But what’s less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?

… So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.

The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that’s beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying “You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn’t need that much description about the forest, because it’s pretty much the same forest all the way.”

So, why not just give up and walk away from blogging and flogging and twittering and figgering?

… the first answer to Why Now? is simply “Because it’s time.” I can’t tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn’t know what we were doing.

Not much has changed, but it has. The article was written six years ago, thought, which is still millenia on the internet, and Mr. Toulouse The Wet brought up an excellent point yesterday: “SM software has perhaps existed for 40 yrs but how long in real use?” As Shirky answered, “[We're] just finding out what works. We’re still learning how to make these kinds of things.” One of the nice things about Twitter is its decentralization, i.e. unless your tweets are protected, everyone in Twitterverse can read your thoughts and respond, which allows fresh air into the room ever so often, so to speak. Then, is following only certain people, forming twibes and other groups in Twitter then counter-productive to true social media?