beatnic - just wondering

A week offline (well just about anyway) and google reader is telling me I have over 3000 unread items…

So I have just hit the “Mark all as read” button.

For a brief moment, my google reader is empty. I can’t remember the last time it was empty.

I wonder what I’ve missed.

Using a combination of different techniques I’ve been managing to keep my email inbox empty for several months now. But that “space” soon became filled with unread items in my RSS subscriptions.

It’ll be interesting to see which bits start filling up first. My “news” (whatever that means these days) tag is the most obvious candidate.

Apparently I have 189 subscriptions. And that’s after a bit of tidying up. Of those, there are only a few that I really hope will have new items each time I check - and they’re virtually all written by people I’ve met.

I’ve been trying out the newly launched Google reader, which I was alerted to via my Bloglines subscription to a Google blog - oh my aren’t we just sooo post-modern ;)

You need a Google account (gmail address) to use it.

Like gmail it makes extensive use of ajax for screen-based rather than page-based interactions.

On the plus side it’s as jargon free as you can get with something like this. A healthy thing that should take the feed reader beyond the realm of the somehwat geeky.

You have “subscriptions” and a “reading list.”

The user interface lets you focus on articles and behaves like the “Preview Pane” in Outlook so you can move up and down the list of titles and the content will appear in a larger area of the screen to the right.

But in doing so it strips the content of any of its original personality and makes everything look the same.

You can label your subscriptions so you can find them later, in the same way you can label emails in gmail.

It mixes keyboard shortcuts with mouse clicks - I still haven’t figured out how you’d add a Star to an article without a mouse.

But I don’t get a sense of community from it and I can’t see how I’d share stuff other than being able to blog it (if I was using blogger) or email it (if I was using gmail). It doesn’t feel like a two-way thing.

I’m sticking with Bloglines for the time being.