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Google reader, I love you – I also hate you.    You are like a bad relationship that I can’t break.   You save me so much time on the web since I no longer have to jump from site to site.   You however do not give me any good reason to use you and save items.    You are a cruel mistress who mistreats me and wastes my time.   Here are things you need to work on.

The first and only thing you need to work is how saved “starred” items work within your interface.     I have been trying to clear out “starred” items since the list was getting unwieldy for me.  Let’s start off by how I use starred items.   I use it to save personally interesting stories that are not relevant enough for me to share the story.   They are also too mundane in most occasions to e-mail to myself.    Yes I know this is in essence using you as a bookmarking service – a service mind you that Google has not officially ventured into.  You are designed to display information rapidly from multiple sources and your saved items is really an after thought.    Or it it?

You attempted to rectify some of this with tagging, the first problem I have with tagging – is other then by using search I can not find a way to find the “folders” made by creating a tag.   It’s all fine and great that we can create tags, but if you can not quickly get to them, what is the point other then to give me hope.   Maybe I’m just retarded when it comes to tags, but tags do not answer the second problem I have, only the bookmarking aspect (and answers it extremely poorly).

The second thing I use you for is saving stories that I can come back and read later.   I get in on Monday morning and I have 367 unread items that have shown up since Sunday when I cleared them out.   I don’t have time to leisurely read the stories, instead I go through and star the ones I want to come back and read later.   By Friday I have over one thousand story I want to come back and read, but who has the time or effort.  The other day to get back to my oldest starred items it took me over 5 minutes of scrolling all the way down and waiting for you to load.   There has to be another way.

A few methods I came up to help the starred overload issue:

Saved feed items by date – if you could categorize items in folder by month/week/or even day that you starred them that would be fantastic and save on a hell of a lot of scrolling.

Starred item by feed it came from – by being able to filter our starred items by source feed would also be awesome.   This would allow me to quickly dig into the stories I want to read when I sit down.   Sometimes I don’t feel like going back to starred items from feeds 6, 5, 89, 90, etc. – when all I want to do is read stories from feed78.     There should be a simpler way to do this then forcing me to tag or search.  I can set up labels and see them on the left in Gmail, why is the reader data so different?

Well next week I plan to publish articles of some of the saved links I have saved by subject.   I’ve been working hard, but like they say you go two steps forward and you end three steps back.     We’ll see how it goes.

Love,

Creeva

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In part 8 I was going to write about crossposting to blogger, but that’s been delayed for the time being.  I’ll get back to that subject as soon as I get a chance.   Let’s move onto monitoring your crossposting.

Some people may have noticed that on my lifestream there seem to be duplicate posts.   This is because I’ve been working on adding all the RSS feeds from all the services in one trackable lifestream.   The benefits are that you can see and track how long information takes to get from one site to the next.   This also allows you to see where your crossposting is failing.   For example I’m noticing that my posts going to pownce are not getting through so when I get a chance I’ll look into what is actually causing that.

Lifestreaming all of our sites into one endpoint site that you can control and maintain allows all the little maintance to happy at a single glance.   We all know that crossposting is usually best effort delivery.  Not everything shows up in all the sites, but that happens because your not actively maintaining those sites and sometimes things just go wrong.

By having a single stream of all of your sites you are not bogged looking at RSS items for every site all together.  If I put all my feed items in google reader then it would take me an hour each day to get through all of them.  Having a quick glance allows the information to be singled out in a daily quick view.

Currently I’m using the wordpress lifestream plugin to handle my lifestream page.  It gives me the benefit of having a daily summary post generated automatically.  This allows me to have a permanent archive of all of my daily archives that I can go back search and vault away in my own life vaulting fashion.

Life is good.  Maintaining and monitoring in a single glance – that’s great.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 – The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 – Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 – Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 – Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 – Myspace

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 – RSS Feeds to Crosspost

The Crossposting God Series Part 7 – Where Can You Post By E-Mail?

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RSS, I love RSS.   RSS makes crossposting easy.   It also allows me to read all of my news in Google Reader instead of jumping to 50 different sites that I used to visit once a day.  RSS allows users to subscribe to your site and read them where they want to, this may be good or bad based on your advertising style.  If you are like me and don’t really make a dime on your blog, then it doesn’t really matter.

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I use feedburner as a choke point for every web service that has an RSS feed (and I’m a member).   This allows me a couple things, the first is I can easily remember all the web services I sign up for.  The second thing is I have feeds that I can automatically plugin to lifestreaming services that don’t support the sites I use natively.

Through RSS I cross post my blog to Tumblr, Profilactic, Friendfeed, Suprglu, and any other life service I come across (just search for Creeva as the username).   Now At this point I’ve made feedburner to do all the heavy lifting and bandwidth intensive work for feed readers.  I even use my feed (a filtered version) to post notifications to Twitter when I have a new story published using the Twitterfeed service.

The other key thing to remember with RSS is when we get to the widget space.   Some sites don’t have an option for crossposting, they are completely locked.   You can however (in some cases) place a widget in your profile on these sites.  More times then not you can manage to place an RSS widget.  An RSS widget shows your current RSS feed items and allows you to place them on these profiles that otherwise have locked data.

With wordpress there is a plugin called feedwordpress that aggregates feeds and publishes them as items on your blog.   They keep trying to make this plugin better, but I can tell you it doesn’t seem ready for prime time yet.  I’ve tried every trick imaginable and I always end up receiving duplicate entries in my main blog.   Because of that I don’t use feedwordpress anymore, I may try in the future.  This would lead to the ultimate life caching solution, by allowing my blog to pull in all the data I generate everywhere else, and then crosspost it to all my friends across the web.  Unfortunately it’s a pipedream at this moment.

Now click the logo to subscribe to Creeva’s World 2.0:

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In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover services that allow you to publish by e-mail.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 – The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 – Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 – Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 – Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 – Myspace

I would like to preface that I work at a place which is known for it’s high technology.    This brings up the irony of what is happening.    I logged in and found a site that I wanted to bookmark, since I’m at my work computer and may actually want to look at it outside of work I attempted to save it to my del.icio.us account.   I hit the bookmarklet and BAM – you are not authorized to view this page, this is a social network / dating site.   What the hell?  It worked last week.

I grunted and figured if I really must I could use the google firefox plugin to replicate my bookmarks.   It’s not really that important to me, and I can just email myself the link and save it later.   It doesn’t change the functionality that is missing.   I agree that del.icio.us is a social network, but not in the same vein that myspace is.   I use del.icio.us to actually do work and search tags.  If I was just going to browse something to waste time I would just go to wikipedia.

Later in the day I was using google reader to go through my RSS items and there was a digg story I was curious on.   I clicked the link and BAM – again YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED SOCIAL NETWORK/DATING SITE.  Now someone most really have their panties in a bunch today.   A couple times a week I’ll run up against a blog or something that triggers the filter, but not del.icio.us or digg.    From a social standpoint, other then your friends can see what stories you are “digging” it isn’t a really social place.   at least not so much more then the slashdot forums.

Ironically I didn’t try reddit or stumble upon today.   I wonder if those get tagged under the same heading digg does?   I would say I would be screwed if they blocked gmail at work, but I could just tether a PDA or N810 to my cell phone and problem solved.   I use gmail for twitter, my rare IM conversation, and of course email.    As long as I have a method to send out email I can still blog and tweet (though I think IM would be dead – but i think I use it less then anyone else at work).

So to all your overzealous web filters out there – a very very small percentage of users are actually hanging out and wasting time socializing with their friends on digg or del.icio.us, we are not chatting the day away.   We are reading and researching.   To those blockers I have one thing to say – I hate you.

Tevy’s my setup is kind of unique but I’ll give you the run down.

I post to my blog at creeva.com – when I make a post my blog crossposts to myspace, vox, livejournal, dandelife, blogger, msn spaces, xanga, and multiply.

My website also has an outbound feed – this is filtered to certain topics and posts notifications to twitter, tumblr, jaiku, facebook, and suprglu.

At then end of the day all the web services that I use (flickr, allconsuming, 43things, 43 places, cocomment, digg, del.icio.us, google reader shared items, youtube favorites, youtube uploads, picasa, photobucket, stumbleupon, newsvine, pownce, and any other blogs I use) are each wrapped up with whatever I’ve done on any of those respectice services through out the day and done as a single post (per service) on my blog.

Of course once a post is made on my blog it gets cross posted to myspace etc, with the exception of twitter (since I use it for notifications AND personal use) nothing really hits my blog twice since I’ve been very careful of any redundant data processing.

We’ll just say I love wordpress plugins

A few article I’ve written on this:

http://creeva.com/2008/01/11/life-caching-is-better-then-life-streams/
http://creeva.com/2008/01/23/brand-management-branding-yourself/

I’m sure what I’ve written above is missing some services and such but that’s about 90% of what is going on.

Now I know that this leads to alot of updates on myspace, but I’m sure this seems unnatural to some since most the people I know post next to nothing.  99% of the updates I see are XXXX updated profile information.  I look at the profile and it looks the same to me.   Very few people actually constantly upload pictures (I’m looking at an automated way to do this from my flickr account) or write blog posts.   So sometimes I need to go to other services to find the people like me that update their profile information and create content.

I truly want to read content from people I know, look at their pictures, or watch their videos it’s just that there seems to be so little, while I of course go through my cross posting glut.   My friends don’t like switching services and that’s fine, I’ll just bring all my glut of information and data to them.

Life Caching:

Life caching is setting up sites that you have complete control over to save data from sites that you only have varied levels of control. Getting all of your meta data in one place. Saving each detail of data in it’s place so it’s saved, used, and recyclable. Life caching is the next stage as the Data Portability Group moves forward. This is not the goal of the Data Portability Group – it is just what their goal enable you to do. The work however is burdened on to you and I can say there is no easy way to do this and some data leakage and loss will always slip through cracks, at least in this stage of the game.

Isn’t this what Life Streaming Accomplishes? How is Life Caching different?

Life Streaming is the step before life caching. While the concepts share alot of overlapping the simplest scenario is that a life stream is a picture in time that does not save your data. A life stream is ephemeral and actual current implementations are very fragile. I have a life stream here. RSS feeds expire so data is lost, companies go out of business so the links it points to is gone, or data just gets missed. But to truly get a better picture of life streaming here is what the life streaming blog says about it:

What is a Lifestream? In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. Mine is available here. Most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as Del.icio.us (bookmarking), Last.fm (Music we listen to), Flickr (photos we take) etc…Then you can either find software to host your own, or find sites that provide a platform for you.

Many people have been writing about Lifestreams and the potential value they offer for ourselves and others. Some of those people are Jeff Croft, Jeremy Keith, and Emily Chang. It appears to be a concept that is gaining quite a bit of steam.

I was inspired to create a blog for the Lifestream concept after doing a little research which I wrote about on my blog. Most of the information I found was pretty scattered and there wasn’t a central repository of resources so I thought I should create one. I feel that beyond the self expression of allowing people to track their actions in a passive manner there will be many more exciting technologies that will surface from the backend data aggregation that can occur from people supplying this information.

The rub is that 99% of life streams only save the links of the RSS feeds and do not save the actual data. This is inefficient in design because like I said before data get’s lost for various reasons. Life caching however has the prime goal of saving that individual data for your use and your manipulation. This gives you freedom to do with what you want. Take your data anywhere and everywhere, do with it what you will.

How is this different from the Data Portability Group?

In some aspects, like the concepts of life streaming, life caching shares a few steps in common with the Data Portability Group. What the Data Portability Group means to give is methods and standards that give you tools to do with your data what you will. However, this doesn’t actually mean you will do anything with it or that there will be a standard out of the box configuration for you. The responsibility is on you to act and use these tools that will hopefully emerge.

The Data Portability Group is key for this going forward and allowing you to withdraw your data from the sites that were previously walled gardens. After the garden gates are finally thrown open you have the freedom to do with the data what you will. Please put this power to good use.

Why Do I care?

You should care because this is about you. It is who you are. It does not specifically define you in any ways and most people would understand that it’s a complete picture of you. There are however aspects of you that you may want to share at a later date. The stories your grandmother told you will get fuzzier over time. Hopefully the idea of life caching which is still in it’s infancy will lead to life story archives that the generations after us can learn from. Our grandkids will be able ot mine the data and read the stories you want to pass on.

Will those after you care that you listened to Fallout Boy on June 7th, 2008? Maybe not, but maybe your grandkids will discover similar music tastes with you. It will give them an understanding of who you are. It will also give them ways to identify with you in a way that you could never identify with the pilgrims that came across on the mayflower.

What do I save?

The ideal answer is everything. I would say between the RSS streams I save and the email I collect I am almost up to a 90% efficiency of collecting my personal data online.

To give you an example:

• I save everything I dig.
• I write places I go and stories about them in 43 places
• I write about things I’ve done at 43 things
• I save stories about people I’ve met at 43 people
• I save all the music I listen to that can be tracked with last.fm
• I track all boks I read and movies I watch with with allconsuming
• I save comments I make with cocomments
• I save when and what pictures I’ve uploaded to Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa
• I save collections of data that I find meaning full with lists of best
• I save the bookmarks I make in del.icio.us
• I save the stories I’ve stumbled upon
• I save the things I’ve shared in google reader
• I save my newsvine articles
• I save my pownces and my tweets
• I save the stories I liked at reddit
• I save the videos I liked an/or uploaded to youtube

This may seem like a lot of data. It is, but it’s also what we deal with in a normal consuming internet fashion. I don’t use the tools that save which applications I’m running and I’m looking for something like last.fm for movies so it’s more automatic – but that will come in time.

Via e-mail I save my phone calls, my bills, banking history- all this can be stored offline and databased in the home. Your own personal Google for yourself should be the end goal of life caching.

Doesn’t this make it easier for companies to mine data about me?

Yes the google monster is omnipotent. Anything you share online can be snagged up and archived away by google. Is this a good thing? Maybe or maybe not. There is no reason you would need to make most of this data public. You could set up to store this data in email archives, private data sites, or personal home encrypted databases. Life caching is not about displaying your life. It’s about having control over it and saving it for a future date.

As the Data Portability Group expands they hope to implement permission controls for the data. This will help prevent against data mining to some extent. The only true answer is that if there are things that you don’t want anyone to know about do not place them anywhere that is publicly accessible or in the hands of any company or person other then yourself.

How do I store and backup the data?

There are many ways. I use WordPress with a variety of plugins to maintain all my data on the site. I also use quite a bit of feedburner kung-fu and gmail filters. The key thing is that I can extract this data into other formats from just those two methods. I could dump it into a personal database or wiki. The tools are only at the beginning of stages to make this useful for you. It is easier to back it up before you lose it then to want it after it is gone.

What Can’t I backup?

In an ideal world there is nothing that you can’t backup. We don’t however live in an ideal world. Mostly the limitations deal with which sites give you some form of access to your data. Some don’t allow you to take friend’s list with you. Other sites don’t allow you to get posts out unless you implement site scraping which could break the terms of service you agreed to.

The limitation is in the tools and the agreements and the Data Portability Group is helping lead the future in developments that will allow you greater access to your own data.

How do you share with your friends?

Beyond having a public blog which your friends may or may not visit there are multiple ways. I have two major RSS feeds coming out my website. The public RSS feed gives everyone a filtered feed of my posts. This way they don’t get spammed with every song I listen to on last.fm or every single story I digg when it happens. This RSS feed then goes and notifies my twitter friends that I’ve posted something new that I find relevant. It also goes out and feeds the stories to tumblr, jaiku, and facebook. It is also the feed that my RSS readers get.

The secondary feed goes to feedburner and gives me a post to email option. This allows me to save via an email archive all of my daily posts so they are searchable through gmail for myself. Users could subscribe to this feed if they asked me, it’s just the amount of data can sometimes be overwhelming and I’ve had a few complaints from a couple of twitter friends.

From my wordpress blog I post to other blog sites. For example when I finish and publish this post it will also be posted at my msn spaces accounts, my old blog at blogspot, vox, xanga, myspace, livejournal, and dandelife. So no matter where you have friended me you can get notifications that I’ve published and posted something.

Finally in some of the message boards I use my signature contains a java script that rotates my 5 newest stories so people can read the headlines and click if they find it interesting.

Do you truly think that this is the future?

Yes, your data is you and part of you is also your data. Hopefully the stories we wish to pass down can be archived, saved, and cached for all to read and consume for generations to come.

Final Notes:

I hope this explanation is relevant for you and that you have interesting in preserving your own data. Each of the links in this article will help you with different aspects of your design. If you have further questions or need some details expanded please leave a comment or contact me so we can hash out ideas and clarify them.

For those heavily interested I would recommend posting and devising ways that you can cache your online and offline life. Work with the Data Portability Group on tools to make this work. The most important thing is to only deal with companies that allow you to do with your data what you want and place it where you need it. Thank and support the companies that do.