My First Fiverr Gig

Things that interest me : Quora, Fiverr, RSS, scripting, micromarkets ...

What if you put them together? My first Fiverr gig!

Why?

Well, first I wrote a quick script to extract my recent Quora answers as part of taking back control of my online writing. Then I offered it to Quorans, but realized that, for some, the technical aspects would be too difficult for them to download and use. How else might those people engage my hack?

At the same time I'm thinking a lot about micromarkets, the future of work (both my personal future and more general questions about how it's going to be organized), about where RSS and feeds are going in the post-Google-Reader / Fargo age.

It seemed like a fun experiment to do.

BTW : Thanks to my mother for the great flower picture I used to advertise this gig. Originally I posted a screenshot of the text of some Quora answers and them reformatted in a new page. But Fiverr obviously thought that was too boring and rejected the gig until I changed it. A beautiful, but irrelevant, flower seems to be more to their taste.

Aaron Swartz Interview

My Email Exchange With Aaron Swartz Shows An Original Thinker

Something that impresses me : the new active blogrolls in Blogger.

I think there's something very profound here. There was a danger that the blogroll would atrophy into a mere historical curiosity as people moved to using dedicated RSS readers to follow their friends.

But suddenly the situation is reverse.d The blogroll becomes your RSS reader. And it's the dedicated reader which is starting to look somewhat dated. Not only that but by adding second degree flow to the web (ie. people who read me also see what's up-to-date with the people I read) everything feels like its moving even faster.

New heuristic rule : blog for people, feeds for news.

I'm not sure I like FriendFeed ... even now. And after intense time on Twitter, I'm using it less.

To access people, I still want to go to blogs. I love my new pipes, but I want real, impersonal news on them : science, ecological disaster, cool nylon toys. Not my friends or blogreads saying what they do and think.

Not sure if this is a temporary thing, but it's the way that makes sense to me at the moment.

Sweet! BeatBlog RSS enclosures now working.

You'll see I'm playing with feeds more.

I have a kind of love-hate relationship with feed-readers. I love them in principle, find it hard to use in practice. Friend-feed is convenient to aggregate me, but I don't like using it for reading other people. Frankly, that's a visual thing.

But twittering / microblogging is here to stay. I love that I hear cool stuff via. Twitter before anywhere else. I know I'd be better informed if I could scan more feeds. And yet feedreaders are inflexible. By the time you've imported them into some kind of Outlook-like 3-pane monstrosity you might as well just visit the blogs. (Same number of clicks.)

Rivers of news are better ... but I want more control for filtering and processing.

What I really want is more intelligence. I want a system that learns what feeds I'm most interested in *at the moment* and highlights them in some way, and yet also adjusts automatically (and quickly) as my interest shifts. I want to be able to finely slice and dice the feeds, filter across feeds, collect statistics. I want cute dashboard visualizations. I want "algebra of feeds"

I like Pipes ... except a) I hate the UI. Sure it's beautiful and sexy and all that, but why can't I have a text edit view that looks like this?

sortDateDescending(union([
   "http://mass-customization.blogs.com/rss.xml",
   "http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blog/feed",
   "etc."
   ]))


 

And b) I don't like that the final presentation in pipes seems to lose images which are there when I view the incoming feed directly in the browser.

Is there a more powerful feed processing application out there? Aimed at geeks?

Dave Winer is looking for Tech. Product feeds. Is he going up as the feed-router rival of Engadget etc?

FWIW I think it would be mind-boggling if someone could persuade MadeInChina to have feeds. John Hegel and John Seely Brown's Global Process Networks on speed.

This kind of thing is getting so old. But something just occurred to me.

The irony here is that one of Winer's avowed reasons for getting into blogging was to have somewhere to put the record straight (when he was frustrated with the tech. journalism about Mac software in the 90s, when he gave up giving quotes to journalists etc.) But the blogging "river" format actually allows such definitive positioning statements to scroll off into history and get lost. That's why despite 11 years of Scripting News people still don't seem to know what he says and thinks about RSS etc.

Wikipedia, in contrast, has a single static page which is fiercely contested - partly because it's considered to be authoritative. But mainly because it's a well labeled single static page that Google (and so the world) knows how to find.

My advice to Dave would be to take a leaf out of Andrea Dworkin's book and have one static FAQ on Scripting News, prominently linked and discoverable (while flattering, "Who is Phil Jones?" doesn't quite make it from the Information Architecture angle) which just states his claims about RSS / podcasting etc. Keep it up to date when there are new misunderstandings, but generally allow it to accumulate the links and "authority" which currently goes to Wikipedia.

At the moment, Dave's responses to his critics are scattered, intertwingled with ephemeral issues, over dozens of blog posts and comments. No wonder people are still so vague about this.