syndication – Climb to the Stars

A Mess of Facebook Pages, Groups, and Profiles (Part 1) [en]

[fr] 1er épisode de ma tentative de mettre un peu d'ordre dans mes Pages Facebook.

Facebook “Like” buttons are starting to spread and I think I’m going to add them around here. So, I’m wondering which “Facebook Like” WordPress plugin I should install, and also, trying to sort out the mess between my various pages, groups, and profile on Facebook.

I recently started importing Digital Crumble into my Facebook profile, a move I’m pretty happy about because it seems to be making my online wanderings more readily available to a bunch of personal friends of mine who interact with me online mainly via Facebook, Twitter and IM. But on the other hand, I wonder: am I drowning my Facebook presence in too much Digital Crumble?

I’m now wondering what feeds to import where on Facebook.

I’ve always been wary of sending my Twitter firehose into Facebook: not the same audience, and too much Twitter at times, to be honest.

Let’s start with what’s easy: Bagha. He’s got a Facebook page and a Twitter account (@bagha) which he doesn’t use much, and in his case I have no problem linking them. I’ve installed the Twitter Facebook app to do that. I tried to use MyFlickr to import Flickr photos of him, but it was such a pain in the neck (can’t figure out exactly how to use it, + timeouts) I gave up and am looking for another solution to import Bagha’s Flickr photos into his page. I’ve also imported CTTS posts mentioning Bagha (feed) into his articles (hmmm, maybe I should resurrect his Catster diary…).

Have to say, though, that Facebook is a pain in the neck: getting it to accept a feed takes multiple tries, and connecting apps like Twitter or MyFlickr to their respective external services is no walk in the park either. Be persistent!

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:

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:

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”.

Giving FeedBurner a Spin [en]

[fr] FeedBurner produit un fil RSS à partir de votre blog. Quel intérêt si notre outil de blog préféré le fait déjà? FeedBurner fournit des statistiques de consultation et tout un tas d'autres services sympas.

Heard about FeedBurner so much I thought I’d give it a try. Feed stats sound like a nice thing to have. So, here’s the new address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ctts. Consider changing your subscription if it’s not too much of a hassle to you. You’ll get my del.icio.us links in there two in daily bundles if you do. 😉

Update: now using the feedburner plugin. Let me know if any breakage reaches you.

Vous parlez de la blogosphère suisse? [fr]

[en] Tag posts talking about the swiss blogosphere (or swiss meta-blogging issues) with blogosphera helvetica. The posts can then be syndicated to create a true multi-author metablog. This seems to me a better solution then setting up a new multi-author blog somewhere. Let's use what we already have: bloggers!

Je crois que tout le monde (ou presque) a réalisé que la blogosphère suisse commence à bouillonner. Mais peut-on parler de blogosphère “suisse”? Savons-nous ce que nos amis d’outre-Sarine fabriquent avec leurs blogs? Les frontières linguistiques sont les plus fortes que l’on puisse trouver sur le web. Pour cause, ce sont pour ainsi dire les seules.

Swiss Metablog fait pas mal de “veille blogosphérique” suisse, mais c’est en allemand. J’ai un compte, mais je ne l’utilise presque pas car j’ai déjà de la peine à suivre avec CTTS. Le blog de iFeedYou aborde souvent également des sujets touchant aux blogs dans notre douce Helvétie.

On a proposé et reproposé de faire un blog multi-auteurs et multilingue pour tenter de rapprocher un peu les différents groupes linguistiques. N’oublions pas non plus qu’il y a en Suisse aussi des italophones, des anglophones, et des toutes-sortes-de-phones.

Alors, voici l’idée: on va utiliser un tag pour identifier les billets qui traitent de la blogosphère helvète. Pour ne pas faire de jaloux, on va parler latin: blogosphera helvetica. Ensuite, on peut consulter la page du tag, s’y abonner, et même syndiquer le contenu pour en faire un meta-meta-blog quelque part.

Je crois que c’est plus viable de demander à des blogueurs déjà fort occupés de simplement rajouter un petit tag sur un billet qu’ils écrivent de toute façon pour leur blog, plutôt que de leur demander d’aller écrire le billet ailleurs.

Qu’en pensez-vous?

Précision 08.03.06: ce tag (blogch ou blogospherahelvetica, on verra) ne sert pas à identifier un billet comme étant “suisse”. Il sert à identifier un billet qui parle de ce qui se passe en Suisse côté blogs. Le public cible pour ce tag est “quelqu’un qui veut savoir où en sont les blogs en Suisse, et ce qui est en train de se passer d’important”. Regardant les quelques billets que j’ai tagués ainsi, je me demande si c’est pertinent pour chacun. Les aurais-je tous publiés dans un blog multi-auteurs portant sur la blogosphère suisse? Pas certain. A méditer…