Social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit.
July 9th, 2009

Hyperlocal News Wire

Here’s a pipe I’ve created that attempts to marshal the content from hyperlocal blogging in Birmingham and allow people only to subscribe to feeds that interest them. This is a piece of investigation and experimentation that I’ve been able to find the time to do thanks to Will Perrin and his hyperlocal blogging initiative Talk About Local. Will also helped define the reason why it would be useful to do — for what he called “lazy journalists”.

Lazy here is used in the same way that it might be used — in praise — of a computer programmer; that is, lazy means you’ll work hard at setting yourself up right to make sure you get everything you need easily later on. Will got to the crux of the argument by saying that journalists interested in a subject — let’s say noise abatement issues — could easily find examples of those at a local level outside the areas they physically know.

So this is a run through of the decisions made in building it (and what other options could work), it’s no more than a prototype at this stage so comments and improvements are very welcome. However if you would rather just get stuck into the pipe itself, head on over.

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May 16th, 2008

New feature wishlist for Google Reader

I’ve been thinking some more about the whole, information overload, autogenerated echo, crossposting thing.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want RSS feeds aggregated for me on yet another web service, I don’t want every feed from every person and have to filter them out (and for duplicates). In short I want all my information in one place, custom search feeds and the like as well as people’s RSS, news as well as flickr tag feeds.

I like the Google Reader experience, I like that it’s in sync across my laptop, my phone, other computers. Google Reader could blow FriendFeed and others away if it implemented a few new features.

Here’s my new feature wishlist for Google Reader:

  • The ability to filter feeds as the come in (by location would be great, I have a lot of searches for “Birmingham” and only want the UK versions).
  • The ablitity to remove duplicate items from different feeds (and chose which “original” version remains). Two examples: blog/news results in my search feeds when I already subscribe to the originating feed. Also removing auto generated posts: twitters in friends’ Facebook statuses or “daliy links” posts in blogs when I already subscribe to the del.icio.us feed.
  • Filters to “mark as read” posts (similar to GMail). By tag would be fine — Google Reader’s search feature is brilliant (allowing you to seach within everything that’s come through), there are things I’d like to be able to search (obsure news feeds, heavy feeds like Digg content) but I don’t want to have them as outstanding posts to be read. You’d be building up your own subset of the web.
  • See other people’s notes (if shared of course) — the new notes feature is great, you could have a conversation with the notes if you could see other peoples’. A little like the “comment on anything” stuff that people are hot for on FriendFeed.













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