Social software does not mean “public”
I again was blog surfing this morning and came across a post about sharing items from your blog reader - at least if that blog reader is Google Reader.
Google Reader has some quirky features but one thing is does well is keep your blog reading in check across multiple machines. I tend to have at least three different computers I use regularly and when traveling on short 1 or 2 day trips I try to go without a computer and use what every I can get my hands on if I need to send a quick email or check the news. For these reasons, Google Reader is great.
I collaborate with a number of like minded groups. Mind you, each group is “like minded” but there is not much overlap between the groups. Within each group, we have common topics of interest but very few common sources of information. Sharing blog entries that are informative or of interest has been relegated to either emailing links or cut/paste links into chat windows. Both of these methods escalates blogs to a higher priority which is precisely what we don’t want to do. Blogs and blog reading is a low priority task that should be set aside for prescribed amounts of time and not serve as an interrupt - but I am way off topic at this point so back to Google Reader and sharing information. Let me pull all the important info together now …
- Google Reader lets you tag entries and you can tag an entry with more than one tag
- Google Reader lets you see a page with all entries of a given tag
- Google Reader lets you give any tag-page public address
- You get to choose who gets the public address
- Recipients of the public address get a “feed” they can add to their blog reader (Google reader not required)
Google has seen the light and written up the instructions here.
I would love to find a similar solution that was “reader independent” because not everyone I collaborate with uses Google Reader.
