Really Useful Syndication

In a world where all of us suffer from information overload to some extent, the ability to pick and choose the articles that we find interesting and have them delivered directly to us surely has to be a useful service. That’s what RSS does. RSS is a wonderful thing, but I know many people who still don’t use it.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a means of subscribing to a webpage, or a blog, or blog comments, or a podcast, or a series of news articles – pretty much anything really – and then every time something on that site changes, a piece of software called a feedreader collects and collates all those changes into one place. You subscribe to whatever you like. It’s a little like designing your very own personal newspaper that contains only the articles that interest you.

If you think about it a bit like an old style message board or web forum where you have new messages delivered to you via email, RSS is a similar idea. Under these old style systems, you become a member of those forums or discussions that interest you, and as new messages get posted they are sent to you via email. RSS is a similar concept, except the stuff that gets fed to you can come from virtually any source, and the software that delivers it is not your email, but a feedreader. (Some newer email and browser apps now have the feedreader function built right in so you can track everything from one convenient place. It makes a lot of sense.) RSS is the technology which let’s you track your favourite blogs and its also what enables iTunes to keep track of your subscribed podcasts. RSS is way cool.

I can’t imagine manually checking every blog or podcast that interests me just to see if it has been updated. For a start, there are just way too many of them. It would annoy and frustrate me browsing through some long list of sites that I need to check each day, only to find that many have not actually changed since I last looked. Obviously, if it hasn’t changed, I don’t need to check it. Equally, it would become tedious having to individually look through each one that has been updated in order to find out whether there is anything there that grabs my attention. I simply don’t have time for that.

When I did a classroom blogging project last year I used RSS to create a feed for every student in my class. Each time one of them posted anything, I would know instantly. I think it used to surprise them just how quickly I would know whenever any of them would post something to their blog. Quite literally, they would write something and normally within a minute or so I would say, “hey, nice post!” I’m sure it made them feel more accountable. They knew I read everything they wrote. Everything. Without RSS there is no way I could have stayed on top of it like that.

Until recently, my feedreader of choice has been Vienna. Light, simple and free, Vienna does a great job of managing feeds for all sorts of things from blogs to wikis to podcasts to photostreams. It has some very nice, very Mac-like features, such as Smart Folders, which make it super easy to track the stuff I care about. At the moment my Vienna is tracking about 80 or so blogs that I follow regularly.

Since I switched to Flock as my favourite browser, I’ve also become quite enamoured with the browser’s built in RSS reader. I really like the layout of the news pages and the way it manages the presentation of each feed. Updated feeds appear in bold, with a number in brackets indicating the number of new posts, and the main reading page presents a neat intro paragraph for each article which you can click on to expand or mark as read. Of course, the layout is very customisable, so you can view it however suits you. It’s very cool and hints that EPIC may be closer than we think…

There are a bunch of other feedreaders that are supposed to be quite good. NetNewsWire has a good reputation, although it’s not free. Apple’s own web browser, Safari, does a pretty fair job of managing RSS feeds although I don’t think I’d use it for managing a large number of subscriptions. I’m not too certain what to recommend on the Windows platform, but I’m quite sure a quick Google search will turn up something useful.  And of course, if you want to really be a cool Web 2.0 dude, you can use one of the excellent web based ones like Bloglines or Google Reader.

Area there any downsides of RSS feeds? There are two that strike me…

One… even with RSS doing all the hard work of tracking your favourite blogs you can still get an overwhelming amount of stuff coming to you each day. I know people that subscribe to hundreds of feeds and you can be back in information overload territory again pretty quickly if you’re not careful, but at least you’re overloading on information of your own choice. Of course, you don’t have to actually read every single article that comes into your feed, just as you don’t have to read every single article in the Sunday newspaper (remember those?) Just read what grabs your attention. Browse. Skim. It’s ok. Don’t feel guilty.

Two… you only subscribe to the feeds that interest you. While that is supposed to be seen as a positive, you can also easily fall into the trap of only following stories about which you have a current interest and therefore exclude yourself from other stories that you may be interested in, only you just don’t know it yet. You don’t know what you don’t know, as they say. Classic example… last weekend I knew all about the iPhone launch and new Skype features for the Mac, but never knew a bomb went off in London. Gotta be careful you don’t subscribe yourself into a very small niche sometimes…

But if you’re a teacher, there are some excellent Educational Blogs out there that are well worth a look… read some Warlick, Richardson, Fisch and Fryer. Get some Aussie input from Pearce, Bruce and O’Connell. Round it out with a bit of Peters and Cofino. (You’re already reading mine, so hey, thanks!)

So there you go… RSS Feeds. Have at them! It you aren’t an RSS kinda guy or gal, give it a try… you might just like it.

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Killing Spam

Spam is an absolute scourge. I don’t understand why people do it, but then I’ve never really understood why people spray graffiti on walls, or write viruses either. I guess some people just get a kick out of being a bloody nuisance.

Of course, spam is a little different in that there is money involved. Big money apparently. If you send enough emails out about methods to enlarge your p3nis or buy p0rn and viag4r4 or whatever else spam tends to focus on, there are apparently enough stupid and gullible people in the world that someone, somewhere can make a comfortable living off their stupidity. It still amazes me that people respond to these messages in any way whatsoever, but apparently they do. The best way to deal with spam is to completely ignore it – don’t read it, don’t respond to it, don’t acknowledge it… just totally ignore it.

For the first time ever I feel like I’m winning the battle against spam, so I thought I’d share how I’ve managed to arrive at this point.

Firtsly, my Australian ISP (Optusnet) provides spam filters at their mail servers, and I have these enabled. I get a monthly report emailed to me from my ISP, and I’ve always been surprised at just how much mail I get flitered. For the past year or so since I turned the filters on, approximately half of the roughly 3000 messages I get each month have been identified by Optusnet as spam. The percentage floats around the 50% mark, although I’ve seen it as high as 57% spam. Interestingly the most recent report said that only 37% of my mail was spam so perhaps things are improving, or maybe spammers take a break over Christmas?

So, what of the remaining 1500 or so messages that arrive at my mailbox? The Optusnet filters are a good start, but they are certainly not foolproof. I would estimate that about 60% of the remaining messages I receive are still spam. I tried creating some basic filtering rules within Entourage to catch the worst stuff, and it certainly helps, but things still get through.

I get a lot of mail from email lists and these are fairly safe messages so I filter these immediately into folders for later reading.

The remaining mail has filters applied that do things like identifying any messages that were sent to the Optusnet domain but do not start with my username. This kills off most of the mass mailout stuff. I have a few other tricky filters that try to avoid the most obvious spammy stuff, but I was still getting more junk coming into my Inbox than I really wanted.

Then I discovered an amazing little tool called Spam Sieve. Spam Sieve is for the Mac OSX platform and uses a complex mix of safelists, whitelists, blacklists, Bayesian classification and intelligent heuristic scoring analysis to make some incredibly subtle and refined decisions about what comprises a spam message. It looks at word counts within the corpus of my messages and decides statistically what a spam message looks like.

The really neat thing about Spam Sieve is that it learns to make decisions based on MY actual mail flow and at the moment it’s running at 97.4% accuracy in identifying spam. ISP filters can only do so much because they are making blanket decisions about spam messages according to some fairly general rules that suit all users, but Spam Sieve is able to make constantly updated decisions about spam that is actually arriving in my mailbox, giving a far more nuanced view of what a spam message looks like.

On the few occasions when it makes a wrong decision, a simple keystroke lets me teach Spam Sieve which messages were actually spam and the software learns from its mistake, relegating the messages to the spam folder where they belong. Just to make sure the creature is dead, I also set up a mail rule in Entourage that automatically empties the Junk Mail folder every 5 minutes. Begone foul spam!

It’s a $30 purchase but the best $30 I’ve ever spent. I deal with a lot of mail, and I haven’t seen a single spam message in weeks. The bottom line is that email has actually become pleasant to use again.

I’ll also say a nice word for Microsoft Entourage for the Mac which , apart from being a little slow under Rosetta, is probably the best mail client I’ve ever used. I can hardly wait for the Universal version!

There are probably similar solutions for Windows users. Maybe someone could leave a comment if you know of anything, or if you have any good spam coping strategies that you would like to share.

Shiny Object Syndrome

I admit it. I’m terrible at staying focused. Especially when you put me in front of a computer, I find it easy to get distracted by the million and one things that can distract a computer user… emails coming in constantly, IM messages bleeping at me every few minutes, RSS feeds constantly updating and all the other services that tend to bombard one with “stuff”. Sometimes, especially when I need to write, it would be good to just shut it all out for a while and resist the temptation to answer that email, respond to that IM or browse that RSS feed.

I suppose I COULD try to use a bit of self discipline and just ignore these things, but where’s the fun in that? I COULD turn off all that stuff and just shut it out, but it’s too tempting to need a distraction from what I should be doing… and that’s the problem in the first place.

So I thought this piece of software looked interesting… it’s called WriteRoom, and basically turns your fandangled, geewhiz, all-the-bell-and-whistles MacBook Pro into something about as distracting as an Apple IIe. Writeroom blanks your screen to fullscreen mode, and gives you plain green text on a black background. Your digital world is hidden behind the fullscreen mode and can be retrieved in a single keystroke, but all the distracting IMs and emails are shut out temporarily… sounds like a good idea to me. Windows users can use a similar tool called Dark Room.

I think it’s worth a look if you also suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome.