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About Me
I'm Zack. I'm an entrepreneur. I like surfing, tea, history, Baltimore sports, and making things on the Internet. I live in San Francisco.
- 59thirty
4 Easy Ways to Read More Content Online
As many of you know, I’m constantly trying to figure out the best way to consume content efficiently. As time goes on and you find more websites that you love - or think you may love in the future - you scribble them down somewhere in your computer’s memory and then hope you’ll someday return to them.
I use four rules that seldom change. These rules may expand and contract based on new data or new behaviors.
We must choose the mediums in which we subscribe to a source carefully.
There are certain sources that are better to subscribe to via RSS and others that are better to simply follow on Twitter. For example, Boing Boing or TUAW publish large amounts of content daily. These types of sources bottleneck in your RSS reader and are better managed through a medium like Twitter or Flipboard.
This rule mainly comes down to reducing anxiety when you go to read backlogs of content.
Recognize and exploit the limitations of RSS.
RSS is such an interesting technology. It provides the opportunity for anyone to subscribe to a source yet publishers shoot themselves in the foot by truncating content in the effort to get you to go to their website and click on a few ads.
Many sources - like Esquire - only provide a headline through RSS. The user is asked to subscribe, evaluate and then click through, leaving them in the browser. This completely defeats the purpose of RSS, leading me to subscribe to sources like Esquire through Twitter.
Other sources, like blogs that publish in low volume, are wonderful for RSS. The content is all there and it doesn’t get overwhelming if you miss a week or two.
Collect, then curate.
Curating is one of the hardest things we can do, both in our digital lives and in our real lives.
Curating requires that we make hard decisions about what stays and what goes. We ask ourselves the question: “What if I want this in the future?” This question is largely a trap and ends in us keeping things that we won’t actually use, leading to clutter.
No one has really nailed consumption analytics yet. I want my systems to phase our sources that I don’t actually read and tell me exactly how I’ve interacted (or how I haven’t) with a source.
Don’t be afraid to experiment.
The beauty of these rules is that you can quickly and easily change how you consume a source or a set of sources. I tried primarily using an RSS reader for a while, that didn’t work for me so I changed things. I unsubscribed from five sources through RSS and began to follow them on Twitter. This led to a much more manageable experience and allowed me to create Rule #1 above.
Make your changes small and temporary, maybe even a few hours or a few days. If you don’t like the change, go back.
What rules do you use to manage your content?
Figure Out Your Content’s Flow
(Photo: JohnnyHype1)
There’s a lot of time and attention online devoted to the personal brand, from techniques on crafting your brand to managing it, blah blah blah.
Stop for a second and ask yourself “Where do I want my traffic to funnel into?” What is the flow of everything I do online? Where am I directing new readers, new fans, et cetera?
Yesterday, I deleted my other blog and wrote down each service I use and what it links to. The whole point is to avoid confusion and allow your readers or fans to easily find you.
This blog links to About.me, my company’s website and Twitter. You can also email me. For this blog, that’s enough.
On About.me, you can find my LinkedIn as well as Twitter, 59thirty and this blog.
On Twitter, you get funneled here.
The point is, I want to build my blog and more importantly, I want you to get here to read it without confusion.
So take a minute and stop crafting that “social strategy” you probably won’t stick to and manage the flow of all of your profiles.
Once you’ve done that, make content that you love. Readers will come; don’t stress out. I love to write and I fucking miss it. Some people will like my stuff and my viewpoints, some people won’t. That’s life.
Hope to see you around my blog again.
ZS
Got an early invitation to Eightbit.me yesterday. A very cool idea and beautifully executed by Addison Kowalski.
I’ve got 3 invites if anybody wants one.
Oh hey, Google’s got a new project.
Somebody used their free company time to copy Twitter.
Blogging, Twitter, and the mainstream media
It seems as though the shift in the mainstream media to an entertainment model rather than a news model was complemented perfectly by the emergence of blogging. In the wake of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, where what organizations heard almost became more important that what they could prove, the rise and popularity of 24-hour news networks opened an avenue for blogs and self-proclaimed experts.
In the first few years of blogging (2003-2005), the mainstream media seemed to reject blogs more than they embraced them. Now, realizing that some very good journalism can come out of blogging, we seem to fit right in with the 24-hour news model.
Unfortunately however, in the communications sphere, blogging presents pressure to news organizations. Gone is their luxury of preparing a factual story over a period of hours. We can report on stories and accumulate comments while they write and fact check and then re-write and re-check. Journalistic standards be damned. The bloggers can publish and amend stories as complaints or corrections roll in (see also: Fox News).
The biggest breakthrough of blogging into our mainstream media was undoubtedly seen during the Iranian election and citizen journalism through Twitter. The mainstream media, mainly CNN, had no choice but to embrace the technology as a simple journalistic tool to the point where live tweets were read on air in place of content created for broadcast. In the absence of information coming out of Iran by traditional sources, the micro-bloggers became king.
Now Twitter has turned into more of a distraction than it has a tool. Social media tools serve as perfect time-wasters to help fill in those 24 hours. Joe19 in Michigan apparently has some brilliant insights. How the hell else did he get on TV?
It doesn’t seem as if blogging is going away, either. Arianna Huffington’s regular appearances on cable news networks, experts and bloggers yelling at one another, and the inclusion of bloggers as a part of news organizations show that embracing blogging will prove much more fruitful than rejecting it.
Updated: How Twitter can improve Trending Topics
I wrote a few months ago how Twitter can improve their Trending Topics by allowing users to delete uninteresting topics from their respective lists.
I’ve updated the post with more information as well as a link to the Twitter company blog detailing their recent efforts to begin to alter the way Trending Topics are built (on their end) and used (on our end)
Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter, talks about his new venture, Square, and demos it in a coffee shop in San Francisco.
A few weeks ago I was in an Apple store buying a replacement set of headphones and as I checked out I handed my debit card to the employee who promptly swiped it in a similar device as square is using only it’s a shell case for the iPhone with a card reader built in. I stood in awe for a second that Apple had developed a device like that. It makes so much sense, I guess credit card readers are just one of those things that we never really think about.
We’re in an age where physical money is becoming obsolete. That does present its own problems, especially in the areas of money management and compulsive spending. Square’s simple little device will not only free up counter space in stores that choose to use their card readers, it’ll add an element of security while reducing paper.
Square’s website emphasizes the emailing of receipts as Apple stores already do. Their website also talks about an emphasis on security, showing an iPhone with a picture that pops up, a picture of you or me or whoever the credit card belongs to. Not only will that crack down on potential identity theft, it will eliminate the pesky need to pull out your driver’s license to verify your credit card.
Five or ten years down the road a lot of the technology we currently use may change. Twitter may be gone, Facebook could go the way of MySpace but I think Square has some real staying power. It’s going to change the way we do business in an age of smart phones and credit cards.
Jack Dorsey may have just done it again.
The (social media) guide to throwing things out
Now is the time of year where people start to clean out closets, getting rid of the things that they will never need or use again. We make resolutions that we’ll be lucky to keep past February. For 2010, why don’t we make a resolution with some staying power: cleaning ourselves up in the social media world.
Aaron of TechThinker.com points out rightfully that:
Having fewer followings mean you will pay more attention to your feed. This gives you a better opportunity to interact and mingle with the people you follow.
Whether you’re a niche blogger or just someone whose Twitter feed is cluttered with users that you marginally care about, you’ve probably got a few people that you could unfollow without thinking twice. You’re not throwing out a winning lotto ticket, you’re just choosing to mute one of the many voices in the online community.
Identify what kind of people you want to hear from. If you’re mainly writing about different kinds of tea, does that ski instructor you never communicate with really need to be followed? Probably not.
The way I eliminate any kind of clutter in my life is to single out a specific object or person and ask myself, “Am I ever going to need/use this/look at it/read it/communicate with them again?” If the answer is an immediate yes, I keep it. If I hesitate, even for a second, it has to go. The item or person you’re following probably doesn’t mean much in the long run.
Don’t do it all at once. Unfollow a few people at a time so you don’t overwhelm yourself. Make sure you’re happy with your stream of incoming tweets and as soon as you’re not, identify what you don’t like and eliminate it.
So you just unfollowed 100 people, now what? Find more people that interest you! Sites like WeFollow.com and Twellow.com categorize users by subject matter, self-imposed tags, amount of followers and influence. Search for “tea” and find the loudest voices in the tea community. If you love tea, you’ll most likely want to hear what they have to say over that ski instructor you unfollowed before.
I use Twitter as an example for this post but the same principles can be applied to any network. Cleaning out is healthy and you shouldn’t feel bad about honing down whose information you want to receive. The social media world is a world of cheap commodities. Following and unfollowing can be done with such relative ease that adding and subtracting from the number of people you follow should be a quick and painless action.
Tweetie developer Loren Brichter just announced that Tweetie 2 is going to be available soon in the App Store.
Head on over to Mashable for a for a full rundown of new features, some really cool screenshots and a comprehensive preview of the iPhone’s favorite Twitter client.
