Drinking from a fire hydrant
You probably noticed my previous post, signaling my big Ooops. If you have no idea what I’m talking about then you’re for the better, but in case you weren’t so lucky, I apologize for the confusion.
Ok, but nobody want’s to hear about my screw ups…so let’s get to the good stuff:
We all have limited time, and most of us have some difficulty keeping up with the overwhelming amount of information out there on the web. It’s like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant – not easy. Most of the information is useless, some helpful, and only a sliver is actually worthwhile.
Well, I happen to spend a fair amount of time sifting through my 150ish blogs or so in my Google Reader and thought you all might like to see what I think is considered ‘worthwhile’. I call them my Starred Posts.
I only ‘Star’ the posts that I consider to be truly excellent. I would say it’s a 1/250 ratio or so. Out of 250 blog posts I read, 1 is worthwhile. Now, this isn’t to say that 249 of the 250 posts are useless, but this helps me manage the impossible.
I was trying to integrate an RSS feed into this blog in a somewhat intuitive way, but failed miserably. So, unless someone has some brilliant idea of how to custom configure Google Reader’s starred items feed into an HTML page including title links and details, I’ll stick with the default starred items public page.
Basically, if you want to see what I think is a must read, take a look at my starred posts page.
While I haven’t personally used it(yet), this sounds like something that Yahoo! Pipes would be great for – have you tried that yet?
@Luke – Just checked out Yahoo! Pipes. Cool App. I like how flexible everything is, but I don’t think I can integrate it into an external web page. As far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong) I think all of the Yahoo! Pipes content stays with Yahoo! However, thanks for the tip! :)
I’ve not done re-syndication with WordPress specifically, but this might get you on the right track:
http://xrl.us/o3puc
I don’t know about the RSS thing, but I do know that in Google reader you can share out certain posts which I think has a similar benefit. However, my problem with this is that the links I want to share come from multiple sources inside and outside my RSS feeds. This is my solution: http://www.member-to-member.net/social-insights-tweet-feed.html. The brevity of the Tweet format forces me to internalize what I think is important as I pass it on and does not allow me to overthink it (at which point it becomes a blog post that gets only 1/2 written and dies amid the flood). I don’t really even care if others subscribe to this because the discipline of publishing it benefits me.
All in all, this whole “limited brain capacity” thing sucks.
Dana
This is weird. How come our comments don’t show up?
@Dana – Sorry! I updated one of my WordPress plugins and for some reason all of the comments became hidden. My Bad! :/
:)
David,
I was going through my google reader and this post caught my eye.
Just as @dana mentioned you can share the posts and then put a shared widget into your sidebar text widget on WordPress.
I have one here http://bryceraley.com
I think it’s a very nice service for your readers, especially ones who don’t even know what a reader is. Many of my readers still manually visit the site or come there from my weekly email newsletter. They are not blogging but will use your blog as a filter for their news and info.
If you use shared items instead of starred items then you can get a bit of javascript from the settings tab of Google Reader. I wouldn’t fancy going through your starred items and sharing them though! I doubt there’s an automatic way to do it.