{"id":376829,"date":"2010-03-01T16:52:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T21:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5587346.post-3788086051274789914"},"modified":"2010-03-03T09:28:08","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T14:28:08","slug":"how-i-discover-people-to-follow-on-google-reader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/376829","title":{"rendered":"How I discover people to follow – on Google Reader"},"content":{"rendered":"
Buzz has been a great disappointment<\/a>.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
It’s not all bad though. Google built a lot of Buzz on the Google Reader Shared Item experiments, and as a side-effect they fixed the long broken social bits of Google Reade<\/a>r.<\/p>\n

So now I’m enjoying enlisting new unpaid specialists to sort and manage the world’s information flow for me. It’s like having my own team of incredibly expensive super-smart uber-analysts — except I don’t pay them anything.<\/p>\n

Mwaahh-ha-ha-ha!<\/p>\n

Ok, so maybe the evil laughter is a bit much. After all, they’re free to follow what I share<\/a>, and we’re all feeding the hivemind<\/a>. It who laughs last is Skynet<\/a>, as the saying goes.<\/p>\n

How do I use Google reader<\/a> to enlist my witting info-drones?<\/p>\n

I look for the “like” link on posts that I like a lot, but that don’t have many other “likes”. I then click the “like” link and scan the names and associated metadata, looking for people who are different from me — different nationality, age, gender, profession, etc. Then I look at their shared items. If they’ve shared interesting things that are new to me, I follow them. I also add them to my special “x-reader” group which allows them to comment on anything I share (should they decide to follow me, though most will not).<\/p><\/div>\n

None of this worked reliably a month ago, but it works now.<\/p>\n

My “People you follow” section is now becoming my strongest information source. I’m able to follow fewer feeds directly, as I now outsource the processing chore to my fellow minions.<\/p>\n

Quite nice, really.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
Update 3\/2\/2010<\/b>: I’m also again trying Google Readers “show in my language” feature to start following non-English “likes”. I believe Google’s Translation feature is extremely disruptive and amusingly under appreciated. This is how the really big things often come – quietly in the night. Note that the latest betas of Chrome for Windows now incorporate translation services into the browser. I’m looking forward to an English-Chinese-English view of my posts that will allow me to optimize my English writing for English-Chinese automated translation.
—
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)<\/a><\/small><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buzz has been a great disappointment. It’s not all bad though. Google built a lot of Buzz on the Google Reader Shared Item experiments, and as a side-effect they fixed the long broken social bits of Google Reader. So now I’m enjoying enlisting new unpaid specialists to sort and manage the world’s information flow for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":711,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/711"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}