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How I use Google Reader

Posted on January 13, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been on the Google Reader band wagon for a long time now. I currently subscribe to about 150 feeds, and I read or skim over probably near 1,000 or more feed items a day. Reading my feeds is how I stay up on the latest and greatest, and how I am able to give the best advice to my clients. Instead of me going to news, now the news comes to me, which, despite the amount of news I read in a day, has made me actually more productive.

Google Reader has recently added a friends feature. Now, all those on your GMail or Google Talk contact lists that use Google Reader will appear in a Friends list to the left of Google Reader. You can choose to turn your friends’ feeds on or off in the settings (upper-right of Reader), and even invite more friends to begin using Google Reader. As your friends “share” the feed items that they like, you also get to see what they are sharing. This feature in effect has actually started bringing me even more news. It will be interesting to see the SEO effects of this as people no longer subscribe to blogs, but rather rely on their friends sharing their favorite blogs with you. Personally, I think it will improve the odds, as now more people will see your blog due to the viral nature of this system, and more people in result will be persuaded to subscribe to your blog – this time through Google, improving the SEO chances of you appearing in Google personalized results for that individual.

Here’s how I use Google Reader. Bloggers may want to take note, as this could provide some tips as to how to further improve your posts to fit with the power Feed readers out there.:

Skim, Skim, Skim! – There’s no way I would get through all 1,000+ of my feed items if I read every single one of them. I skim over the headlines, and sometimes the content, then move onto the next item. Only if the article is important to me do I read the article in detail.

Learn the Shortcuts – There are 3 or 4 shortcut keys that are essential for me. I use the ‘j’ key to open the next item and mark it as read. I use the ‘k’ key to move back to the previous item. I use the ‘shift-s’ key combination to share the item I’m reading if I think those that are friends with me might be interested. I use the ‘s’ key to start items I want to “bookmark” for later – this is Google Reader’s equivalent to del.icio.us. I then use the ‘r’ key to refresh the list I’m on – I like to click on the link “x new items” and read through those. Then, when I hit ‘r’ to refresh, it only shows me the new items I haven’t read yet.

Add as many friends as you can – The more friends you have, the more information you receive. If a friend isn’t providing productive feeds, then perhaps you can take them off, but besides that, information is good!

Stay on top of your feeds – if you don’t check them several times throughout the day, they will build up, and you’ll be stuck spending an hour or two in the middle of the night catching up. I like to use my cell phone when I’m away from my computer to go through my feeds. Google has excellent mobile tools, and Reader is no exception.

Don’t use iGoogle – I was using this for awhile, and realized a) I couldn’t use the shortcuts, and b) I couldn’t utilize the sharing or starring features. Perhaps if they improve it I’ll go back.

Those are the strategies I use to read through my feeds in Google Reader. What strategies do you use? Please add me as a friend – you can either add me as a contact in Google Talk, or shoot me an e-mail and you’ll automatically be added to my Google Reader Friends. jessestay at gmail dot com

Stay N’ Alive Has a New Design!

Posted on January 8, 2008 by jessestay

I’m proud to announce the new design of the Stay N’ Alive blog. Yes, that is me on a Segway, a little slouched, but my real, geeky self, having fun. I’m tempted to subtitle the blog, “A Developer, Having Fun!” Really, that is what being a developer is all about – if you’re not having fun, find something else! I sincerely love what I do – at heart, I will always be a developer, a Geek at heart.

Another geek at heart, Bill Gates, gave his final keynote address at CES last night. He left a hilarious, yet touching video making fun of what his final day could be like. I have to admit, as a Linux and Mac user primarily (I use Windows for my Entertainment Center experience), I was a little choked up after this. I became a programmer because of Bill Gates, working on MS DOS machines, Windows 1 (came on a 5″ floppy), 2, 3, 3.1, and 95 way before I was ever a Linux user. I owe much of my experience as a programmer to this man – while we make fun of him, he is an inspiration to us all:

How to Create Your Own TV Channel for Your Blog

Posted on January 6, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been considering doing this for awhile – we’ll see how long it lasts and when my wife puts an end to it. If you look in the upper-left corner of the blog, you’ll see the “Ask Jesse” Show stream. If I’m online, when you click play you’ll see me, live, as you are on the blog!

Here’s how I did it:

Create an account at Ustream.tv

Click on “My Shows” – there you can configure the look and feel of your show page if you want

Click on the “Go to Show URL” link next to the “Broadcast Now” button

You’ll now see an “Embed Stream” html snippet in the lower right of the page – copy this, then paste into your html layout for your blog

Click “Broadcast Now”, and you’re live for all your voyeuristic viewers to see!

The Camera I’m using is the Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX. It has great picture, includes a built-in microphone that detects how far you are, and the camera comes in with built-in software that follows where your face is (or two faces if you’re more than one person). I’m half-way across the room, and you can still hear me well, and the streaming results are almost real-time! (Scott Lemon says it took just 14 seconds from him Twittering to me saying I received the Twitter)

Some issues to watch out for:

Make sure you’re appropriate when your camera is on! Put a sign up or something reminding those entering the camera area that they are being recorded.

Be careful if you talk to sensitive business clients. You may want to mute, or stop the stream altogether so sensitive information isn’t broadcast out to the entire world

Be sure your router can handle the bandwidth. I use a Gigabit Linksys WRT350N Router, and my Comcast connection has 8 Mb down, and about 3 or 4 up (at times). Search for “Comcast Speed” in the search box in the upper-right for some tips on how to speed up your home internet

My big prediction for 2008 is it will be the year of streaming video, and you’ll see more and more people embracing such technologies. I think I’ll try this for a bit – I think this can be a great way to drive people to stay on your blog longer. People are naturally voyeuristic, and want to know more about the person whose writing they are reading. If they can actually see them and chat with them, they are likely to stay longer, bringing more traffic to your site.

Why I think Facebook Mail is a Good Tool

Posted on January 2, 2008 by jessestay

My Co-Author, Jason Alba, is having a bad day today. I’m sure I haven’t helped, as we both have had somewhat heated discussions over the design of the cover of our book among other things (we think we’ve got a good idea for it though!). Not just that, but now I’m going to disagree on the points he made in his blog today.

While I’m of course very much for social networks (please, invite me to more!), while I’ve also probably sent Jason several large attachments as we’ve discussed our book back and forth (did I mention we now have a Facebook Page – become a fan!), while I’m sometimes a jerk, and I’m definitely a genius :-P, I understand his points in those items. What I don’t agree about however is that Facebook mail can cause people to pay less attention to you.

You see, I’ve actually used Facebook mail to my advantage several times. There are several of my Facebook friends, and even non-friends (remember, I only add people that a) are truly interested in me, or b) I have personally interacted with – this ensures my network stays strong) who I know receive thousands of e-mails per day. I also know people are generally hesitant to use Facebook mail due to its current limitations.

Because of this, using Facebook mail actually had the reverse effect one would think it would. My mail got attention from those users – some times they asked me to e-mail them personally after my initial contact, but now they knew who I was and had established a personal communication with me. Not just that but they had my picture and profile information to find out more of who I was. I now stood out in their mind, and to me, that’s valuable.

While Jason may not want to be contacted via Facebook, I suggest you try it some time to another person you need to get in touch with. I guarantee, while they may not contact you right away, they will be more likely to read and pay attention to your Facebook mail than they would a regular e-mail from you. After your first contact – sure, go ahead and send them normal e-mail!

Now, as to the issue on Cc: vs. To: that Jason mentions, Gmail takes care of that for me! Everyone is a To: in Gmail’s terms, so that’s all I have to see. Now, if Facebook could just have a Cc: and forwarding/reply system. 🙁

A Geeky Christmas

Posted on December 26, 2007 by jessestay

So, after a wonderful Christmas with the family – time well spent with kids, my wife, and in-laws, I find myself reflecting back over the last day and realizing how much of a geek I really am. Here are some of the Geek Christmas gifts seen around the Stay household this Christmas:

Scooba floor sweeper/Cleaner – This was a gift from myself to my wife – I got a super deal off Woot.com for this, and I’m quite proud of it. We’re still trying to decide if I’m enjoying this more, the kids are enjoying it more, or my wife is enjoying it more. For me, it’s just fun watching it almost go down the stairs, then at the last minute realize it’s stairs and turn around – this thing is so smart! For my wife, it gets dirt off her floor she never even knew was there! For my kids, it’s just another pet, even seems to have a personality. We’ve named it “Lionel”, our new indentured servant.

Nintendo DS – We finally got one of these for the kids, along with the game, “Nintendogs”, and “Brain Age Academy”. I tell you – Brain Age Academy will put you in your place if you think you’re already smart. Overall I really like this gift (the DS) – it has built-in Wifi that allows you to play with your friends over the internet and download your own games, a microphone, and the games for it are really cheap! The only thing I hate about it is now I want another one for myself!

Lego Star Wars – the Complete Saga for the Xbox 360 – I love this series. It allows you to play more than one player at a time, which is great for my kids. There is no blood – the worst that ever happens is you chop off an occasional lego head, but it ensures to make fun of the fact that you’re just dealing with Lego figures. It’s also a lot of fun for adults, and you can play with your kids!

Rock Band for the Xbox 360 – This is my favorite gift. I like it for the drums. You can customize your own character, and tour the world, or get your whole family or friends together and form your own band. My kids are a bit too young to be effective at it, but they still have a lot of fun. The great thing about the Xbox 360 version (I can’t vouch for the others) is you can download new songs straight from Xbox Live Marketplace.

Tamagotchi – This was my daughter’s gift. She has two of them, and essentially they are little digital animals you can put on a key chain, backpack, or necklace. You take care of them, pet them, feed them, play with them, and you can even put them together and they can play with each other. I’m told that when you put the boys and girls together they even make babies! This is a great toy if you want to teach your child how to take care of an animal or pet.

Ben Casnocha’s “My Startup Life” – I’ve only started reading this, but thus far I really enjoy it. It goes over how Ben Casnocha started his own dot-com business at age 12, and the successes and failures he experienced while doing it. He shares what to do and what not to do when starting your own business, and goes over the things every startup should consider. It is very inspiring, being the entrepreneur that I am. Every Geek needs to learn the principles taught in this book to best monetize the skills they have.

Beyond the gifts, my Christmas Eve started with my kids tracking Santa on Google Earth at NoradSanta.com (that was a huge hit!), followed by many Tweets from all over the world about the experiences others were having on Christmas. While we had many other great geeky toys, from the traditional Star Wars figurines, to a digital microscope that hooks up to the TV, the above gifts were my favorite that I think all my readers should check out.

OS X Leopard Woes

Posted on December 21, 2007 by jessestay

As those who read this blog know, I have a love-hate relationship with Apple. The other night I completely finished a great blog entry on Facebook releasing its own Platform Architecture, similar to OpenSocial Containers, and Bebo being the first to utilize it. Well, I hit “publish”, and realized Leopard had killed my internet connection again! This, after I just installed another update that was supposed to fix everything.

I’m about fed up with Leopard, the problem is there’s not much better elsewhere. Every Operating System has its strengths and every Operating System has its flaws. I like Vista for its new interface and Entertainment (Media Center) Center capabilities. I love Linux as a server. I love Mac as my desktop because it gives me a great combination of both worlds and has a pretty interface. Unfortunately, Vista is bloated, Linux takes too much configuration to get up and running as a decent desktop, and Apple’s flaw? They can’t do a launch right, but continue to make fun of the competition. I had the same issues with Tiger when it launched, now I’m having problems with Leopard – DNS dying, internet randomly going down, applications crashing, grey screens of death. It’s driving me nuts! I just wish they’d stop picking on Microsoft and fix their own operating system! Frankly, I’m beginning to feel sorry for the poor Microsoft business man (the PC) that guy from Die Hard keeps making fun of in Apple’s commercials.

Great – my internet connection just went down again — Now What???

“Facebook Stalkin’”

Posted on December 12, 2007 by jessestay

My co-author, Jason Alba pointed out this hilarious acapella number by the group, “Straight No Chaser”. Check it out – they are quite talented, and it should get quite a laugh out of you!:

Utah Social Media Developers Garage a Success!

Posted on December 12, 2007 by jessestay

Utah had it’s very first Social Media Garage meeting as a non-Facebook specific group yesterday, December 11. Phil Burns and I started the Utah Facebook Developers Garage, and at our October meeting, the group agreed to making our name much more generic so we could support technologies such as Open Social. I think the meeting yesterday went better than I could have expected.

Jeff Barr, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, was our featured guest speaker for the night. He spoke on Amazon ECS (E-Commerce Service), S3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Electric Compute Cloud), and SQS (Simple Queue Service). I think it was very educational for all that were there – many there were not aware of what Amazon was doing.

Towards the end he featured Social Media technologies that are currently using AWS. He talked about Paul Allen (the younger)‘s We’re Related (a company I consulted for as they were planning the software) and their tremendous success in dealing with 1.8 million users in just 2 months, utilizing AWS, S3 and EC2 to help them with the process. He featured a couple other examples, including iLike, that were also using their services to scale on Facebook.

My favorite feature of the night was Jeff Barr’s demo of how he uses Second Life to help him evangelize, and present AWS to a worldwide audience. He gave one of the coolest demos I’ve seen on how he’s using the second life rendering engine to model the AWS systems in 3D. He clicks on a little Amazon logo in his model, and in animated 3D in Facebook it all runs, demonstrating the process flow in real time right there in Second Life! He says he plans to tie in a real system to this model, feeding real data to display the data in a real environment. He also showed how he has weekly meetings with AWS developers in right in Second Life, and went on to show a presentation he had made in Second Life to a users group half-way around the world!

Jeff Barr, after last night, convinced me that Second Life is here to stay – it’s an invaluable tool that, if used right can be a great method of communication, presentation, and meeting with a worldwide audience. He convinced me that Second Life is even more useful for businesses than it is for the average non-business user using the service! I strongly suggest if you are a business owner, looking at a Second Life strategy to communicate better with customers, lead-gen with customers, and build new business.

After Jeff’s talk, we went over a few more samples of sites using AWS. The Bungee Labs folk demoed some of their services using the service. One guy (trying to remember his name – sorry, I promise I’ll get it!) showed off his site that counts down to 2008 in binary (http://11111011000.com/ is 2008 in binary)! I talked about my Holy Rolls applications (We’re Catholic and We’re Baptist) and how for an application with 4-5 thousand pageviews a day, AWS handles it fine, and I always have the ability to scale if I need to.

When the event was over we all put our names into a Santa Clause hat and drew for 2 Google Water Bottles given to us by Google Code, and some cool WordPress T-shirts provided by Joseph Scott, from Automattic. We then finished the evening with a great competition (and great singing voices!) of Rock Band on the PS3. It was quite a Social!

Danny Sullivan Just Doesn’t Get SNO

Posted on December 1, 2007 by jessestay

Dave Bascom, of SEO.com, and also a good friend of mine, recently reminded me through a blog post of his about Danny Sullivan’s Whiteboard Daily Search Cast where he criticized Facebook ads as a “revolution”. Danny goes on to say that because search ads are being “requested” by the user, search engine advertising is much more of a revolution than that of Facebook advertising.

I respectfully disagree with Danny here. I think Danny is getting his terms confused. While SEO is the process of me getting what I have requested, search engine advertising is not that case. Advertisers on search engines do not know who I am and therefore cannot detect the best ads to send my way. Because of this, it is extremely easy for advertisers to get what I am truly looking for wrong, and especially hard to convince me that I should buy their product. Advertisers only know what I’m searching for – not who I am, not who my friends are, and therefore what search engines can deliver is extremely basic. Search Engine advertisers (note I’m not saying SEO here) are still pushing ads to me, many of which are not what I want to receive.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a search engine’s biggest competitor in the ad space. Facebook, in essence, has on top of the existing internet, created a personal internet for others to use, associate with friends, purchase from retailers, do business, you name it. People remain on Facebook (and other social networks) because it is where their friends and family are. Facebook knows these relationships, these interactions, and all about who you are and what you are looking for. Therefore, all Facebook needs to do is give a basis for businesses to do business on top of their “personal internet”, and now all users have to do is search within Facebook and they can get way better search results than a normal search engine could ever give you. Facebook has done this with their platform. They’ve done this with their “Facebook Pages”, and they’ve also done this through Beacon.

Now, add to that the ability for advertisers to convince your friends to tell you about your product. Danny, it’s not about getting into “the conversation”. Facebook isn’t just a “conversation” – I use Twitter for that. Facebook is a lifestyle – it’s a way of living. It’s not about someone, even a friend entering the conversation and saying, “hey – do you want a new iPod?” It’s about me and my friends talking about what we’re getting for Christmas, and one of my friends knows I’m looking for an iPod, and tells me about a cool deal on iPods he discovered. Facebook is not an interruption – it’s a natural evolvement of life. Well-placed ads in Facebook are those that Friends tell other friends about. They’re about me seeing what my friends are doing, and realizing – hey, my friend just shopped at Fandango (hi Phil!), maybe I should shop there too!

I am going to be blogging here really soon about a term I call Social Network Optimization (there’s also a chapter in my book), or SNO. While SEO is all about defining your place in a linked relationship between websites, SNO adds a layer to that by defining your place in a linked relationship between real people. You’ll start seeing more and more SNO as social networking becomes more and more used. Is SEO dead? I don’t think so – a good company will need to find ways to utilize both techniques to place themselves optimally on the web. SEO could eventually evolve more and more into SNO, but SEO I think will always be around in some form.

SNO and Facebook ads are the new revolution. Viral and Permissions marketing is here to stay my friends – Danny, I’m sorry, but I think you’re wrong on this one.