Told you so

Last week in my Effective Internet Lockdown post on using RSS feeds, I suggested Google Reader as an excellent aggregator. It seems I'm not alone in my choice of reader, as a recent poll of Lifehacker.com's readers revealed Google Reader as one of their six favourite readers. The final poll to narrow the selection down to an overall favourite already has Reader winning by a mile. Go and check it out for a decent list of other readers as well, some web based and some installable.

Dove, good for your skin-or is it?

We've all seen the Dove ads on TV, typical soap and cosmetics fare with slow motion views of beautiful woman using Dove on their flawless skin and proclaiming the difference it has made and how much healthier their skin looks and feels.

Well it turns out that's a really short lived effect. Global warming has this pesky habit of drying out your skin, no matter how much dove you apply to it. As it turns out that lovely moisturizing bar is contributing heavily to deforestation (to make space for palm oil plantations) which is in turn releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and removing the means to process it.

GreenPeace, Friends of the Earth, and other organizations are running a campaign to get Unilever, manufacturers of Dove and many other popular consumer brands that utilize palm oil from unsustainable sources, to call for a stop to such deforestation and instead buy from responsible suppliers.

Watch their video on the problem below, and then visit their action page to see how you can help!

Effective Internet Lockdown: RSS feeds

One of the key points in my Effective Internet Lockdown: Good Habits post was to use RSS to control your browsing habits. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is effectively a collection of technologies that allows you to get content from your favourite websites without having to actually visit the site (and get distracted by all the links and ads). A decent RSS feed aggregator (an application or service that brings all your RSS feeds into one place) is an excellent tool for managing your browsing.

When choosing a solution for my needs, my guiding needs were:

1. Feeds must be easy to manage.
2. Rich content in feeds must be supported.
3. The workflow must not interfere with my own work.
4. As a bonus, access from everywhere would be nice.

I settled on a combination of Google Reader and the excellent AideRSS to meet these needs.

Feeds must be easy to manage

Built in feed support in Firefox means that adding feeds to Google Reader is a simple case of clicking on the feed icon in Firefox's address bar and choosing Google Reader. Management in reader is really intuitive with drag and drop functionality, easy deletion of feeds and nice extras like tagging, starring and sharing.

AideRSS comes in for feeds that I suspect may be a bit post heavy, with loads of unnecessary posts coming through daily (think SlashDot or Digg). It allows you to enter a feed (or choose one already set up by others ) and get a limited feed for only the most popular posts.

Rich content support

Being browser based, Google reader supports anything the host browser does. This includes images, audio and flash based video (such as YouTube).

Non-invasive workflow

Since there is no app installed with automatic notifications, this is a given. Google reader is there when I need it in my browser, gone when I don't need it. I actually tend to use the compact reader gadget for iGoogle more than the main reader interface, so it really fits in well by just being a part of my homepage. The gadget presents a scrollable list of all new feed item headings, and clicking on one opens up a 'speech bubble' with the item contents (also scrollable).

Access from anywhere

Once again Google manages to come up trumps on the mobile side of things too, meeting the bonus requirement. The mobile version of Google reader is as clean and simple as all their other mobile apps, presenting the user with a list of the ten newest items and additional links to see more items, mark items read, view tagged items and star individual items. It's a great way to pass the time while waiting for a dentist appointment.

Tools are not enough

RSS can be just as addictive as normal browsing, and explicitly adding feeds to your aggregator can inadvertently 'commit' you to reading every post. This is a trap a surprising number of people fall into, and with the ease of subscribing to feeds the list of items begging for your attention can grow quickly. It's important to get comfortable with the idea of just marking everything unread and start with a clean slate. Just as you really don't have to read every single article in the newspaper or listen to every single half-hourly news broadcast on the radio, there's nothing wrong with damming the flood of digital information and starting over!

Gone fishing

Well i wasn't exactly off fishing, but we did head down to the coast for a good week long break-hence the lack me posts. We mostly shut out the outside world too-no tv, radio or internet (other than email and facebook-nat is now safely a complete geek!). I'll dump more photos on flickr next week, we disconnected the adsl at home for now and i'm not paying 3g prices to upload all those pics ;)
Treasure hunt
One great new activity we did try out this week was geocaching. It's like a treasure hunt with a gps, and when you track down the 'cache' you log your find and possibly swap an item of your own for one in the cache. I suppose it qualifies as an augmented reality game on a huge scale (essentially a planetary scale, since there are caches hidden all over the world). We found our first 3 caches this holiday and were led to some great spots in the process. Check out geocaching.com for more info.