Rubénerd!

It is with a heavy heart and slight frustration that I bid farewell to another casualty of the short attention spanned intertubes and another aspect of my late childhood. Starting on the 1st of November, Bloglines will be no more. It will cease to exist, like a Parrot. Or a Boss.

It was a drizzly Singapore afternoon...

... in 2004 and I had just finished all my year 12 exams. I was feeling extactic and awesome, and suddently left with the realisation that I had all this spare time to fill for the first time in years. I decided to register for this site which claimed to be able to aggregate sites that I read all the time using RSS feeds, almost like having my own personalised newspaper, and to use it to check on podcasts, these great new things that let people easily broadcast their audible thoughts.

The things that initially drew me to Bloglines were its easy to navigate interface, and the fact I could check it from my brand new PowerMac G5 at home, and my workstation at Veritas. I didn't need to syncronise clients or download feeds like a desktop email client, everything just worked! And it made sense, the data all came from online, so it made sense for it to stay there to make my life easier. I suppose thesedays one would use the cloud computing buzzword.

I discovered so many amazing new blogs from reading Bloglines, and I revelled in seeing what other people were reading. One of my best friends Jim Kloss up in Alaska had a Bloglines account, and many other wheatheads did.

Cloud goes up, cloud goes down

I don't quite remember when it was, but as more and more people starting shipping over to Google Reader, I eventually realised that if I wanted to keep my conversations with people going, I had no choice but to move too. It was a shame, as far as I was concerned Google Reader looked more Web 2.0, but its interface was far poorer than Bloglines, and the beta version of the new Bloglines interface which I was a part of was fantastic. I also really like teal :).

While my friends from Canberra were here I took the opportunity to check my Bloglines account and saw the closure notice. I exported my OPML file, took a few screenshots, and bit farewell. I suppose that will always be the risk of using cloud software.

*hugs* Cheerio Bloglines, it was nice knowing you.

Has Google Reader (or Google Accounts in general) implemented a stricter timeout system for logins, does anyone know? I've been automatically logged out several times today with the above message cheerfully displayed when it never used to happen before.

I'm thinking it could be my newly cleaned out cookie whitelist for PermitCookies in Firefox, but just want to make sure. Could Buzz have anything at all to do with it perhaps? If they are timing out sessions earlier it could be beneficial for security but I tend to have Reader permanently open in a tab and I'd hate to have to re-login every hour or so.

In case you're still subscribed to my blog through the old address (pictured above) but don't follow my shared items in The Google Readers I'm passing this message I posted along with my sincerest apologies!

Sorry for the flurry of blog posts everyone! I had a DNS problem so if you're subscribed to my blog through the old URL still, you probably just got whacked with two dozen new posts. Forgive me, I'll try not to let it happen again!

While I have the RSS feed from my old side redirecting, if you're still subscribed through the old address I encourage you to move over to the new one, if only because it seems Google Reader updates it more often and is more reliable. Thanks :).

Checking my Google Reader page this evening I noticed all of a sudden I have 18 readers for my main RSS feed here at Rubenerd.com, and 34 readers for the old URL bringing the total to 52! I do admit I started blogging because I enjoy writing about my weird and disparate interests first and foremost, but it's another world of good feeling knowing a few of you are interested in some of it too.

<Cheesyness> So I just wanted to get all soppy for a second and send out a thank you and a hug to all of you for thinking my material here was worthwhile enough to warrant some of the time from your hectic electronic lives. Its a fulfilling feeling that has helped a socially awkward, introverted guy like me in ways you can't imagine. </cheesyness>

I'll try my best to minimise the number of typos and grammar mistakes :). I chose the above photo from my Flickr account because it looked all dramatic and the primary colour is similar to uncooked grilled cheese sandwiches.

Peace, health and happiness,
~ Ruben

It's killing me that I don't remember where I heard this, but someone made the comment that many of us online are almost welcoming the demise of newspapers because we think they're outdated dinosaurs, yet at the same time we complain about being overwhelmed by all the content streaming in from web feeds we subscribe to!

While web feeds in Google Reader and Twitter give us many of the same stories a newspaper would have shown us on the following day, one thing they haven't replicated is the newspaper or magazine editor. We've become our own editors for stories we want to see which gives us unlimited power, but then the burden is on us to filter through thousands of new stories a day to find what's interesting and reliable.

The ironic thing is I've toyed with the idea of giving up on services like Google Reader entirely because frankly I just don't have the time to sit down and skim thousands of stories each day let alone read them all, and if you don't it shows you that nonsensical unread items counter. Even Dave Winer has repeatedly made the observation that we don't get a counter on a newspaper or magazine letting us know how many stories we haven't read, because such a number is meaningless and doesn't reflect how we read them.

This is where I think Twitter has had a profound impact on me beyond just reading what someone ate for breakfast (the stereotypical use that keeps getting used for some reason). I follow a few hundred friends on Twitter who comment and link to stories which I then read, and I comment on stories and link to them. In a way I've chosen a few hundred editors who have similar tastes and views (and sometimes beneficially wildly different) as me. In this way, the burden of filtering through all the billions of news stories and blog posts a day is distributed over far more people, and I actually end up reading more as a result. Google Reader has a shared items feature, and sites like Digg let you rate stories, but just as a newspaper feels slow compared to Google Reader and Digg, neither Google Reader nor Digg have the immediacy that Twitter has.

I have no doubt none of us will be using Twitter in several years, we would have moved onto the next collaborative microblog platform or whatever it is (Identi.ca perhaps?), but when you start seeing newspapers and TV shows quoting Twitter you know it's really changing something.

Now I'm off to post a comment on Twitter about an Israeli settlement that's causing problems (no, really?), our PM's latest trip and what type of coffee I'm having at the Boatdeck Cafe. It's not what I ate for breakfast, but it's what I'm drinking. Hope nobody minds ^_^.

As I've eluded to previously I gave up on Firefox 3.5.x on my MacBook Pro OS X and FreeBSD partitions because it was far too unstable to use without going bat crazy insane. I left Windows for a reason!

For some reason though going back to 3.0.x has caused Google Reader to generate a few errors a day after not having any trouble at all. It could very well be a problem with our home internet connection here not Firefox but it is a weird coincidence.

If it weren't for the fact all my friends from Twitter, Whole Wheat Radio and the real world used it I'd probably go back to Bloglines full time. In fact at one point I was going to research whether I could subscribe to people's Google shared items and comments in Bloglines and have people subscribe to my Bloglines shared items and comments from Google Reader. Might be worth looking into again.

Max Brenners at the Esplanade in Singapore, by Angie Teo

One of the problems with using a feed aggregator or blog reader is you tend to act like a kid in a chocolate shop: you just keep adding and adding feeds because they're free and they're full of goodness until one day you're subscribed to so many feeds and you're getting so many entries you start to drown. As a result you start to click the "Clear Unread Items" or equivalent more often than you'd care to admit.

I've never understood why blog aggregators must treat each item as if it were an email or to do list item in dire need of my attention. When I read a newspaper or magazine I don't read every article or story, I only read what's interesting to me. I guess the comeback to that would be that if you receive too many email messages you only start reading ones you find interesting or necessary, but I think that's pushing it.

What metaphor do we use to replace the proverbial story "to do list" though if it's so flawed?

Whoops!

As with a newspaper, unless we specify we want to keep something or share it with friends, we probably don't want to read the same story twice. By greying out an item from our subscribed feeds our software is telling us we don't need to read that material any more because we've already seen it. Short of deleting a story altogether from our own cache of previously read articles, this is probably the most logical thing to do.

ASIDE: Notice my careful wording above, I said the software tells us that we've already "seen" a story, not read it. Unfortunately we've only scratched the surface here, should our software be able to tell me whether I just skimmed an article, just looked at the pictures or read it in full? Could it have a timer perhaps? I'm getting in way over my head!

That's not to say though we want to be prompted in the opposite way if we haven't read an item, because again to me that's akin to the software telling me I'm slack that I haven't read every single story, which I don't want to do. But then again, it's useful to tell me what I haven't read, otherwise how do I know what's new? Bummer, we're back where we started!

I've often heard it said that one of the strengths of computers are their ability to process large volumes of data in an instant that would take a human an eternity. Silly jokes about politicians and physical education teachers aside, as humans we have the upper hand in having intelligence. The fact that so called "tags" and "categories" even exist for posts and other media online shows that artificial intelligence still has a long, long, long way to go. And I mean a LONG way. A computer can download every news story and media item from hundreds of feeds to my aggregator every time I check my browser and perhaps do some rudimentary filtering based on what I've previously read or what I've defined as my topics of interest, but it's speed and accuracy abruptly stop there. "Rudimetary" is the operative word.

Whoops!

Perhaps it's not the software that needs retraining, it's us. Perhaps I need to train myself to stop subscribing to every single news feed I come across with the thought in the back of my mind that my aggregator will handle it for me somehow. Because every morning when I wake up, turn my computer on and am told that I have 1000+ unread stories along with comments from friends for several dozen of them, I end up just reading just the latter, a few other bits and pieces, then leave. I reckon if my Google Reader and Bloglines accounts told me exactly how many items I've failed to read over the years, the integer would be of sufficient length that if I had that amount in my bank account, I could purchase myself a small planet and retire there.

I haven't even touched on the problem of missing out on good stories I should have read because there's so much other stuff crowding around it, but I suspect if you've read this far and use an aggregator yourself you don't need me to elaborate any further!

As I've eluded to previously, what I really need is an electronic secretary of some sort who picks out important blog posts, emails, Tweets and so forth, then sends them to me in an email for me to skim each morning. Technologies like RSS and Atom allow us to deliver that material, but after that computers still have a long way to go.

Thesis material perhaps?