Streams versus Pages

http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/

At first glance this quick article, which is more of an op-ed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed) piece really, seems like filler. Nebulous musings on the Internet that pass for news when there is none. The main point will be somewhat self-evident to the target audience.

However I appreciate what the author has done here. He’s recognized a big trend, and isolated it just a little from the background of other things that are trending. He’s teased it out. And it’s not just fluff, there are quotes and facts and links. Even though it is short, I find that refreshing. It feels balanced, like eating a great salad rather than the scalloped potatoes you’d get from some of the reference services.

I found his advice at the end very helpful. I have been trying to keep ahead of the Facebook stream, the Twitter stream, the RSS stream, as in, read everything in my stream. The revelation that it’s going to be impossible, is hard to take, but I can see it’s truth. I will need to first relax and let some stuff go by, and then find a way to filter the streams for the items that are most important to me.

Reminder - shared feeds

This is just a reminder, that if I have no value to add to an article I read in Google Reader, but I still want to pass it on, I just share it, so it won't show up in this feed. However there is an RSS feed for those items, which you can add to your news reader:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/04600384910697058887/state/com.google/broadcast

Thanks!

Twitter feed of CPAN updates

http://twitter.com/cpan_linked

Perl add-on modules are managed on CPAN. Now rjray ( http://rjray.org , http://use.perl.org/~rjray/ ) has created a twitter-bot to track the changes. Very cool! Plus there is a feed automatically from twitter, so now you can get the updates in an RSS reader too!