bbc persian and google shared items

Take a look at some stats on rssmeme.

Not sure what to make of this, but I thought it was interesting to see that BBC Persian was the 46th highest source of items shared on Google Reader*. The English BBC News site is nowhere to be seen. Even the NY Times which seems have got to grips with new technologies quicker than most is at 49.

*This is only the Google Reader shared feeds indexed by RSSmeme not everyone’s.

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Check out ReadBurner by Alexander Marktl. It shows you the popular shared items on Google Reader and even more interestingly shows you who is sharing your items, therefore indirectly telling you who is reading your blog. Very interesting. Make sure you look for your link on the statistics page after you have burned your link blog.

I would surely have expected Google to roll something like this out - maybe integrated into Google News.

We need access to information at different times and in different ways - when we’re on the move we might use a mobile and at home a desktop. It is this change in circumstances and needs that devices are getting better at dealing with.

Email was one of the first devices to bridge the boundary between the desktop and the mobile. I am using Exchange at work and so a windows mobile phone works “well” at integrating the experience on the move. I haven’t been much of a fan of gmail via the mobile as yet - it currently feels a bit clunky, so I usually wait to answer personal emails when I get home unless they come to my work address but this will improve over time. It amazes me that the iphone doesn’t support exchange. It is one of the major reasons I ruled out purchasing it.

RSS is the next technology to do this and the need for this cross platform integration is stopping me moving from Google Reader. The platform works really well on both the mobile and desktop platforms. It’s all very well talking about using new platforms like Particls or fav.or.it but if it cant provide a great experience across multiple platforms then it at least needs to sync with Google Reader (or other great mobile platforms). It is now the first question I ask when I look at other RSS reader. This all comes back to dataportability. We need the ability to sync data as well as move it.

It’s more than a year since I gave a talk on Attention based management systems and how I envisaged they would become key to managing all the data that is thrown at us everyday. If anything attention as a buzzword has decreased in the past 12 months, whilst the amount of data has increased massively thanks in no small part to Twitter and the Facebook newsfeed.

It would be interesting to see whether a prolific rss reader like Scoble saw a decrease in the number of posts he read compared to last year. Back in September, the BBC reported that the time required to use Facebook has come about at the expense of worker productivity.

So why are attention tools not getting attention? (sorry!) It is actually rather simple. It’s built into everything we use already.

The very Facebook newsfeed that has increased the amount of data we see, is customisable to show what we want to see. Facebook rolled out the ability to give feedback on what you do and do not want to see (I trust it will be used eventually as it doesnt seem to be yet!). It is early days but this very newsfeed allows you to keep in touch with more people using less time.

The major reason more people have been using Google Reader is the flexibility it gives you to read blog posts efficiently. I definitely read more posts now then I used to with Bloglines a year ago. Fav.or.it is another RSS reader that attempts to place content most relevant to you in front of you.

Even the workhorse of the office worker, Microsoft Outlook 2007 has taken a huge step with its task features. It now places tasks both in a new right hand panel so you can see it immediately as well as the relevant tasks in your calendar. I used tasks sporadically before but could not do without it now.

As for the applications I looked at a year ago, Touchstone (now Particls) and Attensa still exist and I’ll take a closer look at both in later posts.

Oh and one last thing - just like in marketing, attention is all about relevance.

Well the hype and anticipation in my mind dissipated quite quickly - installing touchstone on my computer lasted all of 30 minutes. It is in alpha so I should not have expected so much but it is a shame nevertheless. It crashed constantly. I’ll install it on my non-production system and play with it there.

In the meantime it is back to Attensa for now..