Google Reader: the first social newsreader?

by Rob Cottingham | Jul 20, 2009 | Social Signal

Think of a social network, and you probably think of something like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or Bebo. (If you’re especially old-school, or Brazilian, you might think of Orkut.)

Either way, you’re thinking of a capital-S, capital-N Social Network. You join it as a social network, probably with the initial intention of connecting with people.

But some social networks can kind of sneak up on you. You think you’re there to do something purely solitary, but then something happens…

If you’re using Google Reader, you may already know what I’m talking about. Our tool of choice for following blogs and a wide range of news feeds, Reader has been part of the Google family of web applications for nearly four years now. Features have cropped up here and there to make it a little more conversational over the years – most notably the “Share” feature that lets you select individual items for exposure to your audience – but none of them has been revolutionary.

Now, however, things are changing. A series of new Google Reader features is turning a fundamentally personal, individual pursuit into something potentially much more social.

Google Reader now lets you follow other people, subscribing to their shared items, in much the same way you might “friend” someone on Facebook. (Discovering them isn’t nearly as easy as it should be; I’ll show you how in a video at the end of this post.) You can control who can see the items you share as well as who can comment on them.

And, borrowing a leaf from both Friendfeed and now Facebook, you can “like” an item… and, more crucially, who else likes it. That’s some heavy-gauge social wiring: it makes discovering people who share your interests and tastes a lot easier.

This will look pretty familiar to anyone who’s poked around media-sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook. But on a newsreader, this is awfully interesting. And given what newsreaders do – track and aggregate newsfeeds, which are already the lifeblood of the social web – it’s a kind of meta-social layer: being social about social content.

“Interesting”, though, doesn’t mean they’ve reached the destination. Google Reader’s social features still have an embryonic feel to them – possibly because they’re waiting to see exactly what users do with them. I have three one pretty important item on my wishlist before I’m ready to start crowing that the revolution’s here:

• More control over groups and what they can see. Right now, access to comments and shared itsems is like an on/off switch: you’re either in or you’re out. But I’d like to share different things with different groups of people, and have discrete (and often discreet) conversations with each. Let me invite a client’s workgroup to a conversation about a blog post on one of their key issues over here, and my circle of Vancouver Mexican cooking fans to a discussion of fusion mole sauces over here. (Disclaimer: For illustration purposes only. I can’t cook a mole sauce to save my life.)
• Tags, keywords, labels, folders – whatever Google wants to call them, I want them. Google’s labelling feature in Gmail would be at least as handy in Reader, which already allows you to assign feeds to folders (which are effectively the same feature). Let me label blog posts as funny, smart, moving, inspiring; let me flag them for commenting, a follow-up on my own blog, or discussion with my team; let me mix and match and slice and dice to my heart’s content.
• Feed me. While Google’s busy creating those groups and labels, let’s have each of them throw a news feed, like Reader does for shared items.

Turns out Reader already has the last two features… although you need to do a little digging to really use them. See the comments below – and thanks, Boris!

In the meantime, if you’re looking to get started with those new social features, here’s a little help: the trick to searching for profiles from within Google Reader.

How to find People Search in Google Reader from Rob Cottingham on Vimeo.

Somewhere, a zombie is drooling

by Rob Cottingham | Jul 20, 2009 | Social Signal

(one person with an enormous head to another) What a coincidence – I’m a thought leader too!

Social media can give new life to old communication vehicles

by Rob Cottingham | Jul 17, 2009 | Social Signal

For organizations with a strong policy orientation, turning out documents and reports is a pretty integral part of their existence. And often those reports are valuable contributions to the dialogue.

The problem is getting people to read and, even more helpfully, act on them – especially people whose engagement would broaden the conversation. Oh, the reports get to a slowly shrinking circle of the usual suspects: stakeholders, colleagues, competitors, opponents, policy wonks. Maybe they even get a brief flicker of news coverage. But breaking out of that circle is tough, especially if the organization’s voice is, like most, and I say this with love… just a little on the staid side.

That’s why I’m always happy to see an organization let its hair down. And get some green streaks put in for fun.

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society has just released its 2009 Parks Day Report, an annual state-of-the-nation’s-parks roundup. (Disclosure: CPAWS and Mountain Equipment Coop are the organizations behind The Big Wild, an online community we’ve worked on. And we offered some advice to CPAWS on hiring the caribou you’re about to read about.)

The subtitle, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” cues you in to the mix of good news (they protected the Nahanni!) and pretty alarming warnings (like the intense pressure from all sides on tiny, precious Point Pelee National Park).

But CPAWS isn’t content to turn out yet another document. They supplement it with a neat use of Google Maps that gives you an at-a-glance impression of what’s going on in the Canadian wilderness protection scene.

Each item on the map links to more information; several link to campaigns. Even if web site visitors never open the report itself, they’ll have learned a little about the issues affecting Canadian parks and had an opportunity to take action.

And they’ll learn even more if they watch the accompanying video. Enter the aforementioned caribou.

CPAWS’ campaign to protect Canadian boreal forest is represented by a talking woodland caribou by the name of Bou. And in this video, Bou presents the report’s highlights and low points:

You might conclude that the video is pitched someone other than the usual report-reading crowd, and I think you’d be right. I also think there’s a pretty decent chance that most of this video’s viewers will never download that 14-page PDF, let alone read it thoroughly (although it’s well worth the read, and comes across more as a lively magazine photo spread than a dry policy piece).

But they’ll know about logging in Algonquin Park, federal inaction on marine parks and the Quebec government’s inaction on Mont Orfort Park. And they’ll have a chance to respond on those issues – through text comments, a video commentary of their own or by taking action on the CPAWS site. Which is a lot more than most paper reports can ever offer.