The Frustrating Easiness of Sharing a Link on Facebook (and Twitter and Google Plus and Tumblr and…) [en]

[fr] C'est tellement facile de partager des liens sur Facebook et autres que je finis par ne plus le faire sur mon blog, parce que c'est laborieux. Il y a un moyen plus simple?

Today, when I stumble upon an interesting link, I share it on Facebook. And usually also on Twitter. And on Google Plus.

It’s easy. More often than not, I found the link in question on Facebook, Twitter, or G+. Resharing on the same platform is two clicks maximum. The link is expanded into an excerpt and a photo which are nice and pretty and often spare me having to write any kind of introduction to the link (I do, sometimes).

Sharing on other platforms? At the worst, copy-paste (goes quickly when you use keyboard shortcuts and know your way around your browser tabs). Or the bitly bookmarklet.

Sharing on social media is rewarding: people are there already, they comment, they like, they reshare.

I pull quotes out of what I’m reading with the Tumblr bookmarklet and post them to Digital Crumble. That in turn gets sucked into Facebook, to the annoyance of some and the delight of others. Super easy.

You know what’s not easy? Collecting a bunch of interesting links I’ve found recently into a blog post on Climb to the Stars. That sucks. I’ve done it at times, yes, but I do wish there was an easier way to do it than copy-pasting article titles and putting links on them, after having let them pile up in an Evernote note until there were enough of them.

I’m sure there is a way to do this more elegantly. Tell me!

Tinkering with Evernote, Tumblr, IFTTT, and Pocket [en]

[fr] Je bidouille avec Pocket, IFTTT, Evernote, et Tumblr.

This is incomplete tinkering. More questions than solutions. Welcome into my ecosystem for dealing with other people’s content.

I’m a fan of the “read later” button, my buckets are overflowing, and I’m fully aware of the aspirational nature of my ever-growing collection of things to read. I do read, though.

When I read things, I publish snippets (my “notes”) to Digital Crumble. I use Evernote to store all kinds of data and content, and am moving towards storing more and more in it. (No I’m not freaked out by the hacking episode, which I think they handled well.)

I used to use Instapaper as my “read later” bucket but have now switched to Pocket, mainly because the latter offers more triggers in IFTTT.

Here’s what I’d like to do:

I love IFTTT, but get frustrated that the triggers and actions associated to the channels I use are sometimes insufficient for my needs. And yes, this is probably often due to limitations placed by the service APIs (I’m still reeling from the loss of Twitter triggers). For example, the ingredients for the Pocket triggers only contain an excerpt of the saved page, and not the full content. Shame!

So, I might go back to just saving my “pages to read later” to Evernote, but it’s not quite as friendly as Pocket for reading and managing them.

2nd Back to Blogging Challenge, day 8. On the team: Nathalie Hamidi (@nathaliehamidi), Evren Kiefer (@evrenk), Claude Vedovini (@cvedovini), Luca Palli (@lpalli), Fleur Marty (@flaoua), Xavier Borderie (@xibe), Rémy Bigot (@remybigot), Jean-François Genoud (@jfgpro), Sally O’Brien (@swissingaround), Marie-Aude Koiransky (@mezgarne), Anne Pastori Zumbach (@anna_zap), Martin Röll (@martinroell), Gabriela Avram (@gabig58), Manuel Schmalstieg (@16kbit), Jan Van Mol (@janvanmol), Gaëtan Fragnière (@gaetanfragniere), Jean-François Jobin (@gieff), Yann Graf (@yanngraf). Hashtag:#back2blog.

Where Does Tumblr Fit in? [en]

[fr] Tumblr est un outil génial pour rassembler et republier les choses sympa que l'on trouve en ligne, agrémenté d'un réseau social à la Twitter (non-réciproque) qui nous permet de suivre sans difficultés les publications des personnes qui nous intéressent.

Last night on the way home, I was telling a friend about Tumblr. I have a blog there, Digital Crumble, and really really like using it. Many of my friends do not use Tumblr, and I realize that some explaining is not useless.

Tumblr is great as a scrapbook (scrapblog!) of content seen online. Not to say it can’t be used for original content, but that’s not where it shines (in my opinion) and I personally hardly ever put original content in Digital Crumble.

For me, Tumblr is somewhere between Twitter, Buzz, and WordPress.

One reason many people do not get Tumblr is that until you get an account, you do not know about the dashboard. The dashboard is the Tumblr equivalent to the Twitter stream. It is a neverending page of posts by people you have chosen to follow. That’s the big difference between Tumblr as a blogging tool and WordPress: Tumblr is really built around the following/being followed dynamic of Twitter and Buzz.

Here are two zoomed-out shots of parts of my dashboard page so you can see what it looks like:

Tumblr Dashboard Tumblr Dashboard

Two things make Tumblr great for collecting non-original content:

  • the “reblog” button on each post in the dashboard
  • the bookmarklet.

If you’re familiar with Twitter, the “reblog” button is like Twitter’s “retweet” button (but the Tumblr reblog button was there way before Twitter’s retweet one). See something you like in your dashboard? You can “like” it, of course, but in a click of the mouse you can reblog it, publishing it to your tumblelog and pushing it along to your followers. A lot of the content in Tumblr is visual (photographs, design, videos…) — which is pretty cool.

When you stumble upon something interesting online, you can hit the Tumblr bookmarklet, and a pop-up window allowing you to instantly publish what you’ve found to your tumblelog appears. Tumblr makes a guess as to the nature of the content, too: video, link, quote, photo. Hit publish, and get on with your browsing. Tumblr takes care of the rest — including a link to the original source.

Share on Tumblr

A lot of the things I post to Digital Crumble come from the people I’m following on Tumblr. Aside from that, I also reblog a lot of quotes from things I read online. If I’m reading something interesting, I have just to highlight the paragraph I want to save/quote, hit the bookmarklet, hit publish, and it’s on Digital Crumble. Let’s say it’s the web 2.0 equivalent of when I was a student and painstakingly copied out quotes and paragraphs from books I was reading into a small notebook. 😉 (Here’s an example of a recent quote I captured like that.)

What makes this all the more precious is that you can afterwards easily search through your Tumblr Dashboard or your own postings to bring up snippets you’ve saved. When I’m doing online research for a blog post or article, I’ll stick all the interesting snippets in Tumblr, which means I then have them handy (with link to the source!) when I’m writing up.

Finally, what I like about Tumblr is the playfulness of the community. It’s fun. It doesn’t feel too serious, or like the geek/intelligentsia quarters. I think that for non-bloggers who do spend time online reading and browsing without feeling the urge to crank out pages and pages of original writing, it’s a great publication platform to start with.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes!

Another Small Step With Google Buzz [en]

[fr] Maintenant que le soufflé est un peu retombé, et que le gros problème de confidentialité de Buzz n'est plus qu'un mauvais souvenir, je commence à y remettre un peu les pieds, surtout suite à un article que j'ai lu, où l'auteur se demande si Buzz n'est pas le chaînon manquant entre Twitter et le blog -- un peu dans le même espace que Tumblr et Posterous.

It’s been some time now, the horribly privacy flaw has been fixed, I’ve hidden the “Buzz” label in my e-mail, and more or less forgotten about it.

A few days ago, a title caught my eye: Google Buzz and hybrid blogging. There was also something about the “missing link” in the accompanying text.

I read the article, and it’s been gnawing at the back of my mind ever since. A Buzz notification or two popped up in my inbox recently (people replying to things in my Buzz stream, which contained at the time not much beyond my blog, photos, unused Google Reader, etc).

Between the article linked above and the fact that somebody had actually used Buzz to react to one of my blog posts, I went to have another look. Thanks to some in-buzz help, I connected Digital Crumble to Buzz, and decided to throw Twitter in to see what happened. I decided to follow a few more people.

Right now, I’m waiting to see what happens. I feel like I’m slowly thawing towards Buzz. Buzz reminds me of FriendFeed, but less horribly chatty, and nicer (I’m not sure why yet). I just wish that I had a way (as the “reader”) to simply hide all the Twitter updates from the people I follow. I get those through Twitter already.

Liking, Favoriting, Reblogging and Retweeting [en]

[fr] J'ai tendance à trouver que "like/reblog" (Tumblr) et "favorite/retweet" (Twitter) font un peu double emploi. Pas vous? Comment vous gérez ça?

I’m increasingly bothered by what I perceive as a kind of “double emploi” of “liking” vs. “re-ing” features. On Twitter, for example, you can favorite a tweet (see my favorites here) or retweet it (it ends up in your stream for your followers). On Tumblr, same thing: you can “like” posts (that seems to happen privately, though, I can’t find a public page collecting all my “likes”) or reblog them.

So, yes, there are slight differences in functionality. But overall, a pretty big overlap. Should I reblog or retweet something without favoriting or liking it first? I honestly tend to reblog and retweet and neglect the liking and favoriting (though now I’ve decided to feed my Twitter favorites into Digital Crumble, I’m favoriting too on Twitter).

I’d be interested to hear how others manage their likes, favorites, retweets and re-thingies. I expect I’m not the only one with overlap issues here.

Feedly: More Than a Newsreader, Maybe Your Search Engine of Tomorrow? [en]

A bit over a year ago, I switched from Google Reader to Feedly. I have a troubled history with newsreaders: I tend to not use them, partly because I don’t really read blogs. But I used Google Reader for some time, and then Feedly. I really like Feedly. Really. (Plus, it saved 4 months of posts for CTTS after the dropped database disaster.)

All this to say that for many months, I have not really opened Feedly, and I feel kind of sad/bad about it. Twitter and Tumblr are my main sources of “new information”, and I’d love to find a way to use Feedly in a way that works for me. But it just doesn’t seem to happen.

A couple of weeks back, I saw this tweet from Ewan:

Twitter _ Ewan McIntosh: Over the hols I managed to ...

He says that he has sorted his feeds into “30 must-read-daily RSS feeds, with the other 2000 sitting behind as personal search engine”.

Whee! For some time now, I’ve been convinced that the future lies with allowing search in subsets of the web. There’s too much stuff out there, right? Also, in this era of partial attention (which I don’t consider to be a bad thing, in the “keeping a distracted eye on” sense), you often end up trying to “refind” something you know you’ve seen (but where?) — just like I had to dig out Ewan’s tweet ten days after I’d seen it in passing.

That’s why I like Lijit, for example (I’ve put the search box back here on CTTS, by the way): it allows me or my readers to do a search on “my stuff”, including CTTS, Digital Crumble, Twitter, del.icio.us… Sometimes I know I’ve said something, but I can’t for the life of me remember where (see this? having to search your own words…)

Feedly is pretty good at allowing you to search all the stuff you’ve subscribed to:

feedly | explore facebook

It offers a mix of a little bit of generally popular stuff with “your sources”. I like that. So, I like Ewan’s idea of feed subscription as “add this to my search sources” rather than “oooh, I’m going to read this every day”.

I have to say I’m interested in hearing about how you use Feedly or Google Reader (particularly the social aspects) if you’re not a “religious-daily” newsreader enthusiast. There has to be something between “keeping up with my feeds” and “never opening my feedreader”.

New Tumblr iPhone App [en]

[fr] Si vous êtes un utilisateur de Tumblr muni d'un iPhone, il vous faut absolument l'application iPhone pour Tumblr.

I missed the Tumblr application for iPhone when it came out, because I had downloaded an earlier version named Tumblrette — and didn’t spot the name change. I was quite disappointed by Tumblrette, to be honest — but I absolutely love the new Tumblr app.

There is an iPhone-specific dashboard view, you can easily like and reblog posts, follow new Tumblelogs you discover, or create new original posts. Here’s a view of the dashboard (easy insertion of iPhone screenshots by using the WordPress iPhone app to create a draft containing the images — my iPhone is starting to feel almost like a computer):

When you click on the top right arrow in a given post on your dashboard, it changes to this:

To like, just tap “like”, and if you want to reblog, you get a chance to edit (like in the web interface) before posting:

The one thing I’m not wild about, because it really breaks the flow of what you’re doing with the app, is that once you’ve reblogged a post, you end up at the top of the “web-view” dashboard.

The logical place to end up would be back in the “iPhone-view” dashboard, so that you can continue skimming through the posts you were reading before you reblogged:

But in all, it’s really great. If you’re a Tumblr and iPhone user, get Tumblr for your iPhone now!

Les vacances, les vacances! [fr]

[en] Off for the holidays. Some reading recommendations for my French readers.

Je me prépare à filer à la montagne. Pour cause de trop de travail et ensuite de trop de virus, je suis restée un peu clouée en plaine ces derniers mois, donc je me réjouis vraiment d’aller m’enterrer avec le chat sous des piles de neige!

Durant mon absence, n’hésitez pas à aller rattraper de la lecture en retard sur le blog des boulangeries Fleur de Pains (je l’anime à coups de reportage, par exemple sur la Saint-Valentin ou la fabrication des financiers au chocolat& miam!) et sur le blog de voyage d’ebookers.ch, où je suis responsable de coordonner les publications de sept blogueurs enthousiastes qui partagent récits de voyage et bons plans tournant autour de multiples destinations.

Quant à ma petite personne personnelle, si vous n’avez pas consulté récemment Digital Crumble, mon tumblelog, je vous invite à le faire (et à ouvrir votre propre tumblelog, pendant qu’on y est).

Je serai complètement déconnectée en montagne, mais si vous avez de la chance, je vous enverrai quelques photos via Twitter.

Ah oui! Cela fait des semaines que je veux écrire un article en français sur Ada Lovelace Day, qui aura lieu le 24 mars. Il s’agit d’une journée où les blogueurs écriront un article consacré à une femme qu’ils admirent dans les sciences et les technologies. Si vous n’êtes pas encore inscrits, allez le faire — et l’excuse “je ne vois pas de qui parler” n’est vraiment pas valable. Vraiment. (Parce que si c’est vrai, ça montre à quel point une telle journée est nécessaire, et il vous faudra donc y prendre part, quitte à vous creuser un peu les méninges, non?)

Allez, bonne semaine. La mienne le sera, ça c’est sûr. :-)