Info Wrangling

Part 2 in Information Wrangling.
Life on the web is moving beyond representing yourself online via static profiles on places like Facebook and MySpace towards a more open and fluid online identify.

Facebook users are familiar with the News Feed, where their actions within the “walled garden” of Facebook are recorded and broadcast to your friends. The problem with this is that you lack total control. Sure, there are certain preferences you can select to determine what kind of items show up in your News Feed, but most of your items won’t be seen by all your friends, because Facebook selects what items it thinks might be interesting and displays those. Only something like 3% of your friends’ news items show up in the feed on your Facebook Home page.

Now, on Facebook, this is a good thing, because you don’t want to hear about all your friends’ sheep-throwing, poking, and quiz-taking shenanigans. Even the 3% you do see is cluttered with this crap. Wouldn’t it be better to only see the items you think are interesting from only the friends you think are interesting?

Bookmarklets

Many of the sites with which you actively interact–blogging tools, social media websites like Digg and Reddit–have bookmarklets. These are links that you can drag to your Firefox bookmark bar, and from then on whenever you want to “bookmark” a site or piece of a site, you can use the bookmarklet to post it to those sites instead of, say, your regular bookmarks folder or a bookmarking site like del.icio.us.

Let me use the Tumblr bookmark as an example, because it’s a great site with a great bookmarklet.
Tumblr is a blogging tool that lets you share things on the web and categorize them as Quotes, Conversations, Links, Photos, Text, or Video. I went to the Tumblr “goodies” page and found their bookmarklet link and dragged it to my Firefox bookmark bar. Now, let’s say I’m on a John Doe’s blog and he’s made a memorable quip in his latest post. I can click the bookmark “Share on Tumblr” in my Firefox bookmark bar, click “Share as Link” when the bookmarklet pops up, and post that link to my Tumblr site without ever leaving John Doe’s site.

What if I just want to share the memorable quip? Well, I can highlight the quip, click “Share on Tumblr”, click “Share as Quote” when the bookmarklet pops up, and it will post just that quotation to my Tumblr site, with John Doe as the source.

Pretty neat.

Lifestreams

There are probably several sites that you actively interact with that don’t have bookmarklets. For example, you might post photos on Flickr and favorite videos YouTube. Wouldn’t it be nice to aggregate all the things you share on the Web in one place, so that you could just share that one central place with your friends to keep them up to date on the things you want to share with them?

With a lifestreaming website like FriendFeed you can. Just sign up at FriendFeed and enter (for example) your Tumblr site’s URL, your YouTube username, your Digg username, and your Flickr username, and then all your updates to those sites will appear in your FriendFeed, in a similar to (but better than) Facebook’s News Feed. Now instead of sending your friends a link every time you post a photo album on Flickr or have a new favorite YouTube video, they can just see it in your FriendFeed. They can even comment on it — and lo, a conversation is born.

You can subscribe to your friends’ FriendFeeds through the FriendFeed website or through RSS (there’s even an RSS feed for the aggregate feed of all your friends Feeds) so that keeping up to date with your friends online lives is as simple as reading the news. And keeping them up to date on your own online life — which you have defined by deciding which parts to share — is as simple as doing nothing at all, because your FriendFeed updates automatically after you tell it what to keep track of.

Lately my experience on the web has gotten much richer and more efficient. I spend less time aimlessly surfing and more time reading sites that are directly related to my interests — and not just a fixed set of favorites, either; I see new ones everyday. And I can save and share this information faster and easier than ever, as well. I wrote this short guide to show you how to do the same. There are a lot of other sites and tools that can enrich and process your information inputs, but these are the starting points that will add the most to your online life and which are the least likely to ever become time wasters.

The Foundation: Feeds and Feedreaders

If you’re familiar with RSS feeds and already use a feedreader, skip to the next section.

Ever notice the little orange button that appears in the address bar of your browser sometimes? That means that the site you are currently viewing has a “feed” that you can subscribe to by using a feedreader — clicking on the orange button will subscribe. This allows you to take all the sites you read on a regular basis, subscribe to their feeds, and read them in one place. I recommend using Google Reader as your feed reader. Once you’ve subscribed to the feeds of your favorite sites, you can go to Google Reader and see which ones have new content — and you can read them right there, without leaving the page.

Google Reader also has some features that make the process of reading and organizing this content even more streamlined: you can “star” your favorite items, which will then show up in their own feed for easy revisiting. This being a Google product, you can also search your feeds. Once you’ve clicked on an item in a feed, you can use the keys ‘j’ and ‘k’ to go forward and backwards in the feed.

I recommend using the “All items” view in Google Reader, which will show all items from all your feeds in from newest to oldest. If you just start at the top and use the ‘j’ and ‘k’ keys on your keyboard, you can really burn through content that you probably used to spend a lot of time surfing through.

Google reader has a sharing feature that allows you to share items from your feeds, but it’s not fully developed yet, and there’s a better option for sharing information, which brings us to the next section.

The Killer App of Web 2.0: Social Bookmarking with del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a site that lets you bookmark sites, organize them by tags (keywords) and share them. You really shouldn’t be bookmarking sites in your browser any more. Go to del.icio.us, create an account, and make sure to install their broswer extention.

You’ll now have a “del.icio.us” menu at the top of your browser, as well as a “Tag” icon. You don’t have to be choosy in your bookmarking any more — that’s a relic of the browser bookmark days. Every time you find a cool site, bookmark it in del.ici.ous by hitting that “Tag” icon — you’ll then enter the tags you want to use to categorize that site by, and then save it. Let’s say you bookmarked this site and applied the tags “info web2.0 blog jeremy”. You could then find this site among your bookmarks by clicking any of those words in your del.icio.us account’s main page.

Here’s where it gets fun: you can add friends to your del.icio.us network and see what they’re bookmarking (don’t worry - you can choose to make any of your bookmarks private or public). Every tag you or your friends create has its own feed, so if you want to see everything I bookmark about web design, just go to http://del.icio.us/jeremyraines/webdesign and subscribe.

I really enjoy sharing information with my friends, so I’ve created a special tag just for general, cool stuff that I think my friends will like at del.icio.us/jeremyraines/linkblog. That’s the passive sharing approach, but if you join del.icio.us and let me know about it, either by adding me to your del.icio.us network or just telling me, there’s a even more targeted way. Let’s say your del.icio.us username is “johnhdoe”. If I tag a bookmark with the tag “for:johnhdoe”, it will show up in his “Links for You” section — which also has a feed!

So what’s the end benefit of all this? Well, imagine waking up in the morning and checking your feedreader. There’s all the new content from your favorite sites, all in one page that’s easy to navigate. There’s also a feed of links that your friends have tagged specifically for you, and a feed of your friend Joe’s bookmarks on “webdesign” (since that’s an interest you share and you respect Joe’s opinions on web design, you subscribed to his del.icio.us “webdesign” feed).

What’s that? You still want to surf the web and find ever newer, shinier information sources? Don’t surf; Stumble.

Designer Information: Training StumbleUpon to Bring the Web to You

For a long time, I thought StumbleUpon was just another social news site, where users vote stories up or down and the most popular are displayed most prominently. But SU is different. Instead of wasting your time just browsing popular stories, you actually train StumbleUpon to provide you with links that match your interest. How? Just install their browser extension (which you can do when you create your account) and use the thumbs up or thumbs down buttons to rate any site you visit. Everytime you do this, StumbleUpon learns about what you like and don’t like. Clicking the green “SU” button in the toolbar will take you to a random site that StumbleUpon thinks you will like. The more you rate sites with the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons, the more accurate the SU recommendations will be. It only took about 4 days before my StumbleUpon recommendations became scarily (but awesomely) accurate.

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That’s it for now. There’s a lot more you can do with these tools, and there are a lot of other tools for tailoring your information inputs. But just doing the things outlined above can really streamline and enrich your web experience. Here’s the executive summary:

• Create a Google Reader account and subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite sites.
• Use the starring feature and ‘j’ and ‘k’ hotkeys to burn through your feeds and keep track of the best content.
• Join del.icio.us and install the del.icio.us browser extension.
• Bookmark sites with del.icio.us and tag them with any keywords you think best categorize the site.
• Join StumbleUpon and install their browser extension.
• Use the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons to rate sites you like or dislike and train the recommendation engine.
• Click the green ‘SU’ button to go to a random site that fits your tastes and interests.
• Bonus: tag something “for:jeremyraines” in del.icio.us so that I know you’re a user, and we can start sharing!

Credit goes out to Ryan Holiday and his post on Collaborative Filtering, which is a great supplement to this guide.