Last month I saw Cullect for the first time and was very impressed. Up until that moment I was convinced that Google Reader was the best way to stay on top of news and trends in my field(s).

Five minutes ago I just deleted half of my Google Reader subscriptions in favor of migrating my reading to Cullect. Why would I do that?

Google Reader is free!

Yes! Google Reader is free. And, as Garrick Van Buren explained to me, it is a reader that is based on the paradigm of reading email. Reading in Google Reader can be stressful and it does not scale very well. The more feeds I found, the faster I found that I read and, consequentially, the less satisfying that reading became.

Cullect can be free, but there are pay scales

And you get what you pay for. Cullect is a new paradigm of reading. It uses your attention patterns to serve you content that is relevant to how you have been reading. That means that if you only have time to read three posts, you can feel confident that reading those three posts will not be a waste of time.

Cullect also lets you have multiple interests. I am interested in many categories of news, blogs and feeds. I can create several reading lists in Cullect so my reading time becomes even more satisfying. Cullect is about quality and diversity of interests.

I'm on the move. I moved my photography interests out of Google Reader today because they are already in my photography reading list on Cullect. I'll be creating a web reading list and perhaps a new architecture reading list.

How can we use Cullect in an academic setting

This is my big question. There is a lot of potential to use curated Cullect reading lists to create pools of resources. More soon...

old, old bird

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tree illustration

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blue and yellow

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A short time ago I saw Garrick Van Buren demonstrate Cullect. We began the conversation by talking about APML, something I've publicly raved about. My understanding was that APML was a way to program your attention data into your feed reader. Then I met Garrick.

Cullect is so smart that it doesn't need APML. Garrick programmed Cullect to understand nine (or was it ten?) gestures that measure your affinity for a particular article. In this way, as I read posts from various blogs, news feeds and searches, Cullect tallies my behavior and begins to understand which articles I will want to see.

I decided to challenge Cullect with what I thought would be a very difficult task: show me photographs I like. I thought this would be hard because photographs don't have text that can be scanned and I generally do not care what a photo blog post says, outside of the actual photograph. Well, I am amazed. I've been working on my Cullect photography reading list for about a week now and Cullect shows me the photographs I like.

Simplify your reading life

I have been using Google Reader for about six months. I like that I can collect over 300 feeds and still get through them but I have developed some awful habits by using Google Reader. I tend to tear through unread posts and only skim headlines for interesting tid bits. Google Reader collects all my unread messages and tells me how much reading I have to do to clean up my inbox for the web. That is stressful! I've marked everything as read several times and I just feel guilty about it.

Cullect, on the other hand, has allowed me to slow down and actually read. I know that the posts will be arranged in order for me based on my past reading habits. So, if I only have time to read three posts, I can be assured that reading the first three posts in my Cullect reading list will be satisfying and relevant to my interests.

Here is a comparison of my photography reading list in Google Reader and my photo reading list in Cullect.

Have many interests

Cullect allows me to have multiple interests while letting them cross over each other. I can set up just one reading list if I am only interested in reading one topic. If I set up a reading list for each theme I am interested in, Cullect will allow me to have recommendations for each category. I can also use the same feed to fuel several reading lists and Cullect keeps my reading habits separate.

Why you should pay for this service

I know, everything on the internet is free and having a dollar sign lurking around just makes me nervous. I stumbled on Cullect in January and immediately closed the window when I saw that it was a paid service. Now that I have had a chance to play with it, I see that Cullect is a service that is worth paying for. It will allow me to collect articles, read them on my own schedule and feel assured that what I am reading is relevant to my interests.

Cullect, go test drive it today.

Programmable Web just posted an article about Google and OAuth. They summarized OAuth very well:

Like the feature on many cars today where you give the parking attendant a special key to your car that gives him some, but not all, access to your vehicle. On the Web you now have your own keys to dozens of sites but how to best handle the mashup-style case of site A wants you to grant them access to get some data from site B? Ideally you don’t want to give site A your password to site B. OAuth aims to simplify this problem: “It allows you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User).”

I've just spent the last few hours turning the atom feed from a Google Calendar into hCalendar formatted HTML output and I'm exhausted. This requires an asp feed parser, knowledge of XSLT and an understanding of atom feeds. Thank you Nathan for the parser!

Here is the XSLT

Many thanks to Brad Hosack and Dave Hartley for your help!

spring

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I'm beginning to play with hAtom today. HAtom is a microformat for content you might want to syndicate but you don't have in a blogging platform. You might use hAtom for:

• An events calendar
• A homegrown blog
• An announcements section of your website

Like other microformats, hAtom uses standardized classes to tell browsers what kind of content is on a page. In this case, hAtom tells your browser that there is syndicated content available.

I am testing this idea in the sandbox and hope to learn enough about it to make an essentials post soon. I've found Guy Leech's article, Minimizing hAtom to be very helpful.

Is anyone else using hAtom?

Readburner just relaunched last night. Readburner is a service that compiles shared link blogs from Google Reader.

Why should I care?

Shared posts from a feed aggregator can be thought of as recommended reading. I am much more likely to read a book if someone who likes what I like recommends it to me. I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle right now because my sister recommended it and I am enjoying the book. Sharing a link in Google Reader (or any other feed reader) is a way to recommend a blog post, news item or any other syndicated information.

I could spend much less time and get a greater reward if I only read recommended reading from people who share similar interests. That would save me time and make me happier.

Who is reading your recommendations?

Your link blog is somewhat hidden unless you publicize it. This is my link blog. If you have friends who share links, their link blogs will appear next to your unread items in Google Reader. That is a pretty slow way to share recommended reading.

Then Readburner came along. Readburner compiles shared link blogs from Google Reader. Everyone who burns their feed has their recommended reading added to the pile and Readburner's output is a list of the most popular, or upcoming posts. Brilliant. Now you can get a feed of the most popular recommended reading that is being shared.

New features?

I think only time will tell just how much Readburner has improved during its downtime. I already see a new feature I really like.

There are categories now, that each have their own RSS feed. Today I see "All, Web, Desktop, Mobile and Apple." If I wanted to, I could aggregate a feed of the most popular recommended items for Apple. I hope we will be able to get feeds of recommended items for any keyword soon.

ice leaf water

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Thanks to everyone who came to the microformats talk at MinneWebCon today. I put my slides up here.

If you are using microformats please feel free to leave a comment here or email me. I'd like to start an affinity group.

Did anyone else know that Eric Meyer was one of the three people who established XFN and he is involved in microformats? If you did know and didn't tell me, thank you. I think I would have passed out!

MocoLocal is a service that lets you search for amenities in a US city. They also format all the search results in microformats so you can easily plan out your vacation destinations with a mobile device.

Brilliant.

You can also rate what you find to help other users find what they are looking for.

Sitepoint has a good article about the gray area between XHTML and microformats.

They touch on a point that I'd been wondering about. When I first discovered the hCard creator I was impressed that I could fill in my information and get code that helped me understand hCard rules. I was disappointed that all the code was put into div and span heavy coding. I explored adding the information to the address tag that we currently employ for contact information at work. I see now that we've been using the address tag incorrectly because we've been adding street addresses to it. From the sitepoint article:

Now, those paying attention – and those who have devoured the contents of this reference from cover to cover – may well be saying at this point: "Ah, but there is an element for addresses. It's called 'address'." But alas, you are mistaken. A quick check back to the reference for address will reveal that it is not used for the purpose of marking up a physical location, but is in fact for identifying the point of contact for a web page, and therefore may include an email address, or a telephone number or something of that ilk. If the address element is used for marking up a location (number, street, city etc), then it's actually been mis-used. So, what should you do?

Enter Microformats.

Maybe we should work on a mishmash of the address tag and an hCard, which can reside in any XHTML tag. I'd love to see examples in the wild.

Mads Kristensen just summarized something I have been hoping to see for months.

APML = Attention Profiling Markup Language

I think my APML file might look something like this:

In essence, APML allows you to tell your feed reader (or maybe browser someday?) what kinds of things you want to see.

Imagine that you have 300 feeds flowing into your feed reader at any given time. It can be hard to sort them even if you are diligent. It can be even harder to predict what kind of posts will ender your reader on any given day. Wouldn't it be great if you could tell your reader to push certain topics to the top of your reading list?

Based on Kristensen's post, I think we are close.

As Kristensen put it:

"I’ve just implemented APML support on this blog for both the RSS and ATOM feeds, but also for the search page. If you specify a URL to an APML file as a query string to the RSS feed, you’ll get an RSS feed back that is filtered to match your interests."

Kristensen explained this well, but it is still confusing. I want to be able to type in my keywords of interests, rank them and have a reader that will push posts that match the description right to the top. Is there a reader like that out there?

white

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dark

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back light

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alone

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up

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Every piece of this rap is right on.

• Via: Gene Smirnov
• Link: YouTube

This write-up on Semantify is worth a look. I'm testing it out right now on a few sites.

Link: ReadWriteWeb and Semantify (part of Dapper.net)

ReadWriteWeb has posted a thorough article about Semantic Web technologies. There is a good comparison between RDF and microformats that outlines the benefits and shortcomings of both technologies. There is also a great section on semantic databases.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

hCalendar is a powerful microformat that will allow your events to be distributed across web sites, media and devices.

Very much like hCard, hCalendar is comprised of standardized classes appended to XHTML tags. The following is the essential guide to hCalendar.

You can code your very own hCalendar very easily. There are only three required elements that may be appended to any XHTML tag.

1. vcalendar or vevent (this is the root tag and all other classes must fall within this tag)
2. dtstart
3. summary

An example of the most basic hCalendar item is this:

If you want to add more information to your events, you can use the following classes appended to any XHTML tag.

This is an example of a more complex hCalender event.

Resources

• The hCalendar creator is very useful.
• hCalendar information on microformats.org

Chris Brogan wrote up an excellent article on how Yahoo! plans to use its search technology to index your microformatted content.

This means Yahoo! searches might return more concise and more useful data. This could mean that on-site advertising will be less profitable.

Chris Brogan says this so well:

If you look at this as an opportunity, you can see all kinds of ways that having quality microcontent, using appropriate microformats would be a great way to deliver portable value that might catapult you ahead of other previous search efforts.

From Michael Arrington

They are saying that they will support a number of microformats at the start: hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN. They will support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others.

This is a good sign that microformats are the way of the future. Hop on kids, the bandwagon is rolling!

Via: Chris Brogan
Also: Yahoo! announcement and Blogspotting's article on Yahoo!

I love the idea of the creative commons. I just got to use it for the first time. I put the Creative Commons badge on my photography blog about a month ago.

Yesterday I attended a Barack Obama rally in Minneapolis and posted this photo of Obama today.

I received this email today:

Hi,

The Point Reyes Light newspaper has used your public photo of Obama
in our endorsements. Please see it online at www.ptreyeslight.com

I am very open with my work. I am flattered when it is used, referred to or commented on. I love the attention. But I’m pretty clear about using my work for profit without asking.

Does anyone have an idea about what I can do about this?

I recently came across a problem with FeedBurner and Blogger. I maintain a reading list of photography I enjoy with Google Reader. I burn the photography list with FeedBurner because I’m crazy about web analytics.

I noticed that there was an attribution problem with FeedBurner and posts from blogger blogs that did not have titles. FeedBurner wasn’t attaching any link that attribuited the photograph in a title-less post back to the original blog. That just isn’t right.

I wrote a FeedFlare that ensures attribution on title-less posts that solves this problem. It is open for use.

Larry Lessig’s new book, The Future of Ideas, is available for free download under Creative Commons licensing.

I’ve just had a quick look at the table of contents and the chapter about copyright and intellectual property and I’m convinced that this book in its non-free paper version would be interesting enough to hold my attention.