BBC Blog Network

Welcome to the new home for all of the BBC’s weblogs. Although we have had blogs for a number of years, most notably our Scottish community site; Island Blogging and the excellent Ouch, this is the first attempt at bringing you a complete list, some news of new launches by journalists, DJs, and radio shows, as well as links and tips to help you find your way around.

The BBC launched a Blog Network

Collapse

This might be around for some time, but I just spotted it: you can collapse / expand the pane of your subscriptions in Bloglines (either by clicking on the grey border to the right of the pane or via the keyboard shortcut m). This is quite nice for some kind of feeds.

Attensa

The day before yesterday I was singing an ode to Bloglines but I was following my own advice of really checking out other feed readers, and today it really paid off:

Attensa online [attensa.com] is the maybe to most minimalistic reader around (all you basically can do is to

  • subscribe and manage your feeds
  • read them in one of three available views
  • and delete items or mark them read)

but it has one feature, which makes it the killer application for reading news, linkstreams (like Hotlinks, digg, or del.icio.us), and feeds which come in some crippled excerpt mode only: you can switch between a RSS and a Web view. The RSS view gives you the textual representation of the feed, but the Web view loads the original site referred to from the feed right within Attensa.

Attensa also lets you create nested groups of feeds, so all you have to do is invest some time in organizing your feeds according to your feed reading modes, then click on the channel you want to process, make sure the Web view is enabled, move your cursor to the delete button for the items and start exploring.

This is great for feeds, which point to many links you actually want to read, because you can read them (and the associated comments and so on) right within Attensa, but this is absolutely fabulous for feeds, which only point to a few, because you can delete about 5 items per second and really process feeds in a highly effective manner.

(There is one minor annoyance: some sites – like the Wikipedia – seem to take over the window Attensa is running in, so you need to switch to the RSS mode when stumbling upon them.)

The Worst Feed Reader Ever

Most people agree that Bloglines pretty much sucks. It’s ugly, it’s slow, it lacks social features, it does not innovate, even the generated source code is as aweful as you can get it. Still most people use it and continue to use it despite many new feed readers entering the scene. Why is that?

Frank Gruber recently compiled an overview of web based feed readers with a detailed feature comparison chart at TechCrunch, and on TalkCrunch there is an interesting follow up podcast. The comments demonstrate that there is a heated debate on which reader is the best, but the simple answer to this question is: there is no answer, it all depends on your feed reading habits and feed reading needs. You have to figure it out for yourself, but no advanced feature set, no state of the art user experience, no web 2.0 goodness and no lightspeed ajaxian item retrieval will make it your best choice as long as your feed reading basics are not satisfied.

In a simplified setup I’ve got two feed processing modes:

  • reading blogs
    I’m subscribed to about 100 blogs and all I want to to is do read them right now and save entries if they seem important to me, or mark them for later review.
  • scanning news
    and I’m subscribed to another about 100 sources (news headlines, linklogs, del.icio.us/popular and so on) and all I want to do is to go there and read and/or bookmark an article, or mark them for later review.

Only two things are really important to me: I want to get out of my feed reader as soon as possible (and with as few clicks as possible), and I want to be able to come back later to those items I didn’t deal with right now (and without having to work my way through the stuff already read again).

The speed for loading an item is a crucial issue, of course, but this speed actually needs to be multiplied by the number of times you have to click to have all unread items displayed. Google Reader might fetch one item lightening fast, but you need to click a few hundred times to see them all. The ability to group related feeds and access all new entries with one click is crucial here, but many readers don’t provide this view.

Other features I really don’t care about (but you might) within my feed reader are ratings, rankings, votings, or recommendations. I’m all social and Web 2.0, but as far as the feeds I’ve subscribed to are concerned: I’ve made up my mind about them anyway, these are all feeds I really want to read, I don’t need suggestions from my feed reader, there are better tools I use for that. (I would love to see these kind of features in my reader of choice, of course, but only after the reading basics are streamlined.)

So for me and my humble needs Bloglines still provides the best overall package, but I can’t recommend it, it really depends on you. One minor feature of any of the other readers might be the selling point for you (as long as the other features are just good enough.) And one minor annoyance might be a complete dealbreaker, even if this reader rocks in all other criterions.

7:42 pm

Don’t be inadequate anymore!

brilliant, I won’t.

(courtesy of some anonymous spammer)

11:55

del.icio.us – fight:

It’s a bad time to start a company (105 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (35 users)

update 3/27/2006:

It’s a bad time to start a company (151 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (138 users)

update 3/28/2006:

It’s a bad time to start a company (162 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (158 users)

update 3/29/2006:

It’s a bad time to start a company (170 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (169 users)

update 3/31/2006:

It’s a bad time to start a company (172 users)
vs.
It’s a great time to start a business (180 users)

Task Scoresheet

Rough Underbelly [roughunderbelly.com] – a cute productivity application. You can create tasks, assign a level of worth-doingness (based on the Printible CEO) and check tasks as done. And that’s about it.

Space

Through out her writing danah constantly invokes a bottom up defense of youth culture. Essentially that the kids are alright they just need space and privacy to develop their own identities. It’s an argument I’m totally sympathetic to, but it becomes completely problematic when one realizes that something like MySpace just isn’t a traditional bottom-up youth culture situation at all. Rather it’s something more like an engine, a structure to contain the bottom up energy and transform it into something else entirely…

MySpace knows their users basic info, name, email, age, etc. Then it also knows their friends, their friends data, their favorite bands, the way they speak, who they like, who they don’t…

Not only does MySpace have an absurd amount of personal data on people, the sort of stuff traditional demographics companies have been collecting for decades. But it also has something perhaps far more valuable, a wealth of data on the relationships between all those people…

Abe Burmeister on the abstract dynamics of MySpace

Gmail Syndication

This is probably around forever, but I just spotted it: you can setup one account at Gmail as your master email client for all other email accounts you may have got.

There are two steps that need to be performed:

  • you need to tell Gmail which email accounts you want to use: 1. in Gmail go to SettingsAccounts ; 2. click Add another email address and fill out the details; 3. click Reply from the same address the message was sent to to ensure Gmail replies with the corresponding address. Step 2. needs to be repeated for any email address you want to use.
  • you need to verify your ownership of each email address by clicking the verification link Gmail has sent to them; and you need to set up each account to forward all messages to your Gmail account (not every email provider will let you do this, but most do).

Once you’re done you’ll get all the sweetness and benefits of Gmail (search, tagging, spam filtering, …) and still be in control of the addresses you want to use. (You will also be one step closer fulfilling Google’s mission of managing your digital body, of course.)

Google Writer

Both Google and Writely announced the acquisition of Writely by Google.

Google Writer would be my first guess as the new name for Writely.
Wriiiiiiitely or Googely also are likely canditates.