WorldChanging presentation at SXSW

Just watched a really self-satisfied white guy on stage say things like “we all want to be affluent, but we want guilt free affluence” while showing slides of poor black people around the world. His point about helping people deal with their worst issues in order to provide a springboard for self determination was fair enough, but the presentation had an icky feel to it. It was far more politically conservative than most of the people in the audience appeared willing to admit.

Whatever. WorldChanging is an interesting enough web site to check out every once in awhile. Want a cooler one? It’s less optimistic, but it’s smarter, more honest and less politically retrograde -check out Grain.org. I’m sure the Grain folks wouldn’t say these kinds of things about WorldChanging – but I’m not involved, so I can.

DJ Drama Defended in US Congress

If you read my previous post on the arrest of DJ Drama for making mix tapes, you’ll find this video interesting. US Rep Mike Doyle defends DJ Drama and remixer Girl Talk on the floor of the US House. Pretty sweet. I wrote about it in more detail here.

It’s just one part of one speech, but I think it’s awesome. Big thanks to John Harman of Feedia for grabbing it and cutting out these 2 of 30 minutes for me in a hurry.

Ready to Rock Austin

That’s the plan anyway. Alex Williams and I are headed down Thursday afternoon to cover South by Southwest for SplashCast. We’re both speaking on panels as well. He organized the first panel of the whole conference – all about Snakes on a Plane!

Anyway, we’re going to work our tails off to be as on top of the news there as possible. I think we’ll be able to do some very cool things with RSS, podcasting, photos and video all delivered through SplashCast. We are armed with new EVDO connections and Twitter accounts. We even created a special RSS feed for the coverage: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SxswBySplashcast Here’s our first post kicking off coverage. Thanks to Scott Beale, one of the first people to post the player publicly.

We (ok, I) talk a big game, so hopefully we’ll be able to live up to it! I’m addicted to blogging first on news and Alex is a great interviewer – so it should be fun. If you’re down there too, don’t be shy.

Ask goes nuts on local search – again

Ask.com announced an upgrade today to their already impressive local search tool. Now you can draw a shape on the map with a drawing tool and limit your search to inside that shape. They do so many impressive things over there, yet they are so far behind in market share. Is it too complex? Like the blogsearch tool, I don’t even use it myself but it’s so smart! They filter out blogs that don’t have at least a small number of subscribers in Bloglines. Goodbye blog spam in search results! I should start using them more myself.

I just joined Twitter

We’ll see how it goes, I’m at http://twitter.com/marshallk I’m going to have to figure out the best way to deal with the SMS options. I’m used to getting piles of SMS alerts from RSS monitoring services, but this is ridiculous!

Need a Room For SXSW?

My co-worker Alex Williams and I have rented a 3 bedroom house in Austin from the 8th through the 15th. If you are interested in sharing these comfortable digs with us, a short bus ride from the event and coming in at $100/night, drop me a line. marshall@ marshallk.com

Newsgator Online Beta: Better Than Before – Still Not Good Enough

The long awaited next version of Newsgator Online is being shown to some bloggers tonight and will be announced next week. It’s pretty good; click that first link in this post and you can try it yourself.

The truth is, it’s much less awful than previous versions. I love Newsgator but their web based feedreader has been so choked and slow that it’s been unusable. Not so any more. That’s great. The new version reduces the number of pageloads required by performing a number of functions with an Ajax pop-up box. The remaining page loads happen much faster than before – even with 500 feeds. They’ve also added a “loading” image with progress bar, which makes any wait much more tolerable (at least you know the darned thing is working.) There are a number of other small changes as well but none seem super important. The new version is so far still much less pleasing to use than Google Reader or a desktop reader. It still feels like something that was broken has now been covered up with a new layer on top.

Other issues. Embedded video is stripped out of the feeds – there’s not even any indication when a YouTube video should appear. Bloglines and Google Reader let you view Flash video players without leaving your feed reader. Google Reader provides a number of Flash video and audio consumption capabilities inline – that should be expanded on. Also, there’s still no hope of using Newsgator Online on my Nokia phone. I would have kissed someone if that had worked. If I had a different phone, they do have software for that.

Windows users can grab a Newsgator browser plug-in that provides an autodetect and subscribe button – though your browser already supports this itself (click the RSS icon in your address bar.)

Why should you use Newsgator Online? Well, you may already be using one of the company’s desktop feed readers – NetNewsWire or FeedDemon. Those are the best feed readers on the market (except perhaps Google Reader, if you insist) and they sync automatically with your Newsgator Online account. So if you’re a person who uses more than one computer you can log in to your list of feeds from anywhere, be synced up and have a much more pleasant experience than Newsgator Online provided before.

The best thing about Newsgator Online is that it allows me to view things in “river of news” format – what’s most recent no matter which of all my subscribed feeds it came in on. Google Reader lets you do that too, as does NetNewsWire.

I can’t remember if Newsgator’s enterprise product uses this same interface as Newsgator Online. If so, that’s good news for those users. Otherwise, this new upgrade isn’t going to win any new users – Google Reader has set the standard for web based feed readers and no one else has met that standard yet. Google Reader still isn’t as fast as a desktop reader, but it’s getting close. As web based readers go, though – I put this new version of Newsgator Online in second place behind Google Reader and ahead of the too-inflexible Bloglines. I haven’t used a web based feed reader in months, anyway. NetNewsWire on the desktop, NetVibes for a start page and various RSS alert systems work together best for me.