No posts for the next few days over the (US) holiday period as we are travelling.
A parting note on reading feeds. I have shifted to Chrome for much of my web use. Although there are a few things I miss, overall I like the snappiness of its response. This means that I have also shifted to Google Reader for much of my feed reading. I never took to BlogLines, and Chrome is without the two environments in which I did most of my feed reading: the integrated reader of Flock and the Sage extension that I use in FireFox. A few random notes about this:
- Before shifting to a network level reader I had an intermittently synchronized sets of feeds. Different browsers at work and at home were not always in synch (I would typically have four overlapping sets of feeds, as I would use FireFox and Flock on work and home machines). This was a feature. It was nice to open up a different set of feeds, even if the differences were minor. And if I hadn’t used a particular browser for a while, FireFox at home for example, when I returned to it I would rediscover feeds I hadn’t seen for a while. There might be a small core, but the variety was good. It is a bit boring turning to the same set of feeds each time now 😉
- Of course, this represents a move further into Googleville. I have also been using Google Blogsearch as my main blog search tool. I still look at Ask/Bloglines but less often. That said, I notice that recently Google appears to be indexing whole ‘blog pages’, including sidebar text and so on, which is a bit confusing. A search on ‘lorcan dempsey’ for example will bring back newly published pages in which ‘lorcan dempsey’ appears in the blogroll. I wonder why the change.
- As I say, one result of moving between sets of feeds was that I would sometimes go for a while without reading one feed or another. When I didn’t read a feed for a while, I found myself imagining that it had faded away and that other people were also not reading it 😉 Of course, I knew this wasn’t the case, but it was an interesting reminder of how much the rock we stand on influences our perspective …
Writing this, I was reminded of Nicholas Carr’s post on the centripetal web.
