Stephen's Untold Stories

I always enjoy reading Mark’s blog, but he is way off on this one. Here’s a sample:

A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don’t rule forever. That’s the reality.

Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I’m sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions “dead and boring”. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.

Some of you may not want to admit it, but that’s exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.

Hey Mark, I can only speak for myself but my Internet experience is VASTLY different than it was 5 years ago. Here’s how:

• 5 years ago I had never read a blog.
• 5 years ago I had never posted to a blog.
• 5 years ago I had never participated in a Wiki.
• 5 years ago I had never participated in a vibrant online community.
• 5 years ago I had never read an RSS feed.
• 5 years ago I never had kept an online calendar.
• 5 years ago I had never surfed the Internet on my phone.
• 5 years ago I had never made a telephone call over the Internet.
• 5 years ago I had never watched a live baseball game online.
• 5 years ago I had never taken an online course.
• 5 years ago I had never created an online course.
• 5 years ago I had never created an online learning portal.
• 5 years ago I had never used an online spreadsheet program.
• 5 years ago I had never purchased music online.
• 5 years ago I had never posted a video to the web.
• 5 years ago I had never configured a wireless access point.
• 5 years ago I had never used a web analytics service to track the web sites I maintain.

Those are just the things I came up with in a quick 2-minute brainstorm. I am of course only speaking for myself, but I know plenty of people through my work and personal life that weren’t doing most of those things 5 years ago.

I had no idea you could even do this, but thanks to the Google Operating System Blog I do now. This is a great way to share all the contents of specific feeds. Teachers could really use this to share a group of feeds for students. Here are a couple of examples:

• My Education Feeds
• My Technology Feeds

Here’s how to share yours!

Here are some pretty good recent finds. I usually put these in my shared blog, so you might want to take a look there. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for my shared items. If you have your own shared blog, let me know and I’ll check it out!

• Firetune – Tweak your Firefox settings to try to speed things up.
• Differences Between Google and Yahoo - Just in case you couldn’t tell the difference.
• 6 Online Photo Editors Compared - I haven’t used online image editing very often, but it’s nice to know it’s there if I need it.
• Some good 3-column themes for WordPress – 3 columns is all the rage these days.
• Two solutions for copying songs off of your iPod to a Mac - not that any of you would really consider doing anything like that.
• Blog workflow tools wiki – For those of you who want to get things done and get them done quickly.
• Windows Desktop Search - Maybe the best way to search your own computer for files.
• Download Your Favorite YouTube Videos - This one’s straight from the folks at Google, so it must be okay, right?
• 6 Firefox Extensions for Web Workers - Because you want to be more productive, don’t you?
• Make eBooks, webpages, quizzes and other content iPod-mobile! - Trust me. You don’t have enough stuff to put on your iPod.
• 100 open source tools templates and resources - There might be one or two of you out there who actually use open source software. Enjoy!
• How to Do Email and RSS Just Once a Day … and Boost Productivity in the Process - This one made me laugh.
• Top 10 Unofficial Gmail Apps and Add-ons - Your Gmail is just waiting to be hacked. Why make it wait any longer?
• Download Published Documents and Spreadsheets - For times when you are really bored.
• The Best Free Blogging Tools for Power Bloggers - Just in case any of you consider yourselves to be “power bloggers.”
• How to Get Started with Google Reader - If you aren’t using it, you can’t sit with the cool kids at lunch.
• Useful Google Bookmarklets - Because “bookmarklets” is such a neat word.

There. That helped to clean out some of my starred items. Hopefully some of those will help you in your quest to conquer the world.

Dean Shareski shares a sentiment that I have pretty much adopted as well.

If you don’t blog but have some significant ideas, learning, teaching to share, I likely may not know about your or even follow your work. Which is to say that my RSS aggregator has become the primary means by which I learn.

I’m introduced to books, music and ideas this way. I certainly don’t think this is a good thing to rely so heavily on my network but with RSS, I get a better sense of who people are, what type of work they are doing and am apt to use their work more in my learning and sharing. Blogging allows even authors to share their work beyond the scope of their book.

I’ve done Poster sessions at NECC the past two years, and the overwhelming majority of people who stop by still ask “What is RSS?” We RSS evangelists just have to accept that it is still a slow process.

This may wind up saving my life. One of my professors shared this with me earlier today, and it is a very thorough list of RSS feeds from well-respected research journals.

• Here is the link

They also have an OPML file that you can import into your RSS reader, which will subscribe you to all of the journals at once! Check your reader’s help files for how to do that. I did it in Google Reader by going to Settings and then Import/Export.

I did my RSS poster presentation this morning, and I was amazed at the number of people who stopped by. I brought about 100 business cards and I had given them all out before my time was half over. I asked people to give me their cards so I could E-Mail them the presentation, and I got almost 60 of those. A lot of people also copied down my E-Mail and/or presentation link from the screen, and it was really great to see so many people interested in RSS.

If you are interested in the presentation, here is a link!

Thanks to everyone who showed up!

If you ever thought about blogging, or knew anybody who ever thought about blogging, or ever thought you knew anybody who knew somebody who might think about blogging, here is a great site with just about everything you or anyone else could ever use.

• 120+ Resources for Bloggers

Mark Wagner has a great post for anyone who wants to know more about RSS.

On a related note, I will be doing another RSS poster presentation this summer at NECC here in Atlanta. I did a nice session in San Diego last year, and I am very excited about this year’s conference.

I hope to see you there!

I just discovered a very slick web analytics package. It’s called Get Clicky and it has some very nice features. Here is a map it generated of today’s visitors.

I’ve been using Google Analytics, which is free and very good as well. I will actually be using both services for a while. Get Clicky is free for two weeks, and then only $14.99 a year, which looks like a complete steal. The RSS feeds that Clicky generates are worth the price.

I just added the 5 most recent shared items from my Google Link Blog to the left sidebar. I got this idea from Robert Scoble, who has thousands of items in his Link Blog. I guess it really isn’t technically a blog because all I do is hit shift-s when I come across an item in my Google Reader feeds that I want to share. It’s really just a list of cool things I find it my RSS feeds that I feel like sharing with the few of you out there who might be interested. I will occasionally repeat an item here on my main blog, but I try not to do that too often.

If any of you are doing the same, I’d like to know so I can subscribe to your shared links. You can add mine to your RSS feed with this link.

Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology Michael Wesch at Kansas State University has put together an amazing video which demonstrates what I think Web 2.0 is all about. It’s well worth the 4 and a half minutes to take a look.

I can completely relate to this.

Like most addictions my problem started as innocent experimentation. I began dabbling in RSS years ago when it was still a relatively new technology. I told myself that it was a better way to keep up with the news. I rationalized that I’d save hours every day by using RSS to take a more focused approach to online reading and research. A few minutes with my feed reader was supposed to be like an hour or more of surfing the hundreds of the websites that I try to keep up with on a regular basis.

Well, that’s the way it was supposed to be. How was I to know that RSS would turn into the pervasive and addictive social menace that it’s become today?

Here is the rest of the sad story.

Reuters chimes in with one.

So, why are so few people using it?

Only 2 percent of online consumers bother, according to Forrester, and more than half of that group is 40 years old or younger.

For starters, the name is deadly for attracting “average” Internet users — people who use the Web and handle e-mail, but quail at inscrutabilities like “service-oriented architecture” and “robust enterprise solutions.”

Then there are the orange buttons you find on Web pages. Clicking one produces a jumble of computer codes. It’s hardly the path to popularity.

“RSS is a horrible name,” said Li. “And those little orange buttons don’t do anybody any favors.”

People often do not realize that the computer code is useless. What they must do is copy the Web address in their browser, and insert it into their RSS reader. The lack of clear instructions on many Web sites dooms the service to obscurity.

Untangle the World Wide Web with RSS

I keep thinking that RSS is finally to make it to “prime time” with most web users, and this survey gives me a glimpse of hope.

This is the first question:

I was a Bloglines user until a couple of months ago when Google updated its reader. I’ve been using Google Reader ever since.

This site has some interesting analysis along with some cool graphs.

According to the RSS Blog, some people who use Google Reader have had problems subscribing to del.icio.us feeds because del.icio.us uses RSS 1.0 as its feed format. Most feeds today are RSS 2.0, so hopefully del.icio.us will update its feed format. RSS 1.0 is no longer considered the standard for feeds.

This is also pretty cool!

In the new version of Google Reader, there is a “Share” option beneath each article you read. If you click that, it adds that item to a special page that others can subscribe to!

Take look at mine!

And yes, there is an RSS feed for it so you can subscribe to it.

Google Reader is one of their best offerings.

I have been a big fan of Bloglines for quite some time, but I have decided to switch completely to the new version of Google Reader. The old version of Google Reader didn’t interest me at all, but the new one has made me switch. I was able to import my Bloglines feeds into it, and I’ve been using it exclusively for about a week now.

Here is a good comparison of the two aggregators. Please understand that I still consider Bloglines to be a very good product, but I just like the Google version better.

Yes, partial RSS feeds are so yesterday. Sign this petition if you agree!

FullFeeds.com