A Tutorial on Optimizing Your Reading
←[86] This is the only time I will ever whore post across many blogs. Forgive me. It’s justified because it’s for you! Copy and paste the link in a new window. I’m way too lazy to resave and reupload all those images.
This “discovery” is the product of a long line of meta posts that went around the past few days. I won’t bore you with the posts themselves. Usagijen and RyanA had an awesome thought, and to quote RyanA:
What would be really awesome, you may already be thinking this, is to have an aggregator of various reader/blogger’s lensing/noting (Shared Items in Google Reader). Unfortunately, this is more work for authors and asking readers to do such a thing is sort of fishy. If there were a sub-group of producers, not authors, that did this and that is all they did, it could be highly effective…. I wonder if any team-blogs have thought of designating that position to members.
This is a short guide on how to “optimize” your google reader experience. Of course, only those will gmail accounts will benefit from this, but if you didn’t use gmail, you don’t deserve to read this anyway.
With this, you will be able to have a feed inside a feed. And these feeds are customizable, but it all depends on the cooperation of bloggers, readers and lurkers alike to make their feed folders public.
In a nutshell, if you actively use google reader, which you should, you can select various rss subscriptions (blog feeds) to be in certain folders. I have a “MAL blog” folder which contains some blogger’s MAL “microblogs”. But I can also make this folder accessible to the public as a feed: you can then, through one subscription, subscribe to a massive number of selectively picked rss feeds. You can’t do this by just subscribing to Nano or Antennae.
What this means is that if every single anime blogger used google reader to create selective rss folders (a “Japanese culture blogs” folder, “seiyuu blogs” folder, “episodic blogs” folder), the general public, through a google account, can then subscribe to these long, carefully tailored blog lists. Here’s how to do just that:
1 – access your google mail home
2 – in the upper tab find under “more” find “Reader”
3 – access “manage subscriptions” button
4 – add folders to your rss subscriptions by clicking on “add to a folder” then “new folder”
5 – in the settings tab, click on the “folders and tags” button
8 – when viewing this public page, you CAN THEN SUBSCRIBE TO IT!
9 – tada, you now have a feed inside a feed
Now, this doesn’t entirely address RyanA’s first post. No, now we have to get into shared items and notes within google reader, which is a godsend to the development of the aniblogosphere. This “device” would allow bloggers and readers to communicate on a totally different level we haven’t seen yet. By consistently taking notes on blogs in your reader, just as we “subconsciously” update our MAL lists (c’mon it isn’t that hard), you can make public your own Author-esque notepadding “blog”. Here’s how:
*** – you need to create a google reader profile first
1 – Go back to your reader and click on “all items”
2 – If your list does not look like that, you need to change the viewing settings. Use expanded view or list view, it doesn’t matter. At the bottom of each post you will see a “share with note” button. Click on it
3 – A window will pop up, asking to you take a note on the post.
4 – Click on “notes” under the “your stuff” tab. If it is collapsed, click on the + to expand it. You should see the post and then, if you click on it, the note you took on it.
6 – after everything, you should come to your shared items page. Notice that you can subscribe to that page with the RSS button in your address bar. There’s also an atom feed button on the right side underneath your abridged profile.
I have yet to see the cumulative effects of a large number of bloggers doing this, but in order for it to work effectively, bloggers need to make both their shared items page public, as in they need to post the link somewhere visible, in their about page or something. The second thing is for bloggers to actively create selective rss folders to which people can subscribe. There are only so many blogs out there, and this feature might become redundant if everyone is subscribed to all 498784353 blogs out there. If this reading-saturation ever occurs, subscriptions to shared notes subscriptions will take precedence as they hold additional content/notes/thoughts.
One point of this is to promote synergy. If readers want a microblog or notepad of sorts but don’t want to create a MAL or blog, you can do so with your email account. This can avoid the “stigmatization” or hype people receive when they create blogs. Ghostlightning is a good example. With the creation of his blog and MAL, he really does seem like a totally different person. His personality and individuality are concretized in various websites and aesthetic loci. Not to say that everyone should do this, the typical anon has a place in comments. I don’t know. All I know is that this is fucking cool.
sign me up.
i haven’t really taken good use of the share+note feature, and it’s mixed with all kind of random things, but hey.
I’ll post a better public feed soon !
I just saw that google had a boat load of resources on reader. They know what they’re doing (I don’t really).
Edit also: you don’t need a google account to subscribe selective feeds (they’re actually atom…) since those selective feed folders are made entirely public. Awesome.
and mother fucker the image links don’t work. God damn animeblogger. (just copy and paste the link in a new tab)
I googled a bit and I am going to just answer a question preemptively: yes you can make multiple folders with different posts shared, with notes. Create a tag (empty folder), and put in the name of that tag in the post you share. Then in the settings turn that tag/folder into a public/shared folder. Spam the link to that feed to your anime-only friends or people you don’t want to share your other links with.
https://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/17011768500331099577/label/Anime
Try this one.
After playing around with this I’ve noticed some problematic issues in the software: (Omo seems one step ahead of me via notes, haha)
(1) It seems you can’t condense the post on which you took the note. We don’t need to see the entire post, just a link will do (we can open it in a new tab), and the note takes primacy. The note is in some stupid text box and in italics, which isn’t good since it emphasizes the post and not the note. Edit: Actually, I’m not sure which is supposed to be more important. Maybe the downplaying of the note will keep the “society of notes” in check so it doesn’t spiral out of control.
(2) Note taking is recursive: you can take a note on a post, note and that noted post, note on that noted post ad infinitum. However, there’s no way to distinguish this and so things get incredibly confusing if you try this…so don’t.
(3) A noted post isn’t indicated in the title. If you subscribe to someone’s shared items feed, those items are not indicated in the title as being noted upon. So if the original post is titled “vitamin”, any subsequent annotations will appear as “vitamin: from so and so’s shared reader”. So basically, whenever you visit someone’s shared items page, you will only see notes taken by them. I guess that this is a good thing in the long run, effectively killing “comments”. I wonder if it has the possibility of turning into a twitter-esque function with more synergy.
[...] Now you do. [...]
I’m getting ‘403 forbidden’s on the images in your step-by-step tutorial. Is this a general problem, or is it me?
Yeah, I noticed that. Damn animeblogger hotlinking. Just copy and paste the link into a new tab. That should do the trick I think.
Ah, I see. Thank you.
EDIT: I suppose you could plug one of these feeds into an RSS widget on a blog’s sidebar, as those who use Twitter are wont to do with their Twitter feeds?
IK: I’m starting to understand the massive implications of the word “postmodern” – over at omo’s blog I commented, and that I still see recursive feeds as the largest potential of this application. Basically, as we’ve said, you can gather multiple feeds into an aggregate and GR will create a feed for that aggregate; you’ve created your own intelligent Antennae/Nano. The problem is that titles in feeds – the main method of content identification – isn’t changed at all regardless of whose feed it comes out of. That only makes things utterly confusing. I don’t think that’s what you’re asking at all haha.
No, it’s not, but it is interesting.
I won’t write a post on it, but just some other infos:
- The dynamically sized right-column on my blog mixes various feeds, one of them is my shared items from google. There is more in that post I wrote a while back on Blog Lensing.
- Noting works not only on subscribed entries, but you can note anything with a URL (see the bookmarklet Google provides)
- I think you are allowed to clip the original data, so that it’s just a line or whatever. This is done by clicking the section above your note and below the title.
It’s no surprise that Reader does these things, it’s been part of google for a number years, and being google they have the man-power to get awesome stuff out of ideas. I’m just glad Google is more hacker than business oriented when it comes to their “thoughts” … yahoo and ms don’t counter because there is not much business logic in these things (at least from the start; most usable things can be used in business).
Other:
lol, I don’t like the update episodes issue with AniDB or MAL, its just too old-school. When developing the API for melative I made sure of two things:
1) you can update experience on a title and it will show real-time … so if you start/pause/resume/drop it will show (there isn’t a plugin to do this, but it’s available in the API)
2) the tasklist of “episodes” or whatever to watch, so called a Wishlist, conforms only to items the user designates, plus there was no other way to easily allow a tasklist of chapters, issues, volumes, episodes, etc all user-customizable. (this also has API methods so basically it can be done from the WP dashboard if one so wished to code a plugin that way)
The general idea is to have platforms which allow high-portability, 3rd party applications, etc…. essentially this is the same with RSS … thank god for it.
Even though AniDB and MAL have helper clients that auto-magically check off episodes or whatever, its the underlying concept, and its just me… I don’t see why it matters what episode someone has seen as compared to if they have completed the entire series or not, and even what they thought about the episode. So-and-so has seen episode 6 of bla … and?
[...] Now you do. [...]
well, i can’t see the pictures but i want to see what this is about as well
copy and paste the link in a new tab
to do it really fast just hover the link:
right click
alt > C
ctrl + T
ctrl + L
ctrl + V
hit enter
for firefox and XP….
[...] or being involved in the so-called otakusphere, and I’m hopelessly lost in all the recent talk about RSS opti-something that’s been invading my Google Reader. Being the technotard I am, I [...]
[...] her actions towards Minorin. If it’s just for ego, or just because, then, well, hmm. ←[87] Posted in Toradora || Trackback [...]
[...] have seen ways which we can subtlety express our takes on other authors’ content without vertical growth. We [...]
[...] For instructions on how to go about Note-taking, I’ll just redirect you to Lelangir’s helpful tutorial. Spread the word [...]
[...] 1. If you’re unfamiliar with Google Reader and its note-taking feature, start here. [...]
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