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Thoughts and things I care to shareConsuming feeds – revising my methods
I’ve been on a crusade of sorts lately, looking for unique voices in the blogosphere, to find more interesting and relevant content. In the process, I’ve been finding better ways to absorb the information I find.  Many of these methods are a change from how I consumed information in the past and I cover five of them here today.
First, of course, I’ve gone through and gotten rid of all the “dead” or abandoned feeds that added unneeded bulk to my daily Google Reader adventures.
Second, I’ve identified my top 10 all stars, and started visiting their blogs directly to read what they’ve written. This has been a huge improvement for me in getting their point of view on a more personal level, one of the biggest things that I felt I was missing in a feed reader. By the way, that original list of 10 has expanded to 18 blogs that I visit every day (but hey, that’s another post). Yes, it takes much more time than a reader, but these people’s work is important to me and deserves more time than a quick scan in a feed reader.
Third, I’ve started to “speed read” in Google Reader. The difference has been a boon to my information consumption because I no longer try to build each sentence from it’s component words & letters. Instead, I have been scanning each paragraph, using a visual recognition technique that constructs the concepts the writer is presenting. This has allowed me to reduce the time it takes to read the feeds in my reader and continue to add more feeds as I come across new & interesting sites.
This has not been easy, as we’re programmed at an early age to read every word, and then practice this function for decades. Of course all those years of traditional reading builds up a visual library of words & phrases that are more quickly recognized than mechanically assembling each sentence a word at a time.
Fourth, I’ve used the tagging feature in Google Reader to separate out the news feeds from the rest of the blog feeds. These news feeds I literally scan for keywords and quickly move on it they aren’t new, informative, or otherwise don’t interest me. The remaining blog feeds, I’ve also tried to tag specific to different genres like blogging, mobile technology, social media and so on. This way, I can either read the “river of news” of all my feeds from top to bottom, or just focus on a specific genre if I’m limited on time and need to prioritize my reading.
Fifth, the last thing that has been helping me is to perform a “quick glance” at the post in the feed to see if it is visually appealing before starting to scan the text. This quick glance impression of the post along with looking for the “meat” of the post in the first sentence or two quickly indicates to me if it’s worth continuing to consuming it. While this has backfired in some instances, I usually find the post again by another blog pointing to it, and I give it more attention on the second pass because of this.
So these are my latest methods and techniques to consume content faster and give me back a few precious minutes each day to use for writing, working, or relaxing. I don’t know if any of this is of value to you, but it’s how I currently handle a growing number of feeds.
Oh, and one last thing – three of my latest “top bloggers” jumped from “oh, this is an interesting blog” to my top list in less than a week – and I have my original 10 bloggers to blame thank for linking to more quality bloggers! 😉
links for 2007-09-03
- Beware the Bacn from Quechup!
- Show off… 😉
- Tags in Twitter? There is a lot of talk about it and this is a great post to get up to speed on the topic.
- Four of the world’s top wire services make a pact with Google.
- Recap of items from last week and this weekend.
September 2007 Header Graphic
Ah, beginning of a new month. Time to change the header graphic on my blog. Earlier today I uploaded a new picture for the header, taken from a photo at my cousin’s wedding reception. It was a great time, perfect weather and a fun location – the Wabasha Street Caves in St. Paul, MN.
The caves have been used for many events and functions through the years, and have a pretty interesting history in their own right – including a tie to 1930’s era mobsters according to some accounts.
Anyway, one of the pictures I took had a great shot of the entryway and I thought it was interesting. So there it is.
8 Suggestions for blogs of the future
I started thinking a bit after Robert Scoble’s (yeah I know I reference Robert a lot) Kyte video post about his blog of the future. While I may disagree with a few of his concepts, the whole concept of what a future blog may look like got my mind racing in new directions.
The problem that I think we have in many blogs, is the lack of white space which I know is not a new discussion point for many bloggers. The difficulty comes in the tools that we use in combination with most peoples skill in design. Helping the blogger (beginner and experienced) with some additional pre-packaged design elements that fit the majority of styles that a person may choose from would go a long way to improving this situation.
- Configurable Text Boxes that can be placed in a post by the blogger. These boxes would act similar to placing a picture and allow the blogger to set it to the left/center/right and allow text to flow around it. It would have selectable edges (rounded/square), alpha blending borders and background, and allow for different fonts. Possibly accommodate different shapes for the box (circle, square, rectangle, octagon, triangle, etc…).
- Standardized Font “Module” System similar in concept to TrueType or PostScript in the desktop publishing industry, standardized fonts that could easily be added to the blog.
- Standardized XML framework to more easily create customized or customizable Widgets.
- Integrate common technologies like Lightbox into the rendering engine of the blog software so there is less need for users to have to manually enhance their blogs with these add on’s, plug ins, or by having to edit code.
- Use existing research on how people view/read blogs and apply those learning’s to the default layouts, templates and themes that come “in the box”.
- Standardize an Ad Engine API that would allow bloggers to plug in standardized Ad modules from the major ad engines out there. Accommodate, in-line text ads, context-sensitive ads, text-link ads, banner ads, skyscraper ads, etc… Make it easy for the blogger to more cleanly integrate the ads from any vendor. This would also make it easy for ad vendors to integrate with any blog software.
- A standardized tagging engine provided as open source. Get an open source library of standard tags that are either automatically attached to a post, recommended to the blogger, or that could be manually selected. We have too many people creating similar but different tags out there.
- Easily customizable HTML tag styles on a panel in the blog management interface that allows the blogger to more easily customize the “a href”, “img src”, and “abbr title” HTML styles (formatting). Make it easy for bloggers to pick the border, background, text, color, and so on. Allow them to set their selections to override the installed theme’s CSS for these tags.
Well those are my suggestions to help build the blog of the future. I personally believe that the basic layout of a blog is well defined and has little room for improvement. The basic idea of a top banner and a single column of content arranged in reverse chronological order (newest at the top, oldest at the bottom) is hard to beat.
It’s in the themes, bling or “farkles”, badges, advertising, and add-on’s that we all add to our blogs that tend to detract from the readability. Fancy graphics and animations may be “cool” but the pictures and code take time to download – even in our increasingly highly-connected broadband world. Glossy, intricate interfaces are wonderful for local high-powered devices like PCs and phones. However, any time you need to pull the bulk of the site’s rendering media and content across a connection, it’s better to keep it simple and effective (i.e. elegant).
There is more, a lot more, that we all need to start tossing on the pile of ideas for the blog of the future. I’m an IT geek that always thinks about the technical part, but that’s a small portion of what makes a blog a blog.
What are your needs for your blog going into the future? What needs aren’t being addressed today? What are your ideas to make a better blog?
Update: Well, I guess I’m not the only one thinking about fonts on the web. This article over at A List Apart, covers this idea in more on CSS3. I also didn’t realize that CSS has been around for a decade! 😛
links for 2007-09-01
- TOO COOL – MUST TRY.
- Brian Solis has a bit of background info on “lifestreams”, the latest meme to track through the blogosphere. I didn’t realize that the concept had been worked on many times before. It’s only today that it’s as easy to set up as falling off a log.
- Alrighty all my Windows geek friends out there – Paul Thurrott has posted about Windows Vista SP1 Beta complete with screenshots. Have fun!
- Are you a Twitter fan? No? Well then this post by Rex Hammock will really enforce that misunderstanding you have of the service. If you “get” Twitter (or Jaiku/Pownce) then you’ll probably get value from this post.
- Oh brother.
Blog Day 2007
Well, Blog Day 2007 is finally upon us. If you hadn’t heard about Blog Day previously, here’s a recap.
What is BlogDay?
BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.
With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.
So I’ve chosen to participate this year, and I’ve got five blogs that I had previously not followed before, so their new to me. I also tried to find blogs that are outside my normal genre of choice, but I was not able to do that for all of them. Here we go:
- Blogumentary by Chuck Olsen – Blogumentary is a video blog by Minneapolis video blogger Chuck Olsen. Like many blogs, the content varies by day and by the bloggers inputs for the day.
- Helmet Hair Blog by Jesper Bram – Blog about motorcycles and motorcycling. Jesper rides, reviews, gives opinions and suggestions on his favorite topic.
- Wine Library TV by Gary Vaynerchuk – A blog dedicated to changing the world of wine. With a very passionate and animated host (Gary Vaynerchuk) WLTV is a video blog that hopes to include you in the new wine world.
- Jason Langridge (Mr. Mobile) – Jason Langridge is a Microsoftie that works in their UK mobile division. I’ve found innumerable interesting tidbits on Windows Mobile and mobile communications in general.
- Fred File by Fred Thompson & Staff – Yes, this is a political blog for one possible republican candidate for the U.S. Presidency. I find it interesting to see how new media is being used by the current crop of candidates to reach out to voters in the upcoming 2008 election.
So that’s it. There’s my picks for Blog Day 2007, and I’d like your feedback on them.
My Lifestream
Ok, yes this topic was tossed around a few days ago, and I only found the discussion yesterday. A lifestream is simply a page that aggregates your online works, be they blog posts, videos, pictures, comments, Facebook statuses, etc…
The ability to have one place where all your online contributions to “the great conversation” are kept in chronological order. Basically like a “river of news” format pioneered by Dave Winer.
Since a number of people, including Twitter budz Josh Bancroft (who started the idea), Dan York and Steve Rubel, have created one – I thought I’d play the follower here and give it a try. Using Tumblr, much as the rest have, I created my lifestream blog in about 5 minutes. Drop dead easy. An additional 15 minutes and I had lifestream.rickmahn.com set up to take you there.
One of the streams I want to add is my coComment feed. coComment is a comment tracking service, and does a pretty good job of it. The only problem is that the feed includes comments by other people who’ve commented on the same post. There is probably a way to disable that, or filter the other comments out – but I didn’t find it in the 5 minutes I allotted myself.
At any rate, I think that the lifestream idea has real value for anyone who is interested in what your perspectives are, or following you online. Below I’ve included some other bloggers that have commented on the idea or have created their own lifestream.
So I’m curious, what do you think of the lifestream idea?
Kent Newsome’s Swivel Feeds – Group 9
I must say, I’m very honored to be invited to participate in Kent Newsome’s swivel feed experiment! This swivel feed experiment was designed by Kent to find new and interesting blogs to read. Yesterday, Kent invited an additional 12 bloggers to participate by recommending 5 bloggers for him to add to his feed list.
So without further ado, here are my five suggestions:
I just hope that my blogging pal Kent finds value in these new feeds. Also, if you are looking for some new bloggers to follow – please do check out his swivel feeds list as there are a huge number of blogs that you may not have found before. He also plans on publishing a final OPML
Thanks Kent!
Logo courtesy of Team Swivel 
on Flickr
links for 2007-08-29
- In case your interested, Guy Kawasaki is starting to use Twitter. I almost said “live blog”, but we’ll see what he does with it. Kudos Guy, glad to be able to follow you.
- Kent Newsome presents a great point on the advent of video blogging. While some randome videos added to a blog can bring value, most don’t. Good read.
- Copyblogger’s Brian Clark has a great post on transparency here.
- Brian Solis points out what Social Media is really about. This is a great starting point for corporate PR departments to start thinking on – but they have to be ready to take their existing approaches and through them out the window. New ideas for a new
- Great, great post by Steven Hodson about the term “friendship” online and how it’s at odds with the real meaning of the concept.
Renewed Enthusiasm
Every now and again, one finds themselves in that “down” portion of the work cycle. That’s where I’ve been for the last few weeks, and it’s hard to move past that into the effective, productive mode that one needs day to day.
Today, I got to have lunch with a business contact, we worked together for a few years awhile go and always got along. He definitely helped identify some ideas and methods to move past where I’m at – it’s much appreciated.
While I want to thank him, I also just wanted to point out to everyone how easy it is to forget to ask for second opinions. Get another point of view and take the feedback straight up and find the lessons and value in it.
Because of a great lunch, I’ve got a fresh perspective that I didn’t have before. Will it help? Sure – whatever doesn’t hold you back will move you forward. What resources do you turn to for inspiration? Do you solicit external input or keep it to yourself?
@MAC_Arms Pay taxes when you make your money, pay taxes when you spend your money, pay taxes when you successfully invest your money, pay taxes when you save enough taxed money to afford a house, pay taxes to live in your house, pay taxes when you sell the house that you paid taxes on to
Yup, taxes are criminal and we need serious reforms. I've always said that if you want to see a tax revolt, make withholdings illegal and have Americans write a tax check every payday. They'll revolt for sure. You don't miss what you never had.
I think it’s safe to say that @GovEvers should stop blocking audits in Wisconsin and open the books…
“Only AMERICAN citizens should vote.”
Sen. @berniemoreno says voter ID and proof of citizenship are simply common sense.
“We’re talking about a very low threshold — identify who you are and prove you’re a U.S. citizen when you register to vote. I think we’re getting closer to
Wrong. Democrats are solely responsible for hours-long airport lines.
They voted to defund TSA three times and won’t even entertain a conversation about reopening it. Why?
They’re using it as leverage to stop enforcing immigration laws.