I’m egotistical, but fair

And I thought Google Reader was just for reading. When I noticed the search feature, I thought it was just a search feature. It takes someone like Steve Rubel to open our eyes to its potential as a data mining tool.

After reading his post and finding some surprising trends in my feeds (it seems I’m twice as interested in PR than copywriting, and in both quite a bit more than tech), I decided to look afresh at Google Reader. It struck me that I hadn’t really delved into the Trends option, although it’s been there for a long while.

It proves quite revealing, particularly when I look at the blogs I’ve read over the past 30 days, and those I’ve shared (which you can see in the FG Flags feed to the right).

These are the top 40 blogs I’ve read:

… and these are the ones I’ve shared:

 

Points to note:

• I must have an ego the size of a planet. Or I’m self-obsessed. Either way I’m probably temperamentaly quite well-suited to PR. In fairness, the Read figure is probably because I tend to make small changes to a posting after publishing, and the shared figure is influenced by my taking the view that I’m entitled to share my own posts on the FG Flags feed.

• I’m quietly pleased about the other top ten or so blogs I read. I like them all but I really had no idea they were my favourites. I used to think I just picked and chose quite randomly according to what caught my eye on Google Reader. While this is on the whole true – most of them have just been viewed once or twice – if asked I would probably have listed most of them as bloggers whose insight or style (or both) I admire.

• I find it interesting also that I share with a similar pattern. On second thoughts this makes sense. When I go through my feeds I do tend to share the posts I read, simply because they caught my interest.

• I’m thinking that I’ll monitor my read and shared figures, then I’ll turn that both into my blogroll, and into my PowerPR index. The index is very large and proving difficult to maintain: certainly 40 blogs will be a lot easier to handle than over 100.

If you’re a Google Reader freak like me, take a quick peek (a freak peek?) at your trends. You may be similarly proud, happy and thrilled. And, in my case at least, slightly ashamed.

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Google Reader now has a search feature

One of my biggest gripes about Google Reader has been fixed: it now has a search feature. It’s that innocuous-looking field at the top of the page with the word ‘Search’ next to it. This makes it much easier to monitor blogs for specific issues.

I noticed this on Thursday, together with some other small changes such as the funky animated ‘Loading’ icon and the ‘1000+’ feature next to the ‘All items’ listing.

Searching was one of the weakest areas of Google Reader. When I show people the application, this is often the first thing they ask about. You can, of course, zero in on content when you subscribe to news searches, but when you want to monitor specific blogs it can become a chore to separate the wheat from the chaff. You could use just use CTRL+F to search on the page, as you would any Internet page, but that was a bit clunky and only worked with the content on that page, not the full items.

Research on this yielded the previous-best solution, the aptly-named Google filter. The new Google Reader feature does exactly the same thing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s essentially the same tool but incorporated into the main app.

On using it however I realised that it’s not a filter at all, it’s a search. In other words, it won’t pre-filter content out, it’s up to you to go through all the material and search for what you want after it’s been grabbed. Is this better? Well, I suppose it means you don’t accidentally miss stuff out because it’s been incorrectly filtered, but I think I would prefer a proper filter so I just see what I need without taking that extra step to search.

But let’s hear it for Google. Although very familiar with web-delivered applications – heck, I used to design one – I still find it marvellous when you log on one day and suddenly with no downloads, installs or upgrades, it’s better.

Oh, and yes, I did tell people about it at work but no one listened. In fact the person sitting next to me was looking a bit fed up. I asked why. She said she’d been tasked with monitoring blogs. I asked her how she was doing it. She said she was just visiting each one. And, with that, I packed up and went home.

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Google Reader now has a search feature

One of my biggest gripes about Google Reader has been fixed: it now has a search feature. It’s that innocuous-looking field at the top of the page with the word ‘Search’ next to it. This makes it much easier to monitor blogs for specific issues.

I noticed this on Thursday, together with some other small changes such as the funky animated ‘Loading’ icon and the ‘1000+’ feature next to the ‘All items’ listing.

Searching was one of the weakest areas of Google Reader. When I show people the application, this is often the first thing they ask about. You can, of course, zero in on content when you subscribe to news searches, but when you want to monitor specific blogs it can become a chore to separate the wheat from the chaff. You could use just use CTRL+F to search on the page, as you would any Internet page, but that was a bit clunky and only worked with the content on that page, not the full items.

Research on this yielded the previous-best solution, the aptly-named Google filter. The new Google Reader feature does exactly the same thing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s essentially the same tool but incorporated into the main app.

On using it however I realised that it’s not a filter at all, it’s a search. In other words, it won’t pre-filter content out, it’s up to you to go through all the material and search for what you want after it’s been grabbed. Is this better? Well, I suppose it means you don’t accidentally miss stuff out because it’s been incorrectly filtered, but I think I would prefer a proper filter so I just see what I need without taking that extra step to search.

But let’s hear it for Google. Although very familiar with web-delivered applications – heck, I used to design one – I still find it marvellous when you log on one day and suddenly with no downloads, installs or upgrades, it’s better.

Oh, and yes, I did tell people about it at work but no one listened. In fact the person sitting next to me was looking a bit fed up. I asked why. She said she’d been tasked with monitoring blogs. I asked her how she was doing it. She said she was just visiting each one. And, with that, I packed up and went home.

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Another thing Google haven’t thought of yet – filtering

One of the first things I’m often asked when I show people Google Reader is: can it filter? It’s a very valid point and further enquiries reveal that a lot of people want this too.

You can perform searches that effectively filter for news. Just go to Google News, Yahoo News, Google Blog Search or a blog platform’s keyword search – for example WordPress’s own feature – type in your search terms, and subscribe to the resulting feed.

This is seriously powerful but just filters like any news filter, that is, across many sources. It would be great if you could filter an individual source – a feed or a blog – for specific items, whether to allow individual items in or keep unwanted ones out. For example, if you subscribed to Friendly Ghost you might only want items which mention Google Reader, or if you’re sensible, not display items from this blog tagged ‘humour’.

One quick workaround is to use the standard search feature for any web page – by which I mean Edit/Find in Internet Explorer or CTRL-F (I used to use Firefox but I can’t remember what the search is on that browser). Simply type in your term, and you can scan whatever Google Reader is displaying for that term. This only works for headlines in List View or headline plus preview text in Expanded view, however, and only what Google Reader is currently showing.

So, enter the Google Reader filter. As with the Google Report I recently came across, this is another smart utility that Google could – and should – have thought of (they probably are thinking about it right now, this instant). The Google Reader filter searches a feed for a given term so, for example, if you wanted to know how many features mention the word ‘power’ in my PR Feed, simply type http://feeds.feedburner.com/FriendlyGhostPR into the feed field and power as the search term, and hit the filter button (see graphic above).

It’s not lightning-fast and it seems to stop at 500 items (which could be the feed limitation) but it does the job. If only Google could bolt something like this onto Google Reader, even as an interim solution to true filtering.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with feeds from news searches. For example I just tried doing a Google News search for PR, taking that feed URL and filtering it for something that appeared in the results of the search, and it didn’t find anything, nor does this work for an equivalent Yahoo News search. I’m probably missing something obvious here but I would class them both as feeds which should be searchable.

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It’s not tech, and it’s not magic, it’s your job.

Why is it that people stubbornly refuse to adopt new technologies even when they’re tailor-made for the work they do? I’m talking RSS and Google Reader here.

I have, in my mind’s eye, a sketch, and it goes a bit like this:

PR: “Hi.”
Tech: “Hi.”
PR: “I’d like you to develop some software for me please.”
Tech: “Sure, what do you want it to do?”
PR: “I want it to tell me when there’s news for a specific topic.”
Tech: “OK. Anything else?”
PR: “I want it not only to look at news, but blogs. There’s a lot of blogs out there and I want it to cover them.”
Tech (scratches chin): “OK. Anything else?”
PR: “I want it to be accessible from anywhere in the world.”
[pause]
“And I want it to be free.”
Tech: “Free?”
PR: “Yes, please. Free. I don’t want to pay for it.”
Tech: “I take it you want it to be easy to use as well.”
PR: “Naturally. I work in PR.”
Tech: “I see your point. So, to recap, you want something that grabs news for you, including blog conversations, that is freely accessible, and easy to use. Have you ever considered Google Reader?”

And so the conversation goes. This is fine in theory but the end of the sketch would be something like:

[several days later]
Tech: “Hi.”
PR: “Hi.”
Tech: “So, how are you getting along with that software that is tailor-made for your requirements, is free, and is easy to use?”
PR: “I don’t use it.”

This is something I go through often. Around Christmas time last year I made a list of things to find out about, and Google Reader and RSS was one of them. Within minutes I was up and running and within an hour it had transformed a large part of what I do at work and at home. To me, it seemed very easy and intuitive and obviously useful.

But the people I work with just don’t get it. Despite blogging specifically and social media generally being one of the most important developments in PR in recent years, I still have directors who say “Oh, I don’t read blogs” or “What’s Google Reader?” So I explain to the first that of course you don’t read blogs by visiting them every day, you use RSS and a reader (for ‘reader’ I may interchange Google Reader simply because that’s the one I use); and to the second, I explain how to set it up and what RSS is all about. On the outside I’m very helpful and approachable, but on the inside I’m usually pretty angry that I have to be telling people this stuff.

It’s the same with clients. I’ve been to clients to present this to them, and I use Google Reader to provide them with a page of the very latest online news for them to use. But they don’t.

I’ve even taken groups of people through it. I actually show them how to access the reader, how to subscribe, how to use nifty techniques such as subscribing to Google News and Yahoo News, or using Google Blog Search, or WordPress tag searches. I explain how tags work and how you can have feeds from them so you can set up a complete news syndication network delivering news direct to clients. But a week or so later, they’ve all stopped using it.

Other people look mystified. They ask how I know this stuff. I just tell them I spent an hour learning about it. And when I had learned about it, despite having only worked in PR for a very short time, I could see straight away how important it was for PR. Not because it’s tech, but because it’s PR.

I’d be interested to know if other people have the same issues. I don’t class myself as particularly forward-looking or visionary, but by the same token I hate having to class a large proportion of my contemporaries as blinkered.

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Surely I’m not the only person to realise Google Reader has been broken?

So over the weekend I tried to change some settings. I couldn’t. Or rather, I could, but only if I clicked the tiny quarter-screen frame that seemed to have been allocated for all the settings pages, and scrolled up and down to see the full page.

I’m not the only person with this problem. I’ve since tested with several other people’s machines and they all have the problem too.

I reported it to the Google Reader forum and the engineer claimed to know nothing about it. And still nothing has been done about it.

I will bet a large amount of Lindens that, in implementing the Offline feature, someone, somewhere has broken the Settings frameset. But the really weird thing is that I cannot find anyone else reporting the problem.

Am I really totally alone?

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Surely I’m not the only person to realise Google Reader has been broken?

So over the weekend I tried to change some settings. I couldn’t. Or rather, I could, but only if I clicked the tiny quarter-screen frame that seemed to have been allocated for all the settings pages, and scrolled up and down to see the full page.

I’m not the only person with this problem. I’ve since tested with several other people’s machines and they all have the problem too.

I reported it to the Google Reader forum and the engineer claimed to know nothing about it. And still nothing has been done about it.

I will bet a large amount of Lindens that, in implementing the Offline feature, someone, somewhere has broken the Settings frameset. But the really weird thing is that I cannot find anyone else reporting the problem.

Am I really totally alone?

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If you’re interested in Whitehouse and Wolfowitz, you’ll love this.

I don’t just receive. Actually, I don’t really receive much at all on this blog. But I do give.

Subscribe to my feeds and you get a good all-round view of what’s happening in the PR, journalism, copywriting and tech blogospheres.

I’m not going to tell you exactly how I created these feeds, but what I do know is that I’ve developed techniques to ensure wide-ranging, deep-probing and relevant hits for each category. They’ve been filtered, collated and filtered again, and I’ve tested them and they work. I use them every day in my professional life.

So:

• PR Pros Proclaim – find out what’s the haps in the PR blogosphere. This does not cover regional PR activities in Pig’s Knuckle Arkansas. It does cover the latest, most important PR news, in part voted for, digg-like, by PR professionals.
• Journalists retort – well they don’t really but they do like some antagonism to elicit interest. This feed has been honed down from several hundred to just several dozen, and then filtered again for the most relevant to PR and social media. It’s the Carling Black Ice of feeds.
• Writers mumble – and don’t they just. This is the least active feed and the most informative. Quality over quantity. If only those writers would think less and write more.
• Geeks speak – and don’t they just. Strange, in company they’re the quiet ones but give them a screen and a keyboard and you can’t shut them up. I worked in tech for 15 years before coming to PR, so I know. Bless them. The future is in this feed.

Subscribe to all four and all you’re missing is the one feed to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.