30 Nov 2007
Yesterday Official Google Reader Blog announced 2 new features to the ever expanding feature list of Google Reader. Thanks to Google's (ex-)interns we can now drag and drop to organize individual feeds and folders as well as recommendations to new feeds that are actually catered to us. There are 2 ways to get to recommendations: It is displayed as a sidebar box above recently starred and shared on the "Home" page and it is also right next to "Add subscription" in a form of Discoverlink. The top feeds and the whole search for feeds deal has taken a back seat in a form of an additional tab on the Discover page. The recommendations algorithm takes a look at your feeds and compares them to other people reading the same subscriptions. Think of it as netFlix movie recommendation engine, only instead of voting it takes things like subscribers and activity into consideration. You can preview a recommended feed…
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29 Nov 2007
We met with a marketing director today who shared that her company’s web traffic has increased due to their blog contributing to higher search rankings – but then in the same breath explained that the blog was dead, nobody wanted to write anything for it anymore, and they were on the verge of shutting it down completely. Of course, this was a softball lob for us in terms of introducing how to turn this sad situation around. James likes to use the bar analogy: You don’t walk into a bar, start screaming about what’s on your mind and expect people to converse with you. Instead, you first listen to what’s being said – as it’s always easier to enter an existing conversation than to start a new one. Such is life in the blogosphere. If you only write but never read, the motivation can be lost. If nobody responds to…
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15 Nov 2007
Ever since I got my iPhone one app that was dearly missed was the Google Reader mobile. Well, the wait is finally over and just a few days ago Google Reader Blog posted the update that they have rolled out some sweet iPhone related and mobile version updates. The reader works great, its nice and fast, no clutter and everything you need for basic reading is there. You can easily share or star an item you just read, go to the next unread item or look through your tags and feeds. Often times I read and tag blog posts a certain criteria,for example if its something I want to blog about or leave a comment on the author's blog. I like to do those things like an assembly line, first I read all the items that are new or interesting and that's what really takes up most of the…
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12 Nov 2007
Last month’s study on journalists’ usage of online newsrooms, blogs, RSS and social media (conducted by Bulldog Reporter and TEKgroup) had a few findings worth mentioning on this blog. I was just reviewing a powerpoint deck I put together on RSS several months ago, and realizing that the most recent RSS related stats in there were from an old Forester report done around the beginning of 2006. “Wow dude, in internet years that was like a decade ago.” This latest survey consisted of 2,046 journalists (47% editors or editorial staff, 35% reporters or writers), surveyed for the purpose of determining how journalists use the internet to do research. Nearly 70% said they follow at least one blog regularly – but what really stood out to me was the 37% receiving at least one regular RSS feed, and nearly 16% receiving five or more RSS feeds from blogs, podcasts, videocasts or…
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