The Aggregator Lag [en]

[fr] A cause de Google Reader qui m'a servie une version "non rectifiée" de ce billet de danah, j'ai failli contribuer à propager des informations fausses, et ça m'énerve. Ça m'énerve surtout quand (en l'occurence) la technologie vient nous mettre des bâtons dans les roues.

This bugs me. It bugs me because it’s a situation where the technology which is normally supposed to assist us in communicating actually gets in the way of good communication. It’s even worse, actually: here, a technological issue could invite us to spread false information.

(Of course, there is a human issue behind this, but it’s not what I want to address here. Humans can make mistakes, and as long as they are honestly made, I think we should just accept that they happen.)

I just read danah’s last post in Google Reader and headed to the Facebook group she was pointing to so I could get a little more information on the current situation.

Post in Google Reader

There, I found a message which indicated that FaceBook had never sent the ArabLGTB group the message they had received. It was, in fact, a fake.

"We have been fooled"

Well, I thought I’d better comment about that on danah’s post, so I headed over to her blog. There, to my surprise (happy surprise), I saw she had already updated her post.

Post on apophonia

The update just hadn’t made it to Google Reader.

So of course, there is nothing extraordinary going on here. This story is just another case of misinformation spread by good intentions (and I’m thinking mainly about all the people who blogged about this on their LiveJournals and will never know it was not true — or bother finding out). But I’m annoyed that I almost got caught in it too, and that I always forget that we can’t trust aggregators to serve us the latest version of a post.

Check, check, check. When in doubt, don’t blog. (That’s for me.)

I Might Be Switching to Google Reader [en]

[fr] J'aime Google Reader comme lecteur RSS. Surtout la facilité avec laquelle on peut partager des billets qui nous ont plu.

Robert loves Google Reader. Tempted me to try. I think I love it too.

I’ve been using Bloglines for quite some time now (still doesn’t make me a good blog reader). I find the interface for Google Reader clearer. It was easy to export my subscriptions as OPML from Bloglines to try Google Reader.

What really wins me over? How easy it is to share the stuff I’ve liked with you. I’ve even added it to my sidebar. See? Maybe Bloglines does it (I’m sure it does) but it wasn’t obvious enough and I never got around to doing it. With Google Reader, I just click on the “share” button at the end of each post I want to add to my share page.