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Two cheers for Bloglines

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In my continued exploration of the pressing question, “Can RSS help me keep up with the vast numbers of blogs I want to read?”, I’m also trying out Bloglines. Instead of pulling RSS feeds together in a client on your machine, Bloglines uses a web-based, server-side approach: You upload your subscription list and then you can log in from anywhere to check your subscriptions. It’s smartly designed; my one complaint — and one reason I’ll probably stick with Radio for now — is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t let you aggregate postings from all your subscribed blogs onto one page that you can scan. Instead, you get two panes — a window on the left with folders for each subscribed blog, and a window on the right with the postings for the selected folder.

Why don’t I like this? Well, for me, the labor-saving aspect of an RSS aggregator is that I don’t have to click on one bookmark after another in my browser to check the blogs I want to check. I want to scroll down one long page (which is what Radio gives me). Why would I want my aggregator to make me click on one folder after another to catch up with my subscriptions? Isn’t that awfully close to the way my browser works? Put everything on one page for me — or at least give me that choice. Since Bloglines is a relatively new service and it shows every sign of having been carefully designed with the user in mind (Mark Fletcher’s blog tracks its progress), I can only hope that it will offer this feature at some point.
Addendum Oscar Bartos points out in the comments that Bloglines does offer the one-page view, though it’s not intuitively obvious or called out in any way. I’m going to live with it for a few days but I think I’ve found my RSS home, at least for now…

Critical information overload

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Provocative piece in today’s Wall Street Journal by Dennis K. Berman talks about the growing demands on our informational intake, noting the phenomena of “surfer’s voice” (the distracted conversational tone of someone who’s paying more attention to a computer screen than to the voice at the other end of the phone), “absent presence” (cellphone users paying more attention to the voice at the other end than to their physical surroundings), and other anthropological artifacts of our multitasked world.

People have been lamenting the impact of informational overload and “Data Smog” (in David Shenk’s phrase) for a long time, of course. Today what we’re suffering from is the layering of too many simultaneous incompatible channels of incoming information: E-mail is only the tip of the iceberg. Instant messaging ups the on-screen ante. Cell phones are now considered a necessity of life.

One response the Journal piece chronicles is the desire to set certain times aside for meditation — an update of the Sabbath concept. But one interviewee, a daily meditator, sheepishly admits, “I check my e-mail before I meditate.”

I think the article was on the right track in pointing out that some of the problem, at least, is not the result of ineluctable and anti-humane attention-deficit-disorder-inducing Evil inherent in our technology but rather simply a side-effect of the technology’s immaturity: “All the data we receive are still ghettoized… We could use, instead, programs that will break down those walls, helping people keep their train of thought while they switch back and forth between different projects and devices.”

The creation of a Grand Unified Personal Information Flow isn’t going to happen overnight, but people are working on it: Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project is one key effort. No doubt the folks at Microsoft working on Longhorn feel that this is part of what they’re aiming for, too.

The ideology of the PC revolution always talked about empowering the individual, and that remains a good yardstick for success or failure in the arena of personal-information management tools. Are you in control of your e-mail or is it controlling you? Does your cell phone help you get things done or does it keep getting in the way?

This all works on a subtler level, too, since the accelerated communication channels computer networks provide also shape the kinds of things that are easier to get done. The technophobic critique has always been that our digital tools promote instant gratification over long-term effort. That’s true, up to a point. But — given human willpower and ingenuity — the same tools can be marshalled toward long-term projects, too. Just look at Howard Dean’s campaign for an example: All those blogs and e-mail messages and Meetups are aligned toward a goal that is a year away.

RSS to go

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As part of my own ongoing (and often losing) battle to work more efficiently I’m experimenting with trying to read as many of the 100-plus blogs I try to follow using an RSS aggregator. For those readers who are still in the dark about this whole concept — and, despite the excitement in the blogosphere about RSS, an awful lot of people still know nothing about what it is — the idea is that, instead of calling up blog after blog in your Web browser to see what’s new, you have a program on your computer that periodically checks “feeds” from those blogs to find out if they’ve got new posts, and collects headlines from those that do so you can peruse them in one place (and click through to those you want to read).

I posted about my own preferences for RSS use recently, and got some helpful responses. Over the weekend, I took John Robb’s advice (thanks, John!) and installed a version of Radio on my laptop to use solely as an aggregator. I’ll keep reporting here on my experiences. So far I’m finding it helpful, though I’m noticing that certain blogs’ feeds are idiosyncratic in ways that I’m not finding helpful: For example, Josh Marshall’s doesn’t actually link to the story that’s being teased; and the feed from Radio Free Blogistan includes a brief headline but no excerpt from the post, making it harder to figure out what the post is about.

By the numbers

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Dave Pollard has a fascinating survey of Salon Blogs statistics.

For those of you who have been wondering about some of the technical problems we’ve had here in recent months, on and off (most recently, thankfully, off), we’ve sort of been in a holding pattern. Our partners at UserLand, who actually run the Salon Blogs servers and produce and support the software we use, have been in a management transition. Dave Winer, the company’s founder, has posted recently that UserLand should be announcing a new management team soon. When it does, I hope to be able to report to the Salon blog community with more information about what we can do to improve whatever chronic problems may remain.

Dark matters

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Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is one of the very few works of fantasy I’ve read as an adult that moved and excited me the way I was moved and excited by the fantasies (Tolkien et al.) I read as a kid. I’m not sure whether I’d have loved it the same way had I first read it as a kid. I’ll never know, of course.

In any case, Pullman’s New York Times op-ed essay today is a marvelous meditation on the way the rational mind and the imagination coexist. How can a man spend much of his career creating fantasy tales when he doesn’t believe in ghosts and disembodied spirits? Here’s a taste of Pullman’s answer:

  The rational, daylight, functional, get-about-and-do-things part of my mind welcomes the broom of reason as it sweeps away the cobwebs of spookery. But I don’t write with that part of my mind, and the part that does the writing doesn’t like the place cleaned up and freshly painted and brightly lit.

Is there an aggregator in the house?

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I love the RSS aggregator in Radio Userland and I use it all the time. But it’s on a desktop computer that is not conveniently accessible outside the Salon network. So I’m looking for an aggregator that I can install on my laptop (it’s a Windows machine) to take my feeds with me wherever I go. I like the “all on one page” format of Radio rather than the multipane, RSS-headlines-like-emails-in-Outlook approach of so many popular aggregators. I found Amphetadesk, which seems to suit my needs.

However as far as I can tell it’s missing one critical feature of the Radio aggregator: in Radio, the aggregator presents you with a whole mess of items to read, and you can easily delete them with one click once you’ve read the page. Then you won’t waste time the next go-round looking at stuff you’ve already read. This adds a huge level of efficiency to the whole process.

Is there any other aggregator out there that pulls all your feeds onto a single browser page — and lets you delete-as-you-read?

Those who cannot remember the past…

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Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece about the rush of venture capital money into social-software companies, triggered by the popularity of Friendster.

Viewed from the perspective of a technologist or an anthropologist, social software — tools that help people meet each other and work and play together online — is fascinating and hot. And maybe a handful of entrepreneurs will even figure out how to turn it into an actual profitable business.

In the meantime, though, it seems like tens of millions of dollars are being poured into businesses as a matter of blind faith. This is not bitter words from a grizzled veteran of the dot-com bubble; it’s what the venture investors are saying themselves. Robert Kagle of Benchmark Capital calls his investment in Friendster “a leap of faith” and says, “If you’ve got this level of engagement, and people spending upwards of an hour at a time [on the site], that will translate into a set of economics that will support this business model.”

Somewhere around the end of 2000 I thought we’d collectively given up the notion that site traffic, unique visitors, page views and “time on the site” were in themselves financially significant, even in the absence of a careful and sensible plan to derive revenue from said traffic. Of course, maybe such a plan is sitting within Friendster’s prospectus. But then it wouldn’t be a “leap of faith” at all.

Radio Radio

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If you are a Salon blogger (or any other kind of blogger) using Radio Userland as your blogging software you may want to know about Rogers Cadenhead‘s new book about the software, “Radio Userland Kickstart.”

Rogers is a smart guy who has been immersed in this stuff — both software and blogging — for a long time. If you want to get more out of this versatile but sometimes confusing software, I recommend the book (based on the three sample chapters Rogers has posted online, which are also highly useful in themselves).