Uses of RSS

(via and bloggingpro), a great list of things people can do with RSS, compiled by Tim Yang

1. Get the news as it happens from multiple news sources
2. Collect your email from all your email accounts in your RSS reader (mailbucket)
3. Track Fedex packages
4. Get notified of bargains at Ebay (rssauction)
5. Get stock updates
6. Get the weather report (wunderground)
7. Find out what people are saying about you, your company or your product online (technorati or pubsub)
8. Get music, radio programs and TV clips
9. Stay updated on someone’s schedule (RSScalendar.com)
10. Get cinema schedule updates
11. Read your favourite comics
12. Find out what other people surfing (del.icio.us…)
13. Automatically backup your weblog posts
14. Get software updates
15. Get the latest bittorrent files and ahem, p*rn

Some readers add other functions in comments:

1. traffic conditions (maps.yahoo.com)
2. get up-to-the-minute police and fire events (incidentlog)
3. video game statistics
4. jobsearch (rssjobs)

Douglas Coupland about meanings, patterns and combinations

I like this quote taken from “Miss Wyoming” by Douglas Coupland:

“That’s what Vanessa does for a living,” Ryan said. “At RAND. She finds meanings and patterns. Combinations”
“What’s your speciality?” asked John.
“Like Ryan said, I’m a finder”
“A finder?”
“Just what it sounds like. Ever since I was a kid, if something got lost, people came to me to find it for them. I’m able to locate things. I ask questions. I look at data. I make connections. And then I find what’s lost.

Why do I blog this? I find that Coupland just found the right word to express this feeling I already had.

Social Software rules

A french linkedin-like website claims 4 very relevant rules while using Social Software:

1. Don’t rush, results are slow to appear
2. No pain, no gain: enter properly the medadata (your description/profile, invite your relevant relations, … endorsements…)
3. Give to receive: endorse others + answers to others (as far as possible)
4. Respect the netiquette

Why do I blog this?Because I think those rules are relevant to learn which social behavior to adopt on the Internet.

SubethaEdit screenshot

We’re using the really cool collaborative text editor SubethaEdit here at Plan. It’s pretty constructive.

Why and how running a newsletter?

Since lots of people still don’t use RSS aggregator, I’ve came across 2 resources:
Basically, why creating a newsletter

1. Keeping in touch with customers (give them special offers, remind them about your site, ensure loyalty, provide useful links)
2. Developing relationships with people who have similar interests to you
3. Providing an industry or group of people with proprietary information
4. Just for fun!

How do you send a newsletter:

It wouldn’t be very fun sending out an email message to 2,000 people every week via your desktop computer. I know there are many people out there who run huge mailing lists that say it works fine, and all that, but really, it isn’t the most convenient way to do it. It takes up a lot of your time.

A nice solution is getting someone else to send it out for you. It’s easy, fast and usually very cheap, often free. Usually all you do is send one email to their server, and it sends it out to all your subscribers. Very painless. Of course, there is a catch. Most of them will attach a small (or sometimes large) ad to your newsletter. There are a number of companies that offer free newsletter mailing services, including:

1. Groups Yahoo: From what I have seen, this is one of the best free servers on the Internet.
2. Listbot: This one has recently been improved… they now support larger messages and also allow your subscribers to sign up via email.

Concept checklist:

1. What areas are you knowledgeable in?
2. Can you bring something extra to an already well covered topic? (i.e. gardening)
3. If not, do you have focused knowledge in a particular niche? (i.e. growing tobacco)
4. Do you want to make money? If so, is your potential audience really desirable for advertisers? If not, how will you be inspired to keep working on it?
5. Do you know of any competing newsletters?
   If so, how is your newsletter going to be different from existing competitors?

Why do I blog this? I’ve been concerned lately by the topic of ‘running a newsletter’. It surely won’t be for Pasta and Vinegar, it’s more related to a potential start-up project with some folks about futuristic trends.

[LifeHack] Blogpost structure

I am trying to move forward into work efficiency. Blogposts from Pasta And Vinegar will have the following structure from now on:

1. title with the [category]
2. content with the link + author + date when available
3. a short note with “why do I blog this” to explains why it interested me

I am not sure whether I will have time for the last note but it might be a nice way to get the point of what interests me and why it is relevant for my work/purposes.

[Social] People who don\'t like to network + social software issues

I refuse to hobnob for advantage by Lucy Kellaway (financial times).

The whole networking process defeats me, in particular the business cards. I keep my own at the bottom of my handbag, and they are usually a bit grubby on the rare occasions I am required to produce one. Other people’s cards go back into my bag, and get fished out whenever I spring clean it. They then sit on my desk for a while before eventually going into the bin. (…)
The more I think about it, the odder I find the whole networking process. The very word is off-putting: it sounds so pushy and calculating. The point of networking is to meet someone more important than you are. But if everyone goes to a party determined to network, the whole exercise becomes self-defeating. It also offends against the idea that we work in a meritocracy, where talent will out, eventually. In true life, of course, talent does not always out. The smarmiest have an annoying way of getting to the top. But it does not follow that the collecting of business cards at drinks parties is a good use of time. Ah yes, networkers say.

Besides, social software’s relevance is also discussed nicely in the New York Times (with regard to the business model) as well as in other blogs like andy oram.

[LifeHack] A specific setting to make fruits more mature

It’s a shame this banana is not mature enough to liberate ethylen acid so that it can make my clementine more mature…

[LifeHack] What is your RSS consumption strategy?

That’s a question I always think about: how to cope with a too large number of RSS feeds? Roland Tanglao answers:

here’s how I plan on eliminating my RSS information overload:

Subscribe only to 150 blogs at the most. These 150 will be people not search feeds from PubSub, Feedster, etc. and I will read them every day or at least try to. And I will update this list and add and remove people at least once a month. This group I will call MUSTS.

For the companies and blogs that I write, I will create PubSub and Feedster feeds for these companies’ and blogs’ keywords as well as RSS feeds for links to their URLs. This will be called WORK. I intend to keep this list to 100 feeds or less.

The rest (over 500!) will go into NICE TO READ and I will set them to the items to auto-expire so that if I don’t read them for 24 hours, they are deleted. And if I find something in a NICE TO READ consistently, then I will promote it to MUSTS.

Of course, as he claims, “There’s no need to read everything”. I tend to think about this as the first rule. The first month I used a news aggregator I used to read everything and then I noticed that being updated is not a matter of reading stuff once in a while. It is rather to read a bit on a regular basis.

Another thing important is the notion of node, some people can keep track of stuff you’re interested in but you don’t have time to browse about. For instance, even though I am interested in blogs and syndication I don’t really check website about it. Instead of reading specialized blogs on KM or blogs, I aggregate 2-3 of great blogs about it.

[Lifehack?] What\'s in your backpack

Some stuff in my backpack: