what do the pros read?

In an effort to promote both Google Reader and its bundles*, Google has asked leading journalists in technology, fashion and food amongst others to identify the blogs/websites that they read the most.

Some of the people that caught my attention were:

1. Chris Anderson (Editor-in-Chief, Wired)

2. Adam Pash (Editor, Lifehacker)

3. Thomas Friedman (Foreign-affairs Columnist, NY Times)

Would have been nice to have some presence outside the US and also some non-journalists mind!

[update] Forgot to add.. you can see the bundles online here.

*Google Reader bundles are lists of RSS feeds which you can subscribe to using Google Reader – it is a quick way to find other websites/blogs that have content that might be of interest to you.

[image credit: Kevin H.]

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Everyone talks about email bankruptcy, but somehow I never suffer from it. I have many email accounts and each serves its own funtion whether it is online services, personal, work or online registrations. As a result I am able to get through the majority of my email. Outlook 2007 for work and Gmail for the rest has worked well.

Not so with RSS. Today for about the 3rd time this year I am declaring RSS bankruptcy and marking the 1000+ posts I have not read as read and starting again. I do not have enough time in the day to get through the 300+ posts Google Reader receives daily (as if to illustrate my pain, the trends feature in Google Reader is giving an error right now LOL).  The problem though is not just the volume.

It is the efficiency of the tool.

Too many of the posts are on the same news item (product x releases new feature y) or even worse is the same article shared by different friends. I can image the former is more difficult to achieve but surely the latter is much easier to resolve.

Imagine the ability to mark as read all articles about a certain news story.. no more rss bankruptcy..

Take a look at some stats on rssmeme.

Not sure what to make of this, but I thought it was interesting to see that BBC Persian was the 46th highest source of items shared on Google Reader*. The English BBC News site is nowhere to be seen. Even the NY Times which seems have got to grips with new technologies quicker than most is at 49.

*This is only the Google Reader shared feeds indexed by RSSmeme not everyone’s.

Check out ReadBurner by Alexander Marktl. It shows you the popular shared items on Google Reader and even more interestingly shows you who is sharing your items, therefore indirectly telling you who is reading your blog. Very interesting. Make sure you look for your link on the statistics page after you have burned your link blog.

I would surely have expected Google to roll something like this out – maybe integrated into Google News.

We need access to information at different times and in different ways – when we’re on the move we might use a mobile and at home a desktop. It is this change in circumstances and needs that devices are getting better at dealing with.

Email was one of the first devices to bridge the boundary between the desktop and the mobile. I am using Exchange at work and so a windows mobile phone works “well” at integrating the experience on the move. I haven’t been much of a fan of gmail via the mobile as yet – it currently feels a bit clunky, so I usually wait to answer personal emails when I get home unless they come to my work address but this will improve over time. It amazes me that the iphone doesn’t support exchange. It is one of the major reasons I ruled out purchasing it.

RSS is the next technology to do this and the need for this cross platform integration is stopping me moving from Google Reader. The platform works really well on both the mobile and desktop platforms. It’s all very well talking about using new platforms like Particls or fav.or.it but if it cant provide a great experience across multiple platforms then it at least needs to sync with Google Reader (or other great mobile platforms). It is now the first question I ask when I look at other RSS reader. This all comes back to dataportability. We need the ability to sync data as well as move it.