Just a bit of rambling on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Pittsburgh.

A couple of people wanted to be able to share feeds in sort of a group reader so that the effort of finding feeds could be spread among them. Which led to a question of commenting on the feeds internally. Which led to a question of shared bookmarks that is private to the group. Which got my juices flowing a bit.

I’m not sure but I’d be willing to bet there is some sort of enterprise RSS software system out there that does all of the above but is probably cost prohibitive for a workgroup of 5 or 6 people. So this has become my first project to try and build using the Ning platform I’ve become enamored with lately. I’ll keep you posted on my progress or lack thereof.

I’ve decided to use this blog in a different way than I have done other blogging attempts in the past. I want to concentrate on what I’m passionate about: RSS, blogging (although you couldn’t tell by the lack of entries), emerging technologies as they relate to personal content and most importantly how they all change the way we communicate. I’m fascinated with these social networks although for the most part they are full of junk. But I also remember how bad desktop publishing was at it’s birth. Butt ugly!!

So… hopefully each day something new will appear on this site that maybe shows a little bit of what I’m working on or thinking about. Even if no one ever reads this blog I will have some record of what was interesting me that day.

P.S. I also intend to use Ning’s playground for developing my concepts. I think they have the right idea around social networks. As I once remember hearing “let a million blogs bloom” or something like that, Ning enables the same idea for “social networks”.

However….

I am surprised that Rollingstone’s site has very little of what is actually in the printed rag. I was hoping to blog about an article I read about YouTube and the music biz but I can’t find the information anywhere on their site. I want to give Jann Wenner the benefit of the doubt in that somewhere this content must exist on their site. I thought that maybe they have it locked up as a subscriber only access but I don’t see any login screen.

You would think that a magazine like Rollingstone would be leading the way in the didgital world with enhanced versions of their articles on the web along with allowing comments from their readers. And podcasts. And vidcasts. They do have a Rock & Roll Daily weblog but nothing from the current issue. I know that advertising is a big reason for the magazine to continue to thrive but come on!

Now maybe I’m just blind and the information is indeed up there. If that is the case then they have a very bad user experience going on.

Geez.

UPDATE: I was blind. There is a login but in somewhat small type under the Welcome banner. And they do have an RS Updates section that includes newsletters, podcasts, RSS feeds, and Desktop Alerts but it was way at the bottom of the Home page which I never scrolled down to see. I still don’t know how to search for current articles or if they are even available let alone finding old articles. The search field that is most obvious only seems to search music by artist, album, or song. How do you search the other content?

The other book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson is an expansion on an essay he wrote in Wired magazine in October 2004. It’s a very interesting and much debated topic that is basically: what happens when everything in the world becomes available to everyone? When the combined value of all the millions of items that may sell only a few copies equals or exceeds the value of the few items that sell millions each? It certainly changes the playing field.

Now the tough part: which do I read first?

But what i have found is happening (at least to me) is I keep subscribing to more and more feeds trying to fulfill my insatiable need to know. God it’s addicting! At the same time I’m reaching a stage where I am quickly scanning headlines and never finding the time to read the entire article. Slowly it becomes old news.

My dilemma: start cutting back my feeds and actually reading the articles or learning how to let go of the story if it doesn’t catch my interest in the first paragraph. Which is how I used to read the newspaper. My problem seems to be fear of missing the next big thing. Geez! Lighten up Francis! Or as John Lennon said “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”

(Via Techmeme.)

I like the concept of YouOS but it’s sloooow! I don’t believe in creating the same look and feel of a Windows or OS X desktop in my browser. I think it should be an evolved user experience instead of status quo. When OS X Tiger came out an included Dashboard Widgets (or Konfabulator before that) I realized that what I wanted for my information was little apps that did one thing extremely well all housed loosely in a simple environment like the Dashboard. The problem with the Dashboard or Yahoo! Widgets (Konfabulator’s saviour after Apple screwed them) is that they are tied to your machine. I want the same functionality securely available to me on whatever modern browser I happen to have access to. And I want to be able to move my data to wherever I want to host it. The Slate article actually delves more into the concept of a Google based desktop/PC and asks the question Would you trust Google with all of your information? I’m not sure I would. But then again I’m not sure I would trust Apple and needless to say Microsoft.

So how do I reach the concept of my loosely joined pieces? I’ve taken a shine to the Ning playground especially with the release of their recent upgrade that includes the interesting Ningbar. I like the concept of a “social app” community without all of the garbage of a MySpace. Ning gives me (a geek) the tools to plug in web services like Flickr but also offers examples of photo sharing within their own environment. I’m a big believer of using tools that are great at one thing (Flickr or WordPress) with the option of working with them in my own space. This is where Ning comes in. I hope. You can easily get your data in or out as you please. The only thing I wish they had done was support XML-RPC and RSS as well as Atom and their native Rest API. Don’t get me wrong: their API is quite slick but it’s another tool I have to learn and then build bridges too from my other playgrounds. At least it’s all XML based!

This is so funny and so bad for Comcast
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If you like widgets, there’s about to be a whole lot more of them available for use in your blog or profile page. If you’d like to develop widgets and have some one else deal with the details, this could be for you.

Now this is something I thought would really make sense. Widgets are coming out in all sort of products and platforms. Yahoo, Apple, Tagworld and just recently Opera have widget platforms and it makes perfect sense for a clearinghouse to emerge. I wish I had thought it up! Maybe I can turn my hobby of widget building into a my own little cottage industry! Hmmmm…..

I’ve often thought it would be much smarter to create one’s web space with building blocks of information from sources of your own choosing and not being locked into a particular environment. Now I am a geek at heart so it’s easy for me to roll up my sleeves and make programming changes to my site but my wife wouldn’t have a clue where to start. She mainly lives and breathes in email and IM because everything else takes to much time to her to figure out. However when I installed Tiger on her Mac and she played with her first widget I saw her eyes light up a bit. Maybe with the coming explosion (hopefully) of new and more functional widgets someone like her might just get the itch to experiment.

When I first discovered Ning I had high hopes that maybe their “playground” would be the platform that would allow someone like my wife to participate but I think their interface is a little confusing for a novice. And to take true advantage of Ning you really do need to understand programming. Maybe combining some next generation widgets with the Ning platform will prove to be an interesting idea. Hmmm….