TechnoCloud

Google has introduced a new recommendations feature to your homepage in Google Reader. This analyses your feeds list and presents a series of blog that it recommends. It’s unobtrusive and doesn’t flood your Reader with new posts to process.

However, it may still need a little work…

I was more than a little surprised to see the top recommendation coming from the delicately named, Arseblog. Even more delicate was the description (hopefully the blog editor’s not Google’s): ‘It’s f**king excellent’!

Fortunately, further explanation is at hand with the additional descriptive text identifying it as ‘an Arsenal blog’. Oh.

Among the work feeds, I also subscribe to the BBC Sport feed, so I can understand how it may have picked out a football blog for me. Leaving aside the question of picking out a specific club’s blog (notoriously dodgy ground), you’d hope that Google would invest in some kind of swear filter to protect the minds of innocents.

As for me, the swearing I could cope with, but the recommendation of club was the real insult!

See below for the offending screengrab (’oops’ icon added by me).

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Having experimented with several feed readers over the years, I’ve finally settled on Google Reader. The shortcuts, clean design and viewing options meet the majority of my needs. However, there were two major sources of annoyance - number of posts display and no search.

Quite why a search company like Google wouldn’t include the ability to search your feeds as feature no. 1 was as baffling as it was ironic. Finally this has been addressed (but no explanation as to why it took so long) with a simple and effective search field at the top. Job done.

Another source of frustration was with the number of posts display. Once it got to over 100 on an individual feed or on all items, it simply said 100+. So after more than a few days away, half an hour’s feed reading through the likes of Mashable and Techmeme refused to make a dent leaving me wondering just how long I should persevere. A source of stress when you don’t want to miss any nuggets, but do have a finite time to do research.

This has also finally been addressed ramping it up to 1000+ leaving it perfectly clear just how many posts I need to plough through to catch up. Perhaps ignorance was bliss after all…

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Now you can add TechnoCloud as a widget to your blog or space courtesy of Widgetbox’s Blidget. Widgetbox also comes with a built-in stats package which allows the publisher to see not only subscriber numbers, but also the number of views of a particular widget. The widget can also be customised in terms of size, colour and function.

As a test, I’ve just setup TechnoCloud as an RSS feed using the Flickr toys broadway poster image from earlier in the week. To get it click on ‘Get widget’ at the bottom of the widget.

One initial observation. I originally installed the widget on my sidebar, but couldn’t help noticing that the page took much longer to load, so decided to restrict it to this post. Perhaps I’ll be sticking to straightforward RSS in the future…

If it’s taking an eternity to load, let me know in the comments and it’ll be consigned to the widgibin.

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After many, many months using Bloglines, I was tempted by the hype about Google Reader and decided to give it a try to find a better way of managing my feeds. A weekend or even a couple of days holiday meant the backlog of articles soon built up to unmanageable proportions and I didn’t find the Bloglines user interface an efficient way of processing that information.

Despite my grumbles I was so used to Bloglines’ quirks that even the improved user interface of Google Reader took quite some time to become comfortable with. The ‘river of news’ available on the ‘All Items’ link is particularly helpful in managing the information overload. I like being able to consume bite sized chunks of articles rather than having to read all new posts on a feed in one go before they are lost. The number and variety of keyboard shortcuts have also proved useful once mastered.

However, today presented the first bug within Google Reader. As per the image below, on accessing my stories the article preview boxes were blank. If I rolled my mouse over them to automatically ‘mark as read’ the content appeared (see second image), suggesting the bug is related to the ‘mark as read’ mouseover functionality. It was the same issue whether reading the river of news or an individual feed.

The problem appears limited to Internet Explorer (I’m running version 6.0), with Firefox working fine.

Having had a fruitless quick search for others with the same issue, this may be a local javascript error, but I’d be interested if anyone has experienced anything similar.

Image 1: Viewing all items (no mouseover)

Image 2: mouseover a single item and it appears

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