beatnic - just wondering

As mentioned in a previous post, you can ask twitter to text message or instant message you whenever any term you’re interested in is mentioned in a tweet.

As well as tracking East Dulwich, I’ve been tracking a few others including “intranet”

It makes for some pretty interesting reading but was hard to share online until I came across Tweet Scan courtesy of David Sterry the other day.

It’s a twitter search tool with an RSS feed of your search results…

You can filter your search to individual people on Twitter or have it search the entire public timeline.

Also you can add the search to your browser’s dropdown list of search engines.

That’s mighty handy.

And through it I’ve found blogs by Anu Gupta and Jeremiah Owyang, which I’ve added to my intranet reading list.

Are you involved in intranet (in its broadest possible definition) content, design, management, publishing, thinking, consultancy, evaluation or strategy?

What’s on your reading list?

I’ll kick off with my blog subscriptions tagged “intranet” in google reader (view posts/subscribe to this list):

• Column Two - James Robertson in Australia, who is also behind the Intranet Innovation Awards.
• Currybetdotnet - Martin Belam, who I first met and worked with at the BBC when he helped us with our intranet search strategy back in 2002.
• Dilbert - keeps me sane.
• FastForward - stuff on so-called “Enterprise 2.0″.
• Globally local - locally global - Jane McConnell in France. Useful international and strategic perspectives. Annual global survey giving excellent insight and evidence if anyone needs to build a business case for an intranet.
• InfoDesign: Understanding by design - digest of design-related posts and articles (including interaction design, user experience design and information architecture) compiled by Peter J. Bogaards.
• Inside out - A relative newcomer to the intranet blogging scene and a must-read from Richard Dennison at BT.
• Intranet Blog - Toby Ward in Canada. Has worked with numerous companies and seen a lot of intranets - useful case studies and advice on avoiding common pitfalls.
• IBF Blog - Rotating bloggers on a monthly basis offering insight and analysis from research and evaluations of dozens of company intranets. [I wear an occasional Intranet Benchmarking Forum hat]
• Is this wisdom - Richard Hare on networking and sharing ideas.
• Learning Trends - Elliott Masie’s newsletter on the world of learning, work and technology.
• New Thinking by Gerry McGovern - killer content and the long neck.
• The Obvious? - Euan Semple, who started the BBC’s internal blogs, wikis, discussion forum, profile pages long before anyone was talking about Enterprise 2.0 or other such neologisms. Thought-provoking ideas and ruminations on social media, the internet, society and work.
• Signal vs. Noise - The blog from 37 signals makers of Basecamp and other useful, usable and desirable web apps.
• Webcredibles - Accessible writing on accessibility.

This gives me a manageable amount of info and insight and points to other conversations going on that are relevant too.

It’s difficult deciding what to tag “intranet” and what to tag “intranet-related” - as Richard Dennison asks what is an intranet after all?

I’ve tagged quite a lot, including the frequently updating news-based sources, as intranet-related to try to see the wood for the trees as it were.

Right, wrong, good, bad? Too introspective? What’s missing? What do you recommend?

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.