SquidRoad

Less RSS = Less Learning

Been wondering what's been making me cranky the last few months.

Now, before you start shootin' holes in my feeling, let me submit that when I'm not learning something new, I get really, really bored. (For the record, busy does not equal bored.)

It's been about nine months since this fiasco happened and all my RSS feeds went Google Way. Aaargh. That's a challenge when a lot of your learning happens by following, oh, a few hundred blogs.

 
Also a few months ago, I mentioned how I'd gone kicking and screaming to Twitter. What pushed me over the edge was the idea of microblogging, following others' blogs and then pushing my own (or others') information in 140-character bites in an effort to share.

But it's really not the same.

While it takes a lot of content browsing to find what you want via RSS feeds, finding valuable content via Twitter is truly like looking for a needle in a haystack. It takes much, much longer and yields much, much less.

So imagine my information drought of the last several months. Heck, I'm surprised I can still read at all.

Exit my old RSS reader app. (Fine-- go to Big Brother Google!). Enter....enter...well, I'm trying a whole bunch of stuff. For starters, NewsFire and Times (screen shot shown, above).

NewsFire behaves more like my old sellout tool (I'm not at all upset about it)--makes it easy to drill down into it if you want to, although scanning info requires a few more brain cells (still looking for those). With Times, what you see is what you get--in a very slick interface. If you want to feel like you're reading the paper but online, this is your gig. Beautiful GUI...I nearly fell for it, but it's just a bit too pretty for me.

As much as I love good design, when I'm looking for information, that's all I need. Of the two RSS readers I'm trying, so far it's NewsFire.

And I'm reading three-syllable words again. That can't be all bad.

Focus, focus

Being down this week with a mysterious crud that hijacked my voice has left me, to say the least, feeling a bit discombobulated. (That is a big word that took numerous re-writes just now.)

So while I've been trying not to get more sick, I've also been trying to keep up with work. It was exhausting physically, but it forced me to be out of the office a few days.

And that was a very good thing.

Distance does wonders for perspective, for figuring out the state of things and being able to see the big picture as a road map of sorts for where you need to go next.

My reading/research time is so disjointed these days, I haven't had much time to assimilate things I learn into discreet ideas. And life just isn't the same w/o my NetNewsWire. I simply don't read or absorb as many new ideas as I used to. Aaarggh! I thrive on ideas, so it's like a part of me is missing.

In any case, I may have to try to patch it all together here. Reader, beware: UNDER CONSTRUCTION. :)

Late adopter? You just might slip off

...the tech curve--completely!

What an interesting couple of weeks this has been. I'd always been on the cutting edge of tech stuff, especially social media tools. Used to blog all the time. Ck the archives.

Then I traveled--a whole bunch, for a couple of years. Couldn't keep track of my time zone, much less what I was reading. Result? No writing.

And now, that growing list of blog feeds is being managed by GoogleReader--not excited about that. Try going from a nice, neat little desktop app to a flash-based tool that may not really be all that flashy, much less functional.

Not only have I not figured out an efficient way to even browse the 350+ blogs I follow, I'm turning completely to Twitter (oy!) for my sources. That's not entirely bad. But this is where my early-adoption of tech changed to late-adoption.

Back when Facebook experienced its boomer/GenX onslaught a couple years ago, my brother told me I should join Twitter. I thought, no way--I'm not updating even more frequently than FB! And I avoided it, until earlier this year I realized that, heck, even if I can't blog like I used to, I can micro-blog using this quick little tool.

I love to read lots of info and share it w/others who can benefit from it. Would love to say I'm an info-sponge, but I'm more like a pipe. A leaky one.

Anyway, I've been making up for lost time ever since. Now I'm figuring out what my objectives really are w/social media, whether I'll ever blog again (decided I will, both here and kind of 'flash-blogging' at Posterous) and what it all looks like when other priorities compete for my very short attention span.

Excited to have a go at it again, but I won't lie: I got the jitters about keeping it all up. For now, I'm back in the game and looking forward to it.

It's time to get regular again

And I don't mean with Activia.

I've struggled lately with whether to start writing again...really writing or blogging, not just microblogging. But my brain just doesn't hold it. I'm an ideas person, and these days my head is vomiting this stuff up. It's really not all that cool. It's more like torture. It seriously limits my attention span.

Ask my husband: I'm obsessed with Twitter. 

You see, I get a little OCD with technology. Typically an early adopter (read: "geek"), I held off on Twitter for, what, two years? Went running straight into the iPhone's AT&T hell, however. Love the phone, hate the service. Bang head on wall. Fall down with bloody head. Get back up. Repeat.

It's just that, Twitter's different. I'm an information hound, and I love to share what I read and learn. I like to connect dots between things. For me, Facebook is a little too up-close and personal. Honestly, as a pastor's kid, my life was lived in front of scorecards. People always had something to say about what I was doing, wearing, eating, who I was dating. I really don't miss it that much, and I don't need to remanufacture it on Facebook.

I guess what it comes down to is this: Facebook is for friends; Twitter is for strangers. 

Better put: Facebook is for people you met before 'friending' them online. Twitter is for people you probably have never met until following them or being followed by them online.

Guess that means I prefer strangers. (My MBTI profile suggests I have "friends on the side." Go figure.)

That's it, I have to dump

I haven't blogged in a long time. Partly because I really don't have the time to write as much as I used to. Or maybe I just don't make the time. But it's also because, the more I keep things pent up, the more they build up. The more they build up, the more 'cavities' my heart has.

It's high time I get some (re)fillings. For me, those come from doing brain/mind/heart dumps. And since my brain can't keep up with my preferred journaling method of pen-and-paper, blogging it is. I guess it doesn't have to be public, exactly, but I don't mind sharing my opinion, either. (Ask anyone who knows me.)

Things I've learned since my last post:

• I love Twitter. I went kicking and screaming into it after my brother hounded me for a year to start using it. But on a typical day, it is my best and only way to blog. Better than nothing. In 140 characters or less, I can kind of express thoughts I like to learn from, ideas I agree/disagree with. Usually agree with.
• I'm becoming a bit of a feminist. Or maybe it's just that middle-age amplifies gender differences like there's no tomorrow. Hormones really do wonders for distilling life into two distinct camps--for you or against you. My tolerance for GOB networks is approaching zero...fast. Need to find creative solutions for dealing with this. Seriously.
• Family is becoming more important to me, but harder to access. I miss my mom and nieces/nephews, not to mention my brothers.
• Tennis is my mental life preserver. My competitiveness has gone up (surprise), as has the quality of my game. But how long, really, can I keep this up before the body just says, "No way, José!"
• Let's see...learning to lean more, not less, on my intuition and perceptiveness. Not a boast, just a realization that reading people and picking up vibes from situations is a quality rather than burden. Same goes for (I thought, over-)connecting the dots w/everything, finding patterns and relationships between everything. I thought this stuff made me weird and have lived most of my life thinking these all were liabilities rather than strengths.
• 20 years married is quite the achievement, in our book! Good times.

Also since the last post (as always), God has been good. Revealing so much through people and situations. Teaching me a lot about myself, building my self-awareness, you could say. Showing me blind spots. That's always fun. In all seriousness, there are just some times in your life when God allows you to grow up a little bit more. And that's a good thing.

A picture can tell 1,000 words; sound tells more

I'm sitting in my second day of the Nieman Narrative Conference on Journalism @ Harvard. It's also my second time here in Boston for this event, which is definitely an in-the-trenches look at increasing forms of narrative storytelling.

The difference this year from the one in 2004 is that a new track on digital storytelling has exploded w/lots of topics, interest and participants. It's evident to me how traditional print media still is, with a very late adoption of technology.

My biggest takeaway so far is that you can use any kind of media you bring back from field reporting, and make something even better from it. Just depends on the strength of story from the different types of media gathered.

Is your sound better than images? Use it in a podcast. Is the sound OK, but images better? Mash 'em up and produce an audio slideshow. If they're both strong and add value you can run a web story, inserting audio as a standalone component in one spot, photos in another.

The example at left is a great way to use all the media you have for a project--well, ok, the best portions of it--and putting the strongest components where they will make the greatest impact.

Fun stuff that confirms for me that where we're headed at my work is right on track for where content is going in terms of being maximized.

Ahhhh....I can go home now.

Purpose-Driven, meet Karma. Karma, Purpose.

The catchprase takes on a whole new meaning.

"Mad as Hell," and I love it

This security expert moved his entire company over to the Mac platform. Isn't it time for the folks in Redmond to stop and smell the compost?

Face it, folks: (Like compost) Windows stinks. It's not just an aesthetic preference anymore--it's a security risk. And this guy's doing an experiment...

An experiment predicated upon an hypothesis that the WinTel platform represents the greatest violation of the basic tenets of information security and has become, indeed, a national economic security risk.

The comments to this post are pretty entertaining, too. I hope Anonymous 10:32 gets "roasted."

New and improved desktop

Comes with a new and improved 15" PowerBook for showing it :)

Just thought I'd show my new, virgin desktop before it gets FTP'd to death. It's bound to happen soon. A moment of silence, please... (OK, OK, a Gregorian chant is acceptable.)

Yummy, Mmmm-Mmmm Good, Deeeelicious!

Whoa, baby.

Couldn't help it. I just had to buy this software. God knows I've resisted the tempation for nearly a year.

But I just couldn't take it anymore--life without Delicious Library (not to be confused with the free del.icio.us, which I also couldn't resist).

First, I have to admit: the cool quotient of Delicious Library is very high. But I can't get over the slick interface! I could play with it all night long. Heck, with all the books I've got to add to it, it just might take me all night.

There's other cool stuff: If you lend books out, there's a "checkout" feature that lets you put in the name of the borrower, date due, etc. This part makes me feel a tad guilty, especially since I recently read somewhere that if you lend a book, you've given it away. (Does that make one--gasp!--an Indian giver if they only lend a book? I'm so confused.)

Viewing options include a list format (like you see in the iTunes app) or a nice, dark-wood case as a backdrop. Sigh. So pretty. Oh--and you can e-mail a recommendation from your collection to a friend. I want to figure out how to recommend music (or even audiobooks) from iTunes rather than from Amazon.

 

If you've got a media collection you'd like to keep better track of, this is your gig.