Reading 2.0

The iPad and a couple of additional tools (not 100% related to it) changed my online reading habits a lot.

Here's my "Reading 2.0" or rather: as of December 2010, it will probably evolve further:

1. I have Google Reader as the central management point for the RSS feeds (blogs, news, ...)
2. about 30% of those articles I read online while I'm in front of a PC.
3. the rest I scan on my iPad using Reeder.
4. Most of the interesting articles and postings I save for later reading with Read it later, also on the iPad with their app.
5. Item with more "eternal" value might then get save to delicious, but that's only one or two a week.

So basically I separated the consumption phase (step 4) above from the discovery phase (step 3 above).

Tupalo badges

Tupalo (see here) now also has bagdes (i.e. widgets), which allow to embed a spot on your webpage / blog; in their own words:

The Tupalo Spot Widget code is available from every Tupalo Spot page, allowing you to embed a formatted business information widget into your posts. The Tupalo Spot Widget is perfect for those with a blog or website allowing Javascript.

Works fine.
2 minor issues, though:

1. I'd also like to have a widget that lists my favorites on tupalo (=dynamic), not only 1 single spot (=static)
2. the styles don't seem to work smoothly, see the title in the screen shot:
   I haven't looked into it with too much effort, but I guess they just don't really provide their own styles, or they are broken.
   

Apart from that, good work, guys.

If blogrolls are indeed dead ...

...as I said... why then did I still have one here, you might ask.

Fair question.
So I removed it.
I haven't updated it in years anyway...

Gone.

Are Blogrolls dead ?

Well the title of this post suggests a yes and that's what I feel.
Why ?

I haven't updated mine in months (if not years). Not (only) because I'm lazy, but I did not see a point in doing so.

They used to serve as a social network (or at least some kind of social graph) amongst bloggers... but that's no longer the case. Social graphs are now in the social networks (not in twitter, though, mind you).

I guess one reason is also that links are dead - as Steve Gillmor has been pointing out for years.

Don't get me wrong on this, I still like being linked to, but not for the sake of the link, but because I get a hint that someone feels I had something important to say or report or an interesting thought. And a link is only one way to make that statement, and not more important (to me) than say a tweet or IM or email or a real chat, where she/he responds to a post.

What I Read - II

Finally, you regular readers of my blog (thank you, btw) may have noticed that there was some activity in the right column here (->).
Apart from having an Upcoming box, I finally automated the What I Read widget as I mentioned earlier.
Basically it's a tiny, tiny database ("databasette") that holds the data, a (localhost only) web application for me to maintain it, e.g. search the title/author/isbn on amazon, put it into the database, attach my "reading" data to it.

The data is then published as a javascript file at my (static!!) webspace. When I say "published"... well, its just a little script that wgets the data locally and ftps them to my webspace account. But hey, it works.
The javascript is "widget-ready" to be included in my blog.

New and improved: there is now also an Atom feed for it.
It is good for google reader, but the feed widget on blogger fails to display the images... so I stick with the javascript version there.

What I Read

In the right column of this blog you may have noticed a new little feature called "What I read"...
Basically this is a little javascript to embed that lists the books I am currently reading (and nicely links to Amazon, of course).

Amazing what you can do with a little jscript...

Currently this is a manually created thing, but I'm working on a nice little Java (web) application at home that will help me create and upload this jscript file automatically, e.g. search title from amazon (using the amazon webservices) and fill in the author and ISBN details, etc, etc.

Stay tuned.

My reading habits

This is what Google Reader trends says about my reading habits and thereby about my daily routines ...

Steve Gillmor vs Jonathan Schwartz - live ?

looking forward to it...
Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab � BRIC Schwartzhouse

User Generated Content ?

I dislike the term "User Generated Content" for various reasons... I for example, when I blog, do not consider myself as a "content creating user"... much less a generator...
To me, it is not "content" what I produce/write/publish/"generate"... just thoughts, rants, bits and pieces of information ... "Content" is too generic a term to apply to ones own ... eh ... things.

As a consequence, I usually like to mock the term as "Useless, generated content" (fully aware that it of course can be applied to my own blabber here).

But just a few minutes ago, I learned what "useless, generated content" really is: just browse the "Books starting at 2.98 EUR" section at Amazon... the number of totally useless and pointless books you can find there... wow...

Blog Microbuttons

Kosmar created and posted a set of micro-buttons ready to use in your blog (or any other site for that matter):

Great work.
The best part of it is of course that he uses flickr as a repository for them...

My readership

This is the geo-map of you (as in Time's definition of it) from last December until today. According to Google Analytics.

Yes, there is quite high a concentration in (and around) my hometown, Vienna, Austria, but otherwise quite international, I'd say.

So thanks to all of you out there

Sun Weblog Publisher

Sun has a nice StarOffice/OpenOffice extension to directly blog from SO/OOo to your blog of choice, called Sun Weblog Publisher, or SWP for short.
Get the details at here.

Unfortunately (for me) when it came out, Google changed the blogger api ("blogger beta", "new blogger", "blogger2") and the SO extension does not work with it, however - good news:

The SWP will support the new version of blogger.com in a March, 2007 update.

Waiting, waiting, ...