DISQUS

Glad I got a chance to say hello at the Triumph event. I was floored by the amount of stuff going on in Philadelphia, and everything that you've got going on. I look forward to keeping tabs on it all from down here in Atlanta.

Are there any SMS-to-ham radio gateways? If so I'll be able to communicate with you.

To borrow a convention from Vox, [this is good].

I'm hoping the Wii marketing strategy paves the way for more brands to figure this out and follow suit.

I don't think you'll have any regrets about switching to the river style. My RSS stress level went way down when I stopped treating feeds like mailboxes. I was on RSSOwl, and then switched to myEarthLink Reader and am really happy with the dirt-simpleness of the interface (full comment-y disclosure: I write Earthling, EarthLink's blog). I've become less obsessive about making sure I read everything, and thus better able to attend to the things that really are interesting to me.

One of the real tests of a reader is how you feel when you return to it after a couple of days off. How have you found G Reader in that respect?

Count me as a happy Dreamhost customer going back to November '99. When I've had problems, they've been lickety-split fast to resolve them. I don't mean to discount the Andy's anguish, but in my experience they've been good enough to recommend over and over again. I've recommended their company blog too.

Yet these days all I hear about are plans to ‘engage online audiences’ with a brain-numbing combination of SMS and mobile video, avatars, nude models strolling down Park Avenue with URLs stamped on their asses and online games costing clients gazillions in fees to their ad agency. And most consumers yawn and move on.

Public relations is about relations. Relations aren’t built on hammering people over the head.

I totally agree. I have to believe that resistance to the one-to-one and one-to-a-handful approach is partly because it's "easier" to prove your effectiveness at a glance with numbers that show big reach but shallow engagement, and takes more thought and analysis to show effectiveness via smaller reach but high depth and authenticity of engagement.

Hey Robert, how do the myEarthLink Reader/myFavorites tools compare to the other river-of-news readers you've tried?

While it's true we're aiming in part to broaden usage of Readers to more regular folk, we want to know what a feed omnivore like yourself thinks of it too.

Hi BigZaphod,

That sounds really useful. Is that part of it in action anywhere in a proof of concept that you know of?

I'm new to the corporate blogging mafia but will be at CES and would love to meet up. Keep me posted.

Hi Kevin, hadn't seen tailrank before. I like the philosophy -- seems like it has a thinking man's approach to addressing some of the concerns I expressed above about agenda-setting. I have some thoughts cooking but I need to ponder some more and learn more about it. The forum for it seems to be down, and I don't see a contact email address on the page. What's your preferred method for inquiring minds like me to get in touch with you?

Sure, it's not a new concern, but it's certainly still relevant. And it's one worth keeping in mind.

People feel safer talking about news that's already been vetted as "news". It makes for some tedious, repetitive coverage.

Don't get me wrong, I do think the technologies are improving, but they're still not a replacement for sampling a wide variety of sources on your own, and making sure to keep some randomness in the mix. Just because it's an old concern doesn't mean we should dismiss it.

So how do we fix these 'agenda-setting' sites like memorandum and blogniscient and the upcoming topix news to add a little more humanity and broadness back in to them?

A persistent criticism of national network tv news is that in effect it ends up being a small number of fairly homogenous thinkers(from the managerial boards to the news producers) setting the agenda for a large audience of viewers.

It's not quite so true today, but when network news was in its heyday, nothing mattered unless it was on the news, and anything on tv news was given undue weight by its mere presence there.

If the web helped to bust this mindshare monopoly, there's a risk that agenda-setters like memeorandum are a step backwards. It's not deliberate, but on a lazy day I can see people only turning to those types of sites to decide 'what's important' and getting out of the habit of casting a wider net.