Now in addition to FooCamp and BarCamp there is MindCamp in Seattle (via Ted Leung). We should have one of these in the Denver/Boulder area. If anyone is putting together a *Camp for Denver, or even thinking about it, I would love to help out.
Everyone else is talking about Google Reader so I think I will too. Personally, I think they got it almost exactly right. The reading style Google Reader encourages (requires?) is exactly how I want to read my subscriptions. I do a pretty close emulation of the style in Rojo but it is much easier in the Google Reader.
Note, though, that I said “almost”. Unfortunately is does not support segmenting my subscriptions. I do not even know now many feeds I subscribe to these days. I do know that is too many to read them all, all of the time. So I have segmented my subscriptions into basically three groups:
I read posts by friends and comments on my own blog first. Then I read every thing that is new in the the middle priority group in chronological order. I think order is very important in conversations and the canonical newest first order of most aggregators mostly just annoys me. I only get to the third group when I have time. When I do, choose a subject that seems interesting that day and read the entries in reverse chronological order until I run out of time. In the lower priority bucket the newest first order works because I have already conceded that I am not going to read it all so I cannot really follow the conversations.
As far as I can tell, there is really only one big bucket of posts in Google Reader. That fits their M.O. but does not really work for me. I would never get any work done if I actually looked at all the feeds to which I subscribe every day. You can limit the articles to those with a particular tag which might work except I really think I want to seen if there are any unread entries in the higher priority buckets with out actually going to a different URI (the only easy way to filter on a tag, that I could find, is to go to a URI that looks like http://www.google.com/reader/lens/user/03449734039335303102/label/friend).
I suppose I could unsubscribe from the feeds I do not read every day but I do read those lower priority feeds regularly and I do not want to loose them as they often have good posts. Anyway, if I did that then I would just be bored when I am procrastinating. I just occurred to me that the “relevance” ordering provided by the Google Reader might be really useful in this lower priority bucket.
I doubt that Google Reader will ever meet my segmenting/privatization and ordering needs which is quite unfortunate because the article reading model is pretty much perfect as far as I am concerned. So I guess what I am saying is that if anyone knows of an aggregator that works like Google Reader but has multiple buckets and can sort the entries in chronological order, I would really like to know about it.
Just so there is no confusion, Google Reader is really buggy, just like everyone else says, but I tried to ignore that and focus on what appears to function as design.
David Berlind explains why DRM is so dangerous.
Copyright holders are certainly entitled to charge what they want for their music and let the market decide, and if the content is good enough and the price is right, I’m happy to pay. But, judging by reality (how DRM is being used), DRM’s goal apparently doesn’t stop there. Instead of managing my fair use rights to the content I’m paying for, it’s restricting them. Thus, the R in DRM is really for Restrictions, not Rights.
He goes on to describe how DRM leads a technological monoculture and how that monoculture negatively affects both content consumers and producers. I decided a while ago that I would never own an iPod, because I refused to conspire against my peers, children and self by paying Apple money to be evil. However, Mr Berlind does a much better job defending my choice than I ever have.
Jeremy Zawodny has a interesting essay about how the current set of tools we have for manages conversations suck. This part, in particular, really struck a nerve for me.
It took me a while to figure this out, but every aggregator I’ve seen has completely fails to make it easy to stay engaged in a discussion taking place in comments on one or more blog posts. I typically comment on a blog post and never remember to go back to see if anyone else commented on what I said. That’s not much of a “conversation,” is it?
I use Rojo as my aggregator these days. It is pretty good (the best I have found so far) for reading stuff but, as Mr. Zawodny points out, it completely fails to help me engage in conversations. Worse it actually gets in the way, sometimes. For example, it obfuscates the links to the posts so that I cannot just do a “Copy Link Location” in my aggregator and then paste them into my blog. I am forced to click the obfuscated link provided by Rojo and then copy the real link from the address bar after the page has loaded.
I came across Notes on Postmodern Programming today. While reading it I first thought I am a post-modern programmer, then I decided that I am a modern programmer with post-modern tendencies, and finally I concluded that I am not sure which I am. :) Either way it is a fairly brilliant read with lots of food for thought.
[via: Making it stick.]