Learning the Alphabet..

Warning: Tech Jargon Ahead. Lots of it!

RSS readers help me updated with what I like or what I am currently working on. I have tried to use almost all that are on the web right now. But there’s a catch. How to Know Which Feeds are Worth Keeping?

The problem with feeds is- they keep piling up. As internet throws up new information everyday, I keep finding new blogs on interesting topics and hence, new feeds. Hell, there was a time when I had 170 feeds which was highly inefficient.

RSS readers today have lots of features like bookmarking, clipping, putting it in a blog, emailing or tagging it and they’re are all fine. But they’re not intuitive.

The quest for finding those blogs that constantly supplies the best and inspiring feeds finally ended with a small bloglines feature I came to see only after a long time.

The advantages of “Keep New” over other alternatives are
1 I dont have to go to a separate page to see what i saved (like a blog, my email page)
2 There are other things that I want to do to a post other than ‘clipping’ it. Like simply reading it later. This feature helps you in exactly that.
3 All posts that you “keep new” show after the latest posts. So it keeps reminding you each time to read it.
4 When you are done reading it, then you can uncheck it and if needed, blog/clip it.

The implication of all this does not hit you directly. But when you see the feed list, you can see how many posts you have kept new for each feed. After a few weeks, I get to know if I am really getting anything worthwhile from a blog or not. The essential ones are separated.
No other reader I know does that (if it does, please let me know).

Moral for me: Features in a product are like alphabets, but only when they are placed in a particular order, they become words.
Only great products have meaning, otherwise they remain a jumble of alphabets.

Filed under: Theories

Leecher!

Site leeching may sound terrifying and a bad, bad thing to do (hogging bandwidth and other excuses).
But its not. I love it!

It works for me because-
1. I like to read. When a whole site is on your computer, It becomes like a book.
2. You dont need to be online to view it. No loading time, no server timeout, no downtime..
3. The sites that I leech are mostly text-based. So its fast and does not take much bandwidth.

It would not work for most sites today with their regularly updating content. But still there are some useful ones like the latest ones I leeched-

Creating Passionate Users- An inspirational Blog about Innovation and People (the author has discontinued writing, but its already a cult blog- so no problems of updated content).

HowtoGimp- Been trying to use GIMP for sometime now instead of Photoshop. Hope this site helps..

Other categories of sites that can be leeched- movie sites (I leeched whatishematrix.com in college- more than 600MB of videos, pics and interactive flash content!- and all accessible anytime!!!) and tutorial sites.

Filed under: Theories

If Big companies push their games saying this will help kids learn to self manage and manage others, how come MBA colleges have games which are made specifically for the graduate students ? Why cant they play an RTS game and say “Build your management skills by playing Age Of Empires!” ?

Even games which are used by the military are tweaked for their specific purposes.

My point being that the games nowadays are not based on any specific goal besides providing entertainment.

Like they say “Windows is a metaphor for life”- it matches the way in which unexpected errors occur in life and prepares us for it. Do you really think Microsoft management consciously make such software?

Well, I am a cynic of big companies pushing games, saying kids can learn from them. Can one improve complex skills like management by playing Age of Empires?? If that were true, all RTS (Real Time Strategy) freaks would be COOs of big companies right now.. anyway.

I know of games (which are actually simuations) used by management schools to teach actual management skills. The point is- its not ‘disguised’ as a game. Most games on the pc and consoles now can teach some basic motor and cognitive skills but they should not aim higher- for now.

Filed under: Theories