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internet
Giving Feedly a chance
13I wrote about Feedly a few months ago, when they were going through a bit of a PR kerfuffle with users over deleting Google Reader items without notification (when you edit a feed in Feedly, Google Reader also changes). They’ve since fixed that issue, and I was encouraged (by Garnett) to give the service another shot.
I’m not good with keeping up with my feeds. In Google Reader, I hit the “(1000+)” mark in all my categories a long time ago (this, of course, fluctuates depending on the amount of free time I have on any given day). The pure fear and annoyance of going through everything is a major road block for me, as is the defeat of hitting “Mark all as Read.” Upon bringing my feeds into Feedly, I immediately enjoyed the magazine view:
It’s a great way to get an instant snapshot of all the newest updates. Clicking on a feed item opens it up in the Feedly page, much like reading an item in Google Reader. You can recommend the article (which I believe shares it in gReader as well) or send it to one of your social networking sites. Happily, you can also use keyboard shortcuts to jump between items and initiate other actions.
But hey, this service has been out for a while, and there are many good reviews on it, but I wanted to give them a fair shake now that they’ve address the major problem I had with them. I’ll probably still use Google Reader for when I need to power through my gaming and tech feeds, but Feedly makes discovering content in my feeds that I may have missed a breeze. For now, I’ve made Feedly my new start page in FF3, replacing iGoogle. We’ll see if it can remain an integral part of my daily online experience!
“Cuil” is anything but
68
News is all over the place today about the new Google competitor, Cuil (pronounced like “cool”). There are a few interesting aspects to it, like the paneled search result display and related categories area. However, when I did a little ego-surfing, the results were very strange.
First of all, my own website didn’t even show up on the first page of results (on Google, it’s the first result). The weirdest part were the seemingly random images associated with the results. My LinkedIn page, for example, shows a still taken from a video interview I gave over a year ago that isn’t even mentioned on my LinkedIn page. The Cranky Geeks result has the old album art for The Sword and Laser, my sci-fi/fantasy book club’s podcast.
Cuil says that they have 120 billion web pages indexed, which according to Techcrunch means they could be “arguably the most comprehensive search engine on the web.” But what good is an index that large if the results don’t make any sense? On one discussion thread started by Jim Goldstein on FriendFeed, commenter Jared (W.) Smith says:
This picture thing treads incredibly dangerously. Think of the potential misappropriation claims when someone’s photo is randomly associated with an article about, say, a person with a similar name committing a violent crime. Cuil needs to stop the practice. I found my LinkedIn profile with a completely random picture of a person who was nowhere near the profile. Not cool.
What do you think? Have you tried Cuil yet, and if so what did you think of the results that came up? Should Google have anything to worry about here?
VideoCrawler: AT&T’s answer to video search
7
I’m testing out VideoCrawler right now, a new web video aggregation and management site from AT&T’s Business Development group and Silicon Valley-based start up Divvio. The site uses Divvio’s platform for searching and distributing content from video sharing sites of all different kinds, from YouTube to MySpace Video. However, I haven’t seen anything pop up from hosting sites like Blip.tv, Vimeo or Viddler yet. Maybe because those tend to lean towards personal video blogging?
The interface is interesting: you can drag-and-drop the different modules around your homepage, which is nice if you don’t care about the popular videos of the day and just want to always see your search results instead.
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Backup those bookmarks and feeds
25My poor friend Justin had a bit of a disaster today. He imported his Google Reader feeds into a service called Feedly, and didn’t realize that editing/deleting the feeds in Feedly meant that he was also changing them in gReader — they were linked. In doing so, he lost a ton of valuable and tailor-made (via Yahoo Pipes) feeds.
This post isn’t about Feedly though, since this is an issue they’re addressing (and they’re also only 5 days old, so we’ll cut them some slack this time). I just wanted to remind people that they can import and export a snapshot of their feeds with OPML, and bookmarks with HTML and OPML. If you’re switching bookmarking services or installing a new RSS reader, it’s much easier to use these files than manually upload everything. However, it’s not the kind of thing that will sync itself automatically, so you need to save it every once in a while to stay current (if you’re using it for backup purposes, and not just as a one time import).
Del.icio.us:
Which then leads to:
Google Reader:
Yeah, most of you already knew this, probably. But I figured that a reminder is always nice in case it’s been a while since you’ve backed up all you bookmarks and feeds. I mean, most of us backup our computer files every day, so why not our data online? You never know what can go wrong.
UPDATE: Joffi sent me this handy blog post that might save a few Google Readers too!