Blog before you Think!

(started and stopped to use pinboard as a tool to organize the streams of persons of interest at services of interesting outputs etc.) ((the idea was not bad per se but the notation was flawed))

omg, it’s been more than 7 years since I’ve came up with the Next Action Balls process (see the entire series). Since I’ve spent the last couple of weeks getting rid of physical and digital clutter the NABs also had to go, basically I’m back to square one.

happy new year!

wow, this article on the cutting-edge physics of crumpled paper balls gives a whole new meaning to my next action balls system.

happy new year!

The ability to group friends and to filter the stream are highly popular feature requests for Google Buzz. Buzz lets you send your buzzes to a selected group of people only, of course. But unlike FriendFeed they don’t provide an explicit way to manage your incoming stream. It’s Google after all, they want to solve problems algorithmically.

Here is a technique, which lets you create filtered lists right now. It’s actually quite simple:

(1) you need to build a search query for each group you want to create.

You can include people via the from:username or the author:username search operator. Make sure to put quotes around the username and to use OR between each person.

e.g.:

from:“saurier duval” OR from:“google buzz team”

will find all public buzzes from me and the Buzz team.

(2) you can refine the search by including or excluding various sources via the source:sourcename search operator.

e.g.:

source:buzz OR source:“google reader”

will find only buzzes and shared items from Google Reader.

-source:twitter -source:“google reader”

will find all public buzzes except shared Tweets and shared items from Google Reader.

from:“saurier duval” OR from:“google buzz team” source:buzz OR source:“google reader”

will find all buzzes or shared items form Google Reader from me and the Buzz team.

(3) save the combined search as a Quick Link.

One lesser known feature in Gmail (and hence in Google Buzz) is the ability to save searches. It’s called Quick Links and you have to enable it in Gmail Labs (Settings -> Labs). Once Quck Links is enabled you’ll see a box in the left column that gives you 1-click access to any search you save.

To save a search for Google Buzz you enter the query in the search field, click “Search Buzz” and then click “Add Quick Link” in the Quick Links box. You can assign a descriptive name for your group and then you’re done.

Since the process is tedious this technique is best suited for smallish lists or to highlight peope who are really important to you. But it’s also great for generating a filtered stream for oversharers.

Quick tip for being a responsible citizen of Google Buzz: Buzz lets you specify groups of addressees for each site which is connected to your Buzz. So if you don’t want to bore your lolcat-loving mom with your latest ramblings on social media, all you have to do is to define who sees what:

• go to your buzz
• click connected sites
• in the list of connected sites click Edit for the source you want to refine
• in the pull-down box choose Private and then check the checkboxes of the contact groups you want your items to see (see the pic above)
• click Done

If you haven’t set up a proper set of contact groups yet, the most convenient way to do this is Google Contacts. It takes a while, but your friends and relations will love you even more.

What’s still missing in Buzz is a way for recepients to do the same. As is the sender is in control and if he likes to share a lot or consumes a non-healthy amount of your bandwidth your only option is to stop following him at all.

But if you could define which sources to see and which to hide on a per-user basis, Buzz suddenly would become less noisy and an interesting dashboard for many of your information needs. This also would solve the ubiquitous problem of redundancy. I’m following many of my friends on Buzz on Twitter already, and I’m subscribed to their blogs and shared items in Google Reader. I suspect you do the same. I neither need nor want to see these items in Buzz again. It would be awesome to hide a noisy or redundant Twitter- oder shared items stream while still being able to see the rest. Think FriendFeed’s ‘hide other items like this one’, but more transparent and better.

happy new year!

nice, the various APIs of the NYT can be accessed via YQL now.

interesting: Ident Engine – a JavaScript library which builds lifestreams (via)

yay, google barcode doodle.

I’ve been using Readtwit for a couple of days and it seems to be a keeper. In a nutshell it builds a feed from the links twittered by your friends. Whenever possible the content of the linked article is injected too. You even can train it to ignore users or hashtags.

yep.

Time flies. Five years ago Merlin Mann invented the ultimate analog productivity tool, the Hipster PDA.

I’ve been using a slightly modified version ever since, see the Next Action Balls Series

a tiny thread – a new toy from Joshua Schachter which provides minimalistic threads for Twitter (you also can misuse it as a informal listmaker.)

momb kittenfied

Maybe app of the year: the Kittens Bookmarklet

brizzly is a new Twitter client which (like totally) rocks. It supports all basic features of Twitter of course, at its core it is a supercharged Tweet-reader for folks who really want to read the Tweets of their followers though.

Untested, but this seems to be a pretty awesome Javascript library:

WireIt – an open-source javascript library to create web wirable interfaces for dataflow applications, visual programming languages or graphical modeling.

happy new year!

I feel sad that Bloglines continues to deconstruct itself. Feedreaders are like a relationship after all. There are plenty of them out there, each one with its own bundle of strengths and weaknesses. But at some point you’ve got to choose and then better stick with it. Since we spend a lot of time with them, even the shortcomings become likeable. At least we arrange ourselves, develop little hacks and workarounds, and learn to live with them.

Over the last couple of weeks Bloglines has had a few issues. Feeds have not been updated, sometimes none of them for a couple of hours, sometimes the site was just down. But stuff happens and every site has problems every once in a while. What I don’t get though is the communicative stealth mode of Bloglines regarding these problems. There is no blog, no section indicating current issues, nada.

A simple search on Twitter shows that a lot of users – hundreds, probably thousands – are jumping ship and switching to Google Reader. Is this what they want? I believe many of them would have stayed, if they simply gave us a nod that they are aware of the issue and working on it.