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Feed Oriented Browsing

December 31, 2007 Thoughts
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RSS ImageHow do you browse the internet? It’s a funny question to ask really, but you’d be surprised at the different ways people will respond.

  • I look at the front page of Digg
  • I check my friends new Del.icio.us bookmarks
  • I search
  • I visit my bookmarks and see if there is anything new of interest
  • I browse my friends profiles on Facebook
  • I check MySpace updates
  • I watch top rated YouTube videos
  • I see whats new at CollegeHumor

There are many many many more ways to browse the internet and far too many to list here.

I use none of these and yet all of them. I prefer to call how I browse the web Feed Oriented Browsing or FOB for short. It’s something I’ve only begun doing this year. As my final post in 2007 I thought I’d share it.

What is Feed Oriented Browsing? It is a way of browsing the web that gives you the most relevant and up to date information at your fingertips without looking for it.

How can I get the information I want without looking for it? It’s not as hard as you might think. Instead of checking if there’s new information, you are told that a website you found interesting in the past has a new update.

Everytime you go to a website you already make a relatively quick decision on whether or not the site contains relevant information for you or not. It could be the information is not immediately useful but could be used as a reference in the future or it could be the answer you’re looking for right now. Normally, in these cases you would bookmark it either in your browser or using a web service such as del.icio.us.

Bookmarks are stale and not useful. We all know that technology in general changes so fast what you know today is outdated tomorrow. Since Bookmarks point to a particular page this means that information is likely to be outdated by more relevant and better information somewhere else. Does this mean you should just forget the site and move on? No! Your mind has already made the determination that the site contains relevant and useful information. Chances are the website you found is likely to share new information that you will find interesting and relevant in the future. This is the power of Feed Oriented Browsing. Instead of bookmarking a stale link to the site, add the site’s feed to your Reader. If the site doesn’t have a feed create one using a service like feed43 or feeditiy. Often times the feed will contain items that does interest you and items that don’t interest you. If that’s the case use a tool like feedrinse or yahoo pipes to clean up the feed so that it best matches your interests.

The real benefit of FOB appears after you’ve built up a good set of feeds. At that point you can stop browsing the old way all together. Instead use your reader to find new relevant sites. If you like discovering new feeds and new sites still, rather than searching for common phrases all the time, subscribe to a feed of your search. You can easily do this on sites like Digg and Del.icio.us. You can subscribe to searches or tags so that if a new item appears in that list you’ll get notified. If you’re using FOB correctly it will be rare that you need to leave your reader except to discover a new feed and even that is possible within some readers.

Observe your browsing habits. If the first thing you do after leaving your reader is visit the front page of Digg then it’s time to subscribe. If you then hop over to your friends blog to see if he posted last night… it’s time to subscribe.

It takes time to build up a good list of feeds. Making the switch to FOB doesn’t happen over night. You begin the process by visiting your reader first every day. Only once you’ve read all the items or marked them as read should you move on to the other sites you use.

Once you adapt this method of browsing the web it will truly change your web experience. A few months ago I read a study that made a bold claim that 2 out of every 3 ‘clicks’ on the internet were wasted because the content at the other end of the link had not yet been updated (I cannot speak to the accuracy of the numbers but the point is clear regardless). Meaning if someone checked a particular website three times in a day chances are that the website would only be updated one of those times. What a waste!

Often times you search the web to find the answer to a particular problem. You find an excellent resource that tells you exactly how to solve your problem and then forget all about that site again. If you have the same problem in the future you can always get back to that site by searching again right? Well, maybe. Search indexes change and you may or may not be able to remember the search you used. However; If you subscribed to the feed for the site, that piece of information will be in your reader and if you use a reader (such as Google Reader) that allows you to tag and search items it will be incredibly easy to find.

In addition to finding old pieces of information, it is likely that the site that had that great piece of information for you in the past will have more great information for you in the future. If you subscribe you’ll see new information posted by them whenever they update which means you’ll get new information before you even realize you need it.

if you subscribe to every feed you come across won’t your reader get so bloated its unusable? Yep. That’s why you need to be selective in your feeds. Determine whether or not the site has relevant information to you or not before subscribing. To find out if the site has other useful information browse for a moment and see if any other articles besides the one you’re looking at are interesting. If not then don’t subscribe simply use del.icio.us or digg or some other such service to bookmark it. You have already subscribed to your bookmark feed right? If so then that one article will show up in your reader and nothing else from the site.

Once you subscribe to a feed your job is not done. That feed needs to satisfy your interest. If it doesn’t then it needs to go. I give every feed I subscribe to one month. If i don’t receive at least one more piece of relevant and interesting information within one month of subscribing then that feed is gone. Additionally if the ratio of articles posted to articles I find interesting is too low I either attempt to clean it up with feedrinse or yahoo pipes or simply unsubscribe.

Hopefully Feed Oriented Browsing will get you started on the road to a better web experience. It has certainly helped me.

If you’re struggling with feeds and need to learn a bit more before you dive in check out this great video presentation entitled RSS in Plain English. RSS is a type of feed.

If you found this post interesting you might like to subscribe to my syndication category in which I try to post tips to help you deal with all the available feeds out there.

Get Your Money Back with PriceProtectr!

December 29, 2007 Found on the Intarwebs
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Price Protectr LogoPrice Protectr turned 1 this December. I didn’t even know they existed until 2 weeks ago, I wonder how much money I could have saved if I did?

Price Protectr is as simple as it gets. Their claim is to save you money by helping you take advantage of online retailers price protection guarantee. In their words:

Sit back and relax. If we notice the price drop any time within the price protection period, we’ll send an email your way (and we’ll keep sending them if the price keeps dropping).

To use their service all you do is fill in the URL to the item you purchased. They then give you it’s title & current price. They assume you are buying it at that price and that you bought it today, but if not you can change both values. Once you’re finished setting up the item you simply fill in your E-mail address and click the protect me button. You’ll get a confirmation E-mail and then anytime the price drops you’ll get notified via E-mail as well.

There is no requirement to create an account, however if you wish to, creating an account gives you a few additional features such as tracking all of your savings.

At launch they only had 6 retailers. I’m not sure which ones, but I would guess sites such as amazon and buy.com topped their list at the time. Now they have over 70 different retailers listed and it’s still growing!

Consumers, don’t fret! Buy that IPod Nano or that PS3. Stop worrying about whether the price will drop in another few weeks or not and buy it now! Price Protectr is here to save the day!

Retailers probably love this because it will mean more people will throw caution to the wind and buy it now! I wouldn’t be surprised sometime in the future to see Price Protectr partnering with retailers and advertising in their stores.

What concerns me with Price Protectr is a question that often accompanies these web applications. How do they make money? It doesn’t seem like there’s any kind of a business model for them to turn a profit so will they last? Who knows, but I’m sure to take advantage while they’re here.

Send a Kwiry From Your Cellphone

December 26, 2007 Found on the Intarwebs
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Kwiry Text LogoI hear and see things I want to remember all the time. I used the voice notes on my phone for a while but I always seemed to forget they were there. A few weeks ago I was thinking it would be great to be able to send a text message to store little things I think of throughout the day. I even tried writing an application that allows you to send text messages to Google Notebook. Unfortunately Google’s Data API doesn’t allow pushing data to Google Notebook so that was a bust.

A few days ago I found Kwiry which does exactly what I was looking for. Kwiry allows you to send a text message which is saved as a ‘kwiry’ (pronounced query) on their system. It then sends you a notification using any method you’d like including E-mail, SMS, RSS etc that you have a new saved kwiry. There is also a social aspect so you can see your friend’s kwiry’s and they can see yours. I find this feature completely useless and unwanted so I’ve disabled it by setting all my kwiry’s as private. Social networking doesn’t improve everything. Social networking is not a golden hammer even though most new services think it is.

Kwiry stores your texts in their system. Once they’re stored and you get notified (using whatever method you prefer) the links they provide send you to the Kwiry website itself which then gives you search results using your desired search engine.

I love Kwiry and it’s functionality but I’d much rather use it without logging into their system since the functionality it provides is really quite simple. To do this I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that switches the links to point directly to the search engine of your choice. All you need is the base Search URL (Google’s would be http://google.com/search?q=) and the feed URL to your kwiry’s.

Use this Pipe to replace the links in your kwiry feed to your desired search engine.

It's the Variable Noob!

December 25, 2007 Techie Junk
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I’ve seen a lot of crazy code in the past few years but this one takes the cake. The project I was working several years ago was developed while the developers at my company switched to Java. I’m not sure if that excuses the following or not but it’s at least an attempt.

return (test == true) ? ((test != false) ? true : false) : ((test == false) ? false : true);

Just for the record this whole line equates to:

return test;

Hopefully the compiler is good enough to figure that out but even so it’s a lot of ridiculous confusing code to accomplish something pretty basic and fundamental to any language. The sad part is this line of code wasn’t just found in one place, I found it literally everywhere a boolean value was returned.

I wonder what I’ll find in a few years when I look back at code I wrote?

Web Visio Clone : Gliffy

December 24, 2007 Found on the Intarwebs
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Gliffy LogoI’ve slowly started moving to online document management using Google Documents. Unfortunately they lack a Diagram utility (like visio) of any kind and so I went searching for one. Luckily enough the people at Gliffy agree. The Web is a perfect platform for such a collaborative sort of document like the diagrams you can create with Visio. At this point in time they don’t support the ability to import Visio or other Diagram type documents, but just the ability to use an online tool to build diagrams so that they can be shared and collaborated on is awesome.

Gliffy also allows the diagrams to be embedded anywhere on the web as long as they’re public. You can also get many different sizes including a thumbnail version. Private documents are provided as well but that requires a paid subscription to their service.

The service itself is very responsive and in fact allows building diagrams much quicker than doing so in clunky bloated client side applications such as Visio. As with any web application one of the key benefits is also that your created document is available anywhere and no client-side software is needed. An example I threw together quickly is below.

File UML Diagram

Youtube Subscriptions via RSS

December 23, 2007 Found on the Intarwebs
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YouTube Subscription FeedYou’re probably aware of the subscriptions feature in YouTube. It allows you to ‘subscribe’ to users (or channels) who’s videos you enjoy. This means when you sign into YouTube you’ll get a list of videos updated by the users or channels you’re subscribed to.

This is great but unfortunately YouTube doesn’t provide any other subscription update notification systems besides logging into the site itself. For someone like me who doesn’t like to visit sites without a particular goal in mind this is annoying to say the least. I’d much rather know there is a new video I care about before visiting YouTube.

At first I thought YouTube simply didn’t support syndication of any kind. However; with a little bit of searching I found they have a whole list of different types of RSS feeds that are available. You can create an RSS feed for anything from a ‘tag search’ to the ‘Top Rated videos.’ They don’t yet have a way to create an RSS feed of your subscriptions. That’s where I come in.

I’ve used Yahoo Pipes to do things in the past but most of them were very custom and not usable to anyone but myself without quite a bit of effort. This time around I thought I’d make one that’s parameterizable to allow anyone to build an RSS feed of their subscriptions. I have created a pipe that does just that. You simply provide your username and the number of videos you want displayed in the feed. The Pipe does the rest and you can subscribe to it using any feed reader you’d like.

I’ve published it on Yahoo Pipes public page and you can now use it as well. So check it out and let me know what you think!

Zamzar Converts Your Files

December 18, 2007 Found on the Intarwebs
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Zamzar LogoA few days ago a friend asked me how to embed YouTube videos into a powerpoint presentation. I assumed it wasn’t possible but I went searching anyway. I didn’t come away with a miracle but I did come away with a new tool for my arsenal. Zamzar will convert any that you either upload or send it a URL to. Zamzar is also smart enough to convert embedded items such as YouTube and MetaCafe videos. They have a whole slew of other sites that are supported in a similar fashion. Don’t think Zamzar is just for videos though. Oh no, they support word processing conversion, compression type conversions, image conversions, video conversions and music conversions.

Zamzar is your one stop shop to convert your files.

The way it works is really quite simple and eloquent. You fill out the from on their main page (shown below), click ‘convert’ and wait for the E-mail. The E-mail will contain a link to the downloadable converted file(accessible by anyone who has the link, so feel free to forward it to friends or whatever).

Zamzar Convert Form

Be careful the converted file is only available for 24hrs. That’s probably how they keep their costs low. If you’re interested in storing your converted files on their system, they do have pay plans available with pricing for just about everyone.

Disclaimer: Like everything these days, the service is in ‘Beta’ and as such it might come with a few bugs. I also know the site has some pop-up ads so don’t turn off your pop-up blocker.

Goodmorning from Hulu

December 13, 2007 Found on the Intarwebs
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I finally got into the Beta at Hulu last week. I am very excited about the service which, if you’re not aware, is a new web video service that offers network video content over the internet. It’s free of charge, developed by the big networks and is ad supported just like regular network television. The reason I’m excited about this service is that it’s one step closer to the video entertainment of tomorrow.

The future of TV will be an on demand service. You watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it. Some people might say we’re already there with DVR’s. I say no, a DVR is nothing more than a carry over from old video tape technology and thought process. Sooner or later all your television will be streamed over the internet directly to your TV and that means you can select the specific show and episodes you want to watch (or even categories or tags if you so desire) rather than channels which sometimes have shows you want to watch on but mostly just have garbage.

Removing the need for a person to know what they want to watch before they watch it is a huge benefit of streaming. You can go back weeks, months or even years to get back to the beginning and watch all the episodes of a particular show. It also opens up the door to a feed system similar to RSS in which you get notified when a new episode is available so you can have a list of shows in your queue. Another benefit is the space limitation is now gone you stream the video when you want to watch it as opposed to watching it from your own local copy.

I can’t wait for the day that all movies are available online on demand. I’d love to have a paid premium service that removes the ads. I’m hoping that Hulu will add a premium service eventually that removes the ads all together for a nominal fee. If they were to do that and build the content into Media Center or some other interface that is easily adapted to the television then I would immediately switch over to paying for the service and drop Cable all together.

Thus far my only complaints for the Hulu service deal with their interface. The idea is solid but their UI needs a little bit of work. For starters I’d like to see playlists that contain entire seasons of episodes. I’d also like to see feeds that contain only the episodes of the subscribed show not video clips.

One really neat and brand new feature built into Hulu is the ability to select portions of a video to share. I’ve selected a fitting section of the latest Family Guy to demonstrate below:

All in all I think the cable and satellite companies have some new competition and if they don’t adapt quickly they might be in trouble. If I were Time Warner I’d be working on ways to getting online versions of the same content to my subscribers as quickly as possible.

Bee Movie

December 12, 2007 Found on the Intarwebs
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We finally saw Bee Movie the other day and it was quite funny. I rather enjoyed listening to Matthew Broderick and Jerry Seinfeld fight over the plights of life as a bee. The cast was impressive, From Sting to Larry King and Chris Rock. Even though the movie poked fun at the situation, it was interesting to think about how much bees really are needed. Granted lots of other critters pollinate, and the wind even plays its part, but I’d be willing to bet that a majority of pollination happens thanks to our little yellow (and black) friends. What would the world look like without pollination? Rachel would be out of a job (she’s a florist remember?) for sure.

If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at the trailer below, and if you enjoy animated movies like Shrek and Ice Age I’d suggest watching Bee Movie.

Bee Movie Trailer

Yelp for Rochester

December 11, 2007 Found on the Intarwebs
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Yelp LogoA true Web service is only as good as it’s users make it. I just recently discovered Yelp and luckily they have a Rochester page. I have recently been trying to find a website that lists local restaurants along with ratings. Yahoo and Google business results return too many chains that aren’t of interest to me since they’re available anywhere. I’ve been looking for results that are more locally oriented such as the listings found within a Frommer’s guide.

Fortunately Yelp provides everything I’m looking for in restaurants and even has lots of extra categories such as Night Life, Beauty and Spas and Shopping. I was interested to find they also have a list of romantic restaurants which is always difficult to find in Rochester. In order of highest ratings these are the following Rochester romantic restaurants on Yelp:

  1. Rooney’s
  2. Oasis Mediterranean Bistro
  3. Tapas 177
  4. Lucano Ristorante
  5. 2 Vine
  6. Max of Eastman Place

The only one of these that Rachel and I have been to is Tapas (which was excellent and I’ll be sure to rate it thus). We haven’t even heard of any of the others. There are a few missing from this list, like the Triphammer Grill, that we have been to but it’s always great to find new ones.

If you’re looking for new restaurants or shops to check out, look no further than Yelp.

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