nicefishfilms

Feedly is the Firefox extension that turns your Google Reader into a conversation. Feedly empowers conversation by tightly integrating Google Reader with social media services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious and others. The Feedly team has put countless hours into the development of this great service and has been quick to respond to community needs. A few days ago I noticed that Feedly has replaced their right corner blank box that formerly read - "Sponsor This" with a DonorsChoose.org widget. This is a wonderful development.

Services like Feedly must be profitable in order to continue their innovative work. I am a big believer that you should support "free" services by clicking on a few ads now and then. During this shrinking ad dollar market environment, advertisers are seeking quality. gReaders are information seekers, trend makers, educated and social by nature. They share news discoveries with their own networks and are influencers. I am pleasantly surprised that the first uses of this valuable ad space is being used for a great cause. Now more than ever, we must invest into the future of innovation. Education is the most important element in a free market. Thanks to Feedly, I am now aware of the tech. communities "education challenge." Fans of leading tech. blogs like Scobelizer, TechCrunch, O'Reilly, Ars Technica and others can help students get the tools they need to learn.

DonorsChoose.org is a simple but powerful innovation in social entrepreneurship - Teachers ask. You choose. Students learn. Investing in a student is the best way to ensure an exciting and vibrant future for us all.

Because I actively interact with Feedly, I paid attention and acted on their "ad" and I am richer for the experience. Relevant information makes me happy.

msw

Along our curious path we have the occasion to converse with some really BIG thinkers. Thinking Out Loud is the raw stream from some of these encounters.

On this edition: A discussion with Edwin Khodabakchian, developer of Feedly - the Firefox extension that makes your gReader sing and social. We cover managing your RSS feeds, smart data sets, extracting 'concepts' out of news and the forthcoming v2 of Feedly








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Thanks to Brian Roy and his BIG brain at JustSignal- I'm able to track, in real-time, a few of the topics that are of great interest to me today.

These topics include:

Skoll World Forum 09, Stanford University, University of Arizona, Peter Himmelman, NASA, Feedly and nicefishfilms.



I've been studying and trying to put into practice the BIG idea of Social Entrepreneurship since reading: Social Silicon Valleys: a manifesto for social innovation published in 2007 by The Young Foundation.

Download the free PDF here.

For those of us who rely on social networks to feed us the latest news, tips and conversations even a little down-time can really shake up your normal routine. I depend on multiple layers of social-nets to keep me plugged into the happenings of the world. Today, I found myself at a loss, confused and a bit dazed. I realize how much I count on functioning info-tubes only when there's a brief interruption of the free-flowing data.

First, my trusted Feedly RSS Reader/ Magazine went down for awhile. Of course, I could just jump back into my gReader but I'm adjusted to the layout, features and connecting tools that Feedly provides me. Reverting back to gReader had me feeling a bit woozy- where am I? How do I get the latest news feeds to sort just the way I'm used to seeing them?

Next up on the wobble wagon was FriendFeed who experienced some down-time. The remarkably stable social aggregator didn't respond to my multiple requests for connection. What kind of a world is this?! Then TinyUrl stopped working, wakoopa wasn't updating my program usage, what next? I kept checking my net connection just to make sure I was still up and running. Within just a few moments, things started to return to normal, phweeh. I started to breath normally, pulse rate stabilizing. Endorphins still racing through my body, I realized that these little outages remind us of how reliable these new-fangled net tools are. The "uptime" of the aforementioned services are far greater than cable-tv, cellphones and even the California Power-Grid.

I have come to expect an "always-on-always-working" networld. This isn't my fault- it's the engineers, programmers and managers of these social-tools who have done such a great job with reliability, that I couldn't imagine my world without them. Maybe this was an orchestrated wake-up call by these services to remind us of how good they are at what they do.

I'm just glad things are returning to normal, or at least normal for this avid social-net user.

msw

We witnessed a revolution my friends. On Tuesday June 17, 2008 over 8 Million people downloaded Firefox3 setting a new world record. Tech boards lit up with excitement and Twitters shared their joy and frustrations over slow servers. What we saw is true community coming together and doing something new. There wasn't a huge Madison Avenue Ad campaign to launch the new browser and the networks weren't exactly reporting on this phenomenon. Instead it was a group of Fans who lined up and waited patiently to get FF3, they told their friends, put up buttons on their blogs and emailed reminders to their lists. FF3 represents a true advancement in browsers- it's faster and more secure than the just plain icky IE. FF3 is the result of listening to users, adapting technology to what WE want and a great organization behind it- Mozilla.

As social networks continue to grow, we will see more events that are "net" driven. Imagine the power of good people doing good things- it will happen.

Some of the great coverage- TechCrunch "The Hype Worked"

A great addition to your Firefox3 - Feedly which allows you to integrate all your rss feeds- I like it better than Google Reader- lots of nice features.

Some Power tips for Firefox3 - From LifeHacker.com

If you don't have Firefox3 you can download it free over at Mozilla

For a little fun try typing- about:robots into Firefox3.

Power to the Social Networks- we are the news.

msw

Along our curious path we have the occasion to converse with some really BIG thinkers. Thinking Out Loud is the raw stream from some of these encounters.

On this edition: Extracting concepts from the real-time net with Open Calais. A conversation with Thomas Tague, Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative Lead and Krista Thomas, Vice President, Marketing and Communications, Open Calais.

You may have noticed that there's a lot of data streaming around the intertubes these days about 'smart data sets.' Google, Yahoo, newcomer Wolfram and other teams are trying to figure out what that web page of yours really means to other humans.

Trying to teach machines how to read concepts was once only fantasy. How do we code understanding of large ideas in a way that IT becomes relevant to the rest of us? One theory is to embed smart data into the headers of each blog post or news articles. This is 'bottom-up' approach is just not going to be widely adopted by bloggers or the general public. One of the barriers beyond the tech-x-pertise is financial. You need a dedicated team inputting rich meta-data into each post - simply out of reach for the rest of us. This leaves the 'top-down' approach of scanning the data and pulling out the 'meaning.' This is exactly what Open Calais is doing- today.






Recently Robert Scoble mentioned Jimmy Wales on FriendFeed which prompted me to search Jimmy. What came back was Jimmy's Wikipedia page (seems fitting since he's the Co-Founder.) What really got my brain excited was the Feedly data overlay powered by Open Calais. As you can see in the picture, Feedly/ Calais was smart enough to read real-time data from Scoble's FriendFeed stream and alert me that Robert was conducting a live interview. I jumped on the phone with Robert and got to engage Mr. Wales with a few questions. Ponder this for a second- I was able to connect with Robert Scoble and Jimmy Wales because Feedly and Calais extracted real-time data from various sources and served up rich information while I was reading the Wikipedia page.







Richard MacManus of Read Write Web has an excellent series of articles on Calais and "Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web". Worth reading if you want to glimpse into OUR future.

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msw

As we grow more connected through technologies, we are empowered to discover, learn and celebrate the human achievement. Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web are the progressive results of the "human" touch to the net. We are learning from each other how we want the net to respond to our information requests and how to share information more efficiently.

We are seeing communities adapt technologies faster than ever before thanks to the ability to discuss desires and ideas. When Twitter hit the scene, there were some who said 'that's great, but what if...' The latest collaborative efforts to adapt good ideas into a better reality include TweetDeck and the RSS reader Feedly. Both of these adaptations allow us to share our discovered information with our social communities.

Nelson Mandela states it best, "A traveler through a country would stop at a village and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not address themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you be able to improve?"

Share your knowledge of life today, dance with the hope that we are growing together!


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

msw

Feel free to jump into the conversation at- FriendFeed



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Along our curious path we have the occasion to converse with some really BIG thinkers. Thinking Out Loud is the raw stream from some of these encounters.

On this edition: Sparking curiosity with Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant, co-hosts, Stuff You Should Know. We talk about the popularity of their show, encouraging education and:

history of podcasting
history of RSS (Dave Winer)
history of Documentary Film
social innovation
time travel







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