Just a heads-up, I have enabled FeedBurner and all the associated goodies on my site. The plugin should take care of redirecting the current RSS URLs to FeedBurner, so in theory you don’t need to do anything further in order to continue getting the quality blog entries you have come to expect from this site.
However, if you find that your feed has suddenly stopped working, please take a moment to re-subscribe using the icons in the sidebar, near the top. Also, please let me know if you are having trouble getting a feed to work, or with anything else. You can email me: phil (at) scribkin.com
Entries feed
Comments feed
Entries feed by email
Originally published at scribkin. You can comment here or there.
Louis Gray has a great write-up on different A-list blogger’s takes on the thorny issue of comment systems that work in tandem with RSS feeds to allow commenting outside of the blogs the articles were originally written on.
One of the more frequently mentioned suggestions for avid Google Reader users is the addition of comments to the service, so RSS readers could respond to blog posts, either directly from the reader and back to the originating blog, or within the Google Reader community itself, in effect, becoming a social network. But while Google Reader has not yet enabled comments, other services are, and it seems the excitement of adding this capability is hardly universal - and its opponents have gone so far as to call it “outrageous” or “theft”.
- louisgray.com: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?: Silicon Valley Blog
Personally, I believe that a large part of what makes social media exciting is being able to contribute to the conversation. And increasingly as I develop this site, and interact with other bloggers and find new sites, it becomes more and more onerous for me to have to register myself with every new blog, leave my comment, and then wander off, perhaps never to return.
Sometimes I agree to have replies emailed to me, and then I can’t figure out how to turn them off again. Other times I read the other comments but I don’t know who anyone is, because often the comments are anonymous, or they only put in a first name and no URL
As a little background, I come from using LiveJournal for many years. I know, I know. Ugh, LJ. And you are right — It’s a closed system with a lot of fluff and drama. But what is really cool about it is that 95% of the comments you get on your entries are from other LJ bloggers. You can go visit their blogs. You can meet new people. In a way, they got the community thing right.. but then they walled it off, and now there are people who have a HUGE following in LiveJournal who can’t break out because their readership might not follow them.
When I recently discovered Disqus, I felt a breath of home, hokey as it may sound. Suddenly, here was a plug-in system that immediately gives me back that community. Better yet, I can bring my community in to the world of RSS using gReader or other tools! It’s like using StumbleUpon but somehow better because it has an API and works with WordPress and Tumblr and other services!
Anyway, go read the article linked up there. Get the rest of the story. I’m going to go check out Shyftr.
Update: Not in love with Shyftr. I’ll keep poking at it, but I can tell you one thing right now — no keyboard accelerators. For me, this is essential. Page Up/Page Down and mouse clicks don’t make for a great feed reading experience.
Originally published at scribkin. You can comment here or there.
A good review of Flock 1.1 on this site, including some functionality that I overlooked:
Version 1.1 really shines in its enhancements to the MyWorld page, including the Friend Activity Feed. Once you’ve logged into all your social networking services, you can drag and drop messages from one friend to another. For example, if Sally makes a good restaurant suggestion via Twitter, I can drag that message to John’s Twitter icon in my sidebar and he’ll receive a link to view Sally’s message. If a particularly interesting picture comes across my Flickr feed, I can drag it over to a contact on Facebook, and he’ll receive a notification to view the image.
- Linux.com :: Flock 1.1 offers nectar for social butterflies
Originally published at scribkin. You can comment here or there.
Originally published at scribkin. You can comment here or there.
In my last post I asked the question, “how can I show how many comments my entries have in my feed?” I actually sent an email to TechDirt (since I read their feed and it has that feature) and Dennis Yang (who is on Twitter too!) wrote me a very nice explanatory email. Apparently, this isn’t as unusual a question as I supposed, because FeedBurner has already thought of it. Their support is built in to a feature called FeedFlare.
FeedFlare does many things, like allowing the feed owner to add subscribe and email this links to each entries, plus (obviously) number of comments. I think this cements my plans to move to using FeedBurner, there are just too many compelling reasons to not do it, and, it’s all free. That’s probably the best reason.
So how does this relate to Disqus and gReader, you are asking? Well, Disqus (pronounced discuss, I am guessing) is an online commentary-tracking system that “plugs in” to a number of different blogs and sites, allowing someone to sign up once (sort of like OpenID) but also keep track of all their comments across all the sites using Disqus.. where other Disqus users can follow their comments (like Twitter) and build a social network as well. I could write a whole review of Disqus and I think I will, but not today.
Moving on to gReader, I found out about this on the Disqus blog. What this cool Firefox extension does is enable active Disqus comment tracking and responding from within Google Reader! And if you use the bookmarklet, you can enable commenting on any page, even if that site doesn’t have explicit Disqus support! Very sweet.
I have a bunch of work to do actually, I am now itching on getting this extension installed, as well as switching this blog over to FeedBurner.
Originally published at scribkin. You can comment here or there.
I found this video on YouTube when doing a Google search for (ok, I admit it) my own social bookmarking article. Enjoy!
In fact, I just discovered that the group that did the video above has a whole bunch of useful videos, which you can find at their site, The CommonCraft Show.
Originally published at scribkin.com. You can comment here or there.
As usual, I was messing around with a new WordPress plugin from Sphere (you can see the new link at the bottom of each post) and I decided to test it on my Twitter post. It did what it was designed to do and found a bunch of Twitter-related blog links, which, on a lark, I decided to open. What I found amazing was the variety of reactions that Twitter seems to be getting from different people.
Little did I realize that more and more people would use Twitter in ways that actually ignores the question “What are you doing?”
After starting to use twitter (a micro-blogging site that allows people to write small messages via phone, web and a number of applications), I am suddenly in the same situation where I am missing a prime social opportunity. Now that I a less awkward, more worldly (almost), it struck me how antisocial this all was.
Folks, you’re already Twittering and you don’t even know it! You’re just using the wrong tool do to it. Pick the red pill.
[Jeff] Pulver excitedly brought me over to meet an amazing guy named David Troy, who it turned out has 11,600 followers on Twitter. (That means they subscribe to and read the 140-character-or-less Twitter texts he sends out when he feels like it - some call it micro-blogging.)
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