Sharing Curated Content
Following up on last night’s post:
I’ve come up with a solution to my Reader-share problem, at least for now. I use Diigo for lots of bookmarking purposes (my [out-of-date] sidebar “Rillabooks” log, for example) and have set up a “share” tag there that will feed into my sidebar here. See “Caught My Eye” under the Recent Comments widget on the right. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of those posts, if you wish. (Click the RSS icon at the bottom of the list, which at this moment contains a single link.)
As I said in the combox the other day, most of what I shared via Reader was different in tone and content from the more newsy links I share via G+, Twitter, Facebook.
I frequently Reader-share posts I find moving, lovely, heartwarming, funny, or thought-provoking—vs. the more informational, newsy link-sharing I do via other platforms. My Reader shares are from blogs I subscribe to & read regularly (stating the obvious, I know). Somehow it feels different to carry a link to FB, Twitter, or G+ and post it: more official, formal, thrusting the post into your stream if you follow me on the platform in question. Whereas with Reader Share, you come to it or follow it only if you *want* that content. Also, those other outlets are so very *public.* If [a friend with a quiet family-focused blog] write[s] a beautiful post I’d like to share, I might be hesitant to do so on G+ where I’m followed by hundreds of people I don’t know—I’ll feel like I’m invading her privacy or something. Sharing via Reader seems more personal.
For now I’m using Feedly to read my blog subscriptions. It has easy sharing to Diigo, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’ve read that Google may roll out design themes for Reader the way you can get them for Gmail & iGoogle now. If that happens, I may return to Reader for feed-reading.
(Of course now I’m worried about Gmail too. They’re rolling out its redesign soon—you can see what it will look like by clicking the gear icon on your Gmail screen [upper right corner], Mail Settings, Themes. Select the “Preview” theme. More heavy black, excessive white space, ugh ugh ugh. I keep thinking about the design team who undoubtedly worked very hard on the visual elements of this grand Google overhaul—how hard they must have worked & how crushing to have the design met with such resounding disgust all over the internet. Such a bummer.)
Ellie says:
Ah, your Caught my Eye widget is very usable, yay 🙂 (because I am already missing these sorts of links that people share). It’s a bummer about all these changes, I hope it smoothes out soon.
On November 1, 2011 at 9:34 am
Melissa Wiley says:
Ellie, thanks for the feedback. It’s much better than the G+ widget I had up for a few weeks—the one where clicking took you to my G+ post and then you had to click *again* to get to the actual thing I was sharing. (Thanks for your feedback on that, too—I totally agreed.)
I like that readers can subscribe to my Diigo topic feeds, if they wish. Again, it’s about giving people the option to visit a source of content rather than thrusting it into a fast-moving infostream. I’d rather sub to a feed and be able to check in at my own pace, rather than scan a stream and hope I haven’t missed something great.
On November 1, 2011 at 10:52 am
Melissa Wiley says:
But of course this doesn’t solve my what-about-SCOTT’S-awesome-shares problem. This morning he keeps IMing me interesting links (see the BoingBoing piece in my sidebar) with a note “I’d have shared this on Reader if it still existed.” So, yeah, I benefit (as usual) from being married to the guy, but what about the rest of the world? 😉
And he’s not the only one I followed on Reader, of course! A BUNCH of you were in the habit of sharing really excellent stuff. Where are you sharing now, I need to know!
Thank goodness for sensible Ms. Mental Multi-vitamin, who for seven years has been curating excellent, thought-provoking content, supplemented with her sharp insights, right on her blog where I can always count on it. Hobbits, Home and Abroad, as well. Three cheers for the curators!!
On November 1, 2011 at 10:58 am
sarah says:
I am trying Feedly, but I find the layout confusing and I prefer to be able to read whole posts there at the Reader, then click over to comment on the ones I especially enjoyed, or have time for. I love how you spare a thought for the Google designers – you made me smile with that. You know, out of all the things I’ve read this morning on the internet, all the issues and advice and beauty and imagery I have seen, that is the one thing I will be taking with me through the day.
On November 1, 2011 at 12:06 pm
Melissa Wiley says:
🙂 I keep thinking “what were they THINKING???” and then feeling a pang of guilt over it because I’m sure they worked hard and it was months in the making, and somebody is probably feeling very blue today. My usual allergy to giving bad reviews, I guess…I can *think* ’em, I just can’t *write* ’em. 😉
Feedly: I too find the layout a bit busy—that’s why I didn’t cotton to it before, when I tried it out of curiosity a year or two ago. But you should be able to read the full posts directly at Feedly—click around a bit and you’ll find it; you have to click on a post title and the text should come up. At least, it does for me.
Try clicking “Latest” in the list on the left, and then click a post title on the right. (That won’t help much if you’d prefer to read by topic/folder, though.)
On November 1, 2011 at 12:24 pm
Penny says:
I have completely given up on social media. I guess I’m just too anti-social. Still a loyal blog reader though 🙂
On November 1, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Jennifer says:
Going to check out your ideas. I’m just not comfortable in Google Reader now, AT ALL. Too much white space. Even if the only change is the formatting and sharing capacity, it feels like a totally new program, and I dislike change. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Why pay someone to redesign when it looked fine? And even Microsoft lets you choose the old layout when they revamp things. Grrrrr….
On November 1, 2011 at 3:32 pm
Ellie says:
I notice that Elizabeth Foss (in the heart of my home) is now using something called FriendFeed? Her highlighted links widget was always a place through which I found good reads pretty regularly. Anyhow, just thought I’d mention? I don’t know anything about it, other than that’s what she’s got now, and it’s a usable list (for a blog visitor) of links, that one can subscribe to.
On November 1, 2011 at 3:56 pm
Ann Kroeker says:
Appreciating your knowledge base–I’m following along to see if I can come up with a system that I can roll out at my site. I like “Caught My Eye.” You say you use Diigo for that? A friend explained how a share tag on Diigo can send things to twitter…not I need to get a sidebar blog widget going and maybe I’m all set!
On November 2, 2011 at 8:21 am
COD says:
FriendFeed was purchased by Facebook a year or two ago, and has been completely ignored since then. I would expect it to drop off the face of the Internet sooner rather than later, so I would not recommend using it for anything new or long term.
On November 2, 2011 at 9:16 am
Melissa Wiley says:
I’m really happy with the way Diigo is working. I can one-click share from Feedly. (Well, there are more clicks once the Diigo share window pops up: tweaking the title, adding a description, tagging. But I don’t mind that part. I like customizing a share.)*
*A bit chagrined to be using share as a noun, but there it is!
On November 2, 2011 at 9:21 am
Jennifer Fitz says:
Thank you for posting this! I’m feeling the pain of not being able to share posts anymore. I don’t like to do my topic-sharing on the social networks, because most of what I read and write about on the internet is politics and religion, two topics that don’t mesh well with my very diverse real-life set of friends. So I keep FB and the like purely cocktail-party talk, and if people want to know more about what I think, they can click on my website link.
Entropy sent me over here to get ideas. Very helpful. Thank you!
Jen.
On November 3, 2011 at 4:10 am