Library clips

Shawn over at Anecdote has shared the link to his Google Reader Shared Items.

This is basically his link blog (similar to del.icio.us) and it’s great that he can also share stuff he finds outside Google Reader into his link blog.

I share mine to, if anyone is interested, it’s very similar to my del.icio.us links.

If I subscribe to Shawn’s link blog it just becomes another feed in my Google Reader, I was hoping it recognised this feed and put it in Friends Shared Items section.

Problem 1

The “Friends Shared Items” section is automatically added if people in your Gmail contacts also use Google Reader. Umm, just because I emailed a person or they emailed me it does not mean they are my friend. Luckily we can manual deactivate any supposed friend.

Anyway I think the “Friends Shared Items” section should allow me to manually add their feed so it appears in this section, rather than in my regular subscriptions section.

Problem 2

We need another section call “Directly Shared Items”, these would be items that one Google Reader person sends to another Google Reader person. At the end of each item allows you to email an item, well rather just allowing to ping that item from Google Reader to email, why can’t it be Google Reader to Google Reader.

Of course this would mean Google Reader would have to be a open social network, where you can add friends. Once you have added a friend this means you would be able to push an item to a contact. Why be limited to email if that friend also uses Google Reader.

The manual way around this is to create a Google Reader tag for your friend, eg. “Abby”, and then make the tag public, this way your friend, can subscribe to the feed in any RSS Reader . Whenever you tag an item, “Abby”, it will appear in that feed, and Abby will see the items you offer her.

Problem 3

Shawn and I have shared our link blogs, but how do we find other Google Reader link blogs.

Maybe there could be a Google Reader Link blog exchange, just like Toluu does for feeds.

Readburner may be our answer, but I think you have to add your link blog feed (ie. your Google Reader Shared Items feed), I’m not sure if it looks for all the public Shared Items feeds that are out there.

But this is geared more towards being a hot news site rather than shopping for people’s link blogs.

For every shared item, it lists who shared the item, and if you click the name it takes you to the Readburner version of their link blog, there’s also a link to the original site of their Shared Items.
I found an item on the Readburner homepage that was shared by Louis Gray, clicking his name took me to his shared items view, then I clicked on the link to go to his actual Google Reader Shared Items page, and there I can subscribe to his link blog.

Idea

The other day I came across Twiffid

This gave me an idea, in our Google Profiles we can list our websites in our profile, here’s mine.

What if you could run your Google Reader OPML (or your Twitter friends list) through a Google Profiles register, and if any of the feeds in your OPML (or Twitter friends list) matches any websites listed in people profiles, it would give you a list. And further to this, from this list it would tell you which people have public Shared Items.

In an instant you could have your hands on the link blogs of your favourite bloggers.

Even better would be if Google Reader became a social network itself…see FeedEachOther, Streamy, Shyftr, and more.

Oops, I’ve already made a post similar to this one.

Summary

1. I want to shop for link blogs from bloggers I subscribe to
2. I want to subscribe to these link blogs, and for them to appear in a special section in Google Reader (ie. the already existing Friends Shared Items section).
3. I want to send items directly to other Google Reader users rather than email them

We are piloting communities at work, the gist of it is:

Blog - broadcast, experience, ideas, feedback, status
Forum - discussion
Wiki- collaborate, document, website

Step 1

The concept is, it’s much easier to do work using these new tools rather than using email to do all three of these things (broadcast, discuss, collaborate).

Let’s not mention that content is open and centralised for others to see, all have a voice, conversation can evolve into new knowledge, tune into your social filter to ask questions and finds things…pretty much a way to get things done.

Plus all your interactions, contributions, and readings happen in a contextual place. If I want to see the forum contributions I have made on the KM forum, I just go to the KM CoP, or goto my personal dashboard.

For me this beats trying to find this stuff in my email. I like my content to live in context eg. comments about a wiki to be in the wiki itself rather than be separated (disconnected) in my email client.

Jack Vinson talks about context as providing you with a “frame of reference”, he says:

“The better I understand the particular frame of reference (context), the better I can understand what this information or knowledge means.”

This is kind of different to the context I’m talking about. I’m talking about the context of a place, he is talking about seeing data in a context setting (even better if it’s a familiar setting) to help you use your current knowledge to create new information…I guess metaphor is another way.

In a way it does relate to what I’m talking about as reading a forum reply you found in your email, makes much more sense when you see it in the bigger picture of the actual forum.

Anyway so I call the use of our communities as Step 1.

We can now learn to use social tools to get work done with much less confusion, and of course this creates a perpetual open dialogue where knowledge is continuously created and re-used in the open.

Another benefit is that you end up with less email to deal with, as now what would of been email lives at the context of the place (as a blog post/comment, forum topic/reply, wiki contribution/comment).

Although, without an inbox for each community (private messages), one-to-one messages are done in email. I’d rather these emails as private or public messages that live in context, ie. at the community…see more.

Step 2

Does this really give you less email to deal with…I don’t think so.

It’s great we are attempting to no longer just rely on the intelligence of the email system to do our work, these social tools enable us to work easier and content is no longer siloed (a centralised and flowing corporate memory). But we are still using email.

How? Notifications, that’s how.

In our communities we currently have RSS disabled for some reason, maybe it’s a good thing for now, to prevent scaring people with too much new stuff to absorb.

For each blog and forum you can get new content delivered as a new email, and this is not just a notification, it’s the full-text of the blog post or forum topic.
When you subscribe to a blog or forum you are also subscribed to blog comments and forum replies (personally I’d like a choice).

Also, each blog post and each forum topic has an email address.
This means when you get an email for a new blog post, you can hit reply and it will post your comment to the blog…nice one.

You can also publish a new blog post by writing a new email and sending it to the blog email address (you can include non-subscribers to your blog in the to: or cc: field, that way they will get the content even though they don’t subscribe to your blog…nifty!)

OK, first thing.

I really like this email interoperability, it’s bringing the use of new tools to people’s comfort zone. But at the same time I would also like people to visit the actual community to experience the whole realm. There’s more chance you are going to read something else or contribute, if you are at the community itself.

So right now, this email interoperability is both good and bad.

The more concerning issue that some people have been talking about in the forums is since the introduction of communities they are getting just as much email.

They allude to “what’s the difference to my inbox overload if someone writes an email or publishes a blog post which I get in email anyway…isn’t communities meant to help with the inbox firehose.”
They also mention that community content gets lost in their inbox amongst all other types of emails.

This just screams RSS Reader.

But it also may scream our community Watchlist page.

The Watchlist page is a stream of the lastest stuff you are subscribed to, so throughout the day you can go to this page to see what’s new in the stream. The saves you visiting every blog and forum that you like from every community you like…instead it’s in one personalised page.
But I think I have to have an email subscription in order for this stuff to be on my Watchlist…darn (gotta look into this).

Whether it’s a Watchlist or an RSS Reader, it becomes a second dashboard.
You have your email dashboard and your what’s happening dashboard.

You can read RSS feeds within your email, but the idea is that email is a tool for personal correspondence, and that’s it, and an RSS Reader is a tool for the latest updates.

Perhaps a startpage could combine both into one dashboard, or Outlook could have an RSS Reader module that is just as important as the email inbox…in fact Outlook would no longer be an email client, it would be a personal productivity dashboard.

Conclusion

At the moment we are in the pre-introductory stage of Step 1. - a social way of doing work
(lots of learning, and culture change issues to go with this)

We also need to be prepared for Step 2.

And it’s Step 2. that may win the KM team acclaim in reducing the common email overload problem.

Any department that can reduce the email overload problem is going to get kudo’s, will it be the KM team.

A while back I mentioned that Google Reader Shared Items (which is like a clip blog) needs to be merged with a service like Google Shared Stuff (which is like a clip blog).

The problem I was having is that I could not clip stuff I found outside Google Reader into my Shared Items stream, this meant I had to have two clip streams.

Well now this has been solved with Google Reader Notes.

In the Google Reader console there is now a page called “Your Stuff”, and under this there are two pages called “Shared Items”, and “Notes”.
Clicking on the “Your Stuff” link is a way to see “Shared Items”, and “Notes” in the one stream.

Share with Note

For any item in Google Reader there is an addition to the one-click “Share”, now there is another choice to “Share with Note”
- this pops-up a box where you can add a note/annotation (just like with my Facebook Posted Items).

Notes

“Notes” allows you to make a note without it having to be about a webpage, it’s just like blogging an item.

This can be done via going to the “Notes” page in Google Reader

This automatically shares the item into the “Shared Items” stream, as well as being in your “Notes” stream (which is private).
You can unshare a Note so it no longer appears in your “Shared Items” stream, and is only in your “Notes” stream.

“Note in Reader” bookmarklet

The “Note in Reader” bookmarklet allows you to add an item (along with a note if you like) into your private “Notes” stream.
The bookmarklet also has a box to check to include it in your “Shared Items” stream, before you press submit…otherwise you can decide to share it later on from your “Notes” stream.

Issues

- I wish a Note didn’t share by default
- I’d like to filter the Notes stream by Notes I have shared, and Notes I haven’t shared…this way I can keep some private notes in one spot.
- I can’t edit or delete a Note
- There isn’t a bookmarklet to create a new note (you can only do this from within Google Reader).

What could be next?

- Comments
- Tag “Shared Items”
- A calendar archive
- Template/sidebar additions
- Reblog and item from someone’s “Shared Items” to yours (like Tumblr)
- Merge your “Shared Items” with your friends (like a Tumblr group), or perhaps this could be a network instead like Friendfeed (this is more probable as there already is a “Friends Shared Items” feature.

Google Reader seems to be where I live, so instead of having another window for Webnote, I just like a tab in Google Reader…I wonder if there is a hack.

You’d think they may do this with there own set of products, at the moment at the top of Google Reader I have links to Gmail, Calendar, Docs, etc…what about tabs instead…maybe I’d use Google Notebook, rather then Webnote.

Actually this is what you can do with OtherEgo, but this is more of a profile aggregator by tabs (not quite a lifestream). Not sure if you can add a tab from a private service like Google Reader.

But I like this idea of a private startpage, but instead of widgets on the one page, it’s the whole page by tab.

In one window I could have access to:
Google Reader
Gmail
Twitter
Friendfeed
Facebook
Webnote
del.icio.us
My blog
…and several other pages.