Collab-Or-Ate

Since switching from a Mac to a PC, I’ve been on a hunt for an RSS Reader that is as good as the Mac’s NetNewsWire. Simple, clean, and customizable interface. A thin-client for reading about 150 feeds that I’ve lumped into about 6 categories. I have finally found it in RSSOwl.

Sage: Although this seems to be the most popular choice amongst the people I’ve polled, Sage is completely unacceptable to me. When I load a feed that has 20 unread posts, all 20 are loaded into the right-hand viewer screen. That seems great and super-efficient, until you realize that all 20 will remain marked as unread until I have taken the additional, unnecessary step of clicking on every single one of the post titles in the lower-left-hand screen. Why do I have to click on a title to mark it as read when I have already read it? My second complaint about Sage is that when I click on a folder containing multiple blogs, I cannot see the posts of the blogs within this folder. I follow a blog and its comments through 2 RSS feeds and I want to see the comments and posts together, time sorted. This is not possible in Sage. Next!

SharpReader: I used SharpReader for about 2 months and have found it to be much better than Sage, but not a clear winner. It has the logical 3 pane layout where you select a blog (or a folder containing multiple blogs!) and that shows you the titles and you click on the titles to read the post and to mark the post as read (one click does both!). It runs as an icon in your task bar, so you can access it easily and it doesn’t take up a lot of room. My complaints are that there are very few customizable options for how the display works and it causes some bad display flickering on my machine when it is updating the feeds or refreshing its view. The feature that I don’t particularly like but can’t turn off is that when it updates my feeds in the foreground or background, it has pop-up windows that end up covering the entire right-hand side of my computer screen and making my entire desktop flicker like mad until I click on some other application. Basically, I’d say it is an acceptable alternative to Sage, but kind of rough around the edges.

RSSOwl: This reader was recommended on the Simple Dollar a while back and I finally tried it out last week. It is just like NetNewsWire, but free! It doesn’t have any of the annoyance/bugs that the other 2 have and even has tabbed browsing, if you want. Or you can turn tabs off if you don’t want them. And you can customize the point at which you move your RSS reading over to your preferred browser. And you can adjust the colors and fonts of the post reader window. Basically, it is what I want: a client that can handle the organization of ~150 feeds in ~6 folders, allowing me to efficiently read many posts, plus it has some additional customizable features that make it enjoyable to use.

For the paranoid, read this article on arstechnica.com: CIA uses Facebook, NSA wants social networking data. It poses this question:

Are Facebook et al. actually CIA/NSA-backed companies that the agencies are using to create massive databases on Americans without having to deal with that pesky congressional oversight?

My personal opinion is No. Although, see my previous post on the potential evil that can come out of Web 2.0.

Tony has nicely captured the mental states of a PhD student with a diagram:

Still, I highly recommend pushing through, particularly since the alternative is this:

(Matt Groening’s lesson 19: School is Hell)

If you don’t work at IBM, you probably are not aware that this week is Lotusphere.
As an IBM and Lotus Notes newbie, I’m only just beginning to understand the history and culture surrounding the IBM Lotus products. Basically, Lotusphere is like Macworld for Notes users, although admittedly not quite as cool. (Sorry, no iPhone, but we got SameTime 7.5.1!) Because the Lotus software products are focused around collaboration and workplace productivity, these products are the ones most closely related to my research and the research of the other members of the Collaborative User Experience group.

This year’s Lotusphere has generated a lot of press (I don’t think this is usual), but it is fun to see press about the research projects of my colleagues.

InformationWeek has an nice article covering the coolest research that will hopefully become Lotus products:

One of the best things about the IBM Lotusphere conference is always the glimpses it gives you of the future of computing. The various IBM Research labs send representatives who staff a room filled with demo pedestals — two dozen this year — where creators show off their projects. This year, as usual, several projects look like good prospects to become future products, and IBM Lotus has even put one up on the Web so you can get a look at it even though you’re not at the conference.

The article mentions Malibu, Tagging in software development, and Many Eyes, all from CUE.

I saw this on Population of One: an eye contact device for webcams. We already know that web conferencing is frustrating because of the lack of eye contact. We’ve known how to solve this problem for a while: just line up the camera lens with the other person’s picture, so when you look at them, they see you looking at them. Easier said than done. This “SeeEye2Eye” webcam device is pretty clever because it uses mirrors to reflect the image on your computer’s screen to a position that is just behind your webcam, outside of the frame of your machine’s screen. I didn’t fully get it until I watched the introduction video, so I recommend watching it. The device costs $99. A pretty cool, easy fix to a real computer-mediated communication problem!

In Time Magazine’s Person of the Year cover story, Jaron Lanier asks a provocative question:

What’s to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture?

The Web 2.0 movement is about collecting bits of information from a massive amount of people to generate a new level of intelligence, whether it be recommendations or encyclopedia definitions. But simple, collective human acts in the past have led to violent and otherwise very negative events. (E.g. fascists, communists, religious cults, criminal “families”). Jaron is saying that individuals will perform evil deeds just because they are a cog in the wheel. What do you think about this?

I disagree with part of his theory, but I think he is making a good point. Because, when you participate in a Web 2.0 effort (or a cult, take your pick) and your part in the collective act is very small so you don’t have to or bother to think about it very much, those in power can manipulate the collective to perform very dangerous acts. I don’t believe people individually will do evil just because it is Web 2.0, but if there is a malicious leader (say, Hitler 2.0?), then the collective intelligence trend can certainly be utilized to conduct all sorts of evil.