Archive for the 'experiment' Category

Twitter

Published on 11 March 2007 in Twitter, experiment and blogosphere. 4 Comments

I was resigned to not blogging tomorrow - I don’t know a) if I’ll have much any access to a computer, and b) if I have access to a computer if I’ll have much time to do any blogging - but I will have my mobile phone, and perhaps the periodic update won’t be impossible after all. (I was going to lug my Tablet down to Margaret River with me, but I’ve decided I won’t because its wireless card isn’t working, and even if it was, I think that expecting wireless access is overly optimistic.)

Assuming the mobile phone network exists when I get down south today, I’m hoping to do the odd update on my whereabouts and doings using Twitter. (Thanks for digging up the number for non-US users, Morgan! I don’t know why I couldn’t find it - it was driving me bonkers!)

What is Twitter, you ask? Basically it’s a site that allows you to post little snippets about what you’re doing, using either the web, Instant Messaging, or SMS.

Twitter’s doing the rounds in the biblioblogosphere (thanks to David Rothman for reminding me of Libworm!) at the moment. As usual there are roughly two different views of it - the w00t! crowd who love it, and the why would one bother? side. I think I tend toward the woot/positive side. I do agree with Liz Lane Lawley’s point that really only people who know me would want to know what I’m doing. Others have asked how Twitter could be applied to our work - well, we’re not all about our work, are we? We might want to socialise, keep up with our friends, and so on? :)

Some are also asking why or how one would remember to post updates every minute of the day - my response is, why would you do that, unless you have something you want to tell your friends? It’s just another way of communicating, I think.

So, if you do want to see what I’m up to, feel free. I’ve also stuck a “Twitter Party Badge” (displaying what my two friends and I are up to) in this blog’s sidebar.

Having said that, I really hope that mobile phone coverage is okay down there.

More on Google Reader

Published on 15 January 2007 in quibble, RSS readers, blogs and experiment. 5 Comments

Despite saying that I would be using both Bloglines and Google Reader because Bloglines seemed to be slow (and for the sake of comparison), I’ve actually been using Google Reader exclusively for the last few weeks. It was too much work to use two readers to read the same feeds, and I thought I’d just give Google Reader a go for a while and see how it went. I can report that I have been quite pleased with its performance, and at this point, see no reason to go back to Bloglines.

The only (minor) quibble I have with Google Reader is that any text a blogger may present in a light colour, like yellow, for instance, is faithfully reproduced in the reader, but with a white background, making it rather difficult to read the text in question. Of course, on the original blog, such lightly coloured text is usually displayed on a dark background and is quite clear. One of my favourite litblogs, Bibliobibuli, illustrates this problem.

This is the blog as it appears in Google Reader. The red arrows point to the ‘problem’ text.

And here is the original blog - all quite readable, of course.

(And should you want to read the post the screenshots depict, do! It’s here.)

The same post, as it appears in Bloglines, is also quite readable.

Hopefully Google fixes this sometime soon.

Yesterday I noted a nice feature: the personalised Trends that Google Reader generates of your feed reading habits.

The screenshot shows my Top 10 Reading Trends for the last thirty days.

It looks like Global Voices Online and Scobleizer are the blogs with the most posts that I look at most regularly. Third in the list is Kathryn’s blog!

The percentage of read posts for some feeds would probably be higher if I hadn’t had a week off last week (i.e. I would normally have read all of those feeds).

Other blogs that are in the Top Forty:
food pornographer, JadedLotus, Walt at Random, Mooiness, Random Acts of Reality, RobandWend’s Ramblings, Terra Nova, Pegasus Librarian, Rambling Librarian, Orange Crate Art, Moment to Moment, languagehat…

Screenshots in this post created by Snapper, one of my favourite Firefox addons.

Addendum: I didn’t add a link to the Trends page because it won’t work for you unless you are a Google Reader user. If you’d like to read more about the personalised trends, take a look at “I like big charts and I cannot lie”, from the official Google Reader blog.

Google Reader vs Bloglines

Published on 30 November 2006 in RSS readers and experiment. 11 Comments

For the last day or so I have been experimenting with Google Reader, seeing how it treats RSS feeds. RSS is a wonderful way to keep up with everything that’s happening out in the blogosphere, and in the Internet as a whole - I can’t imagine life before it.

I prefer web-based RSS readers, because I use my computer at home as much as my computer at work, and because at work I use a minimum of three different computers every week. Web-based means I don’t have to worry about synchronising my reader - I can pick up where I left off, wherever I am. I haven’t been using RSS for that long, and my current, and until now preferred, reader has been Bloglines. Until now, you ask?

Well, I’m not sure I can say that Google Reader has ousted Bloglines from its pedestal just yet, but the little experiment I’ve been conducting has made me wonder whether or not I should be using other tools for my subscriptions. For the past couple of weeks or so I’ve been wondering about certain feeds and whether updates were being displayed in a timely manner in Bloglines. Some usually frequently updated sites were not updating in Bloglines. Some feeds seemed to have “stalled” in Bloglines, with no new updates after a particular date. This blog was a case in point - the problem seems to have fixed itself now: Bloglines is updating again - but for almost a week there, new posts weren’t appearing. Sage, the RSS reader I use as a tester with Firefox, was displaying updates, so I didn’t think it was a problem with Blogger Beta…

The experiment has been very very simple. I imported my Bloglines subscriptions into Google Reader and just observed which feeds were updating in both readers. I can report that for some feeds, Google Reader seems to be much faster than Bloglines when it comes to displaying updates.

For instance, using Google Reader, I read, at around 1pm yesterday, that Kathryn is going to have some explaining to do (the Yellow Wiggle’s retired). I didn’t notice this update in Bloglines until that evening (8:38pm).

Also, at around that time yesterday evening Google Reader displayed an update of Ponderance. Ponderance is a Blogger blog - is this an issue? This morning, Bloglines still hasn’t registered any updates.

Julie Leung finally blogged after a long silence yesterday (I’m pleased, I enjoy Julie’s writing)! This, again, was brought to me by Google Reader last night. Bloglines only registered the update this morning…

Other feeds that are displaying updates in Google Reader this morning (but not in Bloglines): Ampersand Duck, Justine Larbalestier, Two Peas, No Pod (two new posts I think), Mooiness, Pegasus Librarian… I’m not going to list them all, but you get the picture. (Some feeds seem to be updating at roughly the same times in both readers, of course. Bloglines is not universally slower than Google Reader.)

I’m not sure what this means. Am I just being picky?

Update 7:48am: This post has just appeared in Google Reader, timestamped 7:33am. Nothing in Bloglines as yet. I’m not sure how long I’ll maintain this experiment (it’s kind of doing my head in to have to monitor not one, but two readers) - we’ll see.