explodedlibrary.info

unacceptable flaws in the Google Reader

When Google released its Google Reader, I was very interested in testing it out. I remain a big fan of Gmail, and thought, if the Google Reader is half as good a product as Gmail, it might really give Bloglines a run for its money. Unfortunately the Google Reader is nowhere near being half as good as Gmail is in its niche. It would be generous to say that the Google Reader is one tenth as good.

The Good

First to the positives. I did appreciate the keyboard shortcuts which the Google Reader introduced. They are helpful and necessary. It is unfortunate for Google that Bloglines was able to introduce its own keyboard shortcuts just a few days afterwards, thus eliminating that as a way of differentiating the two products.

The Bad

1. No easy way of marking all items as read

I confess that sometimes I fall behind in my blog reading, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. When this happens, and I find that I have hundreds of unread items, how do I get on top of things? One way would be to doggedly skim through everything, even if it's exhausting, knowing all along that new things are coming in but that I'm still stuck on posts that are days or weeks old. That's my not style. Instead my preference is to do this only for my most favourite blogs, the ones that I really want to keep up with. As for all the others, I just mark them all as read, knowing that I've probably missed some good stuff, but that I'll probably catch an echo of these missed posts later on.

The Google Reader does not have a "mark all read" function - on either a global level or a blog level. There is no option but to plough through all the unread entries. I can only hope that they fix this, because until they do, I would never use the Google Reader to subscribe to a large number of blogs. No, just a small group for here, thank you very much!

2. No refreshing of feeds

This is the very worst problem about the Google Reader, the absolute show-stopper from my point of view. I only just discovered it this afternoon and it's what prompted me to write this entry now. Bloglines is very dilligent about updating the feeds which it subscribes to, so it catches all the edits which are invariably made to a blog post. For example, this is the Bloglines screenshot of my entry from Monday night. It is up to date, and has the same content (albeit with different formatting) as what is on the actual blog right now.

Now look at the Google Reader screenshot, which I took this afternoon. The version it shows is the very first version of this post. It does not contain the extensive edits which I made on Tuesday morning, neither does it show the minor edits which I made 5 minutes after sending the original post. Irrespective of what you think about the practice of post-publication editing, it is a very bad idea not to be able to see the current version of a blog post.

Consider this situation where blogger A writes a post containing significant errors - factual, typographical or otherwise. These errors are corrected as soon as blogger A discovers them, along with a few words of apology and explanation. Normally this would be the end of the story. But blogger B is using the Google Reader, and only sees the original version of blogger A's post containing the uncorrected errors. Blogger B writes a scatching critique of blogger A's post, and nastiness ensues. In the end, both blogger A and blogger B look bad, but I dare say, blogger B would look worse.

Meh

One of the hopes which I had for the Google Reader was that it might re-imagine feed reading in a similar way that Gmail did with web-based email. Google tried a few things in this area, but none of them has really impressed.

For example, ranking subscribed blogs by relevance is very unhelpful. For one thing, relevance to what? Relevance has only meaning in the context of a search. The search statement is what determines the relevancy of the answers. But in the Google Reader there is no search statement, so how can there be relevance? Well, Google says this about relevance in the FAQ, "You can order your list by date or relevance, which prioritizes the items that seem most relevant to you." Not very helpful. Does it have something to do with the blogs being subscribed to? Does this mean that if you have turned on Google's Personalized Search feature, that relevance will be determined by that data? Or will it be determined by the things I write in Gmail? What if I don't use the Personalized Search and only use Gmail as spambait? It's not like I'm after the source code, just some basic explanation of what's going on here.

Whatever the answer is, the relevance ranking is weird, and it doesn't pass my sniff test.

Yes, the Google Reader also has googlish labels and stars. Fix the other problems first and then maybe I'll be interested.

no more rumours - the iTunes Music store is finally open in Australia!

I haven't had time to take a really good look at it, but it's definitely open and features Australian artists. But nothing from Sony. There's more information in the Sydney Morning Herald. I know I'm going to waste a lot of money on this, just as I did with the US store while living over there.

about these Australian library links

I have 2 sidebars items which contain links to some products of the Australian library blogosphere. The first item is my list of blogs by Australian library-type people (and no, I'm not going to be more specific about what this means, but I'll err on the side of being inclusive). Note that the emphasis is on librarians as people, not libraries. This means that if I discover that you're a librarian and keep a blog about something completely unrelated to your work, the link to your blog will end up here. Right now this list aims at being a comprehensive list, in that I'll add any and every blog. If the list ends up becoming too big and unmanageable, that may change

From time to time, I'll highlight a blog which might otherwise be buried in this list, as such C.W.'s Ruminations - which I've been really enjoying lately ~ C.W. is the only Western Australian blogger which I've discovered so far, but I hope that there are more out there. Doubtless if I set my mind to it, I could discover a few more blogs right now, but I'd rather rely on serendipity and let them trickle in.

I've just started another list of Australian library blogs, these are the blogs by and for actual libraries and related organizations. I've only just started looking into this area. I plan to actively find more of these, but until that happens (or somebody passes on a few links to me) RMIT's need2know is there on its own.

Next morning edits: Thanks to my first commentor, I've already added three more blogs to the lists, all from WA. Also, although technically a librarian's LiveJournal would meet my definition of a librarian blog, I'm not adding LJs to this list. Most of them, including my own, were created with the understanding that they'd never end up on a list such as this. Call me biased or inconsistent, but what happens in LJ-land stays in LJ-land. One other thing, this is only going to be a temporary project. I'll do this for as long as it seems helpful, but there will be a time when it will get too big and probably won't be needed anyway. Finally, why do I flout the rules of grammar by listing the names of these blogs entirely in lower case? It's very important that the list be an alphabetical list, and I've learned that in TypePad, the presence of upper case can complicate these alphabetical lists, especially when there is non-standard usage of upper & lower case in the blog titles.

Currently playing in iTunes: Drop The Mirror by Missy Higgins

MPOW and other linguistic atrocities

A couple of weeks back, Steven at Library Stuff wondered why some librarian bloggers refer to their place of work as MPOW.

I think it's interesting how language develops in little subcultures. Bloggers are so used throwing around terms like blogs, RSS, XML, feeds etc - terms which we all know about and understand, but can be confusing and alienating to outsiders.

That said, so bloggers may have their own jargon, but does this mean that anything goes and that we'll all going to end up writing in leet (a.k.a. l337 and l33t)?

New words and terms and acronyms will always be flowing in and out of our vocabulary. I can imagine that sometimes the new words might be good and welcome, and other times, the word might appear stupid and contrived and designed to exclude outsiders (which was my initial opinion of the word "blog"). But generally there's little one individual can do to stop an annoying new word from taking - a group of individuals, that's another matter. And once the word has taken, give up on that lost battle. Focus your energy on repelling the next linguistic atrocity.

Like many of the commentors on Steven's post, I think that sometimes MPOW serves a useful purpose for people who want to blog about their work and workplace issues without naming their workplace. Why would people want to do this? The main reason would be if the blogger knows or senses that the her/his workplace would not appreciate being named.

Read the extended version of this post.

Currently playing in iTunes: Four seasons in one day by New Buffalo

OPML hassles switching from Bloglines to Google Reader

I realize that I am not a fan of the OPML format for distributing RSS/Atom feeds. It's a great idea - and something very necessary, but the way it works leaves something to be desired.

Bloglines has been my main news reader for well over a year now. It's not that I am unhappy with Bloglines, but the release of the Google Reader (in Beta, of course) has prompted me to try it and look at other options.

Maybe it's just me, but Bloglines isn't really all that easy to leave. Here's what their help says about exporting feeds:

How Can I Export My Subscriptions?
From the My Feeds page, click the Edit link at the top of the left panel. There will be a link to export your subscriptions in OPML format.
What's OPML Format?
OPML format is an XML format. For more information on the OPML format, click here. [which goes to a another even less unhelpful site, at least for ordinary users who aren't interested in developing for the OPML format]

I'm wondering if Bloglines is hoping that a lot of casual users will decide that the whole thing looks too difficult and that they'll give up on the foolish idea of trying different blog readers.

For example, why doesn't Bloglines mention that for most people using non-IE browsers, they are much better off right-clicking on that export subscriptions link, and saving the target file, rather than opening it?

Then there's the issue of the Bloglines-generated OPML being incompatible with Google.

I ended up using NetNewsWire 2 (Mac only software) as an intermediary between Bloglines and Google, because I remembered they used to have good import/export features and was curious about testing them out again too. And that approach worked well for me.

It's still too soon for me to have an opinion on the Google Reader or NetNewsWire. After using them for about a week, I should have a better idea.

Currently playing in iTunes: Desired Constellation by Björk

testing MarsEdit and NetNewsWire

Why would anybody want to use (and pay for) a blog editor? It's not like it's impossible to edit a blog without such software. It's quite easy to create and edit posts directly in TypePad from my browser. Sometimes for longer, more considered posts, I'll draft in Word first, for saving drafts and catching the most obvious spelling errors and then paste into the browser. It works OK.

I'm wondering if the main appeal of MarsEdit lies in the fact that it draws these functions together under the one roof and that it works very quickly. I am accustomed to the slight pause that always surrounds opening a new page or anything in TypePad, and so it is quite amazing not to worry about that here. Also that I can switch between different blogs - even blogs created with different software - e.g. LiveJournal or Blogger - very easily.

There's also the integration between NetNewsWire and the editor, allowing the possibility of posting directly from the reader - something I haven't been able to do since I wrote this blog with Radio userland - the only thing about Radio which I've ever missed.

I'll be trying these two applications during the free demo and will see if the subtle improvements they offer make a big difference in my blogging process.

Currently playing in iTunes: Come Into My World (Fisherspooner Mix) by Kylie Minogue

interrupted

No, this didn’t start out as a real block, it’s just that life and things resembling life have distracted me for the past couple of weeks. Now I’m getting back into it, and it’s like, “um, where was I?” Normal service will resume briefly.