ma' 60th + some sunday night back of moleskine 'me own hawtness' product sketchn.

demons footy.jpg
Originally uploaded by redbarren

so it's been a farely busy day, with my mums 60th bday party that incl a layer upon layer of cheesecake with blue, brie, camembert and other tasty cheeses! had a beautiful point leo dusk run in prep for a week where I'm not going to drive anywhere near the 22+ hours, 5 days straight, I did last week. im going2get detailed spec work done, props like hughs i'm behind on, vc questionnaires, get settled into new port melbourne office, and other action points u commit to in a meeting. focus, productivity, resolution, and hardball where/if needed. by friday, ill be bases loaded. locknload.

i've been sketching alot of product features in my moleskine @ coffee shop time, which my left brain/right brain categorises under creative/art. as it may get developed, or not. some of it goes into client projects, others into our own properties/plan. for quite awhile it's been the former, but i'm aiming to get some of my own technical resource. why give up your technical resource if u get nothing back for it?



















as soon as i started using delicious alot (up to 3700 items now!), the area of tagging and annotating made alot of sense to me, and more so, created value. if i ever forget something i've published, i go to delicious/benbarren/whatever _tag_i_used.















similarly, when google reader launched "share" items that was a feature that was really useful to me. initially i didnt use it for much, but as soon I realised I could feedburn my shared items, and then publish to my blog sidebar, it was becoming pretty valuable. your 'shared' / favourited / liked items whether it be google reader or friendfeed are very high signal, vs thousands or in my case tens of thousands of blog posts that go past me every month.

from my google reader trends for last 30 days : "From your 1,836 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 45,738 items, starred 1 items, shared 1,678 items." - So the key there is 1 in 25 of the posts, from blogs I have subscribed to, I share. those are the items I want to do more with, that currently i go only do a very limited amount with, anyway....

recently i've also started using friendfeed's 'share on friendfeed' bookmarklet (my shares 'ere), and that is great for the benefit that u can clip/highlight images on pages, as well as cutnpaste text. the item then goes into your friendfeed stream, which others can like/comment on, but it doesnt seem to have it's own obvious rss feed, which could then be published on blog sidebar. (u can blogbadge your whole friendfeed stream tho)

so delicious + feedburner, google reader shared + feedburner, and my friendfeed page, along with other blogbadges such as flickr, are great ways of sharing non-blogged items on your blog and lifestreaming services. however what i'm missing is ability to manipulate the shared items further.









my google reader shared items outputs to a public page above header, that is very dumb/vanilla. there are some cheesy design templates, with about 3-4 to choose from. unlike blogspot where I can say i want 70 blog posts published on benbarren.blogspot.com home page; i can insert html, css etc; on google reader shared items page there is no blog theme or customisation of the page. similarly it outputs as one rss feed. there is no ability to tag items such as delicious. no way of grouping the videos, podcasts, hot auto pics, recently funded startups, sneakers, watches, and all the nichepassions i/we all have.

a simple solution is for google reader to allow me delicious like tagging of my shared items, and then create feeds for each of my tags. it would also be really kewl given they've bought feedburner and own blogger, that if i didnt want to just take the rss feeds and fburn onto wordpress, etc if i could turn each of these tags into widgets, whose layout/css/fonts/colours/size I could customise. And then put onto my (existing) blog sidebar, or wait for it.... setup a different page with a domain (+/or subdomain) of my choosing. use a non blog layout if i so desired.











then each of my tags could become a widgetable element of the page, and meta-tags could be created; for example i might use a meta-tag for video, podcasts, or big buckets like auto (porsche, ferrari, lambo tags), fashion (models, sneakers, watches tags), money (vc, startups, web2 tags) etc

using such an approach, instead of google just allowing me to choose between 4 headers (Ninja, already wtf?) - I could actually choose between different page layouts - blog format, sure no worries, 1 column rss reader format ? 2 or 3 column ? what about a fashion magazine layout ? or maybe u want a wall street journal look ? or that great new fashion mag architecture consumeristy post wallpapermag that all the designer r raving about!










my east-westcoast pitch is (the roll'yer'own magazine layout of) magcloud meets (high signal:noise of) google reader shared items meets feedly (excepts it about your public not private persona + all about customisation not reformatting googlereader), with the beauty + reblogging of tumblr. it's also prob solving the same one fred wilson has been blogging about (and using) zemanta - but coming at the solution from a more extending reblogging functionality from rss reader, than as a blogging platform plugin.

















this customised realtime reflection of my best of liveweb at any one point of time, would have a range of CMS type features where I'd select (and hide) the items which I thought were best of what I'd selected from my feeds, tweets and lifestreams. I'd setup sections/headings/positions like :

ME OWN HAWTNESS (TODAY).

ABOVE FOLD
- Me Hawtness Image of the Day ala front page of newspaper
- My Latest Blog Posts... as I'd want people to read
- Ma Tweets, and anything else very recent ie last 4 hours.
- Videos Ive watched + rated, inline player
- Audio Im listening, inline of course, friendfeed doin this well
- Hawtness Objekts of the Day : porsches, sneakers, designy stuff
- Of Interest, people on friendfeed, on google reader, flickr that i tend to take an unhealthy interest in and i want to tell the world how good they r, and their avatar looks good on me'page.

BELOW FOLD
- Favourite Posts I've shared, viewable by recency or tag, needs to have that google reader, ajaxy scroll down the page, ideally some type of streaming ere, and or heck lets give em an AIR app option here. that would be good. And unlike google reader's shared items page, can there be more than 10 items per page, 10 is crazy, like google reader it needs to be infinite, until the isp has no more bandwith to push down the page or u run out of items....

Yeah so basically I want to turbo charge my google reader shared items, you can see the experiment i am running on the right hand side of my blog sidebar, where i've published 2 google reader shared items accounts (with same opml) and shared 2 sets of items to publish there.



I'd like to be able to take my shared items and then enable tools to do some tagging, feed splicing, and then widgety, page layout type tools. Or to be more ninja about it, a folksonomy based browser plugin to google reader, or some technical way that allows me to tag my google reader shared items at the time I share them. so i can then have individual feeds for each of the tags of shared items!

See below how feedly (worth tracking their blog to see their evolution, as they r very end user focused) reformat your google reader opml into another perspective on how to represent your feeds, what they dont do is provide a customisable re-aggregation of your favourite annotations : but they are well positioned to do so due to their advanced annotations/g-shared features!


















alternately u bypass google reader alltogether and get fave hyperlinks from mining opml elsewhere, or index outbound links from twitter ? hehe but at moment the feedreader (followed by blog platform-browser plugin) seems to make sense as it's where people are in sharing (or alternatively blogging) mode.. just at moment goog reader sharing is dumb : its not going anywhere other than onto a reader's shared items public page/feed, people's blog sidebar, lifestreams like friendfeed, and aggregators such as readburner. (which i think could be a really kewl business, esp if it could get past tech/web2 etc)















so thats my sunday night back of moleskine sketching - google reader shared items 'me own hawtness' - as i listen to safran and father bob on their sunday JJJ show.

Inglorious Bastards - From the rumoured QT script.
My name is Lt. Aldo Raine, and I’m putting together a special team. And I need me eight soldiers. Eight – Jewish – American – Soldiers. Now y’all might have heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we’ll be leavin a little earlier. We’re gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin’ guerilla army, we’re gonna be doin one thing, and thing only, Killin Nazi’s. The members of the Nationalist Socialist Party, have conquered Europe through murder, torture, intimidation, and terror. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do to them. Now I don’t know about y’all. But I sure as hell, didn’t come down from the goddamn smoky mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half Sicily, and then jump out of a fuckin air-o-plane, to teach the Nazi’s lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got no humanity. There the foot soldiers of a Jew hatin, mass murderin manic, and they need to be destroyed. That’s why any and every son-of-a-bitch we find wearin a Nazi uniform, there gonna die. We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty, they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty, in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the German will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heals, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans, will be sickened by us. And the Germans, will talk about us. And the Germans, will fear us. And when the Germans close their eyes at night, and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us, that it tortures them with. But I got a word of warning to all would be warriors. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me, personally. Every man under my command, owes me, one hundred Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And all y’all will git me, one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred Nazi’s or you will die trying.