A few weeks ago, I already started transitioning all of my feeds off of Bloglines. Why?
- It's slow.
- It's down too often.
- Reorganizing feeds (moving them to different folders, etc.) is worse than being stuck in a closet with Vanna White. Night after night after night after night.
- It's similarly painful to mark just a few articles in a feed as read or unread.

I've moved over to Newzcrawler, a stellar newsreader app for Windows. Beyond just tons of cool power features, it also lets me pretty easily sync my feeds between my desktop and laptop using an external FTP site (okay, geeky, I know).

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With that said, I've still been hoping to see some vast improvements in the online-reader front. Rojo seems to be getting better. And I've heard rumblings over other cool services as well. When I learned today that Google had entered this space, I was extremely excited. Please, I thought, give us another Gmail. Or Maps! :D If not for me, at least for my less-geeky friends whom I'm dying to get into feed reading.

So far, alas, I'm rather disappointed in the Google Reader. I know it'll get better, but for now, Googlers...

1) It's too cluttered and overwhelming.
Hide some stuff. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but blog text blends into all the other text and I find it just tiring to spend more than a few minutes in Reader.

2) No mouseovers?!

3) Ambiguities
Is "Read items" a description or an action? Okay, admittedly this is rather a nitpick, but it is a top-line link .

4) Search what?!
When I see a search box at the top of the page, I expect to be able to search the content-in-context. In other words, if I'm in my Gmail account, I expect to search my mail. If I'm in Reader, I expect to search for a string in my read and/or unread feed items. From an expected user-action standpoint, what's likely to be more common: adding new feeds, or working with the feeds one already has?

5) Save me from overload!
There's no way to mark an entire feed as read. Or group of feeds.

6) Why the weird quasi-breadcrumbs in center focus?!
Why do I want to see "New Subscription" "New Subscription" article article article... Just show me new articles. If I want to see what I'm subscribed to, I'll go to the Your Subscriptions tab!

UPDATE 9/23/05 2:34pm PST:
Looks like I was a bit too quick on the CrankyTrigger this morning. Apparently, Streamload had shifted over to Blogspot, but hadn't updated one of their primary links (1 step off of their home page). Certainly a frustrating but nonetheless innocent oversight. See Streamload's acknowledgment of the issue here in their P.S.

My apologies for jumping to conclusions. I'm keeping the rest of my blog entry intact so I'm not a hypocrite

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I'm a paying member of Streamload -- a multimedia remote storage service -- and I regularly follow their blog in my aggregator.

Recently, they've been heralding their upcoming major service overhaul in their blog... a huge new feature set, new pricing, and so on. Everything was supposed to go live, well, a few days ago.

Well, a day or two ago, they blogged an apology for the delay, citing power outage issues stemming from a storm (no, not one of the hurricanes). I totally understood... these sort of things happen. But then imagine my amazement and annoyance today when, upon checking their blog, I notice that they've wiped out the last month's worth of entries. Poof, gone. Here's the Google cache of what they had written.

A firm message to Streamload and any other companies that may be thinking about, ahem, rewriting history: Don't do it.
1) People like me will catch it and call you on it.
2) This'll create ill-will and suspicions regarding your firm's integrity.

And for goodness sake, if you're nonetheless determined to cover your tracks, at least don't do it half-assedly; roll-back your press releases, too. Sheesh.

I just came back from a blogger meetup, and am for some (possibly related) reason inspired to offer some blogging tips I've accumulated over the nearly three years I've been blogging.

I'm at least temporarily offering both summary full feeds via FeedBurner... which delivers Atom, RSS, whatever your newsreader likes . Just look on over at the lefthand-side of any BLADAM page for the links.

Since I do like people to actually visit my site, however (for both selfish and unselfish reasons) I'm debating on whether to keep the full feed or perhaps just run with the summary feed in a bit.

If you have any strong opinions -- heck, ANY opinions (:cough: comment whore :cough -- please speak below or forever hold your peace.

Or is it piece. I never did figure that out...

Argh. Blasted late night foggy ramblings

What would you think if you saw a blog from Bill Gates or Carly Fiorina or Sergey Brin or even your boss with musings about their personal life... fears, hopes, dreams, quirky friendships, frustrations, and so on?

You'd gawk, of course. And then you would -- along with, perhaps, the press -- freak out. "Wow, what a weirdo. Why's [such and such powerful person] writing about their personal life?"

Real (serious) businessmen and businesswomen, after all, admit no vulnerabilities. They're not even really human, except in limited, PR-approved ways. Indeed, it's okay for angsty teens or coding geeks or others to ramble about life, love, liberty and other personal stuff, but whoa unto the current or future business leader who dares tread into the realm of personal disclosure online.

Google has announced that they've added a special "no-follow" tag option for links that is intended to curb comment spam. What is comment spam? It's the disgusting -- often pornographic -- crap that lowlife spammers spew in blog comments so that Google will perceive their sites as 'more important'. After all, Google Page Rank is partly dependent upon how many sites "link" to another site, even if that link is added by a spammer. The new no-follow tag is designed to thwart that incentive by telling the googlebot "Hey, this link wasn't added by the Webmaster... so don't interpret it as a popular vote for that other site."

Other search engines, including Yahoo and MSN, have quickly decided to support this new tag. And I believe all of their intentions are good. Unfortunately, I think that this is a bad solution.

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a meet-'n'-greet sort of open house with Technorati, a company that is making really useful and fun tools for the blogosphere. I was honored and humbled to be at this event, given that the list of folks there read a bit like an impressive Who's Who in geek lore.

Beyond all the cool info and group conversations, a chat that particularly stuck with me was one I had with Mike, one of the Technorati engineers. I learned that he has a blog on TypePad, and I was initially puzzled as to why someone so technically savvy would opt to pay a monthly fee for a hosted blogging option instead of just using a free tool like WordPress. I always viewed services like TypePad to be geared towards those folks who had lots of interest in sharing their writing and photos with others, but not much geek-knowhow to set up a site on their own.

I've been a geek for as long as I can remember. But I still am amazed and amused to learn just how the Internet shrinks the world... especially nowadays with blogging. I've been hit on by seemingly random women from various locales that I can barely pronounce, gotten warm kudos from Sweden, been rediscovered by an old high school friend in a sleepy town in S. California, and even gotten job interviews from this humble blog.

Blah blah blah... but what still really gets me excited is seeing my stuff translated into other languages!

"I know all about you, Adam" she were practically her first words to me, spoken more matter-of-factly than warmly. Indeed, she had a pretty good grasp on my hopes and dreams, my fears and failures... before she had even set eyes on me.

For the rest of this job interview I sat humbled, stunned, uncomfortable... feeling naked, almost violated.

Some things in life are just amazingly simple, obvious, and intuitive.

Practically all books nowadays have page numbering; to get to the next page, you simply flip a piece of paper, and voila, you continue reading.

Newspapers can be a bit more complicated, but they at least offer straightfoward information: "Continued on page A17." Sure enough, your fingers trudge you to page A17, and you can finish where you left off. Even most news sites on the Web have a simple "Next page" link at the bottom of each multi-page story.

So why are blogs -- theoretically the next step in communications evolution -- so amazingly backwards when it comes to basic navigation?