Rambles In The Brambles

I will continue to play my role as shill to Google’s profitable hegemony. Their products seem to fit my informational needs. I’ve been playing around recently with two of their applications:

1. Google Maps and Google Earth. They’ve published an API for both, which makes it possible to do some really interesting stuff. I've played around with it a bit, and that probably deserves its own post.
2. Google Reader. I really just started using it, and find that it drastically reduces the time that it takes to read through my "daily" websites. It works really well for "aggregative" feeds, e.g. I have a feed that includes US patent filings by aerospace firms, which has about 50 new postings per day. The keyboard commands are critical, of course. I also like the ability to designate posts as "shared" (shift-S), and have them published to my own feed. (Notice that I’ve linked my Google Reader shared posting page to the index page of my blog, on the right-side under "shared links". That's a good way to see what I've been interested in lately, and is always up-to-date as long as I've been use Google Reader.) Perhaps one loses a bit of the unique style (colors, formatting, etc) from each blog, but I suppose that makes it easier to consume their content. I have two complaints about my RSS reader setup: I can’t use it to consume RSS feeds within my company firewall. And many sites do not publish a complete RSS feed, but only titles or the first couple of sentences.