Google Reader

Will and I were discussing whether or not we’d see cable die out, with on demand internet television.  I pointed out that in general, I get all my news from the internet, and very rarely watch television, except via hulu.com.  We then progressed to debating the best way to get a hold of that news.  I tend to use RSS feed bookmarks in my ‘Fox bookmarks bar as seen here.  Will advocates the use of the Google News Reader.  The reason I initially started using the RSS bookmarks was that I simply had no knowledge of the reader.  However, I like having the pull-down menus up among my other frequently hit bookmarks.  This way I can select the feed from any page, see which ones I’ve read or haven’t (only on this computer, though), and check for new ones.  It’s convenient for sites like Digg, where I don’t necessarily want to read every article, and don’t want the Reader app to tell me that there are unread posts.  However, for things I follow very closely like personal blogs and PSD tuts, I like that it tells me when there is an unread recent post.

The reader basically pulls all the data from your various feeds, and puts it all in one place.  Google’s version can be found here.  It then organizes them into folder like sets, similar to gmail’s labels function, and tells you how many unread items there are within each feed.  The strength of the reader comes in centralizing all of that data: you can find anything you need to know from right within that window.  The interface is a little mucky for me, but I’ve only been using it for a couple of hours now.  It’s nice that on the tab it gives you the number of unread posts.  It’s simple to reset all of the posts as read, just a click of the button, and it has an area that gives you all of the unread posts since your last visit, all from within your Google account, so if you need to swap over to your email, it’s as easy as clicking the upper-left-hand-corner link.

From what I’ve found, the reader is a useful tool for pulling everything together, and limiting the amount of places you have to check.  I may be using it more often in the days to come.  The part I find lacking is the ability to navigate to any post within a selected feed from whatever window or tab I might have open at once.  Also, the reader pulls the content right from the website, so you never actually leave the Google interface, which to me limits the access to the websites other content: for instance, on PSD tuts, there’s a photo pool that I like to browse from time to time, which is not available in the individual posts via the reader, but is omnipresent when visiting the posts themselves on the site.

I think I’ll use the reader most often on my iPod Touch.  Since there is no overarching bookmark feature (i.e., the bookmark display bar in Firefox) I can access all my feeds instantly from one site, and I won’t be as worried about visiting the individual sites.  It’s also nice that it’s formatted for a small screen, and thus my browsing is simplified.  However, with powerful computer in hand, I enjoy the ability to use it.

Quotes (July 7th, 2008)

I was reading an article by Stephen King that popped up on digg earlier today, about horror movies.  Below is an excerpt.  I thought it was an interesting theory, and it applies to more than just movies or trying to scare people.

“If a studio is going to spend $89 or $100 million in hopes of making $300 or $400 million more, they feel a need to shove WHAT IT ALL MEANS down the audience’s throat.  Is there a serial killer?  Then his mommy didn’t love him (insert flashback).  A monster from outer space?  Its planet exploded, of course (and the poor misunderstood thing probably needs a juicy Earth woman to make sexy with).  But nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear”  – Stephen King

In terms of horror, that makes great sense.  What people often fear the most is the unknown, things they can’t understand.  When you lend credence and understanding to a villain’s backstory, then they’re much less scary, we have a prior action set to decide how that person is going to make their future decisions, and we have less reason to fear them-we understand them, we understand how to defeat them.  “The enemy we know versus the enemy we don’t”  If you want to scare people pantsless, you need to give them true fear: a villain that they don’t understand, that has no backstory, that has no reasoning, and that will be truly scary.

People will cry out!  They’ll hate it, they’ll hate you, they’ll hate the movie, it will scare them to think that there are creatures out there that don’t have motives, that ARE just cold hearted killers or that there is a beast out there of which they have no knowledge, and no way of predicting the future.

It’s part of what makes sociopaths, terrorists, and killers so frightening, as well as what makes issues we have no clue about very frustrating.  For instance, very often when I’m working with computers there will crop up an issue where the computer should not be doing something that it does.  Longtime or hardcore computer users will tell you that it’s an øe-operator error.  The computer doesn’t do things unless you tell it to.  Sometimes there are bugs, though, glitches in the system, etc, but when you can’t or don’t understand where they’re coming from, they’re that much more threatening.

It seems like it would be similar to me if one of my senses were taken away, and I was told to fight or deal with a problem.  It’d be that much scarier or more difficult if I had only part of the information, and I needed to deal with something, for example, if you blindfolded me and asked me to fence, I would be pretty worthless, and my level of success would be much lower.  If you take a way a channel for information or understanding, then probability of defeat seems to increase while possibility of fear also increases.