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How I Live and Breathe Google Reader

On March 19, 2010, in RSS, by Mahendra Palsule

I spend my entire day in Google Reader and Twitter to get tech news. I am sharing my Reader experience here so that I may learn from any tips you might have or the other way around.

Feed Organization

Tip: Prioritize your feeds in folders.

This is typically how my Reader looks when I start my day in the morning:

Me is my own posts and my tweets faved by others
BuzzShares are people I follow on Buzz (about 65 at present)
GoodShares are a group of about a dozen people
LG-RobDiana are shares by Louis Gray and Rob Diana
Google is for Google’s official updates
Tech has about 50-55 feeds mostly from individual tech blogs
MajorTech are the big tech blogs like TechCrunch, RWW, and GigaOM.

The sequence of folders is arranged by priority from bottom-up. Thus, depending on the time I can spend at any moment, I travel my way up in this hierarchy.

Tip: By adding a person’s shared items to a folder in Reader, you can unfollow the person in Buzz if you wish, while continuing to see their Reader shares.

My Stats (Trends)

Here are my key stats for the past month:

Thus, I am sharing about 160 items/week, or about 20-22 items/day.

My ‘items read’ count might probably look different than other heavy Reader users. This is because of Techmeme as well as Twitter. About 80% of the time, I’ve already read and am aware of the news that arrives in Google Reader, or is a duplicate of an item I’ve read.

Subscription Stats

The following stats are interesting:

You can see that some folks, including myself, share on Reader at a rate comparable to the number of posts by major tech blogs.

Disconnecting Reader from Buzz

I have disconnected my Reader shares on Buzz. I will wait till Buzz provides better filtering options. In my experience, it is easier for me to follow other’s Reader shares in Reader, than in Buzz in terms of efficiently finding tech news.

Buzz is a better place to have conversations and engagement on one’s Reader items. But what’s ‘engagement’ for one, can often be ‘noise’ for another. Without better filters, this engagement is simply force-fed noise on Buzz.

Going Forward

Because curation and sharing is primarily my work at Techmeme, I am increasingly focusing on sharing other stuff on Reader and omitting major news items in my Reader shares. This falls into several different categories – social media, how-to, personal, opinion, media, lifestreaming, etc. – stuff that doesn’t typically appear on Techmeme. If you are interested, do follow me on Reader.

I appreciate and value the shares of people I follow in Google Reader. Thank you for making it such an enriching place!

Please do share your tips, if any.

Tagged with: buzz • google reader

The Local Nature of Real-Time Means RSS Rules Forever

On December 13, 2009, in RSS, by Mahendra Palsule

I wanted to make an observation about real-time and the Google Reader vs. Twitter war, about which Louis excellently summarizes the advantages of both in this post.

While real-time technology is removing all barriers to instant communication and information flow everywhere, there are geographical and biological limitations that it has not overcome yet. While announcements and press releases are being made from Silicon Valley, half the world who lives on the other side of the planet is sleeping.

Scoble, who doesn’t use Google Reader anymore, compares Techmeme with Twitter Lists, also noted:

If you don’t read tweets for eight hours, don’t worry, all the big stuff you missed will be on TechMeme.

My point exactly. Most of the world sleeps anywhere between 6-9 hours a day, and does many other things besides being on Twitter. When they wake up and want to get updated with the major tech news of the day, Twitter is of no help. This is not a limitation of Twitter, it’s just the local aspect of real-time.

When I observe who follows who on Twitter, sure there are millions of cases where people follow folks from around the world. But if someone were to make a statistical analysis of everyone on Twitter, I think it would be clear that the majority of follows are within their own country. The same may not be true of their Google Reader subscriptions or the links in their blogrolls on Wordpress.com. This is why, RSS will continue to rule, as long as the earth keeps rotating, we have nights and days, and need to sleep.

A real-life example encapsulating all this happened yesterday, when I felt earthquake tremors at home here in India. I tweeted about the earthquake from my personal Twitter account where I occasionally indulge in India-specific news, did not tweet from my tech-focused ScepticGeek account, and obviously did not bother to blog about it even on my personal blog.

There was no need for the rest of the world to know about those mild tremors, and it did not hit Techmeme. The Twitter feed of my personal account was filled with tweets about the earthquake, but this would have been “noise” to others. Those who follow me on Google Reader did not get any such noise.

This is the local nature of real-time. This is also why I agree with Mark Dykeman, who noted the difference between a reasonable time web and a real-time one.

Tagged with: google reader • real-time • RSS • Twitter

RSS: Really Smart Search

On August 31, 2009, in RSS, Social Web, by Mahendra Palsule

There has been a lot of discussion lately regarding whether people use RSS to track news. Rob Diana has summed up the discussion well in RSS, Human Filters and Real Time Streams.

What I am interested in is not tracking breaking news but being able to search for relevant information. Alex at ReadWriteWeb had pontificated about Social Relevancy Ranking in search results.

This is becoming increasingly important for me. Google search has no human filter, no personal trust factor. Alex Campbell writes about the stark realization that he doesn’t depend upon Google anymore to find stuff, where he describes how SEO has diminished Google’s relevancy

Marshall Kirkpatrick had designed a Custom Google Search (“Marshall’s Magic Search”) that I have used quite a lot, until recently. Now, I find that my Google Reader gives me better results.

How and why?

Following the right people. This is the most challenging aspect, as Rob Diana says in his post. There is no built-in auto-discovery feature based on relevancy and not popularity. If the Facebook suggested friends feature could be applied to Google Reader, it would be one approach. But once you follow the thought leaders and influencers in your sphere of interest, you have already made your Google Reader search several relevancy levels higher than Google and dismissed SEO garbage and popularity noise in one fell swoop.
The beauty of RSS subscriptions is that searching feeds can go back indefinitely in time. This means in a feed reader like Google Reader, you can get search results from people (feeds) you follow even before you started following them. So if you subscribe to Louis Gray’s shared feed, you can search his “wisdom archives” so to speak, even if you didn’t know him till now.
You can get feeds from social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg if you want to add popularity as a factor in your search.
Organizing your feeds using folders and tags. This comes in very handy so that you can search selectively based on your folders and tags.
Using Starring. Many people do not use the Star feature in Google Reader. I use it as if they were my bookmarks.

Can Google Reader replace Google? No, since at present, Google Reader shows results in chronological order, supports primitive search operators and wildcards, and does not use a relevancy algorithm. There are simple limitations like needing to enclose a phrase in parenthesis and so on.

Steve Rubel has also highlighted the use of Google Reader as a database in his recent post. The effectiveness of the tool depends on how effectively you use it. The smarter you are, the smarter your Google Reader search results. There’s an indispensable human filter involved – and that is you.

However, these are limitations of the feed reader, not of RSS. Since it has a large user base, it is difficult for the Google Reader team to accelerate development of new features. On the other hand, new startups like LazyFeed and Toluu have developed an astonishing service within a very short time span. It might take these new services lesser time to add powerful search functions based on social rankings and personal follow lists. Marshall has revealed how they use open source software for meme tracking and feed parsing for ReadWriteWeb, including LazyFeed to monitor specific topics.

If these startups are able to capitalize on a smaller early adopter user base and bring smarter search results, do you think they can deliver smarter search results than Google and its Reader?

Tagged with: google • google reader • lazyfeed • search • toluu

Remove Duplicates in Google Reader

On August 18, 2009, in RSS, by Mahendra Palsule

If you've recently started following a lot of people in Google Reader, you might have noticed a lot of duplicate items being shared.

I have experimented with a Greasemonkey user script that purports to remove duplicates. Some users have reported problems with the script's earlier versions, so I suggest you use caution if you decide to use it. You should backup your Reader subscriptions as an OPML file via Import/Export under Settings.

I have found that it is filtering my duplicates excellently so far. Install the Google Reader Filter script (you'll need Greasemonkey script support in your browser) and let me know if it works for you as well.

The script does more than filter duplicates. You can filter out unwanted content or highlight wanted content based on keywords. Pretty useful!

Posted via from SkepticGeek’s Posterous

Tagged with: google reader • tips

My Simple Wish List for Google Reader

On August 14, 2009, in RSS, by Mahendra Palsule

I'm spending a lot of time in Google Reader these days. There have been several improvements in the last few weeks in following, sharing, and commenting and I am grateful to the Google Reader team for these wonderful enhancements. As Jorge pointed out, With FriendFeed Out of the Way, Google Reader Has a Golden Opportunity.

To help it further on that way, here is my initial wish list for Google Reader:

1. Centralize All Settings (Incl. Sharing)
At present, most Reader settings are accessed via the Settings link at the top right. For some reason however, Sharing Settings are not included on this page. It would make sense to include these as well.

At present, they are accessible from within the main screens when you click certain sections like Shared Items or People You Follow.

2. Marking Items As Read Older Than Original Date
The new feature of marking items as read that are older than a day, a week, or two weeks work based on the date the item was shared. I would like an option to choose if I want it to be based on the date of the original item (news/blog post/etc.). Why?

I find that even if I'm keeping myself up-to-date with most of the popular stories shared within my community of tech enthusiasts, there are items being shared by people that are say 3 or 4 days old. Even if I filter them out by this new feature, these stale items persist in my unread feed since they were shared just now by others. This makes the feature less powerful than it can be.

3. Eliminate Duplicate Shares
I find that sometimes Reader is able to detect duplicate items in my shared feed, and shows a consolidated "Shared by 3" item. However, many times, this detection doesn't work and I have multiple instances of the same item in my feed.

I checked if this happens only if there is a new/separate comment for each shared item, but that is not the case. I checked if this happens when I've already launched Reader and new items are added after I'm already within Reader. No, it happens when I launch Reader afresh. So the dup-detection needs polishing.

4. One-Click Send To
The current implementation of Send To opens up new browser tabs/windows, and feels very rudimentary. Feedly, for e.g. allows you to tweet or share in FriendFeed with a single click. Reader should allow me to configure my sharing accounts and enable 1-click Send To.

5. Map Shared Folders to Contact Groups
I can organize my feeds in folders and contacts in groups. One would think it makes sense that I would like to share specific folders of feeds with specific groups of people. Unfortunately, that is not the case, or I haven't understood Reader's sharing settings at all.

At present, I can mark each of my folders to be shared or not shared. I can globally set my shared items to be public or shared with groups. This means, each of my shared folders is shared with each of the groups I select.

What would make more sense is to let me share tech stuff with my tech group, arts with my artist friends, and so on.

6. Global Mark as Read
Many people in my tech enthusiast community read and share the same items. After I have read an item from the original source feed, and even shared it myself, I again see the same item as unread in my following feed.

When I mark an item as Read, it should be marked as Read in my following feed as well. The only exception to this is when the shared item has a comment to it.

At the rate at which the Google Reader team is making enhancements, I don't think these tweaks should take long for them to implement? If you like these suggestions, please share/re-tweet this so the message reaches the team!

Posted via from SkepticGeek’s Posterous

Tagged with: google reader • ideas

Using Google Reader with PostRank

On August 13, 2009, in RSS, by Mahendra Palsule

Now that I am heavily using Google Reader, I decided to check out how it works with PostRank:

The PostRank Google Reader Extension brings the power of PostRank filtering into Google Reader. It applies PostRank analysis to all your existing feeds once installed. PostRank scores will be displayed for all posts, and you can adjust the PostRank filtering level in two different ways.

The nice part is it also works with shared items from people you follow. So if you're faced with a very large number of items shared by those you're following, you can use PostRank to effectively filter the posts based on rank.

Posted via from SkepticGeek’s Posterous

Tagged with: google reader • tips

LazyFeed: First impressions

On July 27, 2009, in RSS, by Mahendra Palsule

I got familiar with Hyperactive Feed…er, LazyFeed, via Louis Gray's excellent demo.

I love the service. It helps me get targeted RSS feeds in real-time. I no longer need to hunt new RSS feeds to add to my Google Reader.

Here's one tip for new users: I tried to combine tags in several ways to get more focused results, but the usual techniques didn't work. What if you want to get RSS feeds that specifically are tagged both Facebook and Twitter, or Windows and Linux?

Solution: In the entry box at the top: enter Tag:Facebooktwitter or Tag:Windowslinux – it works. No spaces, no comma.

My wish list for LazyFeed:

1. In my Create-Share-Discover-Collect model, there is no way for me to share or collect from within Lazyfeed. At present, LazyFeed is simply Consume.
2. Use Google Reader as the starting point. At present, LazyFeed let's you start with your Twitter account, Delicious bookmarks, Flickr account, and Blog tags. I expect early adopters who will participate in the public beta will have their own favorite feeds setup in Google Reader and the like. IMO, supporting an import from them is vastly more important than Twitter and Flickr.
3. I'd like LazyFeed to go beyond importing feeds from Google Reader. Integration with Google Reader, Friendfeed, and Twitter has been one of the main reasons for Feedly's success. LazyFeed can trump all of these, because of it's killer USP: Discovery.

Once the Share aspect is added to LazyFeed via integration, a promising future looks certain to me.

See and download the full gallery on posterous