IntoMobile » Trimming in Public

Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 25

Stefan Constantinescu — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:50:19 +0000

Trimming in Public is a series where I go through my list of 293 RSS feeds, 10 feeds at a time, give some detail as to why I subscribed to a particular feed, and then decide whether or not to keep on consuming that feed. In Episode 1, I explained what RSS is and how to use it. Please read that if you need a refresher on why RSS is awesome and why you should be using it if you take reading news on the internet seriously. The prefix to Trimming in Public is “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash.” For the bloggers out there who read IntoMobile, I hope you get a better idea of what I do to keep on top of the news. For the readers who read IntoMobile, I know that this site isn’t the only mobile focused technology publication on the internet, and by sharing which sites I read I’m hoping that you’ll keep on coming back here. Taking out the trash has an obvious explanation, I can’t keep up with my RSS feeds and need to trim my list. For those who want to download my complete list of 293 RSS feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file.

Check out Episode 25 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

I am determined to finish this series off by the end of this week and start a new episodic series next week about the perfect mobile phone that will never exist. With that in mind, here we go:

Twitter / agpublic: Some people’s tweets you just don’t want to miss. This is the RSS feed that spits out Adam Greenfield’s public tweets. He used to share interesting stuff quite often, but lately he just lets people know he updated his blog. I wish I had access to his private Twitter account, but that is reserved for his close group of friends in meat space. We live in the same city, but we don’t hang out in the same social circles. I should be more proactive at building a relationship with him, but I feel like I’m too short sighted and ignorant and frankly would be wasting his time. Self esteem issues? You bet! But there is another person who packs so much gold into all his tweets that I want to make sure I miss none of them: Tim O’Reilly. Decision: Unsubscribe, but replace with Tim O’Reilly’s Twitter account.
Uncov: Sadly, Uncov is dead. It was the brain child of Ted Dziuba and it made your cranky uncle who couldn’t stop talking about the Nazis he fought during WWII sound like a bloody angel. The guy riffed on everyone, everything, and it was Grade A fucking hysterical. You don’t make friends like that however, and Silicon Valley is one small clusterfuck of people. I don’t really know if he gave it up due to external pressure, or because he had a kid, or maybe he just became a nihilist and decided that at the end of the day none of this really matters. What I do know is that I’ll miss this great site. Decision: Dead site = unsubscribe, but will not be counted towards today’s list of 10.
Untitled: A photo blog from a young up and coming photographer from Australia. This girl had an eye for beauty that was profoundly magical. Somewhere down the line she became a pro, moved to America, and stopped posting her photos. Shame really. Decision: No new updates in a millennium = unsubscribe.
Unwired View: Started by Stasys Bielinis from Lithuania, Unwired View has a special talent no other tech site matches: they find all the leaks and rumours before anyone else does. Part of that is dude to Stasys’ ability to read Russian. All the major leaks happen in either Russia or China; don’t ask me why, I don’t know. I briefly met Stasys at Mobile World Congress 2007, but I didn’t have enough time to spend with him and chat, which makes me look like a dick since I remember how excited he was to meet me in person. Since making Unwired View a full time gig back in 2008, he added two more writers: Brad Molen and Ilinca Nita. The site gets enough traffic to call it “big”, but not many people know about it. Well now you do. Decision: Keep on reading.
VentureBeat: Like TechCrunch, but more professional reporting. The writing is tighter too, but it just isn’t fun to read. The main reason I subscribed to this blog was MG Siegler, who is a wonderful author. TechCrunch stole him from VentureBeat back in April of this year. MG writes well because he genuinely cares about what he is writing about. It’s hard to be a technology reporter without a heavy dose of cynicism, but MG pulls it off. Decision: My favorite writer left this blog, so I’m unsubscribing.
VisionMobile Forum: Andreas Constantinou is an analyst who founded his own firm: VisionMobile. They do fantastic work at providing a look at who is involved in a particular field of the mobile ecosystem, whether that be component suppliers, open source operating system vendors, and more. Not a lot of time is invested in the blog, it is used as a marketing tool for the professional services after all, but when a post does go up I always read it slowly from top to bottom. If you like to skim articles or have internet news ADD, this is not a website for you. For others who can read over 1000 words without a problem, subscribe to this. Decision: Keep on reading.
Visual Complexity: A blog that highlights various works of data visualization, a field I love to follow. Decision: Keep on reading.
VoIP Watch: Andy Abramson was once, and still might be, heading a word of mouth marketing project at Nokia (NYSE: NOK). This is his personal blog. As the name implies, he talks a lot about voice over IP, a subject that frankly I could care less about. The few times a year I use my mobile phone to make a phone call make me apathetic to the system driving the telephony features of my device. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Web Strategy by Jeremiah: I’ll never forget the first time I met Jeremiah Owyang. He was an independent blogger, and was responsible for being the door man, along with handing out name tags, at a hotel suite that PodTech rented out during CES 2006. A lot has changed since then. His professional and critical writing landed him a job at Forrester Research where he was responsible for telling his clients about what the future of social networking will be like, and what companies are worth watching. He documented his struggles, gave tips to would be analysts, and eventually left the company to join a startup analyst firm that I can’t remember the name of because they’re not really relevant today. There used to be a time when you could get far on your “personal brand”. Many people took advantage of the general masses’ ignorance towards the internet and blogs in general, I know I sure as hell did, but things are different as we head into 2010. People today are much more cynical and far less trusting. The people that have been in this game for a while tend to forget about this, and they’re hungrier for more attention today than they ever were before, but with unemployment in the USA in the double digits, people should remain humble and enjoy what they’ve got. Jeremiah may sound like he knows what companies should do to get ahead, but has he ever stepped inside the belly of a huge beast and tried to change everything from the inside? I tried, and many others have tried, and failed, to get social networking to work inside Nokia. Change doesn’t come with the purchase of software, it has to be driven by a shift in culture. People who are trying to change things don’t realize that, or they act like just throwing the tools out there will some how cause natural adoption. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Webmonkey: Toted as “the web developer’s resource”, Webmonkey keeps me up to date on what’s going on with the number one platform everyone seems to forget about: the internet. Fuck iPhone OS, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Bada, and every other mobile operating system in the ass with a rusty fork lift. Giving internet services the ability to access the native capabilities of your device, such as GPS, compass, and camera, via the browser will win out in the long haul. The game large corporations are playing today involves building a vertical, sprinkling some magical brand value on top of a sub par service, and then praying for profit. That will change, eventually, and this blog helps me stay on top of HTML5, what Mozilla is trying to do with Firefox, what Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is trying to do with Chrome, and everything else related to that field. Decision: Keep on enthusiastically reading.
Wireless Watch Japan: Reading about the Japanese mobile phone industry while living anywhere else but Japan is like going to a strip club and telling yourself that you’re going to get laid, but sadly realizing that the farthest you’ll get with a lady is to have her tits so close to your face that you’ll easily be able to spot the scar on her nipple that some doctor made so he can shove some silicon inside her previously pathetic fun bags. Water proof mobile phones with 12 megapixel cameras, NFC, they Japanese are so far ahead it isn’t even funny. Reporting on what happens in Japan is sadistic as far as I’m concerned, since stuff like that is years away from landing in the EU, but it was William Gibson once said “the future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed”. That is why I read Wireless Watch Japan, to get an idea of what will eventually happen everywhere else. Decision: Keep on reading

Literally 6 blogs left on my list. Excited to be near the end.

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 24

Stefan Constantinescu — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:46:45 +0000

Check out Episode 24 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

THE RUMBLO RSS FEED ONE MILLION: An online comic that started out as something brilliant, but over time has become terrible. I don’t recommend it, but check it out anyway since you might see something you like. Decision: Unsubscribe.
The Smartphones Show: Steve Litchfield from All About Symbian produces a weekly 10 to 12 minute show all about mobile phones. Don’t let the fact that he writes for All About Symbian put you off, he reviews Windows Mobile devices, iPhone applications, and even has guests appear reviewing BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) devices. I can’t say I really learn anything new from watching this show, but it is nice to watch while drinking a cup of tea, if only to just see what someone has to say about a mobile phone on video. Steve isn’t “just another consumer”, he has been writing about mobile devices since the time when they didn’t have any cellular radios and were known as PDAs. The guy knows what he is talking about. Decision: Keep on reading.
The Technium: Kevin Kelly’s blog that covers how technology impacts our society and how all the technology we own and use in our daily lives will soon become a living and breathing entity. It’s a bit … well how should I put this nicely, the posts are chock full of facts about how we as a species have used technology to help us evolve, and where we are going to continue evolving, but in the end it’s all really just a guess. It’s a guess for stuff that’s going to happen by the time I’m an old man, and I’m not even 30 yet. I’ll stick to focusing on the near and medium term. After learning how to forecast trends while working at Nokia (NYSE: NOK), I’ve learned that forecasting itself is nothing more than an art of bullshiting. I prefer the hard sciences. Decision: Unsubscribe.
The Universal Desktop: A blog about RIA (Rich Internet Application) platforms, such as Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Silverlight and Adobe Flash. The author stopped updating in March 2009, which means this site is basically dead. Decision: Blog no longer updated = unsubscribe, but it will not be counted towards today’s list of 10.
This Isn’t Happiness: A photo blog that shows images one would call retro and nonsensical. Seeing pictures mixed in with my glut of technology and science RSS items helps my mind focus, plus it causes inspiration. I didn’t have the words to describe this, until I read this New York Times article about pattern recognition. Apparently when the human mind is subjected to images and texts that do not make sense, the brain works harder at attempting to find patterns, which thus improves reading comprehension. I thought I was weird, I mean who would subscribe to an RSS feed of nothing but pictures? But now I have some vindication. Decision: Keep on reading, or in this case looking.
ThoughtFix on Nokia Internet Tablets: ThoughtFix is a nice guy, I even shared a hotel room with him one year during CES. This is/was his blog about Nokia’s Maemo running devices. Just yesterday he announced he is no longer going to be updating it, which is a shame. Decision: Unsubscribe and replace with another blog: All About Maemo.
ThreeDimensionalPeople: I owe a lot to Stephen Johnston. He is the man who believed in my passion for Nokia and invited me to speak in front of a large group of people about digital natives, the way we work and the new way to market to people without sounding like a douche bag. This happened after I arrived in Finland, but before I was hired full time by Nokia. Within Nokia, I can’t think of anyone else who is trying to push change down everyone’s throats as hard as Stephen. He started a mailing list jokingly called “Nokia 2.0″ that discusses how the times are a changing and how Nokia should adapt. It’s been running for a long time, several years now, and if it has taught me anything about Nokia, it showed me that there are plenty of bright people inside, but if you can’t convince the handful of people sitting at the top to change their thoughts, then you’re literally just wasting your breathe. I think Stephen is a bit tired of trying to push change inside Nokia, and I have no clue about what he is doing now, but there was once a time when he was an icon inside Nokia. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Today On 3G: The name of this blog changed to “World of Nokia” and as it stands … the site is a bit shit. Mark Guim from “The Nokia Blog” does a better job at covering Nokia, and really, at the end of the day, if you’re a busy person and can’t be bothered with keeping up on what’s going on in the mobile space by reading multiple websites, each dedicated to a specific manufacturer, just read IntoMobile or some of my other favorite mobile sites: Phone Scoop, Mobile Burn, Unwired View and Engadget Mobile. Decision: Unsubscribe.
TorrentFreak: Which countries are hunting pirates down and making an example out of them by slapping huge fines on copyright violators? How are content creators (read: people who make movies and music) using bit torrent to help them profit? What are the most popular TV shows and movies being pirated? This site has the answers. I also don’t really care anymore since reading about people getting fines isn’t going to stop me from pirating. I could also care less about which movie, show or album is getting pirated the most since I could give two shits about what the internet as a whole thinks is popular. I know what I like, and I have circles of friends who have the same, or roughly the same taste as I do, and that’s how I get recommendations about what to grab illegally from the comfort of my home. Decision: Unsubscribe.
TreoCentral: A Palm (NSDQ: PALM) fan site dedicated to the Treo line of devices. If you’re into that sort of thing, I recommend you subscribe to it since it’s quite good. As for me, I’ve moved off the Palm platform, and can’t even check out the new webOS stuff since it isn’t available on the unlocked market. That will change with time, and I’ll probably start reading Palm blogs again after I buy a Palm device, but that isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future. Decision: Unsubscribe.
tvRSS: I’m subscribed to 4 RSS feeds from tvRSS, which is now called ezRSS by the way. This website is a European’s dream come true. In America, you guys get all the latest TV shows first, and then, if we’re lucky, they come to Europe, often delayed by a year or two. ezRSS is a website that allows you to search for your favorite show, and then subscribe to that show’s RSS feed. That RSS feed you just subscribed to spits out bit torrent files which you can then open up in your favorite bit torrent client and pirate away! The bit torrent client I use, µTorrent, already has an RSS reader built in so I no longer need to have these feeds in my reader. If you’re curious as to what I pirate, then let me share my routine: Monday morning I wake up and grab the following shows: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mad Men, Family Guy, The Simpson and Californication. Tuesday to Friday mornings I wake up and pirate The Daily Show. I used to watch Real Time with Bill Maher, but that show jumped the shark after Bill started bringing up religion into each and every episode. I’m a hard core atheist and think religion is probably the stupidest invention man has ever created, but it should not be used as a punchline over and over and over again. I also watch Top Gear whenever the season starts. Oh and I’m also looking forward to the start of season 3 of Metalocalypse next month. Decision: Unsubscribing to all 4 RSS feeds since I have separate software to handle my piracy needs.

Down to 110 RSS feeds and I have less than 20 feeds left to review!

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 23

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:18:38 +0000

Check out Episode 23 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

The Doc Searls Weblog: As one of the original authours of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls is highly respected. This is his personal blog, and while it used to be the bees knees years ago, today it’s more just a collection of things going on in his personal life, sprinkled with commentary on what’s going on in the technology space. I don’t care about his personal life, if I did I would follow him on Twitter, and I think the technology industry is terribly misguided right now, so his comments on whether Twitter or StatusNet take off have no interest to me. Decision: Unsubscribe.
The Frame: A rip off of Boston.com’s The Big Picture, the Frame is run by the Sacramento Bee. They do a decent job, but I’m going to stick with the original, and the best. Decision: Unsubscribe.
The Heart of Business: Another Lenovo (OTCPK: LNVGY) blog, I subscribed to this because … well I’ll be honest, I’m a Lenovo fanboi. Sadly however, I am not a part of the intended audience. This is all about small businesses using Lenovo laptops, getting Africans connected, non profit organizations, basically stuff I could care less about. Decision: Unsubscribe.
The Identity Corner: Site is still up, but it isn’t the site I remember subscribing to; something fishy is up. This looks to be a useless, badly designed, website filled with contact that is of no use to anyone. Decision: Unsubscribe, will not count towards today’s list of 10.
The Inquirer: Boy oh boy, this site in ancient. Ever wonder why I sometimes use British English versus American English when spelling headlines, or why I occasionally drop a few colloquialisms that just don’t sound like anything uttered over in the western hemisphere? Blame this site. The Inquirer, or The INQ as most people refer to it, was the Engadget of their day. It still exists, sadly looking like it used to when they first launched, which I believe occurred some time after the Romans killed Jesus, but before a group of con men published a book called the bible. They do gadget reviews, just like any other site, but their specialty is the processor field. What’s Intel, AMD or nVidia working on for their 2012 lineup? These guys know. They also use such beautiful metaphors that I’m frankly a bit jealous I wasn’t raised in the country where English was invented. As a writer, and personally I don’t think of myself as a very good writer even though my friends blow hot air up my ass, the best I can give you is to read British publications. Steal from the best. I’m sad to say this, but the quality of their work has gone down. They’re no longer timely, their RSS feed is set to partial versus full, and a few of the authors I used to admire, most notably Charlie Demerjian, no longer work there. Decision: Unsubscribe.
The Masked Blogger: Dead site, dead RSS feed. Decision: Unsubscribe, will not count towards today’s list of 10.
The Mobile Gadgeteer: This is Matthew Miller’s other blog, read more about why I like him in episode 20 of “Trimming in Public”. The guy writes solid stuff, often includes a very detailed and informative video in his post, and while I may not agree with his opinions all the time, I do respect what the guy has to say. Decision: Keep on reading.
The Nokia Blog: Now I know with a name like “The Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Blog”, you’d think this was something official, but it isn’t. This website is owned and operated by Mark Guim, a guy who I had the pleasure of meeting at several Nokia events all around the world, back when the economy was doing well and the marketing department was blowing huge amounts of money to make bloggers feel happy, warm and special. He’s straight up nice, and has his priorities in life straight because while he loves mobile phones, all of you reading this love mobile phones, but he loves his wife and friends more. Mark realizes that the devices he uses are just tools to help him lead a fulfilling life versus a geek/nerd who mainly spend their life obsessing over tools. When he isn’t tweeting about the news, it’s usually about some new restaurant he is checking out, or his dog. As for the content, top notch stuff. No complaints. Decision: Keep on reading.
The Nokialist: Dead site, dead RSS feed. This was the first ever Nokia blog, and I only found it after I started blogging about Nokia. The guy, and I can’t remember his name, told me something along the lines of “you’re doing a great job, I’m passing over the baton to you, I’m done blogging”, and I’ve never heard from him since. That was a long, long, long time ago. Decision: Dead = will not count towards today’s list of 10.
The Official Palm Blog: Palm (NSDQ: PALM)’s official blog. Nothing really more to say about that. I respect Palm, even though I think the Pre and Pixi look like crap, and I think that having the Foleo killed was a terrible mistake, but I’ll never forget how powerful I felt when I got my first PDA. I’m betting Palm will come back. They’re in good hands. Reading this is my way of keeping up on them, plus I have to for my job. Decision: Keep on reading.
The PhoneBoy Blog: Former Nokia employee writes this. He worked for Nokia’s security business used to do high end servers, encryption, that kind of boring shit that makes your eyes roll into the back of your skull unless you’re an IT manager getting paid $150k because you have a Cisco certification. Anyway, that part of Nokia was sold recently, so he basically does the same job he has always been doing, but some other company is writing his paycheck. I don’t really talk to Daemon anymore either. Our paths crossed at one point, but that feels like ages ago now. Decision: Unsubscribe.
The Register, Articles by Ted Dziuba: I’ve spoken enough about Ted in episode 22 of “Trimming in Public”. This is an RSS feed that spits out all the articles he writes on The Register. He hasn’t written anything for them since August 31st which makes me question whether or not he still works there … I need to contact him. Decision: Keep on reading … for the time being.
The Register, Articles about Nokia:

An RSS feed that spits out every article written by The Register that mentions the word Nokia. I’m up to my gills in sources giving me Nokia news and opinion, and I don’t need another one, especially since The Register is more about news, and less about opinion, so they’re not really helping me see a news event in a different light.

And that’s that. Down to 122. Almost at the bottom.

Update: Ted says he no longer writes for The Register. Sad. Unsubscribed from that feed.

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 22

Stefan Constantinescu — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:09:10 +0000

Check out Episode 22 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Techmeme: Powered by some super secret algorithms developed by Gabe Rivera, who as far as I’m concerned is a bloody genius, Techmeme is a website that shows you the popular stories that people are talking about in the technology space. Techmeme also does a fantastic job at highlighting what is wrong with journalism today. Under any major story you’ll see that 100+ blogs have essentially rewritten it, and then all linked to the same source. Some might argue that is what makes journalism today awesome compared to our memories of what journalism used to be in the 20th century, to which I have to say: so you’re saying that hundreds of people sitting at home rewriting a story contributes to the public good; how exactly … ? That makes me a bit of a hypocrite, and I know this. Journalists, public relations people, advertising companies, they all produce bullshit out of thin air, yet the small ecosystem we all inhabit some how continues to provide nutrients (read: Euros, Dollars, British Sterling) for everyone to keep on going. Companies that actually make something hire PR people, who talk to journalists, who rewrite what PR people sent them via email, and now those very same PR people buy display ads next to said content produced by journalists, which makes a company money, which then lets that company create something new, which of course needs to be marketed, so the PR people have to be paid again. And so it goes, on and on, the circle jerk known as technology journalism. Sounds grim doesn’t it? I think, and this is purely my opinion, the only way to deal with knowing that what you do has no impact to the good of society is to enjoy the living hell out of your life when you’re not working and to stop trying to change the world, but instead embrace it. Decision: Unsubscribe, you’ll see why in a second.
Techmeme Firehose: Unlike the RSS feed above, which only links to popular stories that stay on the Techmeme homepage for a longer than average amount of time, the “firehose”, as Gabe likes to call it, is an RSS feed that spits out each and every single article that hits Techmeme’s homepage, even if it is there for less than 15 minutes. They call it the firehose for a reason, there are a lot of RSS items being pumped out of this feed. I prefer this versus the feed above since what I may find interesting, isn’t necessarily interesting to the “mob”. Decision: One of my favorite RSS feeds. Ever.
TECHMUNDO 2.0: Yet another technology blog that has been abandoned on the internet by the author. Hasn’t been updated in over a year. Decision: No new content = unsubscribe.
Technology Review: You would think that a publication made by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would have a proper RSS feed, but sadly they can’t figure out how to make it work right. Not only will their RSS feed spit out the same stories multiple times, they’re loaded with ads and only include headlines. I want to like Technology Review since they publish work about what scientists, across multiple disciplines, are working on in their respective fields. Their RSS feed sucks so bad though, that I have to get rid of it. Decision: Unsubscribe, with great saddnes.
TechRepublic News: Yet another technology site, Tech Republic is owned by ZD|Net. I can’t tell why this website exists since ZD|Net is better in every conceivable way. The writers are better, the design is better, the content is more interesting. I’m struggling to find a reason why I even subscribed to this RSS feed in the first place. Decision: Get out of my RSS reader right now!
Ted Dziuba: While everyone else is talking about how cloud computing will change the world, or how one technical framework is superior to the other, even though said person has never wrote a single line of code in their life, Ted Dziuba is sitting in the corner, slowly getting angry, until he snaps and writes articles that are filled with so much hate, anger and rage that they are an absolute joy to read. Ted makes his living as a programmer, so he actually does something useful, he makes something. He is also a father, so he knows how petty and insignificant this whole internet thing is in the grander scheme of things. Ted is the internet version of Lewis Black on The Daily Show. At the time of writing this his website is down, I’ve pinged him to let him know that. Decision: One day I hope to be as funny and knowledgeable as this man; keep on reading.
Textually.org: Emily Turrettini writes one of the most under rated mobile blogs on the internet. Forget about how many megapixels the next iPhone has, or spy shots of some stupid new Android device that isn’t going to his the market for a few months. Emily takes a look at how people are using mobile phones to make a difference in their lives. She also highlights how society is adapting to everyone having a mobile phone. I’d call Textually a blog about mobile anthropology rather than mobile technology. She is the only one I know who writes about these sorts of things and I hope she never, ever, stops blogging since it would be a great disservice to the internet. Decision: One of my favorite blogs.
The Big Picture: You know how a newspaper has small pictures surrounded by massive amounts of text? Boston.com’s the Big Picture is the exact opposite; it has massive pictures underlined by small amounts of text. It’s the creation of Alan Taylor, and it has been cloned many, many times by various publications, but I’ve yet to see another writer at another internet property with an eye for beautiful photos like Alan has. It gets published once a week, I forget which day, anyway I highly encourage you to read the about page to get a better idea of what the Big Picture is all about. Decision: One of my favorite photo blogs on the internet.
The Boy Genius Report: No one really knows who the Boy Genius is, and the few people who do say that you would not even believe them if they told you his name. I’d call BGR “just another technology blog” since the writing isn’t stellar, but they make up for it by a huge, ginormous, crazy amount of exclusive information. He calls his sources the BGR Ninjas, and they really are. I don’t think anyone in this industry scores as many scoops as BGR does. For that alone, I keep on reading his blog. Word of warning: he is a bit of a BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) fanboi, so be prepared to see a lot of BlackBerry related news on the site. Decision: Awesome scoops = I’m paying attention.
The Creative Life blog: Copy and pasting exactly what I said for #3: Yet another technology blog that has been abandoned on the internet by the author. Hasn’t been updated in over a year. Decision: No new content = unsubscribe.

Down to 131 and dropping fast. Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 21

Stefan Constantinescu — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:35:35 +0000

Check out Episode 21 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Stavros Great Event: If Borat was an English art fag, you would have Stavros. A brilliant marketing campaign for the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N82, this was an RSS feed that kept you up to date on what Stavros was doing with his “position art”. The site is still up, for those who want to see the brilliant work of the Nokia Digital Marketing team, but the feed is dead. Decision: Unsubscribe, but not counting towards today’s list of 10.
Steve Garfield’s Video Blog: With every new medium, there is always a pioneer in the space who may or may not know that what they’re doing will set a precedent for everyone else to follow. When it comes to vlogging, or video blogging, Steve Garfield is that pioneer. He was putting videos of himself up on the internet back when there was no YouTube and you had to pay serious money for file hosting. Nokia spotted him early and gave him a top of the line “multimedia computer” to play with, letting him shot video no matter where he was. Then he started showing the world what Qik, a live broadcast TV studio in your pocket. Today he is no longer a pioneer, instead choosing to help other people make their videos better. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is sadly not attracting me to read his blog posts anymore. Good luck with whatever you’re working on Steve, you’re always going to rock because you always give it your all. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Stuff White People Like: A hilarious blog that gives a different point of view to activities and material possessions that white people enjoy. It is updated sporadically, and every time something new gets posted, it finds it way in my Twitter stream or in my inbox. I wish the author did this full time, but I know he probably has a full time job and has better shit to do than make people on the internet laugh. Decision: Unsubscribe, because any new updates will come to me via another medium.
Symbian at 3GSM: Mobile World Congress used to be called 3GSM. This is a blog Symbian setup that told the world what the company was up to at 3GSM 2007. The next Mobile World Congress takes place in 5 months, and I don’t know if the Symbian Foundation is going since they have their own show this month. Anyway, this blog is useless now. Decision: Unsubscribe, but not counting towards today’s list of 10.
Symbian Foundation Blog: Symbian was purchased by Nokia, made open source, and is now known as the Symbian Foundation. This is their blog. They keep readers up to date on what is going on with the platform, what being open source is all about, and try to make everyone ignore the fact that there isn’t going to be a new UI built on top of Symbian until the first half of 2011. That’s right, Symbian is going to continue looking like it does today for at least another 18 months. No worries, I can use a Symbian device with my eyes closed, but for new smartphone buyers, they’re going to pick up a Symbian device in a shop, look at it, and put it back down once they notice the iPhone stand less than a meter away. Symbian is a crazy powerful operating system, and I can’t wait to see what the world is going to do with it when it goes open source next year, but people are very shallow. If the UI looks dated, then they’re going to think the whole device is dated. Sad. Decision: Keep on reading.
Symbian Guru: This blog belongs to Ricky Cadden, a friend of mine from way back when I used to live in Texas. Unlike other blogs that focus on spitting out as many posts per day as they possibly can, IntoMobile is guilty of this, Symbian Guru is more the kind of website you visit with a cup of coffee or tea and take in what the author has written. A healthy amount of editorials, sprinkled with a bit of news updates, makes this one of my favorite Symbian blogs on the internet. Decision: Keep on reading.
SymbianOne: Yet another Symbian site, this one is a bit … well it isn’t fun to read. There used to be a time when SymbianOne got a lot of exclusive content in the form of interviews, but those days are long gone, never to be seen again. Decision: Unsubscribe.
TAMK School of Art and Media: Finland is a fantastic country to live in if you’re a student. Not only is school free, but you get an allowance from the government to live off of. I applied to go to TAMK this year, but was rejected. I was never given a reason as to why I was rejected, but a friend of mine who works for another University told me that they’re seeing at least 2 to 3 times more people applying for school this year versus the last. Why? The social benefits. I’m not bitter, I wanted to go to school for all the wrong reasons. I wanted to be around people my age, versus always being the young kid in a crowd of people in their late 20s to early 30s. I wanted to be with people who think the most fun you can have in life involves a bottle of vodka and a bed with fresh sheets. I wanted to get 50% off public transportation and cheaper rent. Education was the last thing on my mind, so not getting in wasn’t really a let down. I would say “maybe next year!”, but I don’t think I’m going to be living in Finland this time next year. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Tech Digest: Think of this website like Engadget, but with people who have British accents, and with girls. They don’t really do a better job at covering the technology sector compared to Engadget or Gizmodo, not to mention they spit out a partial RSS feed. A few of the original writers left and are now working for Recombu I believe. Decision: Unsubscribe.
TechCrunch: Love it or hate it, not reading TechCrunch today is like not reading the bible back when it was the only book coming off the few printing press machines around in Europe. For those who have never heard of the blog, it’s like Engadget, but instead of gadgets, they follow companies, mainly startups. Who got funding? Who left company A to work for company B? Which company is working in this space, that space, and which company is trying to dominate the entire space? These are the questions TechCrunch answers, and they do a bloody fantastic job. Decision: Keep on reading.
Techdirt: The current patent and copyright systems are fucked beyond repair, everyone knows this, but Michael Masnick is the only one writing concrete examples of how old laws simply do not work in today’s world. He also writes about journalism, how artists should connect directly with their fans, and dabbles a bit here and there into the technology world. The blog is updated quite frequently, and the posts are rarely short. I always end up reading something interesting at least once a day. Decision: Keep on reading.
TechEBlog: Yet another technology blog, this one has more video than the other technology blogs, but … hey, it’s just another technology blog. Decision: Unsubscribe.

Happy October everyone! The “T” section is going to last for quite a few more episodes since a lot of blogs like to call themselves “The something something”. Down to 136 RSS feeds, less than half of what I started with when I began this series.

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 20

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:10:03 +0000

Check out Episode 20 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Seth’s Blog: Seth Godin is a designer, but instead of creating products or pieces or art, he creates bullshit. When I was a marketer at Nokia (NYSE: NOK) (technically S60 which was a separate entity of Nokia), his blog was required reading. Sure there are insights here and there about marketing, and doing the right thing as a company, but honestly, unless you’re in marketing and are clueless about the changes occurring in the industry, then there is no reason to read his blog. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Slashdot: One of the oldest news sites on the planet, Slashdot is still going strong, even when facing new competition from people like Engadget, Gizmodo and Digg. The focus of Slashdot has changed, but the audience has remained the same. Back in the day Slashdot was more focused on hardware, but today they just keep on repeating themselves about open source this and open source that, with an occasional bit of science news sprinkled in. The RSS feed is annoying since while it is a full feed, all the hyperlinks are removed, forcing you to go to the website just to click through the article that was mentioned. I’ve been reading this so long that I can’t imagine not reading it. This is the oldest of the old when it comes to “new media” if you want to call it that. Decision: Keep on reading.
SlashPhone: Back when IntoMobile offered me a job in 2007, I posed a question to my blog, Ring Nokia, asking what they though of me becoming a full time writer at another publication. One of SlashPhone’s employees, I’m not going to name names, wanted me to join his site instead of IntoMobile. We got to talking, but in the end I chose IntoMobile since their terms were much more attractive, not to mention I prefer how IntoMobile looks compared to SlashPhone. They recently did a redesign, and it is very nice, but when it comes to actual content, to delivering exclusive news before everyone else, they don’t really do a good job. They’re literally just another mobile phone blog. One of SlashPhone’s strengths however is that they produce high quality original content. It seems like everyone on the team has a decent camcorder and they’re always uploading stuff on the internet. That being said, it isn’t worth it for me to keep on reading this blog. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Smart Mobs: What happens when a lot of people carry a lot of technology with them all the time? That’s the question Smart Mobs tries to answer. It’s also an answer I don’t care about since I’m more of an alpha user always looking to see what is new and exciting, and I’m arrogant enough to think that what I’m doing now, everyone else will be doing in 5 years. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Smarterware: Gina Trapani was once the star of a famous blog that still exists today known as LifeHacker. The essence of LifeHacker was tips and tricks on how to lead an ultra efficient lifestyle, in addition to personal advice, reworded with some amusing anecdotes, to help you live a better life. Shortly after she published a book, she left LifeHacker and started Smarterware. Was it the stress of working for a Gawker property that made her leave? Did she want to start building her “personal brand” into something she could live off of? I honestly don’t know and the site’s about page doesn’t really help either. She has become far less useful, posting far less frequently, and about things I don’t really care about. Gina gave up the stressful life of a blogger to enjoy her offline life a bit more, and there is nothing wrong with that, I congratulate her, but I’m not going to keep on reading her blog. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Smartphones and Cell Phones: One of Matthew Miller’s two blogs, actually I think he has three now if you include Nokia Experts. Matt is an awesome guy, a family man, and a devoted Christian always looking for the best bible application for the latest smartphones he tests. He covers the American wireless space wonderfully, and if it wasn’t for him, I would have no idea about what is happening across the pond. His style of writing is easily digestible, and he often includes videos in his blog posts, which I love to watch. Decision: Keep on reading.
SMS Text News: Technically it is now called “The Mobile Industry Review”, but the RSS feed in my reader is still labeled as SMS Text News. This site is written by Ewan MacLeod, and he is one of the few men I know who are more pissed off about the current state of the mobile industry than I am; that says a lot. Yes, he tends to focus on the UK, and yes, he writes like an Englishman (he is Scottish (I think) so this will piss him off), meaning 1500+ word rants that could have been just as effectively written using only 500 words, and yes, he got rid of the epically good ¡Three Amigos! known as Dan Lane, James Whatley and Ben Smith, but the man knows what’s going on because he networks better than anyone I’ve ever seen. I’m not talking about the type of networking where you try and collect the most business cards in an attempt to make your rolodex weigh more than your laptop, he knows the right people who can get shit done. That alone makes reading his blog worth it. Decision: Keep on reading.
Social Web Blog: What is Google (NSDQ: GOOG) trying to do to kick Facebook in the balls? This is Google’s official blog to give you that answer. For me, I don’t really care anymore. The battle isn’t being fought with standards, widgets, or data portability discussions, it is being fought in the streets. More and more I’m seeing my peers stop sucking the social networking dick they’ve been gagging on since they joined Facebook. They’re rejecting social networking because they realize spending time in front of a computer to spend time with their friends is just an unnecessary intermediary. The word on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days is “experience”. How can I make a service that will create an awesome user experience? How can I make a product with a fun experience? How can I make my website a memorable experience? Know what an experience actually is? Remembering beer coming out of your friend’s nose because of a joke you told. Remembering the smell of the woman who walked by you on the street. Remembering that face the old lady standing behind you in the supermarket made when you bought extra large extra sensitive condoms. Social networking? Give me a fucking break. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Software Everywhere: Former Palm (NSDQ: PALM) employee David Beers talking about what he thinks the future of software development will be like. Web services accessing device APIs, HTML5, smart forward thinking shit like that. He only recently started blogging again after a hiatus of nearly half a year. Can’t wait to read what he has to say. Decision: Keep on reading.
Spotify: The blog for my favorite music service since Napster, Spotify. They update readers on new tracks being added to their library, new features of their software, and new releases of their software for the PC, and more recently, mobile devices. I love to know what these guys are up to! Decision: Keep on reading.

A little over 1400 words, I hope you could reach the bottom without feeling like this took forever to read. Down to 144 RSS feeds, can’t wait to be in the double digits!

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 19

Stefan Constantinescu — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:49:23 +0000

Check out Episode 19 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Roger Ebert’s Journal: This guy doesn’t need an introduction. Everyone has heard of Roger Ebert. This is his blog, and his passion and in depth knowledge of film pours out of every sentence he writes. Sadly, and I really hate saying this, he writes about movies that either come out a few months later in Finland, movies that are specially screened, or movies that are so old that it is difficult to find them on bit torrent. I don’t like being teased about a film I can’t watch. I like movies, don’t get me wrong, but I can do without reading his blog. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Roland Tanglao’s Weblog: I met Roland at a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) sponsored event some time ago, but I’ve been reading his blog since before our first encounter in meat space. He writes his opinions about Nokia devices, and has for a long time, long before the large number of Nokia focused blogs started popping up once news broke out on the internet that if you contacted Nokia and asked them for a device to review, they would grant your wish. He still writes about their devices, nothing I don’t already know, but coming from him it just seems a little bit more genuine since he has been at it for so long. He doesn’t blog often, so it isn’t going to hurt if I keep him in my RSS reader. Decision: Keep on reading.
RunningWithBulls.com – The curse of Sanfermin: My buddy Bernard Tyers is a Nokia Siemens Networks employee, and he is obsessed with the running of the bulls. He keeps a photo blog of the event, which I think he goes to every year. He is Irish, but deep down inside I think he wishes he was Spanish. Anyway, I follow him on Twitter, and I don’t really care about the running of the bulls, so this feed is going to go bye bye. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Russell Beattie’s Weblog: Beattie is one smart motherfucker. He once said something along the lines of “if you’re going to show me the next big thing, and it isn’t mobile, then it isn’t the next big thing” long before anyone was taking mobile seriously. He now works at Nokia, but take a look at his CV, the man has been everywhere. He has criticized me for unsubscribing to feeds that don’t regularly update, saying that he himself blogs sporadically. Smart people don’t get deleted from my list of RSS feeds, so Russell is safe. Decision: Keep on reading.
S60 Blog: Dead RSS feed, dead site. Decision: Unsubscribe, but not counting towards today’s list of 10.
S60 Blogs: When Nokia purchased Symbian, one of the questions that Nokia faced internally was: what would happen to the S60 folks? For a while they were the most depressing people in the building since they had no idea if they were going to have jobs. The S60 brand is dead, but the S60 site is still up. I wonder why. The blogs haven’t been updated since June, and they’re not going to be updated ever again. Somewhere inside Nokia there is a cost center paying for this site to keep on functioning, when it should have been taken behind the barn and shot in the back of the head. Decision: This site should not exist, and it will die eventually; unsubscribe.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: An internet comic not for the faint of heart. The drawings are fine, but the text … well, it makes fun of just about every single politically incorrect subject out there. Ranging from religion, to AIDS, to rape, to child molestation, to feminism, sexism, racism, this comic is hilarious for those who have a deep dark sense of humour. Recommended for the sick fucks out there, but not something a lot of people will stomach. Decision: One of my favorite blogs.
Scoble Link Blog: Blog posts Robert Scoble shares with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Reader. More often than not he shares something I’ve read already, but lately he just hangs out on Twitter and FriendFeed. I don’t follow him on either of those two services. It’s funny, there was once a point in my life when I wanted to be just like Robert. I wanted to be that cool guy who works at Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) that gets to run around the building with a camcorder and share videos of the cool projects that cool people were working on. When I came to Finland I even pitched Nokia my services, wanting to create a Channel 9 like website for them. Lawyers and conservative old people would not have any of it. Corporate Communications at Nokia is controlled with such an iron grip that even Eichmann would be impressed. Anyway, back to Scoble. He committed the sin of vanity and starting believing that his personal brand, when associated with other brands, would some how equal success. He went from being a part of a brand (Microsoft) to being an annoying public relations person who says they’re a part of a brand, when in reality they will push anything as long as they’re paid. I don’t want to say I’ve fully lost respect for Scoble yet. The lessons he taught a lot of people in the early part of this decade are still highly useful. I’m just saying he isn’t the apple (NSDQ: AAPL) of my eye anymore. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger: Robert Scoble’s personal blog. He doesn’t write in it very often, but when he does, he often brings to my attention something that is either A) a total fucking waste of my time or B) something that can potentially change everything in a few years. The bullshit to gold ratio is low enough that I’ll keep on reading his blog. Decision: Keep on reading.
Scott Kveton: Scott has done a lot of work in the digital identity space. He can paint you a fantastic picture of what the world is going to look like post Facebook, the problem is that even he himself recognizes that the world he has conjured up in his head is not going to become reality for a long, long, long time. He has become irrelevant to me for one, and only one reason: I no longer care about the open digital identity space since I know is not technology standards that impact the future, it is companies, and as long as companies like Facebook exist, so will walled gardens. Users have no reason to complain, but when they do find something that pisses them off, that is when things like OpenID will start to matter. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Scott Robinson: Dead feed, dead site, Google Reader shows that the last time this blog was updated was July 2007. Decision: Unsubscibre, will not count towards today’s list of 10.
Scripting News: The man who makes the whole concept of “Trimming in Public” exist, Dave Winer, inventor of RSS. I read this blog more out of a form of respect than anything else. Dave is always working on something in his free time, even though I’m not really sure how he makes money. He just seems to have a lot of it saved up. Dave always has an opinion in any technology debate, and is good man from the core. Decision: Dude, come on, this guy invented RSS. Of course I’m going to read his blog!

And that’s that. Down to 149 RSS feeds. I wonder if I can get this to under 100. In two more episodes I will reach the letter “T”.

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 18

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:20:28 +0000

Check out Episode 18 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Gooooooooood morning Monday. Hope everyone had an awesome weekend, I know I did at the “Helsinki Drum & Bass & Dubstep Conference 2“. I can still feel the bass lines in my lower intestines. With that, time to kick off this episode:

Pocketfactory: This RSS feed hasn’t spit anything out since June 2007, back when it was a news site. Now the site says “PocketFactory Mobile Development Labs: Coming Soon”. Kent Pribbernow was responsible for the content, and now it looks like he is doing freelance web design. His personal blog is here. Decision: No updates in 2+ years = unsubscribe.
POP! PR Jots: Maintained by Jeremy Pepper, who works in public relations, this blog hasn’t been updated in almost a month. The topics discussed have to do with public relations, social media, and that’s about it. Social Media is dead to me, there was even a kid on the dance floor at the Helsinki DnB Conference on Saturday who had a shirt that said DIE FACEBOOK DIE so I know I’m not the only one who has left the service. As for public relations, is it important? Not really. Make good products, make your customer service tip top, make sure your employees are friendly when talking to external customers, and you don’t need a PR firm to spin your next “innovative” as the next big thing to purchase this holiday season. Decision: I used to work in marketing and unless I’m broke and living on the streets, I’m not going to do it ever again: Unsubscribe.
PostSecret: I have no idea how this site got started, but I love it none the less. Frank Warren posted his address somewhere on the internet and people send him anonymous post cards with secrets on them. He scans them, and then posts them on the internet. People rarely say what is really on their mind, so when I see genuine human emotion, I’m hooked like a fly to a rotting banana. Topics such as suicide, homosexuality, low self esteem, infidelity, and all the beautiful fucked up social conditions that we as humans experience are covered on this blog. Winter is coming up, and I can tell you from experience living in a country this far up north, seasonal depression is real. Post Secret is one of the ways that helps me cope. Decision: Keep on reading, it’s one of my favorite blogs.
PreCentral.net: A Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre fan site by Dieter Bohn, and a part of the Smartphone Experts network of mobile blogs. The business model is solid. Create a bunch of blogs that tailor to a specific vendor in the smartphone space, gets lots of hits on all of them, walk up to an advertiser and say “across all of our properties we get a billion hits a month”, at which point the advertiser is practically throwing money at you. On top of that you sell accessories and software as an affiliate and get a tiny kick back from online retailers. It’s an ancient (by internet standards) formula for success, and the Smartphone Experts are firing on all cylinders. That being said, back to PreCentral, do I really need to read a blog dedicated to a device that isn’t selling in Europe yet? Nahhh, I’ll just get the new Palm news from the official Palm press RSS feed and updates about the hacks, cracks and new firmware updates from Gizmodo and Engadget. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Widsets Press: Nokia (NYSE: NOK) used to have something called “Widsets”, a play on the word widgets, that was a Java application that displayed little bits and pieces of data from various online properties. I thought it was a terrible concept, and so did Nokia since the project is dead. Widsets became a part of Ovi this April, and no one cares. Decision: Dead RSS feed = unsubscribe, but it will not be counted towards today’s list of 10.
Symbian Press Releases: This used to be the official Symbian RSS feed for new updates on how the platform is doing, but ever since Nokia purchased the company, and then rebranded it to be ultra cool and hip, the official Symbian site got shut down and was replaced by the Symbian Foundation blog. Decision: Dead RSS feed = unsubscribe, but it will not be counted towards today’s list of 10.
Public Jaiku Nokia: Before Twitter and FriendFeed existed, there was a service called Jaiku that did the whole microblogging thing. It was HUGE in Finland, which you expect since the company was built by a bunch of Finnish guys, and it gained some popularity around Europe as well, but it never took off in the states. When all was said and done, the team who built the website got purchased by Google 2 years ago. This RSS feed was a custom Yahoo Pipe! that I built. I took the public RSS feed, which spit out everyone’s Jaiku, and applied a filter to it to see only posts that contained the word “Nokia” in it. Very useful back when I was writing at Ring Nokia and wanted to find scoops. Decision: Dead RSS feed = unsubscribe, but it will not be counted towards today’s list of 10.
Putting People First: As a kid who always took apart everything because I wanted to know how it worked, and who also annoyingly questioned, and disregarded, the status quo, design was a subject I’ve deeply admired. Not being a creative, at least a practical creative that creates products and services, but instead wrangles words in a word processor, I’m always interested to see what’s the latest and greatest in design and more importantly the thought process that went into creating something new. Putting People First does that job remarkably well and it is one on my favorite blogs on the internet because of that. Decision: I love it!
Radio Free Finland: My buddy Phil Schwarzmann, who now runs Nokia Conversations, and also performs stand up comedy in Helsinki on a fairly regular basis, used to have a podcast were he interviewed Finnish people to discuss current issues in the country. He hasn’t updated it in over 2 years, which is a shame, since I learned a lot about Finland from this show. He is still active on his other blog, Finland For Thought, which is maintained by him and a few locals. His recent post about how to fit in Finland is a must read. Decision: No new content in 2+ years = unsubscribe.
ReadWriteWeb: This blog polarizes people. Some people say the conclusions RWW reaches are often wrong, while others say they highlight issues that are going to be critically important in the near future. Back up for a second, what is RWW? Think of it as a blog about the internet, and where it is going. A topic that I’m greatly interested in since I’ll never forget how I got my start on the internet, using America Online, even saving my allowance one year by not eating lunch at school just so I could buy a faster dial up modem. Compare that to where we are now, and is it any wonder why I’m curious to see where the future is heading? Now I agree some what with the people who hate RWW, that the conclusions they reach are often incorrect, but that being said, they do bring to my attention topics that I wasn’t thinking about before. I’m enough of a critical thinker to appreciate new information, even if it is incorrect information, only because it helps me conduct research about something I’ve never heard of. Decision: Keep on reading.
Releaselog: I don’t make it a secret that I commit massive amounts of piracy. All pirates face the same problem, and no, it isn’t the government, it’s an issue I like to call “The Pirate’s Dilemma”. Before digital piracy existed, and technology was still very expensive, the range of content available to you was rather limited. You could, if you put in some effort, watch all the videos in a video store or listen to all the music in a music shop. Today there is an explosion of content out on the net, so much so that you don’t know what to consume. People much smarter than I am call this an “attention economy”, the thesis being attention is now the new scarcity, and therefore the new valuable currency. ReleaseLog is simply a blog that keeps track of what has been posted to the internet. When a new movie comes out, they post a link to the torrent, the score of that movie on IMDB, a photo of the film’s poster, a link to the trailer, and a brief plot outline. The same can be said for music, television programs, and software. Is it illegal? Sure. Have they been threatened? You bet! If they get shut down, how long will it take to get replaces? Less than 24 hours. Decision: Helping me solve the Pirate’s Dilemma = I love you.
RickyCadden.com: Ricky and I started out as arch rivals. He started his website, Symbian-Guru, a few days after I started Ring Nokia. We were both living in Texas back then. Over time, as both of our sites got popular, we slowly became friends, and that friendship became official when we got together one night and cranked out a few videos to parody the “I’m a PC. I’m a Mac.” commercials. He was the Nokia N95, I was the iPhone. We had a great time. RickyCadden.com is his personal blog and he uses it to keep people up to date on side projects he is working on and what new technology he is playing with that isn’t related to Symbian. Decision: I read my real life friend’s blog.
Ring Nokia: My most hard core of hard core fans always ask me for an RSS feed that has only my posts from IntoMobile, and nothing from the other editors. This RSS feed is it. I prefer you read what everyone on this blog has to say since we all pretty much cancel out each other biases. Now you may be asking, why the hell am I subscribing to my own stuff? I like to see how my content looks like in an RSS reader. I use it to tweak my visual style in terms of how long my paragraphs should be and how many links should be in each paragraph. Writing well is a necessary skill for surviving on the internet, making your text look good is a skill that is highly underrated. Decision: Keep on reading.

With that, over 1900 words, I hope you enjoy your Monday!

[Photo above via Flickr user Groovnick]

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 17

Stefan Constantinescu — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:02:59 +0000

Check out Episode 17 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

There is going to be the last “Trimming in Public” episode this week since I’m going to spend all of tomorrow at the “1st Nordic Conference on Innovation Journalism” in an attempt to get better insights as to what the future of my profession is going to be like. After that I’m going to hit up a sauna and then pass out, I’ve had a longgg week. With that, let us begin:

Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus: Paul Thurrott is one of the two people who I trust for news about Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), the other being Mary-Jo Foley. Internet Nexus is Paul’s personal blog and he hasn’t updated it in a while, not to mention that when he does update the blog it is usually to dump shit he no longer wants versus having to go through the hassle of eBay. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: The definitive website about Microsoft’s Windows operating system, plus a few bits here and there about Office, Zune and the XBOX. No one goes as in depth as Paul, and he literally installs every leaked version of Windows to hit the net just so he can share screenshots and opinions. I’m a PC. Decision: Keep on reading.
Penguin.SWF: This is an official Adobe blog written by Mike Melanson that keeps track of Adobe’s Flash player for Linux. I don’t give a shit about Linux, and I honestly hate Adobe for having such a stranglehold on the internet streaming video space. I literally said “holy shit” when I read that Google purchased On2, the company that licenses their video codec to both Adobe and Microsoft. If Google (NSDQ: GOOG) makes On2’s software open source, along with pushing the living hell out of HTML5, we can see Adobe’s death grip on online video come to an end. The should stick to what they know best: photo and video editing tools. Decision: Unsubscribe.
People Linking To Me: I’m shocked this RSS feed still works. Back in the day, way back in the day, Technorati was the best blog search engine on the planet. When searching for something that was written on a blog, you didn’t even bother going to Google. Getting on the Technorati list of top 100 blogs was the equivalent of winning an award. Today Technorati is a pile of shit. This RSS feed was to show me who linked to my old blog, Ring Nokia (NYSE: NOK). I obviously don’t write there anymore so … this is a bit useless. Decision: Unsubscribe.
PHD Comics: People seem shocked when I tell them that I’m a drop out. I never finished University. It wasn’t due to a lack of capability, hell I was working with grant money from Intel on attempting to see which substances could stick to silicon. This involved multimillion dollar x-ray spectroscopy machines. I just can’t stand the arrogance and lack of practical knowledge that burst out of ever University campus I had the displeasure of visiting. Do I miss sleeping with freshmen girls and getting tested for chlamydia every semester? Do I miss hitting a one meter bong? Do I miss those very very very limited number of professors who would blow your mind in lectures and talk to you after class for hours at a time? Of course I do, but it isn’t worth several thousands of dollars a year just to have my name on a piece of paper that says I showed up for class over a period of 4 years. Sad thing is, I did show up to class for 4 years. Switching my major fucked me. I was computer science, but then switched to chemistry. I dropped out with more credits than most of my peers. Hell if I got credit for the amount of classes I actually sat in, but didn’t register for, so I could you know, learn something I actually cared about, I’d have a PhD at the end of my name too. Was it foolish to leave and will it stunt my growth career wise? Probably, but right now I’m having a ball and times are too good for me to go back and hit on freshmen girls. Besides, my girlfriend would be pissed if she knew I was doing that. PhD comics is a blog that mocks higher academia, and I always get a chuckle out of it. Decision: Subscribe.
Phone Scoop: I could talk at length about Eric Zeman, but for the sake of simplicity I’m just going to say that he does one of the best jobs at summarizing news, and writing reviews of mobile phones, on the internet that I’ve ever seen. His site, Phone Scoop, has an extremely limited amount of employees, I think less than IntoMobile even, and that allows him to make this his full time job. Based out of New Jersey, he often goes into New York City to meet public relations folks. I know this because he is always tweeting about how much traffic sucks. The guy diggs BMWs, which I do too, and he even pays for music he likes, which is fucking impressive. The best thing Eric does is event coverage. Take for instance his write up of Mobile World Congress 2009. Everything is in one page, listed in multiple parts, lots of pictures, lots of opinions from actual hands on time versus rewriting a press release and using press photos. Awesome stuff. Decision: Highly recommended blog.
Phone Scoop Blog: This is Eric’s personal blog, which he hasn’t updated in almost two years. The sad thing about being a technology blogger is that you’re essentially getting paid by advertising. Advertisers care about one thing and one thing only: how much traffic can you get. Eric is a really bright guy, and I’ve talked to him at length about the wireless ecosystem, but the sad thing is that writing up his thoughts and putting them out there takes time and effort. Time and effort he could be spending covering every bit of news on the planet. More blog posts per day = more traffic = more money. Writing a hard hitting article can possibly get you a lot of traffic, but it is a bet that Eric can’t make since he uses Phone Scoop to put food on the table. I’m fortunate enough to have a boss and colleagues who push me to write more editorials. We’re not all that lucky. Decision: Unsubscribe due to lack of updates and if I really want to know what Eric thinks about something, I’ll just call him.
PhoneArena.com – Latest Reviews: An RSS feed for every review that Phone Arena publishes. The site is solid, and they usually get devices quite early. They also review a whole range of devices, not just boring expensive handsets. They’re fair, in depth, and almost always include a video with their reviews. Decision: Keep on reading.
PhoneArena.com – Latest Phones: This RSS feed spits out new devices that have been added to Phone Arena’s database of mobile phones, which is one of the most comprehensive out there on the internet; only GSM Arena is better. This feed is useful if you’re a mobile phone nerd, but I honestly don’t need it for my job. Decision: Unsubscribe.
PhoneArena.com – Latest News: Dear people who run Phone Arena: You need on RSS feed that literally has everything you guys do, versus 3 separate feeds. This RSS feed is for the latest news, and they’re usually not the first to break a piece of news. I don’t need yet another blog to read the news when I have so many already. Decision: Unsubscribe.

That’s it. Down to 163!

[Image above is via Flickr user "ohSNAP Photography"]

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 16

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:17:47 +0000

Check out Episode 16 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Up to the letter “O” today. Show me your “O” face

Office Evolution: Marc died almost 2 years ago so he is obviously not going to update his blog anymore. Sigh, sad to seem him go. I almost forgot about him, but seeing his feed in my reader brought back memories. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Office of the CTO blogs: Dead feed, dead site. This used to be the blog of Bob Iannucci, who was once the CTO of Nokia (NYSE: NOK), but then he got kicked out of the company. The official press has been told that he resigned, but internally there was talk that he had been fired because he tried to make Nokia’s Research Center be more U.S.A centric versus Finnish. Obviously those are just rumours, I don’t know what to believe. Decision: Dead RSS feed = unsubscribe, but it is not going to be counted towards today’s list of 10.
Official Google Mobile Blog: Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is a search company, first and foremost, but man do they kick ass at creating software for mobile devices. This is their official mobile blog and definitely one I intend to keep on reading. I tell everyone this: Google Maps is the killer to make use of the GPS chip inside your mobile phone. I literally can’t go anywhere in any city without it. It’s sad, but true. I’m talking restaurants less than 1 kilometer away, I still use Google Maps. Having removed the cognitive load for remembering where things are allows me to store more things in my mind. Knowing where I am at any given time allows me to roam a city aimlessly with no fears of getting lost. Being able to layer data from Wikipedia over my maps = awesome as well. Decision: Keep on reading this blog, with pleasure.
Opera Mini Blog: Opera’s official Opera Mini blog. It helps me keep up to date on what the company is working on. It’s a bit redundant since all of their new stuff is highly publicized and I have a fantastic relationship with their public relations folks. That being said, Opera Mini is one of my favorite mobile applications. Be sure to read my review of Opera Mini 5 beta. Decision: I love Opera Mini, therefore I love this blog as well.
Orange Cone: I think this blog was recommended to me by Adam Greenfield, I’m not quite sure. Either way, it is written by Mike Kuniavsky, a very forward thinking designer and technologist. He doesn’t blog too often, but when he does I eagerly read his stuff. Things like the internet of things, the future of social, all that new age internet hippie shit; I love it. Decision: Keep on reading.
O’Reilly Radar – Insight, analysis, and research about emerging tech: I’m jealous of the O’Reilly folks. They host conferences and get to listen to the best of the best talk about the trends they’re seeing and from that data they distill an awesome set of links and content which they share on O’Reilly Radar. There is a daily post called “four short links” that shares 4 links and a few sentences about what each of them are, and the topics range wildly from the future of journalism, to being green, to government transparency. I like to think of this blog as Reader’s Digest for technologists. Decision: One of my favorite blogs, keep on reading.
OSNews.com: There used to be a time when I had three or more operating systems on my machine. I would try every new Linux distribution out there, beta versions of Windows operating systems, you name it, I probably ran it at one point on my system. OS News does a fantastic job at keeping track of what’s going on in the operating system space, Linux, and they even touch on mobile devices every once in a while. Today, this blog is useless to me since I am no longer a part of the intended audience. I run one operating system, Windows 7, and I have a workflow and certain applications, with every keyboard shortcut memorized, that works for me so well that I’m too stubborn to change. Decision: No longer interesting. Unsubscribe.
Palm Developer Network Blog: I’m not a developer. I subscribed to this blog back when there was little to no information out about webOS and I was hoping that there would be something mentioned to developers that wasn’t mentioned to consumers, which I could then pick up and write about. It’s a bit useless to me really. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Palm, Inc. – All News Releases: All of Palm (NSDQ: PALM)’s press releases, delivered straight to my RSS reader. When I was a kid I had a Palm Pilot, a Handspring Visor, and a Sony CLIÉ. I used the living hell out of my Palm devices. I had a whole range of accessories for them, including a fold out keyboard that let me take notes in class. This was way before anyone at Palm ever though of shoving a cellular radio inside one of their products. I miss those days. The Pre is … well I can’t say too much about it since I’ve never touched one. The Pixie looks interesting too, my preferred form factor. What I’m waiting for is something that can compete with the Nokia N95/N96/N82 in terms of camera performance. Decision: I need this RSS feed for my job, and I love Palm.
PalmInfocenter: A Palm fan blog. Why on Earth am I reading this? You can’t even buy Palm devices in Europe. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Patricia Handschiegel: I used to have a very bad habit of subscribing to a blog if I was linked to one really excellent blog post. Patricia must have written such a blog post because she has been in my RSS reader for a while, yet every time I bump into her feed I always “mark as read”. Decision: Unsubscribe.

Well that’s it for today, down to 169. I’m thinking that once I reach the bottom of my list of RSS feeds I should do one more episode and just name the feeds that have remained, along with a 140 character description, in one epically long blog post. What do you think?

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 15

Stefan Constantinescu — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:02:02 +0000

Check out Episode 15 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

In case you didn’t get the memo, I restarted this series yesterday. Read Episode 14 if you missed it. Today’s Episode is where I hit the letter “N” in full force so expect a lot of Nokia (NYSE: NOK) stuff to be here.

Nokia Music Podcast: Nokia used to have a music blog, similar to Disco Dust, managed by … I can’t remember his name. I should, he gave me a Nokia N93 a long, long, long time ago. Anyway, dead RSS feed, unsubscribing, will not count towards today’s list of 10.
Nokia PC Suite news: Always wanted to know how I know about firmware updates for Nokia devices? This RSS feed has them all. The sad thing about this RSS feed is that it is usually late and most users discover updates for their device before this feed is updated. I find out via Twitter, or other blogs, about software updates for Nokia devices before Nokia’s own official RSS feed. That’s a bit … sad, don’t you think? Decision: Unsubscribe.
Nokia Phones: Phone Reviews and News: This blog hasn’t been updated in over a year. I can’t even remember why I subscribed to it, probably because it is a Nokia focused blog and if you can’t tell by now, I’m a huge Nokia fanboi. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Nokia Press Bulletin Board: An official Nokia blog for press people, and it usually has press releases that Nokia doesn’t deem significant enough to put on the proper Nokia Press site. I can’t understand why this blog exists, but hey, it is what it is. Nokia’s strategy of having one million billion blogs, twitter accounts, and websites set up to communicate their message seems slightly retarded, and I know someone who is trying to fix that, but he keeps on running into a brick wall since many of the internal groups don’t talk to each other. One day, when the average age of employees at Nokia headquarters isn’t 40, Nokia’s communication strategy will be sound. Until that happens, enjoy the madness. Decision: I need to read this blog for my job.
Nokia Press Releases: Nokia’s official RSS feed for press people. Decision: This isn’t even up for debate, of course I’m going to subscribe to this.
Nokia S60 3rd Edition Applications Review: Dead RSS feed, dead site, unsubscribing, will not count towards today’s list of 10.
Nokia S60 3rd Edition Applications Review: This is the new RSS feed that replaces the dead one above. This blog is/was written by Zach Epstein and hasn’t been updated in a year. If Zach’s name sounds familiar to you, it is because he still blogs. You’ve probably read his stuff on The Boy Genius Report. Decision: Blog no longer updated, writer now works for a respectable website, unsubscribe.
Nokia Software Update News: Duplicate feed, the exact same as number 2 on today’s list. Unsubscribing, will not count towards today’s list of 10.
Nokia Technology Media Briefing: Nokia used to have an RSS feed that spit out podcasts with people explaining new technology and how it is going to impact Nokia’s strategy. I think it used to be active back in 2007, but can’t remember exactly. Either way, it hasn’t been updated in ages. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Nokia World Blog: Dead RSS feed, was probably used to track the events coming out of Nokia World one year. Decision: Death = Unsubscribe.
Nokia World Blog: The RSS feed above in my read twice for some strange reason. The URLs differ slightly. Decision: Death = Unsubscribe, but it is a duplicate so I’m not counting it towards today’s list of 10.
NokiaCast: Blog has not been updated in over 2 years. This used to be a podcast run by AME Info, which is like Bloomberg, but for the Middle East. Decision: No updates in 2+ years, unsubscribe.
NotebookReview.com – The Webs Best Source For Laptop Notebook: My favorite website for laptop reviews. I usually get a laptop every 2 years, and I’ve had mine for about 2.5 now. Waiting on quad core chips that have low enough power consumption to last at least 3 hours on battery and cost less than 1500 EUR before replacing my bulletproof Lenovo (OTCPK: LNVGY) ThinkPad T61 that now has 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive thanks to a recent upgrade. Decision: I’ll definitely keep reading this, I love notebooks.
Nseries Arena Blog: Dead site. Unsubscribing, but not counting toward today’s list of 10.
NYT Movies: The New York Times movie reviews section. I have no idea why I read this since they usually review movies that I can’t pirate because they’re not out yet or are too niche to even be pirated. My memory is so bad that I can’t be bothered to read a review of a film, keep it in my head for a few months, and then remember the details when I see the film show up on Bit Torrent. Decision: Unsubscribe.

Not as epic as the 1600 word list yesterday, but that’s because today had a lot of duplicates and dead RSS feeds. Notice how many Nokia blogs used to exist and now no longer don’t? When the Nokia N95 came out, it was the most epic device on the face of the planet, and then a year later the iPhone was launched and many of these blogs stopped updating. Is that a coincidence? I can count on one hand the number of Nokia/Symbian blogs I used to read when I started out (November 2006) that are still here today. Anyway, down to 175 RSS feeds. I’m thrilled.

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 14

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:01:11 +0000

Check out Episode 14 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Episode 13 was published on July 20, 2009. After 2 months that involved a lot of partying, a lot of resting, a move from the Detroit of Finland (Tampere) to the capital city of Helsinki, I’m back to trim my list of the remaining 198 RSS feeds. Sorry for the delay, but I got caught up in the spirit of the summer. While the sun was shining from 4 in the morning to 3 in the morning the next day, it was hard to sit on my ass behind a glowing LCD. Now, sadly, fall is upon us in the Nordics. Wet leaves make the ground slippery, it is constantly raining, and it is no longer t-shirt and shorts weather. Enough bitching and moaning about the weather, I’m starting to sound British!

My (and your) E61: A blog about the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E61, my first S60 smartphone and the device that eventually led me to start up “Ring Nokia” and then get hired here at IntoMobile. It has not been updated in over 2 years. Decision: Obsolete blog, deleted, will not count towards today’s list of 10 feeds.
My Nokia Blog: Written by Jay, also known as Jose_R.A.M on Howard Forums, he is a Nokia addict. Just like I am. He actually has original content too thanks to Nokia’s social media team who supply him with handsets to review and fly him to events around the world. Sadly, and I really regret saying this since I’ve met the guy in real life, I don’t want to read yet another Nokia blog. My decision would be a bit different if the blog decided to publish a full RSS feed, but instead it is only partial, and that makes my daily reading slower. Decision: I still have a hard on for Nokia, but it isn’t as hard as it was when I was a younger man. Recommended if you love Nokia, but not for me. Unsubscribe.
My Tweeple: I can’t share the URL of this RSS feed with you since it is unique and has sensitive information, but I can tell you about the service. MicroPlaza is a service that tries to do a lot of things, even I’m not familiar with the full feature list, but one thing they do very well is store the URLs of the links people you follow on Twitter have shared with you. Say I follow 100 people, and half of those people post one link a day, I would then get 50 new RSS items with the links that they’ve shared. The service doesn’t work very well since the list of people I follow is always changing. I constantly follow and unfollow people on a weekly basis. MicroPlaza has not updated their system and are showing me links from people who I no longer follow. That isn’t cool. There is a service that does something similar to this, it was recently covered on ReadWriteWeb, and is called ReadTwit. I have not tried it yet, so I can’t recommend it, but I plan on giving it a go once I finish “Trimming in Public”. Decision: The service no longer does what it should be doing. Unsubscribe.
My-Symbian.com S60 3rd Edition: Someone a lot older than me will have to double check this, but I think My-Symbian is the only Symbian focused website on the internet that is older than All About Symbian. I met the owner in Spain a few years ago, and I’m kicking myself in the ass for not remembering his name. He used to be a hell of a lot more active than he is now, and I miss his detailed reviews. I was reading this blog back when there was only 3 or 4 websites dedicated to Nokia and Symbian, but now they’re a dime a dozen. I guess that kind of competitive pressure got to him, since I don’t see content coming out of My-Symbian too often anymore. It’s a shame really. Decision: Unsubscribe.
MyPhoneRocks dot com: Dead RSS feed, dead site. Decision: Unsubscribe because it no longer exists. Will not count towards today’s list of 10.
News for Nokia Corporation (ADR) – Google Finance: Analysts, stock traders, people in the financial industry, more often than not they’re better than bloggers. While a blogger will read a story and think about whether or not he should put in the effort to re-write it and put it on his site so he can get a few thousand hits and rake in $10 from Google (NSDQ: GOOG) AdSense, people in the financial industry have thousands of dollars, sometimes more, riding on every bit of news that comes out about a company. Google Finance does a crazy awesome job at covering Nokia news, and I recommend you use this tool to cover your favorite company, your favorite competitor, or any company you have an interest in. Decision: Highly valuable RSS feed.
The feed above, it is in my RSS reader twice. This is due to the fact that Google Finance started out as an ATOM only service, but then added RSS support later. Deleting the duplicate, it will not count towards today’s list of 10.
News From Symbian Smart Phones World: Symbian-Freak has an external reputation as a site dedicated to hard core Symbian hackers and fanbois, and an untalked about, private reputation, as one who sucks at linking to their sources and even disables the ability to highlight text from their website to prevent copy and pasting. I don’t read the site anymore. Decision: Unsubscribe.
NFOrce NFOs – PC App ISOs: Quick lesson on piracy: Internet pirates, just like real world pirates, each have their own name. When they release a piece of pirated software, or film/audio/book/whatever on the internet it is always accompanied by something called an NFO file. NFOrce is an online library of NFO files. What do NFO files contain? If it is software, they usually contain a serial number or instructions on how to crack the copy protection. If it is a video, it usually tells you more information about the film, such as the source of the rip, the settings used to encode the film, and whether or not subtitles are available and in what language. I used to pirate software, not because I needed it, but because I was a collector. What an idiot I used to be. Today I just pirate when I want to see or hear something. I’ll even pirate the same thing over and over again because I’m too lazy to back it up to an external hard drive. Decision: I’m still a pirate, but instead of being a Captain, I’m now the guy who sits below the deck and peels potatoes. Unsubscribe.
NOK – Seeking Alpha: Look at what I said for number 6, Google Finance’s feed. Seeking Alpha is just another aggregator. One is enough. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Nokia – Beta Labs: Oh how times have changed. I remember there used to be a period in my life when I stayed up and night and tried to find new software for my new smartphone to see what capabilities I could add to it, but today my mobile phone is a critical piece of equipment and I have a bullet proof workflow that I do not want to fuck up. It takes a lot for me to want to play with beta software, and to be honest Nokia Beta Labs has not pumped out anything interesting in a long, long, long time. If they do come out with something cool, I’m sure my friends are going to talk about it, or Engadget is going to write about it. Decision: Beta software isn’t cool anymore, beta services are. Unsubscribe.
Nokia – Google News: Love it or hate it, Google News is one hell of an aggregator for online news. This is an RSS feed that spits out every article, from every publication Google News tracks, that contains the word Nokia. The Google Finance RSS feed (scroll up and read number 6) is enough, I don’t need to read this feed too. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Nokia Beta Labs blog: Number 11 was a link to an RSS feed that spits out announcements about new software, this is an RSS feed that spits about new blog posts by the Beta Labs team. Unsubscribing from this too and not counting it towards today’s list of 10.
Nokia Conversations – All Posts: Nokia’s official corporate blog. Most of the time the content is bland and boring and very sterile, but they do have scoops (obviously) on announced devices. Decision: Ehhh, why not, I’ll keep on reading this.

And with that, 1600+ words later, I hope to bring you “Trimming in Public” on a more consistent basis. I’m down to 187 RSS feeds by the way!

[Photo above from Flickr user jabberwik]

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 13

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:49:57 +0000

Check out Episode 13 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

The last episode was published a little over 2 weeks ago. I apologize for that. Blame it on summer. When I moved to Finland during the summer of 2007, I could not understand why people partied as hard as they did. After living through one winter, I never questioned the hard core drinking, grilling, and sauna-ing ever again. When you live somewhere that has no sun and doesn’t get above 5 degrees centigrade for more than half of the year, you go all-fucking-out at having a good time when summer arrives. That being said, today is a terrible day, which is why I’m stuck indoors, writing this for you my dear readers:

MobHappy: Home to Carlo Longino and Russell Buckley, this duo usually writes about the monetary aspect of mobile, mainly focusing on advertising. With Russell working for AdMob, what do you expect? I have mixed feelings about this blog. Both Carlo and Russell point to interesting stories, but when Russell starts talking about advertising, I cringe. I hate advertising, in all shapes and sizes. Hearing how many millions of impressions AdMob had in a month is a bit useless, that would be like me recording how many brunettes I saw walking down the street on my way to get a bottle of Stolichnaya. It’s a gimicky metric, but Russell does a good job of not bringing up AdMob very frequently. These two have been in the mobily industry longer than most, and for that I respect their opinions since they’ve been around the block. I’ll keep on reading MobHappy because I learn what it is like for the people out there in the mobile industry trying to put food on the table. They’re just as important as the people who buy devices. I only have one request for you guys: blog more frequently, your nuggets of gold on Twitter are good, but people are starving for quality content. Decision: Keeper.
Mobile 2.0 and Emerging Mobile Media Services: Dead feed, will not count towards today’s 10.
Mobile Entertainment: The title of this site gives it away, they focus on videogames, music, and most any form of content that makes money on mobile. They spit out a partial RSS feed and going to their site results in little text, lots of ads, and zero links. If I find something interesting on Mobile Entertainment, I usually end up searching for that bit of news on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) to find more substance. Decision: Partial RSS feed, crazy amount of ads, little depth = good bye.
Mobile Jam Session: This feed is for an event that happened last year. I’m sure it will happen again this year too, but do I really care about hack-a-thon sessions? Not really. What do these late night, Red Bull drinking, illegal file trading evenings result in? Applications that need a lot of refinement. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Mobile Opportunity: Michael Mace is a bloody genius. He started working for Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in the late 80s until the mid 90s, then he worked at SGI for a year, after that he jumped on board with Palm (NSDQ: PALM) and proceeded to work there for 6 years. He has seen a lot, and that kind of experience is highly appreciated. With the number of blogs focussing on mobile doubling every few months, it’s hard to find people who actually know what the hell they’re talking about. Mobile Opportunity is a front for the company he works for now: Rubicon Consulting. They do surveys, and create strategies, but they don’t actually do products or services, which is a shame. They’re consultants, and if you’ve ever worked for a large company, you know the term consultant has some very strong negative connotations. That being said, his insights almost always help me ask the right questions in order to get the answers that truly matter. Decision: Fantastic content.
Mobile Phone Helpdesk: A long time ago, this site used to get a lot of scoops. I don’t know what happened, but they stopped bringing exclusive content to the table. Now they publish news that I’ve already read 24 hours ago on other mobile blogs. Decision: Slow to update, no more interesting content, unsubscribe.
Mobile-Review.com – last news: This RSS feed is for the English version of one of my favorite websites: Mobile-Review. That being said, it has not been updated since December 2005. Dead feed, will not be count towards today’s 10.
Mobile-Review.com – ????????? ???????: This is the Russian version of the above feed. No I can not read Russian, but Google Reader has a translate feature which is ultra handy. Almost all the leaks that happen in the mobile industry appear on this site first. I should keep on subscribing to it, but I’m not going to. Another one of my favorite sites, which I’ll get to in another episode, called Unwired View, has an editor who can read Russian and he usually does a bang up job at translating the important bits of information that I need to read and churn in to IntoMobile blog posts. I’ll let him keep on top of this. Decision: Unsubscribe.
MobileBurn.com: Most mobile phone sites are like the BBC program Top Gear. Ordinary people, testing ultra high end expensive devices, telling the world which one is the best. Mobile Burn does that, but it also reviews hardware that others may glance over such as mid range and low end devices. I like that about them, and because of that I’m going to keep on reading their site. My buddy Ricky Cadden also blogs there, which is another reason I keep subscribing to this feed. Decision: Keep reading.
MobileCrunch: TechCrunch’s attempt at a technology blog focused on mobile. It hardly has any original content. The site just republishes blog posts from the larger, more popular, CrunchGear property. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Mobility Site: This used to be my favorite Windows Mobile blog, but that honor now goes to Pocket Now due to excellent concise writing, and loads of multimedia. I don’t have Pocket Now in my RSS reader, I just read their stuff via Twitter. I’m not usually the guy to handle Windows Mobile news, but I’ll still keep myself up to date just so I can engage in a semi-knowledgeable conversation about the operating system. Decision: Unsubscribe.
mocoNews.net: I don’t care if I get in trouble with the IntoMobile crew for saying this, but if I had to read only one blog to keep on top of the mobile industry, it would be mocoNews. These guys must have read the Reuters manual on journalism. They have no biases, most of the time at least, they have plenty of original content in the form of interviews, and the fact that they focus less on devices and more on services is what makes this website one of the few that I would actually pay for, out of my own pocket, to read. Decision: Enthusiastically recommended for everyone in the industry.

Down to 198 feeds!

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 12

Stefan Constantinescu — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:45:19 +0000

Trimming in Public is a series where I go through my list of 293 RSS feeds, 10 feeds at a time, give some detail as to why I subscribed to a particular feed, and then decide whether or not to keep on consuming that feed. In Episode 1 I explained what RSS is and how to use it, please read that if you need a refresher on why RSS is awesome and why you should be using it if you take reading news on the internet seriously. The prefix to Trimming in Public is “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash.” For the bloggers out there who read IntoMobile, I hope you get a better idea of what I do to keep on top of the news. For the readers who read IntoMobile, I know that this site isn’t the only mobile focused technology publication on the internet, and by sharing which sites I read I’m hoping that you’ll keep on coming back here. Taking out the trash has an obvious explanation, I can’t keep up with my RSS feeds and need to trim my list. For those who want to download my complete list of 293 RSS feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file.

Check out Episode 12 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

What a week. I’m sure you’ve missed Trimming in Public on Tuesday and Wednesday, lots of things happened in my personal life that I’m not going to get into on this blog, but feel free to scroll through my twitter account if you really care. I doubt you do.

With that out of the way, let us continue our regularly scheduled program:

Martin’s Mobile Technology Page: Martin Sauter’s latest book is called “Beyond 3G – Bringing Networks, Terminals and the Web Together: LTE, WiMAX, IMS, 4G Devices and the Mobile Web 2.0” and he is one of the few people out there who can break down infrastructure in a way that I can understand. I feel smarter after each blog post he writes, and if you can manage to get to the bottom of this post and have an increased pulse, then I recommend you subscribe to him. Decision: One of my favorite sites.
Mashable!: Reading “social media news” is a bit stupid if the phrase “social media” causes your left eye to twitch and gives you an urge to leave your house with whatever little clothes you have on, find a baby, and proceed to throw it into oncoming traffic while your friend who happens to be a registered sex offender records the entire incident on his brand spanking new iPhone 3GS and then uploads it to Youtube. I’m just saying. Decision: Leave. Now.
Me and My Phones: Asian geek with a lot of money and connections. He usually got hardware before anyone else did. I still haven’t figured out how. Anyway, he has not updated his blog since February 2008 so his feed will get cut. Decision: Abandoned blog = buh bye.
MediaShift: Where is the future of journalism heading? How will journalists make money? Is Twitter a viable source of information? How much of an impact does real time make? These questions are asked, and attempted to be answered, over at MediShift. I plan to dedicate an entire essay on the future of advertising and journalism at some point, but right now I’m just waiting on my drug dealer to score some Adderall. Do I want to keep on reading this blog? It’s a hard question, but I’m going to have to go with no. Journalism will always live on forever, whether the newspaper industry survives is another topic of discussion. Smart people will not figure out how to solve the monetization problem, risk takers will be. Right now it doesn’t seem like anyone is trying anything radical, and all the smart people (read: consultants) can tell you is that you should make everything free and make your content stand out. Fantastic advice, but that’s like reading the instructions on the back of a shampoo bottle and hoping that with your new found knowledge, the lice in your hair will be cured. Action will win, blog posts will do nothing but cause debate, which is great if you’re the blog owner since more traffic = more money. Decision: Unsubscribe.
MEX – The strategy forum for mobile user experience: Marek Pawlowski used to write about interesting finds in the mobile UX field, now he just pimps his MEX Conference to hell so that executives from all around the world, with too much money in their wallet, can escape their wives and children by flying to London, state everything that is wrong with mobile design, discuss what qualities are required to achieve awesome mobile design, and then go back home to their company with little to no idea on how to change their strategy to get effective results. It’s the greatest con of the century really. Put people in a room, make them workshop, make them pat each other on the back for stating the obvious, and then let them go home feeling good about themselves because they think they know more than their competitors about the current market. While this is happening, the competition is building tomorrows market. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Michael Gartenberg: This is a dead RSS feed because Michael Gartenberg changed where he writes. He used be Vice President and Research Director at Jupiter Research, which got purchased by Forrester. He did not want to be a part of the newly combined mega-analyst firm so he left and became Vice President of Strategy and Analysis at Interpret. He now writes here, but I have to ask myself: Do I want to subscribe to his new feed? I’ve never seen or purchased any reports from Jupiter or Interpret, and his blog is more of a space on the internet where he can talk about what’s on his mind in a casual voice. I don’t want to read that. I want to read hard core 10+ page PDF files with more numbers than the ever increasing United States National Debt. Decision: Not subscribing.
Microsoft Research Downloads: Say what you will about the products Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) ships, their research division is another beast all together. The stuff they work on is amazing, and two years ago I cared about it, a lot, but today … not really. The last application they posted to the public is called: “Dynamics Simulation and Geometric Modeling Using D* Symbolic Differentiation” and yes, there was once a point in my life where I cared deeply about things like this. Few people know that I used to do research with my chemistry department, with a grant from Intel, using expensive x-ray spectroscopy equipment, in an attempt to see which metals we could bond to silicon wafers. I used to live for that kind of stuff. Then I discovered I was much happier listening to Bob Marley, smoking weed and having sex. Thank you higher education and fuck you Nietzsche. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Microsoft Research News and Highlights: What cool new things is the Microsoft Research department working on and what are news media organization saying about it? That’s what this RSS feed is in a nutshell. I have to echo what I said above. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Microsoft Research Publications: I used to read research publications all the time, not just from Microsoft, but from Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Research Center, IBM, and other large Fortune 500 companies who throw billions of dollars at research every year. I stopped a long time ago because I got upset. I was upset that here I was, reading about something that could have a major impact on the future 5 or more years from now, and I’m either too dumb to contribute or too impatient to wait. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility: Mike runs the Silicon Valley Mobile Monday events, he also has a knack for attacking issues from multiple angles and can explain his conclusions very persuasively. I like that. I just wished the man blogged more! Decision: Smart guy, keep reading.

Down to 206.

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 11

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:04:48 +0000

Trimming in Public is a series where I go through my list of 293 RSS feeds, 10 feeds at a time, give some detail as to why I subscribed to a particular feed, and then decide whether or not to keep on consuming that feed. In Episode 1 I explained what RSS is and how to use it, please read that if you need a refresher on why RSS is awesome and why you should be using it if you take reading news on the internet seriously. The prefix to Trimming in Public is “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash.” For the bloggers out there who read IntoMobile, I hope you get a better idea of what I do to keep on top of the news. For the readers who read IntoMobile, I know that this site isn’t the only mobile focused technology publication on the internet, and by sharing which sites I read I’m hoping that you’ll keep on coming back here. Taking out the trash has an obvious explanation, I can’t keep up with my RSS feeds and need to trim my list. For those who want to download my complete list of 293 RSS feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file.

Check out Episode 11 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Ah Monday, what a fantastic day to be a blogger based out of Europe. Press releases usually hit the wire around 9:00 New York time, which for me is 16:00. I could have slept in, but instead I’ve been on a Mad Men marathon, consuming all 26 episodes in the span of 3 days. Let us begin:

Journals.ars: Ars.technica is a portal for news. They have “journals” (read: blogs) which represented specific sub topics such as Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Web, Telecoms, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), etc. Since I’ve already subscribed to the high volume “everything feed” and mentioned it a previous episode of Trimming in Public, there is no reason to have this in my list. It will not be counted as one of today’s 10 since it is a redundancy versus a new property. Decision: Gone.
Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog: One of the most highly read, and respected, blogs that discusses online identity. I used to deeply care about this issue, I was even an OpenID cheerleader, but now I’m exhausted and unenthusiastic. Read Kim Cameron’s bio and you’ll agree with me that no one on the internet knows more about identity than this man. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Lenovo Connections: A Lenovo (OTCPK: LNVGY) blog that talks more about what Lenovo is doing in the social media space than the actual products themselves. I’m on the fence with this one. Some blog posts are better than others, but due to the low volume of posting I think I’ll let it live. Some people are whores for Apple, I’m a ThinkPad whore. Nothing else in Lenovo’s portfolio excites me sadly. Decision: Brand loyalty is compelling enough to keep reading.
Lifeblog: Charlie Schick’s personal blog. This is the man who started Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Conversations, but is now leaving the company. His interests include biology and science in general, which is a huge sigh of relief from all the other repetitive people in this industry who either talk about devices, services, or how SMS is a killer application. Charlie got me an interview with Opera, and for that I’m eternally grateful. He also acted as a mentor while I was at Nokia, letting me know about how the huge machine works. I like this blog. I like Charlie. Decision: Interesting links, and a friend that is leaving Europe, adds up to a blog that I’ll keep on reading.
Lifehacker: Tips for getting shit done. Doing fewer things and putting your best effort into those highly selected tasks, versus and doing a lot of little shit, will make you feel much more accomplished and fulfilled. I used to get a lot out of this blog, now it’s just a repeating pattern of the same 20 tips, over and over, with a few sprinkles of software reviews and recommendations for books that tell you how to get — guess what — more shit done! Top tip: If you’re reading a blog that tells you how to get shit done, you’re doing jack shit! Decision: I don’t need to feel good about procrastinating by reading tips on how to procrastinate less.
LinuxDevices: Every year the same article gets published by various journalists. Every year is claimed to be the year of desktop Linux. Every year those articles get 500 comments from Windows users saying Linux is too hard, Mac users saying OS X is built on top of Unix, but it is easy to use and therefore the best operating system, and Linux users saying that if you can’t use Linux you’re a fucking idiot. Linux Devices is all about Linux in the embedded space. Cars, mobile phones, network attached storage devices, that sort of thing. I care about products and whether or not they do their job. I could care less what the OS under the hood is, as long as said product does what it says on the box, I’m thrilled. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Live Mesh: Microsoft’s blog that keeps me updated on the status of Live Mesh, one of the most interesting internet projects that I’ve seen in recent history. Read my article on Opera Unite for some background information. Think of Live Mesh as your hard drive on the internet, and think of a future where you don’t need to sign up to a service and start from scratch, uploading your media, connecting with your friends, doing all the tedious things that are usually required to get the most out of a new site. Imagine you find a service, and simply point it to your Live Mesh, and you’re done. Live Mesh as a product will never take off due to being highly proprietary. Ray Ozzie can say whatever he wants about it being based on open standards; spare me. When the open source people figure out how to clone this, and get around the Microsoft software patents, expect the concept to be called new, revolutionary, and take off faster than you can say cloud computing. All of your personal media and private data will sit on some hard drive, thousands of miles away, and changing the services that have access to this information will be as simple as changing file associations today. It’s all very interesting, but it isn’t happening right now and I’m not going to care about this service until it is actually beneficial to me. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?: Cute cats, funny captions, but I’m a dog person. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Loren Feldman: This is a dead feed. It should point to 1938 media. I read Loren’s stuff on Twitter anyway. While I’m not paying for a subscription, I do admit that few men have the balls to really say what’s going on today. His jokes may seem cruel, but people laugh at them because secretly they know that they’re true. I’ve been inspired by Loren several times, yet on a few occasions some of his videos make me want to sit him down and smack some sense into him. You can’t watch his material, or read his content, and be neutral. That is where he wins and other people fail, miserably, at getting noticed. I digg this guy a lot, him and Hugh MacLeod. The problem is he is reinventing himself, and I don’t think he has found exactly where he would like to be. It’s a growing pain that comes from being on the internet for such a long time, and getting bored of what you used to do, but it’s a pain that I do not want to suffer with him. 1938 media is one of the few sites that I still go to my address bar and type out the complete URL and then proceed to browse, versus reading in an RSS reader. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Lunch over IP: “Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the TED Conferences, the producer of the Forum des 100, and a frequent public speaker.” He stopped blogging over 6 months ago because he is now a busy man apparently. I used to read him because I believed in the power of conferences to spread new ideas and make change happen, but I’ve quickly learned that the type of people who get shit done usually don’t go to conferences. They sit at home, or in the office, and do their job, release a product, and then the people who organize these sort of events, like Bruno, contact them, harass them actually, to come give a talk as an excuse to charge $1000+ per ticket. I do not have beef with TED because the talks there are recorded and uploaded for all to see, and that totally syncs with my ethos of sharing, but at the same time how am I benefiting by reading this blog? I’ll give you a hint: I’m not. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Magical Nihilism: I covered this blog in episode 3, and I quote: “Matt Jones used to work for Nokia. He is one of the people who banged his head against the wall when the iPhone came out because Nokia had stuff like the iPhone in the labs, but the company classified his work as too risky to implement. He has a wicked eye for noticing what’s happening around his immediate surroundings, you have to as a designer, and I respect what he outputs. Sadly, he doesn’t blog here anymore. He moved to Magical Nihilism, which I subscribe to. Seeing as how this RSS feed is dead, it deserves to be removed.” Decision: Does not count for today’s 10 since I’ve already covered this blog. Yes I still read it.
Mark Shuttleworth: Mark founded Ubuntu. That used to matter to me. I remember when Ubuntu came out, we all made fun of the name, but I used it because Mark said something to the tune of “we need to make this work perfectly on my IBM ThinkPad X40.” I had the same laptop at the time. His distribution was still not as good as Windows XP. Decision: Unsubscribe.

This was a long one, over 1700 words. Sorry about that. Down to 214.

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 10

Stefan Constantinescu — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:59:17 +0000

Trimming in Public is a series where I go through my list of 293 RSS feeds, 10 feeds at a time, give some detail as to why I subscribed to a particular feed, and then decide whether or not to keep on consuming that feed. In Episode 1 I explained what RSS is and how to use it, please read that if you need a refresher on why RSS is awesome and why you should be using it if you take reading news on the internet seriously. The prefix to Trimming in Public is “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash.” For the bloggers out there who read IntoMobile, I hope you get a better idea of what I do to keep on top of the news. For the readers who read IntoMobile, I know that this site isn’t the only mobile focused technology publication on the internet, and by sharing which sites I read I’m hoping that you’ll keep on coming back here. Taking out the trash has an obvious explanation, I can’t keep up with my RSS feeds and need to trim my list. For those who want to download my complete list of 293 RSS feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file.

Check out Episode 10 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Inside the Box: Another Lenovo (OTCPK: LNVGY) blog I subscribe to. Inside the Box, if I had to compare it to anything, would be most similar to Nokia Conversations. Can’t emphasize how large of a ThinkPad nerd I am. My favorite post has to be the owl fan. Who in their right mind would go to such lengths to detail the innovation achieved by mimicking nature when designing fan blades to maximize air flow and reduce noise? Decision: As long as ThinkPads stay square black boxes, I’ll be reading this blog.
Internet Evolution: Where is the future of the internet going? I want to know. Part of wanting to know, is reading what other people predict. Internet Evolution has two problems: 1) They spit out a partial RSS feed and 2) They talk more about what is happening today, than where they think the internet is heading. I know what is happening today. I’m an alpha-beta-testing-whore for my generation. Instead of writing about what’s happening on the internet, I simply use the tools that at some point will drive the future of the internet. Best way to learn. I used to learn a lot from this blog back when it started, now … not so much. Decision: Garbage.
Internet Tablet Talk: Curious to know what’s happening with Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s Internet Tablets? Read this blog. Do I care about Nokia’s Internet Tablets? No. Today you’re much better off buying an iPod Touch than an Internet Tablet that has a large 4.13 inch screen that doesn’t quite slide in your pocket with the greatest of ease. Decision: Unsubscribe.
IntoMobile: When it’s my turn to blog, I need to see what my team wrote so I don’t write a duplicate post. Our search engine, no offense to our technology team, but it blows chunks. I get far better results using Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Reader’s search engine. Decision: Crucial to my job.
Jaiku | Latest from christinad: I used to be a huge, HUGE, Jaiku addict. After Google purchased the service, it died a slow and tragic death. I’m on Twitter now, but it just isn’t the same. Apparently I really cared enough about a user called christianad to subscribe to their Jaiku posts. I don’t even know who this person is today. Update: christinad is my friend’s wife. I always used to tease him about the things she said about him. Good times. Decision: Dead service, dead feed, good bye.
Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect: Jan works for Nokia as an anthropologist. He isn’t an arm chair anthropologist either, creating surveys and then asking a team to hand them out. When he goes to research a new territory, culture or social class, he sleeps, eats, and works with people to get a most excellent idea of what it’s like to live in their shoes. His blog posts make me question the assumptions I’ve already made about the reality around me, and expose me to new lands and cultures that I may not have been familiar with before. He used to live in Tokyo, now he is in Los Angeles I believe. Either way, the man is always traveling somewhere. I saw him in the Nokia cafeteria one day, eating with his team, and I was too timid to approach him and say hello. I regret that. Now that I no longer work there, I don’t know if that opportunity will ever present itself again. This article about Jan in the New York Times is a must read. Decision: Love his work.
Jaymo’s World: Yet another Nokia blog that started, and died. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Jeremiah’s Shared Links in Friend Feed: This is a custom Yahoo! Pipe that I built. Yahoo! Pipes, for those of you who have never heard of the service, is a way to chop up an RSS feed into something that only spits out the data you want. Jeremiah is an analyst at Forrester, and thus maintains a lot of relationships with his clients using various social media tools. I could care less about his personal life, and who he talks to, but at some point I used to care about the links he shared. I said this in a previous episode, but I have a strong ethos for sharing. That’s what makes the internet awesome, the fact that you can point someone to something and then engage in a conversation around that social object to quote Jyri Engeström. The pipe I created is rather simple, input Jeremiah’s Friend Feed RSS, filter through the results that only have the word “http://”, and now I only see the links he has shared. Useful, but now I no longer care about the groundswell, social media, or any of the other things that old companies need to learn about, yet new companies are doing right out of the gate because that’s the only way they know how to operate properly. Decision: Unsubscribe.
John Forsyth’s weblog: Symbian employee who used to blog actively, and then he stopped a year ago. If he writes something important, I’m sure David Wood will write about it, or the Symbian Foundation blog. Decision: Unsubscribe.
John Tokash’s Blog: I’m scrolling through the content in this blog, and trying really hard to remember why I subscribed to it in the first place, but nothing is causing a spark. Decision: Unsubscribe.

Down to 233.

10 episodes = I’ve combed through 100 RSS feeds, so 293 – 233 = 60 feeds that have been chopped. If I maintain this current level of trimming, I’ll have only 118 RSS feeds by the end of this series. Wow.

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No Trimming in Public today, due to the death of an icon, and failure to check the bus schedule

Stefan Constantinescu — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:30:45 +0000

One thing lead to another, and today I ended up staying out until 4 in the morning. I regret not publishing a Trimming in Public episode today.

I have a valid excuse however: I missed my bus home and ended up waiting for the next one at 2 in the morning, and when it didn’t show up I checked the internet to see the next one will roll in, and Journey Planner said 4 AM. Fuck that. I walked the 10 km home since a cab ride is around 20 euros and I’m not spending that unless I’m either taking a girl with me to my flat, or my crew and I are whacked out of our skulls. Conclusion: I walked through my door at around 04:15.

Lame excuse right? How about another one: Michael Jackson died.

MJ – Billy Jean
by Masterfill

Now excuse me while I get some rest and scratch myself to death after walking through the Finnish forests in an effort to save time, only to end up getting bitten my mosquitoes with a wingspan the size of my sneaker.

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 9

Stefan Constantinescu — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:25:48 +0000

Trimming in Public is a series where I go through my list of 293 RSS feeds, 10 feeds at a time, give some detail as to why I subscribed to a particular feed, and then decide whether or not to keep on consuming that feed. In Episode 1 I explained what RSS is and how to use it, please read that if you need a refresher on why RSS is awesome and why you should be using it if you take reading news on the internet seriously. The prefix to Trimming in Public is “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash.” For the bloggers out there who read IntoMobile, I hope you get a better idea of what I do to keep on top of the news. For the readers who read IntoMobile, I know that this site isn’t the only mobile focused technology publication on the internet, and by sharing which sites I read I’m hoping that you’ll keep on coming back here. Taking out the trash has an obvious explanation, I can’t keep up with my RSS feeds and need to trim my list. For those who want to download my complete list of 293 RSS feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file.

Check out Episode 9 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

HF: Nokia: Howard Forums is the premier North American internet discussion forum to discuss mobile handsets. You’re not going to find me on there since the place is terribly moderated and the majority of the people who post there have a difficult time wrapping their heads around this concept known as unlocked devices, but they are good for breaking news and leaks. Remember what I told you in previous episodes: harness the power of social media to help make your job easier. I’m a damn Jedi when it comes to browsing the internet, but I am only one man. Having an entire online forum scouring the internet for the latest news, in order to post in a thread before everyone else to gain bragging rights, helps me spot things before most people do. I can recall several instances where reading this RSS feed has provided me with a scoop, but to quote the French film Irréversible: “time ruins everything.” The signal to noise ratio became too high. Any time someone created a new thread in the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) subsection of Howard Forums, I’d read about it. Not anymore. Decision: Unsubscribe.
HF: S60: Same concept as above, but this sub forum was for S60 based smartphones. Same conclusion. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Holy Internet Batman!: My personal blog that I haven’t updated for 2 years, and don’t plan to update ever again. I will not count this toward my 10 since I lost all rights to the domain holyinternetbatman.com due to Go Daddy failing to inform me that my credit card expired. Decision: Unsubscribe, not counted.
Horizon Channel: This blog was started by the people who started Communities Dominate Brands. They stopped posting two years ago. Yet another failed social media experiment. Decision: Unsubscribe.
How to Change the World: Guy Kawasaki was a man who was in the right place, at the right time. He is known to be the first Technology Evangelist, meaning everything he said about the company that paid his bills had a positive spin applied to it, making anyone listening to him get a better impression of that company compared to what was actually occurring inside. Today this is called being an online troll, a fanboi or a paid social media consultant. The company that Guy worked for was Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), and he worked there for around four years, the most important one being 1984 which saw the launch of Macintosh. Since leaving in 1987 he has done a few odd things, mainly speaking gigs where he told other people about how they too can con people into believing whatever marketing material the public relations department published. In 1995 he went back to Apple with the goal of, and I quote: “maintain and rejuvenate the Macintosh cult.” He did that for a couple of years and then left again. Now I’m not saying Guy is full of shit. The man gives genuinely good advice. Fantastic advice is you’re a clueless individual who can not sell a bottle of Vitamin Water to the latest no talent asshole to grace the stage of MTV’s Real World. But I’ve had enough social media propaganda. Decision: Unsubscribe.
HowardChui: Howard is the man behind Howard Forums. This is his personal blog. I don’t even know why he blogs, the amount of money this man makes from the ads on Howard Forums could afford him a comfortable lifestyle of endless mojitos and girls in bikinis lounging around an Olympic sized swimming pool. He doesn’t really break news, and his reviews are often less than 300 words. Decision: Unsubscribe.
HowardForums: Your Mobile Phone Community & Resource – Palm OS: Same concept as the first two in today’s list, except this is for Palm (NSDQ: PALM). I used to use Palm devices all the time, hell I miss my Handspring Visor, but today I could care less about what Howard Forum members have to say about Palm. Will the Pre save them, will Palm die, will Verizon (NYSE: VZ) get the Pre and will that help Palm not die? Waste. Of. Time. Decision: Unsubscribe.
I Watch Stuff! – The Best Movie News Ever: I love movies. I download them all night, and watch them all day. I Watch Stuff is the blog I used to use to keep track of what’s hot and what to avoid. Now I use something else, and I’m not going to spoil it, you’re going to have to wait until I reach the letter “R.” Leave a comment below if you think you know what the site it. Back to I Watch Stuff: the writing is great, to the point and with plenty of witty metaphors. I just can’t read it anymore though. It’s frustrating reading an awesome review, or watching a fantastic trailer, and then realizing that film hasn’t been leaked yet. I mean really, it would be like me telling you about a Nokia device that will come out during Christmas 2010. Fantastic to know about that piece of hardware, but if you can’t purchase it, of what use is that knowledge? Decision: Unsubscribe.
IceRocket news search: Nokia: Ice Rocket used to be a blog search engine, similar to Technorati, that would spit out an RSS feed. Type a query for Nokia, or your favorite brand or topic, and then subscribing gives you things you may have missed. Now they’re trying to search everything. I don’t want this type of feed anymore. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Identity Woman: Hate the fact that you’re on multiple social networks, each with a different username and password, each with a different set of friends? I do, and Kaliya Hamlin does as well. Her blog stays on top of topics such as OpenID, Facebook Connect, and Google (NSDQ: GOOG)’s Open Social in an attempt to understand what is happening in the identity space and weigh in on the pros and cons of the technology companies introduce. You may not care about the fact that Google and Facebook know more about you than you know, but at some point I’m thinking users will start to get a bit worried about having so many traces of their digital self online. While I deeply care about these issues, I don’t care enough to keep on reading her blog. The internet changes all the time, and what may be a truth today, may be heresy tomorrow. I’m just going to go with the flow, rather than push my views down someone’s throat. I can’t count the number of times I told the people building Ovi that the identity system should support OpenID. If it did when Ovi shipped, Ovi would still be shit. See what I’m getting at? The small pieces are important, but the big picture is even more so. Decision: Unsubscribe.
information aesthetics: A must read site for data visualization nerds. Decision: Keeper!
An extra one for today, I have information aesthetics in my RSS reader twice. One of the feeds is dead. It’s been removed.

Down to 230!

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 8

Stefan Constantinescu — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:49:55 +0000

Trimming in Public is a series where I go through my list of 293 RSS feeds, 10 feeds at a time, give some detail as to why I subscribed to a particular feed, and then decide whether or not to keep on consuming that feed. In Episode 1 I explained what RSS is and how to use it, please read that if you need a refresher on why RSS is awesome and why you should be using it if you take reading news on the internet seriously. The prefix to Trimming in Public is “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash.” For the bloggers out there who read IntoMobile, I hope you get a better idea of what I do to keep on top of the news. For the readers who read IntoMobile, I know that this site isn’t the only mobile focused technology publication on the internet, and by sharing which sites I read I’m hoping that you’ll keep on coming back here. Taking out the trash has an obvious explanation, I can’t keep up with my RSS feeds and need to trim my list. For those who want to download my complete list of 293 RSS feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file.

Check out Episode 8 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

Gizmodo: Engadget vs. Gizmodo is like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) vs. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Israel vs. Palestine, Capitalism vs. Communism. I don’t want to take a particular side since both have their respective strengths and weaknesses, and it’s shocking to see how well they compliment each other. Engadget is more family friendly and focuses on technology that at some point in the future you’ll be able to purchase. Gizmodo has a talented team of Photoshop artists, who always manage to make me laugh, and are more in touch with their inner geek. Engadget would never cover something like steam punk, or the technology that goes into special effects of the latest Terminator movie, while Gizmodo uses that to their advantage and gives you pieces of information that are cool to digest, but difficult to take advantage of in the real world. I have yet to figure how the different cultures emerged, but something tells me it has to do with the pay structures. Gizmodo is owned by Nick Denton who is notorious for paying fewer dollars per post, encouraging more articles to be written, so that in the long run the site receives more traffic from Google (NSDQ: GOOG). Engadget is rumored to pay per post, and include a base salary, but since they’re owned by AOL they can afford to pay a bit more since the relationships with the advertisers have already been developed. Anyway, that’s just speculation. If you held a gun to my head and asked me to pick Gizmodo or Engadget, I’d probably go with Gizmodo even tho the writing isn’t always as good and I highly dislike the site design. Engadget is that really pretty girl in High School who was smart and tried extremely hard to get good grades so she could get accepted to a University that she thinks will make her future perfect. Gizmodo is that girl who, with little to no effort, gets above average grades, smokes pot with you behind the gym, and doesn’t really care where she ends up, because she just enjoys every day for what it’s worth. Life is a balance between those two attitudes. Decision: One of the best sites on the internet.
GOOD Department: Transparency: I’m a data visualization nerd, I admitted that in one of the previous episodes of “Trimming in Public.” GOOD has a section called Transparency that shows pretty interesting infographics, and they update the RSS feed roughly once a week. Nothing more to say really. I like the site. Decision: Eye candy for the win.
Google Blog Search: Nokia: People always wondered how I found all those Nokia (NYSE: NOK) stories back when I used to write for Ring Nokia. Subscribing to Google blog search engine results is an awesome way to keep on top of your favorite company or topic. Be warned however, there is a lot of overlap. This feed is very useful for posting scoops, assuming that you’re living in your RSS reader 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The whole point of this “Trimming in Public” series is to get a grip on my offline life again. I’m going to have to let this one go. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Google Chrome Blog: I love browsers, and swear no allegiance to any particular one. During a typical work day I’ll use Opera 10, Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 3 and even Internet Explorer 8. Keeping on top of Chrome is something I enjoy and plan to keep on doing. Decision: Bring on the HTML5 goodness.
Google Chrome Releases: I’m subscribed to the Google Chrome developer channel, meaning I don’t wait for software to go from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 to update. I get a new version of Chrome every week, file bugs, and test out new features before everyone else. To learn how to subscribe to the developer channel, click here. With this blog, I get updated when a new version becomes available and a highly detailed changelog. Decision: Helping make the internet a better place is a nobel thing to do.
GottaBeMobile: GottaBeMobile ranks up there with Notebook Review as one of the best websites to stay on top of what’s going on with laptops. Their videos are consistently of high quality and I used to spend a lot of time on their forum. Sadly however, thank the crappy economy and good enough performance from yesterday’s chips, but I don’t upgrade my equipment anywhere near as often as I did just a few years ago. My laptop, the one I’m using to type this blog post, is over 2 years old. I plan on buying another battery and larger hard drive this summer, and that will be the extent of what I’ll be spending on personal computers. With 2.2 GHz and 2 GB of RAM, you can get a lot done these days. If Lenovo (OTCPK: LNVGY) would like to send me their latest ThinkPad to review, I would be more than happy to do so, but when it comes to spending my own money: I’m fine with where I am and don’t need to know what laptop manufacturers are up to. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog): What Forrester has to say about social networking, communities, and all that other nonsense that was awesome to talk about 2 years ago, but if anyone asked me today how strong my personal brand is, I’d punch them in their personal area. Decision: The Web 2.0 Kool-Aid hangover is over and done with and I never want to see a social media consultant again.
Gumption: Joe McCarthy used to work for Nokia, I forgot what exactly it was he did. Anyway, he moved on to Strands and no amount of Adderall will help me get through his legendary long blog posts. I’m sure the content is good, and I’m not a simpleton, I can read long form writing just fine, but his style just doesn’t jive well with that parts of my brain that process text to memory. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Gustav’s Mindshare: Gustav Söderström is the Vice President of Products for Spotify. He showed off an alpha of Spotify for mobile at Google I/O recently. I read his blog thinking he’ll say something about Spotify Mobile that isn’t going to make it to the official Spotify blog. Why do I torture myself so? Anyway, for the USA audience who has no idea what Spotify is: pretend you opened iTunes one day and everything was free. You could listen to any song you wanted. The only catch, you need to be connected to the internet and you can’t enjoy the music on the go. The amount of music piracy I do on a daily basis is a fraction of a percentage point of what I used to do before Spotify. At first I thought to myself this service can’t be legal. How can one listen to all this music for free? They’re legit. They have the licences, but it only works in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. If you’re living in the previously mentioned 6 countries, stop reading this blog post right now and go get yourself a Spotify account immediately! It’s seriously one of the best things to happen to the internet since Napster, Bit Torrent and Usenet. Decision: I’ll get Spotify news from the Spotify blog, unsubscribe.
HEL LOOKS: Here is something I bet you didn’t know about me: I’m into fashion. I have zero fashion sense, and am constantly seen wearing the same combination of clothes with only the color of my socks and the design of my tshirt changing, but there are few things I enjoy more than looking at beautiful people, wearing beautiful clothes. One of my dreams is to become a fashion photographer, as well as take artistic nudes. I kid ye not. I can’t take a photo to save my life however and I don’t know the first thing about approaching a model and asking her to pose. Maybe I need a mentor, maybe I need to take a photography class, I can’t say, but for now that pursuit is put on the back burner. The money I should be spending on a DSLR plus a few lenses is being used to purchase shots for teenage girls every weekend and the cab ride back to my place. At some point I have to stop, whether it be due to venereal diseases or old age. Maybe then I’ll pick up a camera and start reliving my youth by taking photos of the things I can no longer enjoy. I’m just talking out loud. HEL LOOKS is a blog that takes photos of people on the streets of Helsinki and asks them where they got their clothes from. Decision: Keep on reading.

Down to 241, and only now am I reaching the letter H!

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Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash: Trimming in Public: Episode 7

Stefan Constantinescu — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:43:58 +0000

Trimming in Public is a series where I go through my list of 293 RSS feeds, 10 feeds at a time, give some detail as to why I subscribed to a particular feed, and then decide whether or not to keep on consuming that feed. In Episode 1 I explained what RSS is and how to use it, please read that if you need a refresher on why RSS is awesome and why you should be using it if you take reading news on the internet seriously. The prefix to Trimming in Public is “Becoming a better blogger, reader and helping me take out the trash.” For the bloggers out there who read IntoMobile, I hope you get a better idea of what I do to keep on top of the news. For the readers who read IntoMobile, I know that this site isn’t the only mobile focused technology publication on the internet, and by sharing which sites I read I’m hoping that you’ll keep on coming back here. Taking out the trash has an obvious explanation, I can’t keep up with my RSS feeds and need to trim my list. For those who want to download my complete list of 293 RSS feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file.

Check out Episode 7 after the jump, and all episodes by clicking on the Trimming in Public tag:

EuroTelcoblog: This is a classic case of “blog that covers a certain niche turns into a blog being more about the author’s life that what it was originally about.” EuroTelco used to ask hard hitting questions about the telecoms industry, now it’s turned into a personal diary. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Explosm.net: An online comic that features stick figures and story lines that make you scratch your head and wonder which mental institution the author escaped from. I love comics like this. Decision: Humor is the best medicine.
FeedBulletin for: DevilsRejection: This RSS feed no longer works. Feed Burner was a service I used to use, back when I ran my own blog, to keep track of how many people subscribed to my RSS feed. I honestly can’t remember how many people read Ring Nokia (NYSE: NOK) at the peak of the site’s popularity, but I’m a total statistics whore. Spending hours in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Analytics to see which countries have the largest Firefox install base, what time of day traffic peaks, and what the most common resolution people use, all provide me with a sickening amount of joy. I will not count this towards my 10.
FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE: This site is like delicious, but for images. When I’m feeling a lack of creative energy, I’ll just scroll through the pictures people have saved. They can range from 60s posters, to a business card, to a drawing, to a font sample, to naked women. I’m a very visual person and I get a high off of separating my Id from my ego and trying to analyze my first reaction at viewing a random image. It’s difficult to put into words why I do it, it’s just something that helps me reach inner peace. Decision: One of my favorite feeds.
Finland for Thought: My buddy Phil, who works at Nokia, has been writing this blog for several years. He got dragged to Finland because of a tall beautiful blonde, and was a bit upset at the lack of English blogs. He started one. If you’re in Finland, you should be reading this. If you want to know what’s going on in Finland and get a taste of Finnish culture, you should be reading this too. Decision: When in Rome, do as the Romans. Step 1: Learn about what makes them tick.
Flors: Quim Gil works for Nokia and his title is “Marketing Manager, Open Source.” Nokia is working on a Linux based operating system called Maemo. You may not have heard of it, because marketing dollars have no gone into it. The devices that Nokia has released based on Maemo are large, slow, and lack a cellular radio, making them only useful when in range of a WiFi signal. Quim’s job is all encompassing, from developer relations, to getting end users excited about the power of open source. I like him. I like him a lot. I just think his efforts could best be served at another company. I keep on asking Maemo people what their OS does better compared to Google Android, and they can’t give me a straight answer. Some say it’s Nokia’s view of how Linux should look on mobile. Some say it’s supposed to kill Symbian. Some say it’s to give Nokia experience with the open source community. I can’t tell you why Nokia continues with this little side project , because I honestly do not know. People will care about Maemo when Nokia releases interesting devices that run Maemo and also pours marketing dollars into the platform. Until that time comes, I can’t say I’m interested in yet another Linux distribution. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Forum Nokia Blogs: I said this in a previous episode, I’ll repeat it here: If you’re into a technology company, chances are they have two different public relations channels. One for end users, the people who look at the advertisements on the side of a bus and recall it when walking into a shop, and one for developers, the people who want to know every single detail about the software platform they’re going to be pouring their blood, sweat and tears into with the goal of making an application that can yield them large sums of money. Forum Nokia Blogs are blogs maintained by developers for developers. Sadly, they’ve rarely spit out something interesting. Decision: Unsubscribe.
Forum Nokia Search Results: This RSS feed is dead. I will not count this towards my 10.
Future Watch [Beta]: The N-Gage blog for the 34 people in the world who give a shit about N-Gage. The first attempt known as N-Gage was a hardware platform consisting of one device that required custom memory cards. The second attempt at N-Gage is a software platform that does not take into consideration the different capabilities of hardware and various keypad layouts, while having a separate payment system from that of Nokia’s Ovi Store. N-Gage is a joke, and I wanted to believe Nokia could do something interesting with it by making it a software platform capable of running on multiple devices, but instead they just fucked it up. Decision: Take it out, pour gasoline on it, invite buddies over for a barbeque.
Gaim News: I used to use this multi protocol client when living in America since my European friends used MSN, my older American friends used Yahoo, my school friends used AIM and my geek friends used Google Talk. Now, I install Skype and Google Talk and that’s it. If you’re not on either one, I’m not talking to you. I no longer use Gaim. Decision: Unsubscribe.
gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: My first business cards had a Hugh MacLeod cartoon on the back. Everyone told me I should get rid of them since the cartoon I selected had the word “fuck” present. I caved in due to peer pressure, got new cards a week later. I regret that decision. Hugh is an interesting man. He lived in New York City, where he burned out, so he moved to London, and he burned out again; now he is living in Texas. He doesn’t get the type of credit he deserves because he scares people and is a rather shy person. He is a simple man, who uses simple words, who draws what he sees happening to himself and the world around him on the back of business cards. The amount of truth he can convey on the back of a 89 x 51 mm piece of paper scares the living shit out of people. I’m jealous since he figured out the formula for eternal happiness. Due to his popularity, he can now start charging large sums of money for prints that take little effort to replicate. Instead of residing in New York or London, where the cost of living would have burned through the money he makes off of his site, he moved to some little city in Texas no one has heard about and is now leading a humble life. The city he lives in is small enough that he can get to really know people, and actually be a part of the community, versus being just another douche bag with a blog in a big city, starving for attention, who lists networking as a hobby on their Facebook profile. He has not only figured out how to make himself happy, anyone with a fully functional brain and decent analytical skills can do that, but he pursued that option irregardless of how unorthodox it was when compared to mainstream culture’s list of requirements you must achieve to qualify as being capable of feeling joy. You go Hugh. You rock. Decision: Keep reading.
Garfield Minus Garfield: What happens when you take one of the most popular cartoons to ever come out of America, and remove the main character? You get a peak into the life of John, the guy who owns Garfield. After all, isn’t Garfield a cartoon about a guy’s cat? Get rid of the cat and you’ll see the story around John, an actual human being. It’s sad, funny, disturbing, and depressing, but taking Garfield out of Garfield makes for a cartoon that is infinitely more interesting than the original. Decision: Keep reading.

Down to 246.

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