Propos et Commentaires du Climenole

.

Hi Gentle Readers

[{p ٧ ¬p} W {p ۸ ¬p}] ٧ significare aut crepare ٧ σημασία ἤ θόρυβος
or, in other words,«Speak if you have any words stronger than silence.» [Euripides]
So I keep silence for about one month in these pages (but a lot less on Twitter…) 

Google Reader new features

Announced by the official Google Reader Blog [Flurry of features for feed readers and Looking for great stuff to read], repeated like parrots by almost every Bloggers and Tweeters, I would like to avoid to add my voice in this Buzz & Noise to give you some Signal instead by shortly reviewing the new features of Google Readers (you can explore by yourself) and stress on the meaning of these feature from the perspective of Data Processing (“Web 1.x” or “It’s about data”) & People Connecting via the Social Medias (“Web 2.x” or “It’s about Poeple”)

No, the Rss/Atom is not dead and yes Google Reader gives you the opportunity to add new sources of information from other people and share your discoveries with the others in social medias including via your blog ( FYI: blogging is not dead …).
.
Here the new look of Google reader including the People You Follow feature:

An example of People You (“I”) Follow

The Sharing on Social Media feature:

Custom Sharing feature:

And finally the Bundle of feed you may create and share: (an example…)

.

.

The Cycle of Information and the Web

These new features gives to us the complete cycle of information production/consumption.

All Functions in the Information Cycle are present in the GReader features:

• Creators (content makers)
• Critics (comments, ratings, and reviews),
• Collectors (gathering, tagging and sharing contents),
• Joiners (connecting people to poeple via contents),
• Spectators (or pure consummers)
• Doers (because information is related to “energy” and lead to works on physical stuff…)
• Actors (because information is also related to communication and people relations…)

These functions are not exclusives to some peoples and not the others: each of us may, from time to time, be a creator or a pure consumer, or behave as critic or joiner… The only difference between the Internauts à la Web 2 is in the percentage of their time dedicated for each of these functions.

To keep things simple: presently, writing this article for you, I  behave as creator by making a new and valuable contents (I hope so!) but for the last month (august 2009) I was more critic, collector and joiner than creator and soon (if everything goes according to my plans) and doer and actor. Then I will return to the function of creator and, for sure, from time to time as a pure consumer. See the idea?

By the way, it’s not only about “Real Time” (synchronous applications) which are often chronophages but mainly about the new flexibility in the social functions of data processing and communications. People are no more maintained in a limited social function but have the opportunity to change from one function to another. This idea and it’s reality are more important, IMHO, than the so-called “Real Time” applications (a buzz word only ). Every creator know they must keep their most productive periods for themselves and their creation process”. Asynchronous applications are valuables tools as much as the “Real Time” ones.

Using Stylish Firefox add-on for your Google Reader (and more)

I can’t leave you without some Goodies so let me talk you about a very useful Firefox Add-on: Stylish.
Stylish let you fix ugly sites or customize the look of  any site or web applications such as Google Reader. There’s  an on-line repository at userstyles.org. Just few clicks and the chosen style is applied.

« Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript »

Easy to use , just click on the icon in the Status bar of Firefox and check for a style sheet created for the web site you visit, select a style, apply it and check if it’s ok for you. Often you have many choices for a site so feel free to experiment. Styles are easy to apply and to disable.

Some screen captures for Google Reader:

.

and many more accessible at Userstyles.org via the Stylish Firefox Add-on.
Have fun!