So because all my RSS would be being aggregated in one place I’ve always been put off, I’ve spent a long time putting my life online, and to be restricted in this didn’t make sense to me.

When Google Reader appeared a while back as always I tried it out, I’m an early adopter and I like to play with Betas, for fun and sometimes to learn from them. It’s like a tiny window on the future.. But I was disappointed with this initial offering. It was clunky and bloated, didn’t have the freedoms I wanted and it wasn’t always clear what you were reading. I did start using it, but not for long, it just didn’t occur to me to check it. I usually browse by having lots of tabs saved in a set with Sessionsaver which i periodically refresh. Well every 5 minutes or so all day!

Having all these tabs open meant I just forgot to check the reader. However, I had Sage installed as a plugin for Firefox, so I decided I’d take the convenient aggregated feed that the Google Reader offers of all the feeds you’ve loaded and load that into there. So I had all my feeds online (when I remembered to check it) and it was a very simple matter of just loading one feed into any desktop app i happened to have, wherever I was.

Convenient right? Well actually this didn’t work out either. It must have been a light Obsessive Disorder that took hold of me because I hated the fact that the items in my Google Reader weren’t being marked as read. Which bugged me! On top of that, again it was hard to tell when using this feed of feeds in Sage which articles were coming from where. Very frustrating.

So now I have a shiny new Google Reader to play with. All the same feeds are in there, and I’ve added a few more. I might remove Digg because it usually accounts for at least 3 quarters of the items in there and has the effect of diluting the rest. But that’s another article.. Aside from that I’m finding it a much more pleasurable experience, like the man says, it feels like an inbox for the web. And actually it looks like one too. I guess it just needs the spam and I’d feel right at home!

So my browsing patterns have changed. Now I wake up in the morning and refresh the reader (with “all items” selected) on my laptop before my journey to London. It has a great feature that loads more items as you get to the bottom of the page. It’s a never ending scroll, it doesn’t end! Which is good and bad. It means I never lose anything, but it also means that if left for a few days it becomes a giant list of things I don’t know yet. Which again brings on the Obsessive Disorder, I have to read it all, and it doesn’t end!

The other side effect is that I now end up with a LOT of tabs open to things I need to investigate or read in more detail. This is ok if I have some time or if I can read them there and then, but being on the train with a flaky-at-best internet connection, this often means I end up with a bunch of empty tabs. These I then refresh when I arrive at my destination and immediately I’m overwhelmed with information.

So is this a better way of browsing? It feels like it, but it has pitfalls. Added to the ones I describe is the lack of traditional browsing, hopping from one site to another. Have I created my own walled garden?

Pete invited me into Vox (here’s my page) which is essentially a hosted blog site much like Blogger or Live Journal. The difference is the way you interact with the community and your media.

The reason I call it the Flickr of blogging tools is because of the first impression I had; you basically have flickr, but instead of photos you have blog posts. I can’t explain it any simpler than that. You have similar privacy options, tagging, sets, groups.

Go check it out, I have a couple of beta invites still…

I realised quite early on what we were doing providing free wifi in brighton. people in brighton got very used to it and we started getting phone calls from them when they were out of town, “why isn’t it free? i thought it free in bars and cafes?”…

Andy’s right people have to come expect it for free.

The way we sold it to venues in brighton was to convince them that it was a value add to their customers. they give away free wifi, and they sell more coffee. coffee that the person was gonna buy anyway somewhere else. this way the customer isn’t spending any more but they chose your venue instead.

So yeah, of course the same rule could apply to airlines, just as hotels realised about 2 years ago (not many though).

Now, expand that. why don’t the councils get in on the act. give it away to the public as effectively a value add for paying your taxes. Of course some are. But not on a proper scale and not really thinking through all the implications.

Ubiquitous free wifi effects local business, your own local network, the local and national telcos, the list goes on. Most councils don’t want to become ISPs. They are also under pressure not to screw over people like BT by undercutting them.

Free Wifi is still quite a way off. but not for technical reason, more for political or simply not understanding the marketplace properly. Mostly people don’t see it as a marketplace.

Some of the things i’ve been meaning to blog for a while are:

1. My manifesto for new media in the developing world
2. Why Google won’t become a web host
3. My top 5 films (currently. Everyone else has blogged it, so should I :)
4. Frisbee survival tips

I’ll get there eventually. I was planning to do at least one today, but i’ve had to come into work a day early. Which is fine. I guess i wouldn’t have written this if i hadn’t!

A lot of blogs I read talk about their owners work lives as well as their personal lives and interests, and i reckon i’ll do the same, just to see how that goes. I can always delete the archives :)

So my first post (above) is one that i wrote after a meet with the Brighton Farm and it’s about Web 2.0. It’s my first post in the category “Drunken Ramblings“!