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General — Comments Off on Google outsourcing comments to Digg?
14
Aug 08

Google outsourcing comments to Digg?

Social networks are the big thing, it seems. Everyone wants to be in the middle of the people, piggybacking and collecting the output of our daily dramas and conversations. In addition to sites like Facebook and Myspace, other services are seeking to insert themselves into the middle of our online social lives in order to build their own networks. Of course, they do this by creating a compelling product and removing friction for users, but there are significant advantages to bringing large numbers of people to your product. With people comes traffic and advertising revenues and other network effects. While Facebook and Myspace are interesting anthropologically-speaking (boy, has dating changed), I have been more interested lately in some of the companies trying to stake out the high-value ground by reaching out to the rest of the web, services like Disqus or IntenseDebate, that effectively centralize blog commenting by connecting any blog that uses their service into one larger network.

With all the rumors about Google acquiring Digg, the web’s perpetual frat party, and with Google experimenting with Digg-like features in its search results, I was surprised to notice how the Official Google Reader Blog outsources its commenting system to Digg. I don’t recall Google supporting a third party service quite like this before. Do they use other web services they do not own?

Official Google Reader Blog

Each of the official Google blogs look pretty different from one another in terms of whether comments or trackbacks are enabled, so maybe each project manager gets to decide how they connect to other services, as well. Google Reader and Digg share some things functionally, in terms of providing a mechanism to collect valuable social data on what people are interested in (what gets the most stars and diggs, what is shared the most), which would naturally lead to more personalized and relevant search. Also, by including a Digg commenting link, the Google Reader Blog provides a sure-fired way to generate more attention to what improvements they’re making. The more high profile the project, the more likely to have Digg comment links?

Official Google Mobile Blog

Other official Google blogs like the Google Webmaster Central Blog, and the Google Mobile Blog support the usual Blogger commenting system. I don’t know if it means anything, but it does bear notice.

General — Comments Off on Daily reads with feeds
11
Aug 08

Daily reads with feeds

Last Friday I was reading through the monthly archives at Matt Webb’s excellent and erudite Interconnected blog. I especially enjoy his brief book reviews and reading recommendations, which I follow religiously as he reads 100+ books a year, most of which I have never heard of before.

Anyway, he created an RSS feed to read Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebooks (1,565 pages) on a daily basis in easy to digest chunks. This is a great way to read lengthy material that is not presented as a linear narrative or in chapter form. The Notebooks are perfect for this as would be any sort of diary or journal. For other daily content, I recommend subscribing to the Pepys Diary, which provides several different types of feed content based on what you would like to glean from the material.

There is also a service, DailyLit, which specializes in delivering daily book content via email or RSS. There are many public domain and copyrighted works available and you can customize delivery with options like receiving updates only during the work week or at certain times of the day, etc.

General — 2 Comments
30
Jul 08

Shallow versus deep

Despite my desire at times to be otherwise, I am a shallow thinker – in the sense that my normal thought pattern is more lateral and connective than deep and focused. There are few things that I know deeply, but many things I understand superficially.

I hate not knowing something and yet feel satisfied once I have understood something sufficiently well to connect it to everything else I have stored away. Like most things, it is probably best to have a foot in both camps: the ability to process large amounts of information while capable of ‘going deep’ to focus when necessary.

In my experience, most people are in one camp or another. Yet, which mode is the most ideal?

A few things I have noticed:

  1. Shallow thinkers tend to be more social relative to their deep thinking peers. Many deep thinkers are even frustratingly asocial.
  2. Deep thinkers are rare whereas the world seems to abound in shallow thinkers.
  3. Both shallow thinkers and deep thinkers get something from the presence of the other. There is a certain excitable state that emerges when capable shallow and deep thinkers get together.
  4. Shallow thinkers seem more practical and action-oriented, while deep thinkers seem drawn more to the theoretical, or at the very least, they seem more content with the thinking versus the doing.

Which type of thinking are you most comfortable with?

I started thinking about this after viewing my Google Reader Trends:

From your 203 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 8,077 items, starred 491 items, shared 1 items, and emailed 45 items.

I am also reminded of the (humbling) description of the socionics type, the ENTP at Psychological Types uncovered from the Socionics people:

ENTps are very curious and process a lot of information, similar to a gold digger washing out the soil looking for gold. And ENTps know where the “gold” is. They are often well aware of some new and unusual discoveries. Such information is usually available to everyone who is interested enough to look for it, but not many people are that bothered. ENTps ideas are often based on these discoveries and for someone who didn’t know that these findings are already in existence, ENTps ideas may look very radical and original.