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Sometimes I read a post that really gets me thinking. Anil Dashes' recent post 'The web we lost' did it this time. I think reading the full post is well worth your time if you're interested in where the web is headed. Two fragments from the post triggered me the most: We've lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich. But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be. (...)  The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the p...

Talking to an old-aged man who had just discovered the internet, he said: "The internet is just so great, what a huge amount of sources we have there!" And I agree with him. The internet is amazing. The huge amount of content shared there about all kinds of topics. The way we can interact with content and people via the internet. The amazing number of different internet services. And we have reached the end of what the internet will bring us. But is the internet all good. There have been many that question if the internet is such a positive force. Shouldn't we question some (or all) of the changes the internet is doing to the world and to. Andrew Keen wrote about the negative aspects of the internet on culture . Nicolas Carr published about book about what the internet is doing to our brain . And more can be mentioned here. Recently I bumped into a review of The Filter Bubble in my Dutch newspaper , went over to watch the related TED Talk with the same title and ...

Say something happens and you hear about it on TV or you read about it on the web. This topic really interests you and you wonder how it will end. For instance a murder case. As you know lots of topics start on one day, but don't end until months later. How do you keep track of them? Do you just bump into its 'solution' on tv or the web? Or do you have some way of tracking that topic? Wouldn't it be interesting if you could just point to the article or video about the topic and say: subscribe to all articles about this topic. A topic-RSS feed. Of course you can do this for big topics, using hashtags in Twitter for instance. And you can also define a query and subscribe to that feed, using Google Alerts for instance. But for smaller topics it's not that easy. Or am I missing something? Or do you know of apps that already solve this problem? Tags van Technorati: news , search , tracking , rss , feeds

Filtering information has always been important, but seems to be ever more important in the networked world we live in. I'm experiencing this too. In no time I subscribed to lots of interesting blogs. And I love the way this can be done using a feedreader and RSS technology. But what to do when you have(?) to sift through hundreds of posts a day? Is there a way to help you decide what to read and what not? For this reason I thought I'd try Postrank (used to be AidRSS). And I must say it's been very helpful in several ways. Postrank ranks the feeds you get in your feedreader. It basically gives every post a number (1-10) telling you how popular a post is. This is nice. For me it doesn't imply I don't read post that have a lower rank. Sometimes these posts are even more interesting than popular ones! But Postrank helps me filter posts from blogs with loads of posts-per-day. And it helps me filter my Google Alert RSS feed. Lately Google Alert is giving me way to ...

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting post on the 'Enterprise RSS' market and says it's dead . Go over and read the post and join the conversation. I commented too by saying: Maybe I'm one of the only people that agrees with your post. We did an in depth investigation on Enterprise RSS in our company. We built our own feedreader some time ago, but this app was outdated, compared to Google Reader and the like. And because we thought feedreaders/feedreading matured we were quite convinced we'd find a vendor that would meet our needs. Sorry to say we didn't find one. One of the main reasons is security. We wrote about it here . Newsgator seems to be the only one responding to our wishlist and actually says they will address our needs soon. So, for now I'm using RSSpopper to read internal feeds. This implies there is a big opportunity in this market. If you get things right here (and why not just start by copying Google Reader and adding security features?), you...

As you know I'm a happy Google Alerts user . However, I've been looking for a way to read the alerts in my feedreader. Not too long ago I told you Google is working on it. And now... it's there and it works . And I love it! [Thanks for the pointer, Google Operating System ]

Great! Google is preparing something new: allowing us to create RSS feeds for web search results. RWW has the story/rumor . This is good news, because the tool that already did this, Feedmysearch, doesn't work as I wrote before .

I was pretty enthusiastic about this new app Feedmysearch and started using it right away. I'm glad I didn't delete my Google Alerts yet. I set up several Feedmysearch feeds on topics as "document management" and "knowledge management". The results are horrible. Google Alerts gives me daily results, which are pretty relevant. Feedmysearch gives me a feed every so often, and the results are really bad (old, limited, etc.). I stopped using Feedmysearch. Back to good old Alerts (and my regular feeds of course). I wonder: Am I the only one experiencing this?

A couple of days ago I mentioned 'Feedmysearch' with which you can RSS-ify a Google query. Very neat, but the 'automatic subscribe button' on their site didn't work for me. However it does work in this way: - type in the Google query you want to RSS-ify, - click 'Feed my search!', - copy the URL (instead of hitting the 'subscribe' button), - paste it into your feedreader (in my case Google Reader ) ... and you're all set!

Just read the interesting article by Josh Bernhoff and Charlene Li , titled "Harnessing the Power of the Oh-So-Social Web" (published in MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2008). Lots of the article is a nice summary of the stuff that has been going on in the social media world for some time now and how it's being used. What I really like are the tables on page 38 en 41. The table on page 38 is about "Participation in Online Social Activities Around the World". I was shocked to see the low percentage of people using RSS (8% in US, 3% in UK, 0%!! in Japan, 4% in Germany and 1% in South Korea). We RSS users have a lot of explaning to do! The table on page 41 is about "Using Social Applications in Different Departments". It gives a nice overview of what social applications you can use in different departments and how. UPDATE: Just found out this article was also translated into Dutch. It was published in Management Executive , juli/augustus 2008, "...

I've been waiting for this for some time: to be able to turn Google searches into an RSS feed. I've been using Google Alerts , but I don't like getting the results in my Inbox. Feedmysearch solves the problem nicely! It turns your Google query nicely into an RSS feeds. Thanks Lifehacker for the pointer.

Not to long ago I received an invite for the new feed reader fav.or.it . I wrote about this feed reader before and said I this seemed to be the new norm for reader. Now that I've used fav.or.it I'm not as enthousiastic about it as I hoped to be. Fav.or.it looks great: great look and feel, very user-friendly. It's also a very social feed reader (sharing tags, feeds, most-read posts, etc. etc.)! But it's still really in beta. You're not able to add your own feeds yet. You can only subscribe to predefined feeds. What I was most curious about was replying to feeds right from your feed reader. But for some reason, this doesn't work. I tried replying to some posts. The reply did not end up on the blog that I replied to. I thought: maybe this takes a while. So I waited some. But still it don't show up. My reply also didn't end up in the '(my) conversations' section... (By the way, it would be nice if you could add your own feeds, because replying to a...

James Dellow has an interesting post on his ChiefTech blog about the question "Why focus on Enterprise RSS" . At the end he points to some interesting slides about his view on Intranet 2.0 and he says: RSS readers, forums, blogs and wikis are applications, but Enterprise RSS is part of the Intranet 2.0 infrastructure ... and its only with the right infrastructure that users will be provided with the building blocks to meet emergent future needs. I strongly agree with this statement. RSS must be seen as infrastructure. But not only intranet infrastructure, but also IT and Communication infrastructure, I'd say. So, if RSS is infrastructure, I was wondering what your thoughts are on 'enterprise RSS servers' and RSS-ifying corporate information? What's your vision on these topics? How would you implement RSS in the enterprise?

Understanding RSS is a critical factor "in the successful adoption of wikis (and other social media tools)" in enterprises, says ChiefTech's James Dellow (- I'll write more on this post soon!). If so, then explaining RSS to others is important. This blog post by Common Craft with wonderful blogposts and vid's addresses this issue.

Read/WriteWeb has an interesting post on which feedreader has the most subscribers, Bloglines (“owned by owned by Ask ” ) or Google Reader . And an update . I’m a Google Reader user and am happy with Reader. I wouldn’t easily switch between reader unless there is some substantial added value. However, integrating easy comment reading and posting seems to be a distinctive feature. As does feed search . Oh, Google just added search to Reader! Techcrunch and Google Operating System have the story.

What are comment posting and reading best-practices? Sometime ago I posted this question. In the meantime ReadWriteWeb has an interesting post on a new feedreader , called fav.or.it that: ...lets you read feed content and comment , all within the app. The comments can be two-way, meaning publishers can choose to aggregate fav.or.it comments into their blogs. A video also gives you an idea what it looks like and how it works. Is this the answer to my question? It sure looks like it! But we'll have to see in practice. Soon they'll be open to the public.

Just set up a "Shared items list" which shows feeds I've read and like to share with you. They're on my blog (on the right hand side). You can also find them here (and subscribe to it, if you want). Hope you enjoy it.

I posted about missing search in Google Reader before here . Today InformationWeek ran an article titled "What's next from Google? Perhaps Reader Search, Hosted Google Enterprise" . It says: Google Reader, the company's syndicated newsreader, is search-less today, despite significant demand for the ability to search through news feeds and other RSS subscriptions. A few hacks to search through Google Reader feeds have even popped up on the Internet. The Google Reader team "gets the message," according to Google software engineer Matt Cutts, and Google Reader search is one of the top priorities on the team's list. Looking forward to it! And how about adding Google Reader to the Google Apps package ?

A fellow blogger asked me to review i-Fetch , a RSS reader by Ideafarms . I took some time to look at iFetch. And compared it to what I'm using: Google Reader . (Disclaimer: again, I didn't use iFetch and using it sometimes changes my impression... ) - Looking at the list of 'Features', my first reaction was: nothing new, nothing that Google Reader, Bloglines , etc can't do. However, after looking more closely i-Fetch does have interesting new stuff (- at least new to me). - "Watch" is interesting. Nice feature. After looking around in Google Reader I found out that they too have it. It's called: "Subscribe as you surf". But it's somewhat hidden, more that in iFetch. - Search in feeds is interesting. Reader doesn't have that. It's a much requested feature... - "Autodiscovery" of feed link is interesting. Didn't know Reader has this too: can be done with, again, "Subscribe as you surf". - The article/post o...

On productivity sites such as Lifehacker I already bumped into a Commoncraft video about RSS . Wonderful video explaining RSS in the easiest way! Now they also have a video explaining wikis "in plain English". Enjoy! Video: Wikis in Plain English | Common Craft - Social Design for the Web