skippy dot net

I've been using Gregarius as my feed reader for many moons now. Prior to that, I used FeedOnFeeds. Both present the "river of news" style, whereby new posts are displayed in chronological order regardless of source. This is something to which I've grown accustomed. Many other aggregators I've looked at display new items only with other items from the same source; so to read all of the new items in all of the sites in my aggregator may require a fair number of mouse clicks. River of news is my preference, by far.

Unfortunately, my aggregators have repeatedly displayed the same previously read items as new items. I ditched FoF because I was tired of seeing the same things again and again. Now, Gregarius is exhibiting the same problems. It's gotten extremely bad this last couple of weeks, reporting that many posts across many sites are new, when I've already read those items several times that day! It's extremely tedious to see the say ten posts from someone's blog, which I know I've read at least five times, but Gregarius still thinks they're unread.

Frustrated, and not particularly happy about it, I tried Google Reader. It was trivially easy for me to import the OMPL of my Gregarius feeds. My initial reaction was unfavorable: the sidebar on the left wastes space; the styling of individual feed elements wastes space; the fonts are a little smaller than I'd prefer; etc etc. With my previous hosted solutions, I had the opportunity to style things to my own tastes, but with Google I only get what they give me.

Somewhat ironically, ColdForged started using Google Reader, too, and has nothing but praise for it.

After having used Google Reader for the better part of the day, today, I think I've decided that I can live with it. It hasn't shown me any duplicated content yet, which alone makes it worth the switch. The AJAX update feature is extremely handy, notifying me of new posts without me having to reload the page. As I scroll past items, Google automatically marks them as read, which is pretty handy. I'm also looking forward to trying out their mobile version on my Treo, something which has proven impractical with Gregarius.

I suppose if I were motivated enough I could construct a custom stylesheet in order to get the kind of styling I find most comfortable. That's a battle for another day, though.

I was contacted last week by someone working at Yahoo! Directory telling me that they were planning to use one of my CreativeCommons licensed photos for their "On the Web" feature for today. They wanted to know how I'd like to be credited.

Today's feature is on Loch Ness and they wanted to include a photo of Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. (If you're reading this after May 2, 2006, the photo should be available here: On the Web: Loch Ness.)

I can only surmise that most (if not all) of the photos used in the "On the Web" segment are available under CreativeCommons licenses (since they all seem to be on Flickr, and Yahoo! owns Flickr...).

CreativeCommons is a net benefit for everyone:

• readers get a chance to pursue additional photos with ease
• amateur photographers get increased exposure to one of their photos, hopefully earning additional clicks through their Flickr photostream
• a publishing entity is permitted to use photos of (sometimes niche) subjects without having to pay exhorbitant licensing fees

I admit that it's mostly the "fifteen minutes of fame" about which I'm currently smiling. But it also makes me excited to know that any one of my photos could be used to create something wonderful. Individuals are encouraged to create something greater than the sum of the parts from CC licensed data. My photo of Nessie, by itself, isn't particularly noteworthy; but coupled with an informative news item, or even a stirring piece of fiction, it becomes part of something greater. That's exciting!

For example, I was contacted last year by someone looking to use one of my CreativeCommons licensed photos for a Thanksgiving card. It never panned out, but I was delighted to know that one of my photos caught someone's interest enough to be thought of for a seasonal greeting card -- it was certainly a use for my photo that I would never have considered!

My mom used to give a lot of PowerPoint presentations in her work, and she often struggled to make them engaging. I encouraged her to scrap all the silly clip art and blended-color slides in favor of CC-licensed photos from Flickr (taking care, at my insistence, not to use the ones prohibiting commercial use). It took her about a month to prepare her first presentation using this technique, and she was extremely hesitant as she showed it for the first time. But it was a huge success: real people doing real activities provided a very dramatic background for her speaking points. Mom took the time to watermark each photo with the photographer's Flickr username for attribution, and closed her presentation with a small statement that all of the photos she used were available online for others to use. She received a lot of wonderful feedback, and she all but abandoned traditional PowerPoint slide templates in favor of Flickr photos. Her presentations, always popular, had earned even more word-of-mouth advertising amongst her peers and the sessions she presented at conferences filled up even faster than before.

CreativeCommons is a net benefit for everyone.

I'm listening to Brave Men Run, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The author really captures a lot of what I remember feeling when I was fifteen, and when I had my first date. It's an interesting story, well read, and I'm glad I decided to give it a listen.

The only thing that really bothers me, though, is the long intro and outro for each segment. I would really like for podcasters to recognize that some (maybe many?) people will be downloading and listening to these things long after the initial release schedule has passed. As such, the extended intros are kind of annoying. Worse still are the metacasts in which the author pleads for votes at some podcast ranking site. The voting for these things is long past, so their mention in the introduction to the podcast is jarring, and frankly superfluous by the time I get around to listening to it.

The one exception I make to the above rule is EscapePod. I like Steve's introductions because he usually has something relatively interesting to say. The intros on Brave Men Run, however, are long blocks of music that just make me agitated because I don't want to listen to music but the damned story!

So podcasters, please: either recognize that future listeners won't care about your longwinded introductions; or at the completion of your original release schedule please make new files available that give us just the story.

Thanks.

I got my Threadless shirt today, and in the package was a sticker for another skinnyCorp gig, ExtraTasty.

It brings the tag hype of Web 2.0 to your liquor cabinet. Use the MyBar function to see what drinks are possible using only the items you have handy. What a great idea! And an RSS feed with a drink of the day gives you something new to look forward to after work.

I just received a comment spam on one of my Flickr photos. This photo received a comment with a link to an online shoe store. Sheeesh.