I haven’t blogged in ages, but then, neither have you. It seems much of the blogosphere, meaning you and me, have been lured, entertained and distracted by twittering instead.

Twitter satisfies many of the needs that blogging used to sate. It’s instant, social and fun. But Twitter is so much easier, so easy that even talentless celebs can do it. And Twitter is a much better platform than blogging for “showing off” because one’s followers (or readers) are explicitly “on show”. Measurment is transparent.

But the twitter can’t half be annoying. And when I say “twitter” I mean you … and me. What I hate most is not the people who tweet what they had for breakfast which I quite like, I mean, any sentence with “kipper” in it is automatically improved in my book but the people who ruthlessly self-promote, ALL THE TIME!

Recently I was watching “Question Time” a political UK talk show. The audience and twitter alike were full of tough questions, humour and vitriol and someone (at 10:30PM) tweeted “New Blog Post: 15 ways to increase your traffic”. I’ve got nothing against self-promotion at all, it’s a dirty job and all that, but to push a crappy SEO blog post whilst everyone else is fuming about duck islands, moats and second homes apart from being beyond the pale seems unbelievably one dimensional and boring.

And whilst I’m probably more guilty than you are of mindless bandwagon jumping and I too find myself trotting out excuses about “not having time to blog” and “not quite seeing the point” I’m going to have a bash at old skool blogging again where I simply share what I’m doing, what I’ve done and what I’m thinking about doing in a “think out loud” way. Not with any alterior promotional motives, but just in the hope that it makes a connection for someone somewhere.

You never know.

p.s Like lots of people, I use Google Reader to read my RSS feeds. I had to move to Reader because NetNewsWire simply couldn’t cope anymore and neither could I. News reading had become a chore because Google Reader (apart from having a raft of usability issues) was just so bloody ugly. So thank goodness for Feedly (image above) which makes reading blogs not just easy on the eye but also has enough small usability additions to have me hooked.

Every little helps.

The Spectra Visual Newsreader at msnbc.com is swooshy AND floaty. The first two things I look for in any application nowadays.

I was just finding NetNewsWire struggling lately to display all my newsfeeds and thinking, blimey, there has to be a better, more swooshy and floaty way to do this… and here it is…

Of course it is… you may then want to try Feed Rinse , which at first glance looks useful and very nicely designed.

Except… here we go eh? ….

1. I can’t read my feeds from here, they just do washing… and deliver OPML by the look of it (or am I missing something?)

2. Could anyone be bothered to set up a rule for EVERY SINGLE feed? This is a big disappointment… they aren’t rinsing my feeds, they are delivering the soap and I have to do it myself.

I know I couldn’t… although I would be happy to set up a few global rules and then add n prune as I go. Sam has been playing with the idea of a Baynsian RSS Reader for a while where you flag certain posts to be “more like this”…

There is a huge need for a semi-intelligent RSS Reader , one where the set-up (or progamming/rule creation) is not front loaded but done incrementally, almost without the reader being aware, like an in-the-zone-gardener pottering with their secateurs and whistling.

What a lovely (looking) interface, xFruits is a tool to help me “Compose my information system” but I can’t work out what it actually does… I hopefully filled in a few fields but then nothing actually happened….

UPDATE: I kinda worked out what this site does now (I can have a URL where my feed is turned into a site or PDF)… but still have my doubts…. especially since the interface feels so clean n green but acts so brown n dirty.

Stickies done, but with a purpose this time… very cool.