dcinput

Going to the movies in Second Life

I’m currently in Second Life watching the Four Eyed Monsters SL premiere. Here are some photos of me and my date Pixie Box who is all the way in Montreal. Lots and lots of back chat. All in all a very funny experience.

The quality of the video was pretty good most of the way through the film. Unfortunately the last 5-10 minutes were horribly depixelated, so bad so that I ensentially missed the end of the film. However the experience was as much about the banter between everyone watching as it was for the film. Second Life might not be quite ready for serious film watching though the ability to meet people all over the world, fans of the film hooked by the brilliant series of video podcasts, and interact with them in a virtual environment should not be underestimated.

GReader has re-invented my feed reading

Until this christmas I had been a Bloglines user for a couple of years. My feed list however had grown into an unuseable state and so for many months I had basically stoped reading news via RSS.

I had noticed that several readers of the blog were coming from Google Reader accounts and I’d heard some good things so in between Christmas and new year I imported all my feeds into the GReader to give it a whirl.

I spent the time to reorganise all my feeds, culling feeds, renaming others and seperating them into groups that make sense. Somehow the reorganisation process felt far less daunting than it ever did with Bloglines. The interface also just is a lot slicker and feels nicer to use. It’s not that there is any new feature, its just that every thing GReader does, it just does it that little bit better than Bloglines.

Dave Winer: “Get in bed with the guy whose lunch you want to eat”. Google have eaten Bloglines’ lunch. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

In my re-organising I figured out one key thing that’s made all my feed reading so much better it was a revelation. While deciding categories to classify the feeds under I eventually came to the conclusion that there were only two categories that made sense: individuals and groups. Individuals is for blogs written by 1 person and groups for those which have many authors. So I reclassified all my feeds under these two categories and also renamed each feed in the individuals category to the name of the person’s blog [important].

When I read these in a ‘river of news’ style by clicking on the category everything just seems manageable now. I’m always on top of my feeds and I know who’s written what. The renaming kind of feels like I’m getting to know the people I read a little better too, as if I’m putting names to faces.

A few days after all this reshuffling this essay on Blogs as the Unedited Voice of a Person somehow seemed to ring very true.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 2:29 am and is filed under dcinput daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.