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?

And I’m thousands of miles away :(

At least Flickr is there for me…

So as a result of realising that actually being 26 isn’t so bad, i’ve decided to make sure that i feel the same about being 30 when i get there.

Firstly I’ve started taking more photos, something i used to do a lot of six or seven years ago. So I bought a new camera and started using my neglected Flickr account. So far so good, I’ve got almost a hundred photos up and I’ve found a bunch of people I know also using Flickr. I’ve encouraged a bunch of people to start using Flickr too!

Next I started finishing a document I started in 2005 about New Media’s place in developing countres. There is a need to organise the efforts of all the individuals and organisations working in this area, to minimse overlap and to encourage technical compatiblity. Of course there is also a great opportunity for business development too, but this has to be seen as a long term goal, the short term goal being to develop the businesses and infrastructure and to educate people in these countries about all the great stuff new media can do for themselves and their communities.

As a result of this document being published i hope to form a group of influential new media and communications experts to lobby and work with all the major players. Many I’ve shared this idea with have expressed great interest and are committing their personal time to help.

Some of my personal projects have fallen to the side due to my current full time job at Comic Relief. But there are 3 projects that are almost ready for the prime time, and i’m quite excited about them. One is a community site with a wiki and mailing list centered around the co-operative movement. Another is a web app that I’ve been working on with a friend. We’ve both been very busy and work’s been slow on it, but it’s an idea that just needs to exist, so we’re making it! Thirdly is BrightonWiFi, a site that basically shows you where you can find WiFi in Brighton. It’s a mashup of Google Maps and WordPress. As a result of this project (only about 15 hours work) i’m going to release the WordPress theme back to the web, I think it’s a great use of the tech, it allows non-nerds to use Google Maps in an accessible way. Check it out…

So being 26 might turn out to be ok, I’m being more productive, I’m working on getting my sleeping patterns sorted, and I’m finally producing some of the projects I’ve talked about for years. Now if only I could make some spare time for relaxing and seeing the outside world more…

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“!