Starting Afresh

One of the challenges with a fresh machine is that you want to reconfigure everything again. I'm still using Firefox as my primary browser, and I'm looking for the various addins that I like. In particular, this google reader subscribe Greasemonkey script is one of my favorites.

Feed Reading Spoilers

I love Google Reader, but one problem is that some websites post spoilers in invisiotext -- so they're visible when highlighted on their home website.

Of course, if your feed reader strips out the formatting, those spoilers show up plain and clear. I haven't seen anything that I wasn't already aware of yet, but still....

My general spoiler policy is to have the spoiler as the first comment in any post -- that won't get picked up by any feed, but will be easy enough to pick up. I don't tend to post a lot of spoilers, but sometimes it happens....

Google Reader Trends

I was interested in seeing that Google has added some trends to google reader.

The most interesting piece for me was to see what feeds I added to my shared list the most.

The top ten over the last 30 days are:

1. Lifehacker
2. Robert Scoble's Shared List
3. Outpost Gallifrey
4. Boing Boing
5. Sci Fi Wire
6. Digital Spy
7. Nate's Shared List
8. Tech Crunch
9. BBC Entertainment News
10. Digg

What I found was the most interesting is that two of the items on my list are other people's shared lists. And they're the only two shared lists that I have on my subscriptions.

And as a reward to Lifehacker, I just received their book summarizing some of their best tips and tricks.

What I would add to Google Reader

I was thinking about Google Reader a bit after reading about how google reader could turn into the next digg.

I live on Google Reader. I think the sharing can be pretty powerful, and has enormous potential. But there are a few things that'd make sense -- especially if you combine it with tagging. It'd be nice to be able to have it so you could subscribe to a subset of links based on a tag. Most of us have diverse interests and we don't always overlap 100%. You might be interested in the technological items that I share but not the Doctor Who items, for example. It is relatively straight forward to build your own search engine so you can search your regular news sources.

I like the idea that the sharing can turn us all into filters. There's so much more information than any of us can handle -- and the challenge is how can we gather, summarize, and process all of this data all the time.

The Coolness of Google Reader

I am enjoying Google Reader more all of the time. One of my favorite features is that it lets you create a shared list of items -- that anyone could also subscribe to. I've got my shared list -- and I'm always interested in seeing other shared lists, so let me know if you have one.

Of course, what my long-term wish-list for this feature would be that it would automatically capture my folders -- and then you could theoretically subscribe to someone's shared links *from a particular tag* -- for example, you might be interested in the items that are computer related, but not my entertainment related.

But still, it's very neat -- and it makes keeping an eye on lots of places throughout the web much, much easier...

Blogger Beta Feeds

As I mentioned earlier, I switched over to the blogger beta a week or so ago. I was primarily interested in getting the labels (or as I've usually seen them refered to, tags) going. I thought it'd be useful to split off, for example, the Doctor Who posts I made before I started the Torchwood Institute.

But I've had a few frustrations with the feeds that are generated through the system -- it looks like it's breaking the feed into live journal and technorati. And while it hasn't broken them from going into Google Reader, it pushes items as they are edited and labeled to the top of the feed. Which isn't really what I would have ideally wanted.