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One of the better analogies I've ever heard for Twitter is that it's like a really crowded party: there are lots of conversations going on at any one time, and just like at a party one can casually listen in on a number of them simultaneously and choose to engage those that are most interesting. I've been trying to execute that metaphor for the last year or so, gradually following more and more people and accepting that there will be important stuff that I miss as a result. The upside is that I get exposed to more interesting stuff than I might otherwise find. But upon reflection, most of the "interesting stuff" I've been seeing on Twitter is largely ephemera: small time wasters that entertain me for a minute or two, and then fade away forever.

Since my first tweet in late 2007, I have made a pretty conscious choice to limit the number of people I follow on Twitter. I only have so much capacity each day to read what's happening in the world, and the more people I follow the less I can consume from any of them. I regularly stop following people who get really tedious or simply tweet so much as to dominate my feed. And I've resolved for 2012 to further reduce the number of people I follow.

I've decided to retire from the "crowded party" and instead focus on the people about which I really care, or at least those people who have things to say that affect my life. I already have plenty of ephemera in my life (anyone reading Boing Boing has enough ephemera to keep them busy all week long!), so I don't really need to be exposed to more.

Whereas Owen has decided to abandon Twitter, I've purged many from the list of people I follow on Twitter down this morning, and will likely reduce it even further in the days ahead. For the time being, I've elected to keep following a few "noisy" people (Cory Doctorow and William Gibson being the most prolific) because I do get some interesting news of the world from these folks.

This may well reduce the overall utility of Twitter, but I hope that it will improve my sense of connectedness to the people about which I care.

The internet is an indispensable resource for people, providing quick access to everything from news and stocks, to weather, and sports. Many people bookmark the sites they read on a regular basis, and making the rounds to read these sites constitutes a daily ritual, whether it's over morning coffee or during their workday lunch break. Keeping up with all the sites in your bookmarks can be a daunting task. Some websites update on regular schedules, others update randomly throughout the day, and still others update so infrequently that you never know when an update will occur. Various solutions have been put to the test in the past, ranging from the failed Pointcast news-delivery screensaver, to notify-by-email systems popular on many professional news sites.

For many folks who spend most of their day online content syndication is the only way to keep up with the tide of information updates. Rather than manually browsing all of your bookmarked sites, you use a computer program to do all that boring work for you, and prepare a complete list of all the latest information. If a website hasn't updated yet, you don't need to waste your time checking it. If all of your favorite websites have updated, you can read all of that fresh content in a single sitting, without waiting for the pages to load or looking at the annoying advertisements. And you can be more efficient by skimming the headlines of new stories to decide if it's something you really want to read now, or save for later, or skip altogether.

You may have seen these orange buttons on websites: . These buttons are links to eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, versions of the web pages we read. Although XML documents can be read by human beings (with a little effort), they're designed to be read and processed by computer programs. Clicking them in your browser will produce various results, depending on what web browser you're using. The links aren't really for readers, but for programs called aggregators.

Aggregators, or feed readers as they're also called, are the programs that do all the work of visiting and collecting web updates for you. When new content is available, the aggregator fetches the XML data and makes it available for you to read in a friendly way. Aggregators generally list new items first, so you can quickly skim all your feeds, or subscribed sites, in the order in which they were updated. There are many different aggregators available.

You, the reader, tell your aggregator that you want to subscribe to a site's feed. Most of the time, you simply enter the URL of the website you want to follow and your aggregator will automatically locate the XML version of the content. Then, the aggregator will periodically check for and fetch any new updates.

Some aggregators are programs that run on your computer. For these to work, your desktop or laptop computer needs to be on and connected to the internet. If you use an aggregator on your PC at home and on your PC at work, you may have to skip past the content you've already read, which rather defeats the purpose of aggregating the content to begin with! Thankfully, there exist also several web-based solutions. The advantage to using a web-based aggregator like Google Reader, Bloglines or NewsIsFree is that their computers do all the work of polling websites and obtaining updates, and you can read your list of feeds from wherever you may be using nothing more than your web browser. This means that you can check your list of feeds while eating breakfast at home, and then see a complete list of updated information during your lunch break at the office. Web-based aggregators also work well with smartphones, allowing you to keep up with your feeds while on the go!

Content syndication saves website readers time, but it can save website operators money. Visitors using a web browser to read a website request and receive the entire site every time: text, graphics, layout information, advertising, and anything else that might be on (or in) the page. Web browsers can cache (or "remember") some of this information, but there are a variety of reasons why this doesn't always work, and the visitor ends up downloading most everything from that page every time they visit, regardless of whether there's anything new (actually, advertising often causes this, as the advertisements change every time the page is loaded). Aggregators visiting a site's feed first check the timestamp of the XML feed: if it hasn't been updated since the last visit then the aggregator immediately stops. When updates are available, aggregators will receive only the content from the website, without advertising, background images, navigation buttons, and the like. Combined, these can prevent vast amounts of unnecessary traffic, allowing content producers to reach their audience without incurring astronomically expensive web hosting bills.

Several tangential benefits also arise from using content syndication. First, syndication-specific search engines look through feeds, allowing you to maintain a constantly-updated list of links to information in as close to real-time as currently possible. Second, the machine-readable format of feeds makes it possible to create mashups using syndicated data -- much easier than personally visiting the pages to copy-and-paste the bits you want. Third, syndication can be used to include content from other sites into your own website.

Of course, there are plenty of challenges with content syndication. The biggest challenge is the machine language format used for the feeds. Although feeds are in the XML language, there are a variety of popular dialects to that language. Some feed-reading programs can speak them all, while others are limited to just one or two. There's a joke that succinctly explains the situation: "The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!"

The most common syndication format is RSS (which stands for Really Simply Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, or maybe RDF Site Summary), which is itself a little misleading because there are nine different types of RSS. The history of RSS is complicated, with several competing parties vying to establish the definitive standard. In common practice, only two or three of these formats are regularly used, but even that's too many.

The other dominant syndication format is Atom, which is a community-driven format that is trying to avoid many of the perceived shortcomings of RSS. Atom isn't (yet) as widely-supported as RSS, but it's quickly gaining ground. Lengthy discussions wage on about these competing standards.

Thankfully services exist that translate syndication formats, so you don't need to worry about which format is winning the debate. Web-based feed readers should all be smart enough now to handle any feed format, so you the reader shouldn't need to worry about this too much. If you're a content producer, it's worth spending some time to familiarize yourself with the various formats, so that you know what you're offering to your readers.

Another issue with content syndication is that the syndication source (ie: the website offering the feed) chooses whether to provide the full content of new posts, or just an excerpt. Advertising-driven websites will often provide just an excerpt, or teaser, to tickle your fancy in order to get you to load the webpage in your browser and thus see the ads that are displayed there. Some such sites will send out the first couple of sentences for their feeds, which may or may not provide enough information for you to determine whether it's worth your time to follow the link to the story. Other sites will carefully craft meaningful summaries of new items which you can quickly skim and decide whether to read the in-depth report.

Many syndication feeds come from personal weblogs, but big businesses are recognizing the value of the technology. Reuters offers feeds for its news items. The BBC offers categorized news feeds. Microsoft offers feeds for developer resources. Apple offers RSS feeds for its iTunes Music Store to display new releases and top rated songs or albums.

I've been using Google Reader as my aggregator for some time now, and have been thoroughly pleased with it. It offers a nice suite of features, good performance, and the traditional simple Google user interface. If you're not yet using an aggregator, or are unhappy with the one you're using, consider giving Google Reader a shot.

What are you waiting for? Start aggregating!

While chatting some time ago with John about high school, I slipped into bitter old man mode for a bit, and railed against FaceSpace and MyBook because they make it too easy to "friend" people online who you might never be friends with in the real world. Surprisingly, this got me thinking about high school reunions. I submit to you that reunions are less relevant today because the kids all have their FaceSpace and MyBook and eleventy billion other social networks, so the graduating class has a much easier time staying informed and connected. The purpose of the high school reunion is to catch up with folks you might not have seen for the last five years. Reunions are an old-school social network, allowing you the opportunity to create new bonds, or find new connections, with people. That opportunity is now being satisfied by new tools. Now the only reason to go to a reunion is to see who got fat. Maybe that was always the reason, anyway. I don't know.

Similarly, John reminisced about the underground newspaper I wrote in high school. I was ultimately expelled for this. I wonder if the kids today would take the time and effort to distribute an underground newspapers through a school. With the increase in easy communication, things like underground newspapers become less relevant. Instead, we're more likely to see unsanctioned reactionary blogs and forums; not to mention an explosion of private direct communication through text messaging and email. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing; though I do think kids are missing out by being subversive only online. There's a real thrill to producing and distributing a physical paper as your voice of complaint against the system! To sit in your room and do it all online removes some of the visceral reward.

There is, however, a subtle benefit to the explosion of world-wide communications available to kids today: their sense of community and belonging can easily be greatly expanded. When I was in high school, the population of the school was, for the most part, my community. I didn't have a lot of friends at other schools; most of the kids in my neighborhood went to my school; and I didn't participate in many activities that introduced me to too many new people.

In middle school I was a frequent participant on local BBSes, a few of which were connected upstream to various networks, so I had a glimpse of what it was like to communicate and interact with like-minded folks far away from me. So I grew up taking it for granted that there were people elsewhere in the world who shared my interests and passions, and that I could exchange ideas with them without too much effort. The kids today can easily find online communities that share their interests and passions, and I should hope that that helps alleviate some of the feelings of isolation and exclusion that were all too commonly associated with high school.

Of course, as we all integrate Internet technologies into our daily lives in more and more ways, the Internet stops being a thing we consciously use, and becomes merely a conduit for other activities. I can remember a time -- not all that long ago -- when "getting on the Internet" was a big deal: a task unto itself. It required configuring a SLIP or PPP connection, fiddling with WinSock settings, and a host of other things. Once online, there was always a purpose -- a task -- that directed my actions. Even the now-trivial act of downloading drivers was a big deal. It was a kind of freedom, access to a wealth of information that was in some ways intoxicating. Now we don't think twice about the fact that our computers connect to some server somewhere to automatically fetch the latest driver. We don't marvel at the staggering amount of information available to us.

Instead, we engage in flame wars, post bizarre photos (and more bizarre photos), post links to crazy sites, and generally take for granted the phenomenal conveniences now afforded to us. We don't think twice about making a video call with someone across the globe. As comedian Louis CK says Everything's amazing, but nobody's happy.

I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It's a surprisingly thought-provoking book, and I recommend it if you're interested in learning more about the "why" behind the ways Internet communications are changing not just how we communicate, but how we think about communicating.

The book explains in comfortable detail the major shift from scarcity to ubiquity across several historical industries. The art of the scribe was all but destroyed by the advent of the printing press. The art of the news reporter has similarly been disrupted by the ease and speed with which independent agents can publish information. A subtle but important corollary to this shift is the change in relationship between producers and consumers. We're all pretty used to being consumers, but many of us are just now figuring out how to be producers.

Shirky points out that the process of publishing information in the age of mass amateurization has changed from "filter, then publish", whereby information is specifically identified as noteworthy and worth sharing, to "publish, then filter", whereby the ease and convenience of sharing information combine with the relative low cost of such actions to make it easier for everyone, everywhere to share whatever is on their mind. The audience then selects which things deserve their attention.

This explains perfectly why so much "user generated content" is perceived as fatuous, or at least just plain boring.

It's simple. They're not talking to you.
We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read. More is different, but less is different, too. An audience isn't just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn't just a small audience either; it has a social density that audience lacks. The bloggers and social network users operating in small groups are part of a community, and they're enjoying something analogous to the privacy of the mall.

Shirky goes on to detail how you might overhear some portion of a conversation at the mall food court, but you'd be considered rude if you actively turned your attention to that conversation. You're not part of the audience, or the community.

This was one of those "Of course!" moments where the blindingly obvious suddenly makes sense to me. All the people posting stuff to Twitter aren't necessarily writing for you or me, specifically. If we lack the context of the community that cares about the information, we most likely lack the interest to place any value on that information. It's easy for us to deride the boring, trivial posts because we don't care about the content or its creator. This is not a failing of the social tools, but rather our own failure to adequately filter.

I don't care much for Westerns, so I'm unlikely to watch a Western movie that might be on television. I'm not going to spend any time in the Westerns section of any bookstore. I'm certainly not going to read a Louis L'Armor novel and then complain about the fact that it's a Western. I filter out Western input from the media I select. It's easy to do with television, movies, and books; but not always so easy to do with some of the social media sources I use.

If I overhear a conversation at the mall food court, I'm not likely to tell my friends about it unless something particularly noteworthy catches my interest. I'm not simply going to call all my friends and deride the boring, petty conversation I just overheard; nor am I going to make a blog post out of it. It takes too much effort to do that, and there's basically no benefit. But with the ease of perfect digital copies, it's trivial for us to excoriate some banal blog post, or some trite Twitter update.

I'm more than halfway through "Here Comes Everybody" and am really enjoying it. It's sparked a number of interesting lines of thought that I'm really looking forward to exploring. I highly recommend this book.

I recently wondered why I'm paying $100 for DSL service, when I can get comparable -- if not faster -- Internet service for less. I've been a Speakeasy customer for the six years I've been a homeowner, and I've been absolutely delighted with the service. But it's been bothering me lately that I'm paying twice as much as I might pay were I to use cable Internet.

I originally selected Speakeasy because they permitted home users to run their own servers. For several years I ran this website (and many others) on an older computer tucked under the desk in my bedroom. I liked knowing that I had full control over all the data on the computer, as well as having physical control over the server itself. Occasionally the server would foul up, and having console access allowed me to administer it more effectively.

Looking over my support history with Speakeasy, something made extremely easy through their customer portal website, I see I've opened a couple dozen support requests. Most of them were resolved extremely quickly, and with little fuss. This is in stark contrast to the few support requests I remember from when I was a Road Runner customer. The Speakeasy support staff are responsive, extremely professional, and competent. I don't think I've ever dealt with anyone reading a support script. Quite the contrary: I've had in-depth technical discussions about Linux configurations with Speakeasy support staff, something that would never happen with cable support.

I have a static IP address from Speakeasy -- a real static IP, not just a long-lived DHCP lease. They provide reverse DNS for this IP, which was important when I was managing email services from my own server. They permit me to run servers, allowing me to make incoming connections to computers within my network. I know lots of people do run servers on their cable lines (and I did, too, when I was using cable), but that's a violation of the terms of service and can be shut down at a whim by the Internet provider.

I opened a trouble ticket with Speakeasy yesterday, inquiring about any "customer loyalty" discount for which I might be eligible. I pointed out that I could get similar speeds for half the monthly fee I was currently paying. I also indicated that I don't take advantage of many of the other perks offered to me from Speakeasy (1 GB NNTP throughput, complimentary dial-up access), and wondered if I could rescind those in exchange for a lower rate. 35 minutes after I pressed the "Submit" button on the support form, I had a reply from Speakeasy. I had been given a $10/month discount on my service.

My initial reaction was mixed. I was pleased that they were so quick to respond, but thought that maybe $10/month wasn't a sufficient discount to keep my business. I thought about it through the day, and slept on it before making any kind of final conclusion.

Ultimately, I've decided that I don't mind paying a little extra for Speakeasy DSL service. I've only ever had superb support from them, and knowing that that's available to me is worth a couple extra bucks a month. The fast response in regards to my discount inquiry and the no-fuss application of said discount reassures me that Speakeasy really does want to retain my business. I have no doubt whatsoever that such a request to one of the cable providers would have fallen on deaf ears. Finally, it's nice to know that my monthly Internet fees are going to a company that permits me to use my connection for the things I want, whether that be constant download (ie: no hidden quota or usage caps) or running servers.

Speakeasy gets it. They're an ISP worth having.