Blogging: Stand Alone Indexing
Who needs Ani-nouto when you can harvest the power of Web 2.0 and make your own? It’s like a salad bar.
Google Reader always seemed like something that require extra coaxing to make this idea come true. Honestly a lot of Google feels like something stuck in eternal Beta land that while you know, deep inside your soul, you can do all kinds of awesome things, you just don’t know what that would look like.
Just to bring up the love-to-hate-but-lovely Russian Author again: yes, it’s like hot-linking. But it’s hot-linking of love. And you can’t really share the love with a local feed reader like you could with Google Reader or some equivalent. The cloud is warm and nice (so far), hop on in. But I suppose it’s just a matter of preference.
Now, Google Reader is definitely imperfect; one problem is just how the heck do we aggregate feed of feeds in a meaningful way? Google doesn’t really push it either when the potential for this is huge. A big problem is also in the implementation. It’s not obvious, and the difference between a tag and a folder is not clear at a glance. And you need to do both to take full advantage of it. For example, if you’re Hinano and you want to share with us a bunch of stuff relevant to you but you know some of your friends don’t care for the local news and some of your friends don’t care for Asian MMORPGs that are kawaii desu, then you could actually filter your shared posts by tags, and share them as separate feeds. If you got the time to play with it, it’s quite powerful.
There are other problems–unless it’s a feed, you can’t really index it via Google Reader. Bloggers still need things like Animenano to discover new blogs–new as in age, not as in “I haven’t seen this before.” And it can turn into an expertise-indexed feed much like the present crop like 9 Rules. But at least this gives the users the control over whose feeds to follow, out of those of us who bother to click and tag our Google Reader shared posts.
The more important and the problem everyone runs into first–you can’t re: on a shared post. And that’s fair–when you see something interesting coming through you RSS reader, it isn’t like you can reply through it. To reply, you have to visit the post directly and post in the comments, or link to it via a reply blog post or the equivalent (like a Google Reader shared entry note). But Google Reader doesn’t allow people to reply to a shared entry’s note by sharing it again. At least this way no one can say “why are your comments locked” because, dur, you aren’t suppose to do that!
Still, I’m all for share-and-share-alike over indexes. I’m not sure if it provides any tangible advantages for readers and bloggers but it’s one more tool to add to your arsenal in dealing with the internet. It’s something relatively unique but at the same time it feels like it can replace something some of us are already doing. Maybe it’ll add to your routine, or maybe it will simplify it. I don’t know.
But at least use a reader. Srsly. Can be anything. I’d love to find alternatives to Google Reader that has this capability.
Lastly, this is my public anime feed. I guess I’m going to make an effort to share crap. :3
I think we’re making it overly confusing because “shared” stuff is primarily meant for friends that have each other listed as contacts in their google accounts. That way, you don’t even need to subscribe to a shared feed, everyone’s shared stuff just pops into your shared tab in reader. When you subscribe to a shared feed, you end up getting redundant double posts in your general, “all items” section of your google reader which is more bothersome than it is helpful. And you can’t distinguish at all between those two posts unless one has notes. This problem does suggest, or at least make me think that shared items is primarily for and between people with google accounts (hence friends’ shared items). So we’re kind of like making a google hack that either (1) Google didn’t think of and hasn’t compensated for in coding/programming or (2) that we’re not supposed to do it in the first place (but this isn’t the same problem you discussed, recursive annotations).
It’s slightly alarming that shared feeds become this confusing, because I saw the most potential in recursive feeds. But I simply haven’t explored GR enough to say anything really productive.
While I think this becomes problematic, the general feature of shared items can be pretty useful, and doubtlessly it has unexplored potential we should try and take advantage of.
There’s also a whole boatload of web2.0 features that simply don’t exist yet as I see them fitting the needs of a continuously progressing ’sphere.
Feeds are homogenizing, taking in all content from a source. But can there be feeds that discriminate between content? Can there be a feed that lists Impz’s posts alone on THAT? Impz’s and Crusader’s? In any combination?
Even GR’s lack of recursive annotations is slightly indicative of this; while we are supposed to find the original post and comment there, Disques (or w/e it is) allows for commenting on commenting within the general comment space. They called this “forums within blogs” or something. But I don’t even know if it’s a question of “what we’re supposed to do”, since that is cultural and discursive, while technology can’t discriminate between culture and programming. It may be “ethical” to comment on the original post, but the question is whether GR doesn’t allow for that because, as you said (I think), we’re obliged by cultural norms to access the original, or because GR physically isn’t capable. In either case, it’s true that GR can’t do that, it depends on what the programmers were aware of. I think I’m spinning out of control and have no idea what I’m saying.
There are probably more examples, but it turns into a more abstract notion of technology catching up to society. Society creates the need for these technologies, we just have to wait for someone to realize the exigency of the situation and implement theory to practice and create new technologies that satisfy the needs of society…and thus the wheel keeps turning.
Edit: Oh yeah, and I forgot to thank you for just getting this out there. One of the first things is for people just to try it out.
Wow. I must try this out when I get home from work.
And as for Animenano, I haven’t even signed up yet!
I’m still not exactly sure what this would accomplish. I can just get a bunch of feeds I follow and filter them with something like Yahoo! Pipes. You think I read every single post on 2ch’s boards with my subpar Japanese just to catch early-hour anime news? I subscribe to RSS feeds, set up filters with Pipes, and subscribe to the output feed. No need to rely on community indexing efforts, although Pipes enables this, but it’s far more automated if I understood Google Reader correctly. Any user could set up a hub of different indexing parameters, what’s more, Pipes offers easy cloning of pipes made public, so it’s very easy to set up a network of differently filtered indexes.
OK, I think pipes just owned GR. Again, back to Omo, I think that what GR lacks in relation to pipes makes it even more suggestive that GR is only “meant” for interconnectivity between accounts, not making these recursive feeds publicly accessible.
In any case, though, pipes and GR cannot in themselves create large “meta-note” aggregators like nano. That can only be done through new programming, or some huge database that has the capacity to search entire spheres for content, then be able to filter and have features like that of pipes. It seemed like pipes could only receive feeds or data from aggregates, and that’s where its functionality comes in to pay off. Using pipes to read to one persons blog whose signal-to-noise ratio is very high seems pointless since you don’t make effective use of its filtering capabilities. So yeah…pipes looks very intelligent.
edit: it also seems like pipes is capable of recursive feeds, having an rss of several pipes. Hmmm. I’ll have to play around with it. What pipes still lacks is synergy between annotation and centralized distribution, though.
I think my intial distrusts for pipes was due completely to my google fetish. I am sorry.
This is interesting. the need for an incredibly large aggregator from which Pipes can get a feed is based on standard models of power. In this sense, power is beholden to The Boss, one incredibly large source, the aggregator.
GR has the potential to do away with this model of power via Foucault’s concept of capillary power wherein people are not controlled by a source, they are controlled by each other. It’s like self-policing - there is an illusion of power and it amounts of people playing musical chairs with each other, only they don’t know about it. So GR’s sharing function, something Pipes doesn’t have, is interesting because it doesn’t require one large Nano-esque aggregator to aggregate things. It’s grassroots aggregation.
But holy crap you can link a jumpcut account to your gmail account. Jesus. It seems like Pipes is a really nice complement to GR’s annotation function.
Author updated his post to make some comments. I think the point right now is just knowing. From what Miha describes Yahoo Pipes works more or less the same way, except without the social networking aspect as much.
But no matter which tool you use, it’s something that can be helpful if someone bother to set it up. It’s just that Google’s cross-service integration is much better than Yahoo’s (or Mugshot or Facebook or whatever).
Is this an underhanded blow trying to secretly tell me that I’m a google reader spammer? :( I don’t know how to tag them lol
LOL no, it’s just you’re the only anime blogger I know who uses it extensively.
Yeah, tagging is weird in GR, and I don’t think you will like it.
my shared articles are for JP like 95% of the time xD;
I finally got a wind of this from my greader via 1000+ posts.. that has piled up. Seriously though, mostly when I think about Greader, which I do a lot of times.. and have to go thru that much posts, I always think of what news sources are out there. Though even if Greader doesn’t allow a person to do certain things.. I always make sure to spam like minded librarians or friends of certain news.