Ever since I switched over from Bloglines to Google Reader several months ago, I’ve been making more and more use of RSS as a part of my daily online information intake.
I did muse a little while back that Techmeme and Twitter/FriendFeed were eating into RSS’ usefulness for me, but I’m changing my mind on that point. And I’m not running for president, so I have much more leeway on such things! I’m starting to believe that a healthy combination of RSS consumption and Techmeme scanning along with social media participation on Twitter/FriendFeed is a pretty great way to interact with friends, colleagues, and those you think are rad/cool/admirable while gaining access to the stories and information that’s most useful to you.
That’s all prelude to saying that I was thinking about sports today. I’m watching a show called CostasNow right now on HBO – it’s a town hall special with some of baseball’s living legends, looking at the history and future of the game. And I’ve been thinking about sports in general lately, about how I used to be a pretty big sports fan but have let my attention slip as to the goings on in the sports world with the exception of football.
Part of it has to do with the fact that I’m a native New Yorker who is inching dangerously closer to being a longtime Californian with each passing year. And part of it has to do with all the shenanigans going on with social media obsessions and online media cultery mentioned above. There’s only so much time and attention in the day!
One way that I keep in touch with both my New York roots and with sports is to track the feed of Mike Lupica, columnist for the New York Daily News and flat out one of the best writers and sports journalists in the country.
But watching the Costas special and realizing with some dismay that at the baseball all star break I have no idea what’s been going on all season (aside from the vague knowledge that the Yankees are stinky), I decided to take some action.
I headed to ESPN.com, grabbed a few general sports headlines feeds, plugged them into Google Reader. Boom. Now I can have half a clue of what’s cooking in the sports world at large.
A small thing, a small way in which RSS can aid your life to be sure. But a pretty nice thing all the same.
Anyone have any sports blogs that they consider must reads (or must feeds)?
Using FriendFeed and Google Reader in tandem is great. On FriendFeed, I get access to a huge range of stories that people are sharing, and the one-click ability to “like” the stories I like is an easy and addictive way to add my two-cents to the stories I, well… like. And of course if I want to add more than two cents I can hop in and leave a comment. And on the Google Reader-end I can share stories that I’m into, giving other people on FriendFeed access to the stories I’m checking out in the same way.
This is all great… but, there’s a small but to throw in there.
This morning, I wrote a story called The post-blogging generation. During the day, I noticed that Online Media Cultist was picking up a nice amount of traffic from the story, with the general referral coming from somewhere on FriendFeed.
This has happened to me a number of times. It’s fantastic to know that one’s story is getting checked out somehow, but always a bit frustrating to not be able to pinpoint the source. And in the case of FriendFeed, I’d love to be able to know who is sharing the story, who is liking it, and most of all I’m keen to check out and respond to comments.
Now, the first thing I investigated of course was to see if people were responding to the story on FriendFeed through my own personal feed. As had also happened several times in the past, this was not the case. After a minute of mulling the situation, I decided to use FriendFeed’s search bar to search for keywords in my story’s title.
Bingo. I found no less than five people – including (the omnipresent and perhaps omniscient) Louis Gray, Hutch Carpenter, Marco, Mike Fruchter, and Colin Walker – who had shared the story using Google Reader. Each iteration of the share had picked up its own smattering of kindly “likers” and even a few generous comments.
So in essence the whole decentralization of conversations… conversation is hitting home here. It would be really nice if there was an easy way for me to see – on the Google Reader-side or more realistically on the FriendFeed-side – who is sharing my stories. Even if all of conversations and likes aren’t brought together in a One Ring to Rule Them All kind of way, it would be great if there was an easier way to get a Big Picture view on the shares than hunting them down through search.
I finally made a big switch (for me) last week, choosing Google Reader as my primary RSS reader.
I’ve used Bloglines for several years now and have always liked it. It’s a pretty straightforward service for plugging in RSS feeds and letting the stories come to you. However, I’ve been increasingly tempted to switch over to Google Reader but it took some time as I was simply comfortable with what I was doing.
Now that I have, I’m starting to see what the buzz and hubbub has been about. While getting used to the simple RSS reading part has taken a little getting used to (and the more I do it, the more I prefer it to the slightly clunkier Bloglines UI), the social part – the ability to share stories via a simple click – is surprisingly powerful and even addictive.
For one, I can now easily share stories with and receive stories from all of my Gmail contacts. A Friends’ shared items area on the Google Reader side nav is a pretty ingenious way for me to browse stories from my friends and fellow bloggers that I’m in contact with.
Now, bring in the Friendfeed factor and things get really interesting. When I share a story, it will show up on my Gmail contacts’ shared item area, but also as part of my Friendfeed “life stream” as well as the new Friendfeed “rooms” that I’ve been kindly invited to be a part of.
As a blogger, online media cultist, and semi-voracious consumer of information, it’s pretty wonderful that a combination of my blog feed, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Google Reader shared items can be used as a powerful way to share ideas and stories while partaking in a dynamic and vibrant community.
This is social networking of a different and new sort, I believe. We’re onto something big here. I’m always happy when following a story and I can’t wait to see what happens next. This is a perfect example.
I’ve noticed that much of the discussion of this new notion of Blogging 2.0 revolves around what users want. In fact, as I noted earlier this week, Duncan Riley declared that Blogging 2.0 is “all about the user.” Fair enough.
That said, my sense is that there’s a galaxy of well intentioned and ambitious bloggers out there who are and will be trying to figure out how to find their way in this new and strange era of distributed conversations (i.e. you spend the time, brain power, expertise, and hard work to create and share a new idea on your blog and it ends up being discussed in any number of other places).
It’s a question of finding the opportunity in the challenge, which I started to get into in a piece called Bridging the Blogging 1.0 and Blogging 2.0 divide. In my view, bloggers can be successful from a Blogging 1.0 vantage point (page views, RSS subscribers, comments, advertising revenue) by embracing the Blogging 2.0 environment.
That’s fantastic, you say, but what the hell does that mean?
It means that successful Bloggers 2.0 need to dive headlong into the places where eyeballs are and conversations are being held. The idea is to make friends, share ideas, and above all else promote one’s personal brand with the hope that people will eventually find their way back to your blog. It’s “old fashioned” online promotion – make friends, show that you’re smart and have something to share, and the people will hopefully follow.
This topic also led me to think about Blogging 2.0 tools from the blogger perspective. I mused on a WinExtra piece called Evangelizing is hard work (and it is, let there be no doubt!) that “I think that this need created by the complex environment that you’ve described will demand new means for publishers to promote themselves.”
That said, here’s a slate of some current popular means that bloggers can use to engage Blogging 2.0 with an eye toward driving the bottom line:
* Disqus - This is a good one to start with as it’s a comments plug-in system that exists right on your blog. So when people leave a comment on your site, those comments are also “cross-published” to the Disqus community. Further, all of your comments made around the Internet on other sites that use Disqus are stored for you in one place.
I installed Disqus here on Online Media Cultist a few weeks ago and like it for the most part, but one major qualm I have is that it’s difficult to tell which site commenters hail from (this should be one-click away). I’m also not convinced as yet that Disqus is an effective promotional tool overall beyond traditional commenting.
* Twitter - Beyond being the preeminent “smart people network,” Twitter is a wonderful place to see and be seen, or tweet and friend and follow in Twitter parlance. It’s a wonderful and flexible and powerful platform, built on a vibrant community of influential-types, bloggers, techies, geeks and, increasingly, everyone. Now if only it didn’t crash so often.
* Friendfeed - Friendfeed may be the perfect example of Blogging 2.0, a “lifestreaming” aggregator that facilitates conversation and provides social networking opportunities around a bevy of writing, link sharing, and media uploading that you’re doing around the Internet. It also works symbiotically for bloggers, in my view: the more you blog, the more you tweet, and the more you share, the more you show up on Friendfeed, the more likely you are to attract conversations around your ideas and, ideally, those click back visits that you’re hoping for.
* Facebook - I’m not a big Facebook user, but some bloggers utilize it as a promotional outpost for their sites. It has a Twitter-like “status” service, which in conjunction with typical comments and the horde of Facebook apps makes it a place for distributed conversations to take place and potentially take advantage of.
* Google Reader - Increasingly, what we can share is becoming important in addition to the new ideas and perspective we bring to the mix. Google Reader is significant in the RSS world as its shared stories feature ties into other services like the aforementioned Friendfeed as well as Readburner. So in essence we can add “sharing” as an important piece of participating in Blogging 2.0.
* MyBlogLog - I was extremely excited about MBL in 2007 as a blog promotion tool and blogger-centric social network, but that excitement was fleeting and transitioned to near-apathy over time as I didn’t find significant reasons to stick around the MBL community or ways to connect with other bloggers. Still, the MBL widget remains a nice way to get a visual (or at least an icon) on who is visiting your site. There’s also been a nice amount of chatter about recently added features, which I’ve been meaning to investigate for some time now. The bottom line is that there’s no better way to promote your blog than amongst an audience of likeminded bloggers, so MyBlogLog has an opportunity to be a place where people can do that.
As I mentioned briefly above, I do think there’s a growing need for tools that will help bloggers to harness the activity going on in all of these disparate places. Disqus and Friendfeed go a ways toward doing that, but I sense that we’ll see a lot more activity in this space over the next year or two.
I’ve written a fewstories about Shyftr over the last week. In short, Shyftr pulls full text RSS feeds published by websites and creates community around them on its own website. Although they’ve changed how the site works (in part due to an innocent question I asked on Twitter over the weekend, which set off quite a little debate throughout the blogospheric realm) the fundamental problem remains: you can read full text stories on Shyftr and comment on those stories on Shyftr without ever visiting the original publishing source. Some people disagree with this position, but in my view that fundamentally interferes with a publisher’s ability to interact with readers and the ability to create community around the original publishing source.
Last night, I discovered ReadBurner, a site which I believe does things in exactly the right way. ReadBurner takes stories that are being shared on Google Reader and provides a space for comments and voting to be made on them. The critical difference here is that they show an excerpt only and not the full text of the article. This in my view means that ReadBurner provides a valuable and unique service in the marketplace – content aggregation and social networking features focused on RSS-based social bookmarking – while promoting publisher source content. As LifeHacker notes, it’s a sort of neat conglomeration of del.icio.us and Digg.
I contacted Drew Olanoff, co-owner of ReadBurner, and asked him if he would like to comment on what his site is doing in comparison to Shyftr. I found his response to be very interesting:
While we won’t really speak to what Shyftr is trying to do, as we’re focusing on our own strategy… I can say that ReadBurner’s goal is to not steal the conversation, but to get it started. We want to be able to send new visitors to blogs who might not have ever visited in the first place. On ReadBurner, they’ll see a steady stream of fresh stories shared from their peers and will be able to interact and re-share if they wish.
I think getting the conversation started as opposed to stealing it gets down the heart of the issue precisely.
ReadBurner also distinguishes itself in a few other ways. Its design and user interface is clean, intuitive, and blessedly straight-forward. (It’s always essential for me to have the why am I here? question answered within a few seconds of arriving at any webpage.)
And here’s another thing: ReadBurner provides two prominent links back to the original content source for each article entry: the article title itself as well a “read more” link below the excerpt. The “shares” link and comments link take you to a ReadBurner drilldown page where you can comment on the story. Again, I think this is the right approach to take. This compares very favorably to what Shyftr does, where you’re almost always forced to be at least one click away from finding a page where you can click back to the original content source.
ReadBurner was founded by Alexander Marktl and was acquired by Olanoff and Adam Ostrow last month. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one for sure.
Everyone knows that your phone is now a video camera, that your TV and computer are melding together, and that your dog is really more robot than mammal these days.
Okay, one of those might be not so much. But what does feel like science fiction made real is that you can now access Google Reader with your Nintendo Wii gaming platform. So in between tennis and Zelda sessions you can rest your Wii elbow and catch up on your RSS feeds.
On a serious note, it’s extraordinary that the computer may see serious competition in the near term as a platform for accessing the Internet. And meanwhile there seems to be a serious drive to produce remarkably cheap laptops, as low as $10 in fact if Indian manufacturers are successful.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to checking out my cereal box-based comic book reader.
Update: A kid talks about the wonders of the Wii browser.
