Posted via web from ag

Posted via web from ag

This is actually pretty cool, posterous has a nice posting interface, and the posterous bookmarklet allows images and other types of media to be easily collected.

Not quite sure how to do categories and tags though....

Posted via email from ag

Google Reader recently added a customisable ‘Send to’ drop down, allowing for easier integration to thirdparty services (like twitter, delicious, Facebook, etc). The popular ones are pre-packaged, but you can add your own service as well.

I was going to spend a little bit of time working out what needed doing, but as usual, someone saved me the effort - from the Pinboard Google Group

 

• Go to Settings, and then the "Send To" tab.
• Click the "Create Custom Link" and enter the following:
  • Name: Pinboard
  • Url: http://pinboard.in/add?url=${url}&title=${title}
  • Icon Url: http://pinboard.in/favicon.ico

I started using Pinboard as my bookmarking service a while back, after the sad demise of magnol.ia (which luckily for me didn’t end up costing me any links).

Pinboard has been tagged as the “anti-social” bookmarking service, which is a little unfair perhaps,  the emphasis is most firmly placed on providing a simple and fast bookmarking service, with little of the increased (and probably non-rewarding) complexity of delicious.com and others.

It works (for me), it’s quick, and does what I need it to do.

Marshal Kirkpatrick over at RWW proclaims that Enterprise RSS has died. Taking a closer look at the post reveals some basic misunderstandings of RSS and how it's being used by organisations.

First up, what he is really talking about is that RSS reader uptake within the enterprise is very low. If we narrowly define RSS reader as a separate single function application (whether desktop or browser based), then I'd probably accept that - installing new software is hard within a lot of orgs (for various reasons), and who really, apart from hard core information fetishists, needs yet another hosepipe of information ?

However, it's a long leap to equate the lack of uptake of RSS readers (as narrowly defined above) with the death of Enterprise RSS, because the two are *not* necessarily correlated.

When I had my all too brief stint at Headshift, we (and I'm going to say we, because I think I was in the room when this was being discussed - and was definitely in the building somewhere), worked out that within an organsation, RSS was the transport layer for information, upon which all sorts of amazing social, collaborative, filtered applications could be envisaged.

And that still remains the case - from what I see, increasingly, RSS is being offered as a data transfer protocol, or a wire protocol, allowing information to be taken from one source, mashed up, munged or left alone, and reused and redisplayed somwhere else - a dashboard, a custom built application that has information display as one of its features. In many cases, no one using the system is even aware that RSS is being used , or what it is. And that's fine - they don't need to.

And there's more. I'm doing some work for a PCT - a part of the NHS responsible for delivering services to local people In conversations with partner organisations, the following phrases occur often and naturally:

"We'll supply an RSS feed of news items, you can take that and use it if you want"

"Can you give us an RSS feed of your events so we can add it to our health section"

So, RSS is being used as a transport layer between organisations, allowing simple pubish and subscribe mechanisms to move information around with little additional effort. I'd call that a very significant use of RSS in the enterprise.

So - is RSS dead ? Hell no - it just stopped being an overt feature and became part of the plumbing instead.