Lifestyle and Emerging Technology In Plain English

Category Archives: Social Media

Posts about the social media channel.

Godspeed Commander Hadfield

Cana­dian astro­naut, space enthu­si­ast, edu­cator, social media sen­sa­tion, and now enter­tainer? Yep, those are just a sampling of the roles that Com­mander Chris Hadifeld ful­filled dur­ing his 146 day post­ing to the ISS as Sta­tion Commander.

His Soyuz cap­sule returns to Earth tomor­row even­ing, but as a last sur­prise, the Com­mander released this video rework­ing of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Enjoy, and thank you Com­mander Had­field! Have a safe jour­ney home!

So. Google’s shutting down Google Reader

Frankly I’d not thought about my RSS read­ing pro­cess in a while. I use NetVibes (pic­tured above) as my main reader, and it’s been pretty stable up until today; they pos­ted a note say­ing they’re deal­ing with an influx of new mem­bers — likely emig­rants from Google Reader.

I like NetVibes because it gives me a simple headline-in-a-tile view that makes it easy to quickly scan my news, and NetVibes man­ages my feed sub­scrip­tions.

This is where the pain will be felt by those using Google Reader when the big G shuts it down. Many 3rd party apps for mobile devices use Google Reader as the ‘sub­scrip­tion man­age­ment’ fea­ture of their app. When Google Reader closes on July 1, these apps will have to have in place some sort of replace­ment for sub­scrip­tion man­age­ment, or they’ll break.

Update: If you’re look­ing to migrate your Google Reader sub­scrip­tions to NetVibes, the team at NetVibes have this handy guide. (Thanks Randy!)

For now, this won’t impact me or my news­read­ing habits, but as I men­tioned at the top, I’m rethink­ing my RSS read­ing, and as Dave Weiner states, rethink­ing my use of Free when applied to ser­vices I’m com­ing to depend on.

 

A better mobile eBook reader?

It’s been a while since I took a look at what’s cool in the mobile eBook reader space, as I’ve been quite sat­is­fied with my cur­rent read­ing apps (GoodReader for PDFs, Stanza for ePubs) and their use with Cal­ibre (a must-have eBook lib­rary man­age­ment pro­gram).

So today I’ve installed Read­Mill — a ‘social’ eBook reader that works with both open ePubs as well as open and DRM pro­tec­ted PDFs (a valid Adobe ID is required). The blurb from the developers states:

Read­mill is a unique ebook reader that lets you read share and dis­cover great books. Avail­able as an iPad and iPhone app, Read­mill works with ebooks in ePub and PDF format. It’s all about shar­ing what you read, and all of the high­lights and com­ments you make between the pages. It’s also a great place to dis­cover new books through friends, and find out what’s most pop­u­lar in your social graph. Wel­come to a world of reading.

So I’m just get­ting star­ted with it. Feel free to check out my Read­Mill pro­file https://readmill.com/bradblog and fol­low me.

I’m think­ing the Read­Mill exper­i­ence will be sim­ilar to GoodReads, but will update my exper­i­ences here as I use it more.

 

Hashable is shutting down

Long time Twit­ter ‘access­ory’ Hash­able is finally out of beta, and clos­ing down effect­ive July 25th 2012, accord­ing to an email I received late yesterday:

Dear Hash­able Users,

We regret to inform you that the Hash­able mobile apps and Hashable.com will be shut­ting down on July 25th. The ser­vice will be unavail­able after this date.

While we are still very pas­sion­ate about mak­ing bet­ter con­nec­tions and meet­ing new people, the time has come for us to focus our energy elsewhere.

Some of you have stored valu­able inform­a­tion in Hash­able, and we want to give you the oppor­tun­ity to save that data for your own records. If you’d like to receive a file with your com­plete his­tory, please log onto Hashable.com, nav­ig­ate to the “Pro­file” tab, then to the “Your His­tory” sec­tion on that page. You can down­load the file by click­ing “Export full his­tory to .csv” and accept­ing the dia­log that pops up.

We are incred­ibly grate­ful for all the people we have met through Hash­able. Thank you for all your sup­port, and we hope to con­nect with you again in the future.

All the best,
The Hash­able Team

As it says, mem­bers can down­load and archive their data stored in Hash­able by fol­low­ing the instructions.

Love Skyrim? Love creative music videos? Then this video’s for you!

So, I’ve been watch­ing the amaz­ing work of Peter Hol­lens for a while now, both through Empire Avenue and his You­Tube chan­nel. And this Skyrim theme cover is some of his best. And yes, I’m writ­ing about it because it hits a few areas for me, multi-voice tracks, video gam­ing, soundtracks. Oh, and it also has the amaz­ing violin work of Lind­sey Stirl­ing. Nuff said. Watch and enjoy!

I’m Moving to Empire Avenue!

This likely won’t come as a shock to many of you; I’ve been invited to go work on Empire Avenue.

Of course, I said yes.

Start­ing Thursday, Septem­ber 1st, my role will be, as with any star­tup, kinda fuzzy to begin with. Offi­cially I’ll be the Dir­ector of Social and Com­munity Man­age­ment. In real­ity, I’ll be blog­ging, work­ing with the vari­ous com­munit­ies, and help­ing the team get things done. Whatever those things may be. Clean up after the Squir­rel, you know.

What I’m leav­ing behind
For the last five years, I’ve been a Web Con­tent Spe­cial­ist and Web Busi­ness Ana­lyst with the Alberta Motor Asso­ci­ation.

It’s be a great time with a mar­velous people and a great employer who’s allowed me to make mis­takes, grow, and test the cor­por­ate waters with innov­at­ive social media exper­i­ments (hello @AMARoadReports)!

If you’d like to check out the pos­i­tion I’m leav­ing, here’s the link to the offi­cial post­ing. And I’d be happy to dis­cuss the role, or the organ­iz­a­tion should you have any ques­tions — email me (bradblog@gmail.com).

The Future
Well, as I said, it’s going to be kinda fuzzy. Empire Avenue is a star­tup, and as such, there are lots of cool things that we’re doing, and that can be done! And in my work with com­munity, I’m going to be work­ing with and ask­ing a lot of ques­tions of *you*.

So, what can we do, together, on ‘the Avenue’, hmmm? Let’s find out!

Many flavours of RSS readers for iPad

title.jpgEarlier today Feedly was rein­tro­duced to the iPad iOS world with sig­ni­fic­ant buzz — Robert Scoble pro­filed the reader (check the video below).

One of the not­able things about Feedly is its HTML 5 base — which allows the major­ity of func­tions to be device agnostic (Android, Win­dows Phone, etc).

But on iOS devices, there are a num­ber of RSS read­ers that have made names for them­selves, and are hap­pily co-existing on my iPad.

All of these read­ers, in some way, tap into your vari­ous social media streams, as well as an exist­ing Google Reader account — which is cool, as you can use the power of Google Reader to man­age the feeds, then simply con­sume the con­tent on your mobile device as is con­veni­ent.
 
Photo May 03, 12 25 25 PM_480.jpg

Some are my daily use RSS reader, and oth­ers, while inter­est­ing, just haven’t man­aged to keep my atten­tion.
Here’s a few of the ones I like, and why:

 

Zite.jpg

Zite
Cur­rently my daily use news reader, grabs con­tent from your Twit­ter stream, your Google Reader RSS feeds, and your Deli­cious bookmarks.

Zite gives you a very clean and pol­ished inter­face con­sist­ing of algorithmically-selected stor­ies from your con­tent feeds.

Inter­est­ingly, you can rate and share the con­tent. As you do this, Zite ‘remem­bers’ the con­tent you’ve rated and will get smarter about dis­play­ing con­tent to you as it learns. After a few weeks, you’ll have your own tuned and per­son­al­ized digital magazine made up of the con­tent you like to consume.

The only down­side? The danger of too much ‘same­ness’.  I do occa­sion­ally like to read out­side my reg­u­lar pat­terns, and I fear Zite will not expose me to some new and inter­est­ing things by only show­ing me more of what I like and review. Time will tell.

 

FlipBoard.jpg

Flip­Board
Ini­tially my reg­u­lar reader, now it’s down to about once a month. Nice dis­play, nice method of read­ing, but not good enough to keep me com­ing back. Zite has replaced Flip­Board as my ‘visual’ reader.

 

Reeder.jpg

Reeder
The 500lb gor­illa of RSS read­ers — quickly and effi­ciently man­ages your con­tent. Dis­plays RSS feeds cleanly and allows you to eas­ily browse your feeds. Simple and eleg­ant design has kept me using this as my reg­u­lar RSS reader when I want to drill down to see what con­tent I’ve missed from a par­tic­u­lar source.

 

PULSE.jpg

Pulse
I have a love / hate rela­tion­ship with Pulse. Nice dis­play. Easy to use and share con­tent. It’s my Num­ber 2 RSS reader…except when it crashes. And it has, usu­ally once a ses­sion when I use it, which is becom­ing less frequent.

 

Flud.jpg

FLUD
An odd one that has stayed on my device, for the time being.

Sim­ilar to Pulse in lay­out, but not quite as effi­cient in hand­ling feeds, at least from an end-user perspective.

 

Feedly.jpg

Feedly
The new kid on the block. Ties in to Google Reader, has a nifty swipe-sensitive inter­face to flip pages, and a very nice look and feel.

I don’t like the way the con­tent is locked in a ver­tical ori­ent­a­tion (por­trait mode)…and am some­what con­cerned as a blog owner that they’ve blocked out an area for insert­ing advert­ising in my blog con­tent stream — yes they ask you to ping them if that’s your con­tent stream, but what if I don’t — will they insert their own advert­ising on my content?

Regard­less, Feedly is new, and has my atten­tion for now — time will tell, espe­cially as it grows on other mobile platforms.

Your turn — what mobile RSS reader is your daily go-to reader, and why?

Oh, and here’s that Feedly video I promised :smileyhappy:


This post of is one of many I pub­lish weekly at the Future Shop Techb­log. Read more of my Life­style Tech­no­logy art­icles here.