February 22nd, 2010

Regardless of how tech-savvy you are, using a feed reader will save you a lot of time and, despite what Robert Scoble says, Twitter lists are no substitute for using RSS, so long as you remember that, like with a real printed publication, there’s no reason to feel guilty if you don’t read your feed in full. Using Google Reader, despite its clumsy interface, is better than no feed reader at all and should be enough for the moderate user. But Shaun Inman’s Fever now offers an attractively designed, fully customizable and fantastically clever way of digesting a larger-than-average number of feeds efficiently and pleasantly. Although it suffers from the absence of a proper iPhone implementation, I’ve decided to use it as my default feed reader from now on.

February 18th, 2010

Observers today, whether they be politicians, ordinary citizens or even academics, appear to overlook the tragic deterioration that has taken place in France’s once widely-admired political institutions. In the thirty-year period following the institution of a directly-elected presidency in 1962 through until the Maastricht treaty ratification in 1992, the system put in place by de Gaulle was highly successful, regardless of the personality and political leaning of the Elysée Palace’s incumbent. This has now given way to a period of instability, governmental weakness and disillusionment. Yet the causal link with the destruction, though a constant stream of constitutional revisions often conducted for the most trifling motives, of General de Gaulle’s institutions has curiously gone not only unlamented, but unnoticed.

February 12th, 2010

Google Buzz has one thing going for it: in contrast to Twitter and Facebook, it actually does make it easy to “generate your own buzz” by asking you to simply add services to your pre-existing Google profile, in contrast to Facebook which has been doing exactly the opposite, turning itself into a sort of closed shop.

There are three things I don’t like at all about Buzz:

• first, you need to use Gmail to even be on Buzz; using Gmail for Buzz should have been made optional, not mandatory;
• second, I don’t believe it will take off: I doubt that they will be able to get enough people to follow their Buzz activity to make the service gather momentum, which is another reason why tying Buzz to Gmail is a mistake;
• third, Google hasn’t addressed the issue of user names properly: when anyone uses any Google service, Google creates an account under the slug chosen and from that moment, no one can use a service.

Despite settling the privacy concerns, Google hasn’t clearly positioned its service as a private, friends-only oriented one, like Facebook originally was and should have remained, or a public one, like Twitter; the privacy slip-up shows they obviously didn’t think this one out at all when they designed Buzz, which is a pity; if they’d positioned Buzz from the outset as the social network where you can easily share some content publicly, and some just with your friends, they would have been onto a winner.

February 6th, 2010

My new website, which I coded myself over a couple of days, is a bit of a landmark in my four-year blogging experience: I designed and coded it using the tools I had been dabbling with over the past few months and dispensing with off-the-peg templates altogether. Starting from a stripped-down version of the WordPress template, I designed the theme, wrote the CSS and coded the pages, using Coda, a rather clever little application that has now matured, three years after its launch.

In doing this I have merely been going further along the minimalist road that I had set upon four years ago when I first started blogging: the result is a site that is less of a blog and more of a place where I can share my online presence (meaning, essentially, Flickr and Twitter), while keeping Facebook separate for interaction with people I know in real life.