David Wiley writes:

I think we may know how to mashup “even unpopular tools,” depending on
what one means by mashup. By mashup, I mean utilizing a wide range of
individual tools (like flickr, delicious, technorati, etc.) and
aggregating the results of those uses into a collection of data that I
can do new things with. If this is what we mean by mashup, I think that
RSS and our imaginations give us most of the answers we need.

I agree with David, though with two rather large caveats: ease-of-use and federated data sharing.

RSS does give us the base to remix using different tools, but the ease-of-use and integration can stand a lot of improvement. This is also a matter of conception and terminology: simple aggregation is relatively easy, even for the non-technically inclined, but real remixing still has a long way to go, particularly if students are going to be able to synthesize, remix, and share. I still find myself having to go through contortions (custom programming) just to achieve relatively simple integration from different sources.

Finding a way to federate data is also going to become more and more important. It’s an interesting feature of many social tools that they thrive as they scale… the more users, the better the experience will be for each. As early pioneers  like flickr and del.icio.us are joined by dozens of competitors, the fractured store of data impacts the whole system.

Ultimately, for example, it shouldn’t matter if a user chooses del.icio.us, furl, spurl, or others as their front-end to manage their bookmark data, the core of that data should be federated across systems. Rather than compete in the zero-sum game of locking users in, these services should compete in terms of interface, features, and data mining techniques to the pool of aggregated data.

If there is no sharing, then all the remixing tools in the world become weakened (if not irrelevant) because people will be operating solely within their own, limited ecosystem and an artificially stunted folksonomy.

[ruminate, social software, remix, rss, edtech, federate]

The problem with Liz and Scoble’s argument (the current trend seems to be to use A-List bloggers names as if you personally know them, so I’m going to do so) about being an “edge case” or an “early adopter” is that both of them want to graft an emotional meaning onto statistical terms, and they are both worse off for it.

Scoble sees “edge case” as a critical appellation, feeling (rightly) that in his past it’s been used as a derisive term standing in for strange, eccentric, radical, etc. It might have been used that way before, but it’s a misuse, and there’s no evidence Liz was trying to insult him.

Liz wants to misapply a temporal element to the discussion. All early adopters are edge cases, by definition. But the reverse is not true. She’s right that an early adopter is someeon who recognizes the value in something before others do. It’s precisely why you can’t call someone an early adopter when they actually are one– you have no way of knowing that they are this special kind of edge case unless their actions/tools are picked up and used by a larger body of people.

It’s very simple: an edge case is someone who does something statistically out of the norm; an early adopter is an edge case whose actions or methods became relatively widespread. All early adopters are edge cases. Not all edge cases are early adopters.

Of course, we all want to see our edge case behavior as being that of the early adopter– it validates our decisions and represents our optimism that we are on the “right” track. The landscape of technology (and educational technology, dear reader who wonders why I’m commenting on this at all) is littered with the remnants of the edge cases who– despite their confidence and enthusiasm– never became the representatives of new movements. There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, it’s laudable. After all, one has to be on the edge to eventually receive the accolades of being an early adopter.

(Incidentally, in this case I agree with Liz: the average user is never going to read 840 feeds. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to work on changing the products to suit this kind of voracious information ingestion even though I keep up with 500+ feeds myself and feel his pain. And I think Scoble is changing the terms of the discussion when he equates that kind of behavior with seeing the product of rolling together that many– or more– resources as one does in Google News. Reading a few top stories from 700+ news outlets is a very different proposition from actually tracking those news outlets, much less the 10,000 that form the basis for Google News as a whole. Information consumption of various kinds will grow, particularly in very narrow, highly vertical areas, but the average person wants entertainment, and uses the time they could be information processing engaging in passive reception… and happily so.)

[ruminate, information, edge cases, early adopters]

James Farmer has a Martin Luther King playlist for K-12 educators… do you have anything to add?

[ruminate, h2o, edtech, playlists]

I’ve been occasionally ranting about the moribund state of development of web-based RSS readers for about six months now. In one of my first posts on the subject I theorized that FeedLounge might be the antidote. This Monday we will all get a chance to find out. From the looks of things it might combine the best of desktop feed reading features with the portability and ease of the web-based aggregator. As someone who tracks hundreds of blogs on a regular basis, and another few hundred intermittently, I need very strong features in tagging, marking, and scanning. At this point, Bloglines remains my top choice despite some vocal critics. It hasn’t failed me yet…

FeedDemon, the cream of the crop of desktop readers, does all of these things. But dealing with that many feeds, the synchronization features just aren’t strong (or fast) enough. That might change with FeedDemon 2.0, which is almost here as well. Let’s hope this is a sign of richer times ahead.

[ruminate, rss, aggregators, feedlounge, feeddemon, bloglines]

The new SuprGlu service allows you to create a custom page from multiple, disparate RSS feeds. Your own little digest…

Tim Lauer’s SuprGlu page is the one that first caught my attention…

[ruminate rss atom aggregator digest]

Reader^2 is del.icio.us for books. List, tag, create a catalog of your books. Then use the social network to discover new titles, find shared interests, pursue discussions, etc.

I am so ready for this. All I need now is a companion desktop app to make the entry even faster and more fluid and I can start with my thousands of books.

Tagging the physical world is something we are almost technologically prepared for. As I contemplate being in San Francisco next week and look for places to visit and people to see, I realize how nice it would be if events and places and shops were not just linked to and referenced around the web, but tagged and pulled together not just to provide recommendations relevant to me, but with Google Maps and the like, with relevance to where I will be and information on how to get there.

If I could search for stationery and find all the cool places that sell fine paper, for instance, in my vicinity, with user ratings, mapped with directions– I’d be in heaven (and my bank account in serious trouble).

[ruminate books tagging folksonomy reading]

Dave Winer writes about ‘Reading Lists’

This is not a new idea– I wrote a request to Bloglines to create just such a feature some time ago– but hopefully with Dave and others getting behind the concept we’ll see some progress. And I promise never to fight with Dave about who gets credit…

At any rate, my idea was that instead of a static export of OPML on demand, the OPML file should be dynamic, shared (subscribed to), and used to find intersections and create smart recommendations for feeds. Most of the technology for this is already there.

[ruminate opml reading lists rss]

FeedLounge is looking really good, and judging from discussions on the forums it seems to work well too. Are we finally seeing some real competition for Bloglines for high-volume RSS consumers? There are a number of other pretty interfaces out there, but most seem designed for people that don’t keep up with more than a few dozen feeds, and for whom feed reading is more about passive surfing than information consumption.

Maybe my bitching about the lack of progress in this arena was premature?

Of course, I can’t know until some kind soul hooks me up with an Alpha or Beta invite…

[ruminate feedlounge bloglines rss webfeeds]

Feed Digest let’s you mix multiple feeds together into a single “digest” that you can subscribe to, creates HTML and Javascript includes so non-programmers can repurpose feed content, create a “river of news” web dashboard for viewing your favorite feeds online. A lot of cool stuff that will hopefully grow to encompass some of Feedburner’s features (such as statistics gathering).

Now we’re starting to see the incredible value of the investment in time and tools that provide syndication feeds and tags in the shape of end-user tools that do for everyone what only programmers could do before.

This is my basic argument at work for why we want to use these tools in our business processes. How can we predict how we might want to get at and remix the information we are keeping tomorrow? But I can tell you for sure that if it is all locked away in peoples’ email accounts (or at least those remnants which aren’t in the trash), then it won’t matter what we want to do with it, because it will be useless if it remains at all.

Just a few days ago someone mentioned a new service for turning an RSS feed into a PDF document. I scratched my head for a while. But this morning I though “cool!” Leveraging the feed as a publishing platform back to print. Good idea. Reverse the traditional process, putting the vital information out there now, but still allow an easy way make a nice print document for all those times such things are needed.

A little tweaking, and why not produce our “newsletter” in real time through a blog, then port those articles back as automatically as possible to a print document? The newsletter, coming out only every few months, will– by its nature– always contain old news anyway. Why not share it both ways, but the web way first?

[Ruminate km rss syndication]

Search engine ranking can be weird. It seems odd that a post of mine comes up 4th in a Google query for bloglines search.

Not that I’m complaining. And a message for Bloglines staff: you’ve been good to me in the past and I promote (and believe in) your product as the best of breed right now, but the search problem I reported, which you acknowledged you’d look into, still hasn’t been fixed!

[Ruminate bloglines]