content-discovery on S Anand

Advanced Google Reader

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve stopped visiting websites.

No, really. There’s only one website I visit these days. Google Reader.

Google Reader is a feed reader. If you want to just catch up on the new stuff on a site, you can add the site to Google Reader. Anything new that is published on the site appears in Google Reader. Right now, I’ve subscribed to over 50 feeds. There’s no way I can remember to visit 50 sites – so I’m actually able to read more and miss less.

In a sense, that’s the essence of using feeds to read stuff: remember less, read more and miss less. If I ever find an interesting site, I just add it to Google Reader and forget about it.

But it goes beyond that. You can subscribe to search results.

Videos, for examples. Subscribe to a search for google engedu on Google Video. Any new TechTalk at Google, you get it in your Reader. (The talks are fabulous by the way.) Or search for hindi movies.

Photos? Track new photos of the Indian cricket team on Flickr.

Movies? Get an update of the latest movie torrents from mininova or torrentspy. Or just get updates on American Gangster DVDRip.

Presentations? Track anything on Javascript or consulting from SlideShare.

Documents? Find new eBooks on Scribd.

Not all pages offer a feed. But Page2Rss offers a reasonable solution. It converts pretty much any page into a feed.

It’s gotten to the point where anything I know I want to read, I put it on Google Reader. The rest of the Internet is when I don’t know what I want to read.

Comments

Jayan 16 Dec 2007 12:00 pm: Same here. I ve been using it for over 2 months now. I subscribe to over 200 feeds. This reader is coool.. - (http://ekalayva.wordpress.com)
Simon32 16 Dec 2007 12:00 pm: I agree, RSS is great! Btw, you might also want to checkout Feedity - www.feedity.com for creating free custom RSS feeds.

Google Reader shared lists are tough to find

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Though Google Reader learns to share, I haven’t found it easy to see what others are reading. Even a Google search for shared lists reveals very few.

Google Reader

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Google Reader. Gmail principles applied to RSS. You can subscribe to posts, label feeds and star RSS items. The reader suggests items from your subscriptions based on your interest.

Autoblog

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:00:00 +0000

I have an automated (and lazy) way of finding interesting sites. This is what I do every day.

I get the del.icio.us tags of every URL I blog about. (It’s available at http://del.icio.us/rss/url/ followed by the MD5 hex version of the URL).
I pick the most popular tags (at least 50 links must have this tag), and use them as my “preferred tags”
I scan the most popular sites on del.icio.us, and get each site’s tags
If a site has my preferred tags, I give it points (the number of points is equal to the number of times I’ve blogged that tag)
I pick the top 5 sites based on my points, and read them.

There are two problems I have now. Firstly, I will find sites similar to those I have blogged about – not discover anything new. That’s fine to start with – I can search for those manually. The bigger problem is, this is restricted to del.icio.us. There are two ways I can extend this (lazily).

By finding new sources of popular URLs (which requires a site with a list of popular URLs updated daily, which I will find interesting)
By finding new sites that tag URLs (which ideally requires an API to get the tags for a given URL)

There are lots of sources for popular URLs. But though many of sites, including notably Technorati, tag URLs, but none of them I know have APIs.

Comments

Ravi 2 Dec 2023 5:08 pm: I am a intensive user of ChatGPT . Asking it to ask clarifying questions was not successful in 3.5 . I gave up . I have not returned to it . May be I don’t think the sentence / context completion model is capable of saying, ‘ huh?’ I have not tried ‘ List the different ways will you will interpret the prompt , . But if I already know that there is room for ambiguity, why won’t I disambiguate the prompt myself ?

News is free

Wed, 19 Dec 2001 12:00:00 +0000

News is free. Very good.