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, Web, Telecoms, Microsoft, 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 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 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.