Nick Bradbury

Share Your NewsGator/FeedDemon Clippings with ReadBurner

About a year ago, I wrote about how link blogs are attention streams.  The premise behind that post was that while attention algorithms can uncover what people are paying attention to, the articles people are sharing provide an even better way of determining their attention.

As I mentioned in that post, seeing what other people are paying attention to has brought me a ton of relevant articles that I would otherwise have missed.  The folks at ReadBurner had a similar idea, and they built a great service which displays the most frequently shared content across the web.

In the past, ReadBurner has relied solely on Google Reader and Netvibes for its shared content.  That just changed.

NewsGator has partnered with ReadBurner, and as a result, it’s now dead simple to share your NewsGator clippings with ReadBurner.  This means that FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator Inbox and NewsGator Online customers can easily share their clipped articles with ReadBurner.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. If you haven’t done so already, share one of your clippings folders as an RSS feed (this screencast explains how this is done in FeedDemon).
2. Copy the URL of the shared clippings feed to the clipboard (in FeedDemon, you can do this by clicking the “Copy” link from the clippings properties).
3. Browse to http://www.readburner.com/
4. Go to the "Add Feed" option on the right hand side of the ReadBurner menu bar, then select “NewsGator Clippings” and enter the URL of your clipping feed.

Once you’ve done that, your clippings feed will be shared with ReadBurner.

Side note: Keep in mind that you can share any web page with FeedDemon – you’re not limited to sharing items from RSS feeds, but can instead share any article you find on the web.

George Carlin is Up in Heaven Now

Damn.  Last year we lost Kurt Vonnegut, and now we've lost George Carlin.  Two darkly hilarious guys who despite their cynicism still made us (or, at least, me) laugh out loud at the human condition.

I never subscribed to the growing bitterness that Carlin showed as he aged (I agree with Terry Heaton that his best work was earlier in his career), but I still loved his insightful, biting humor.  You can count me among those who will miss the dirty old bastard.

PS: Check out Mashable’s video obituary for a smattering of Carlin’s humor.

Flippin' Dummy

When I was a kid, one of my weirder hobbies was ventriloquism.  I don’t remember why I got started, but I do remember that some people thought I was pretty good at it.  In the short time that I was a ventriloquist, I won several local talent shows, and one time I even got to appear on live TV.

The TV appearance started off badly.

The crew sat me and my dummy in a chair in front of the camera, and soon afterwards the cameraman made some sort of hand motion at me.  I had no idea what the hand motion meant, so I just sat there, assuming it was nothing I needed to be concerned about.

Then he did it again, and this time it was clear that I was supposed to do something.  But I didn’t know what to do, so I simply looked at the camera and said, “what?”  He did it one more time, this time more forcefully, and again I said, “what?”

The cameraman, obviously displeased that I didn’t grok his secret language, leaned forward and said, “YOU’RE ON!”

Oops.  I’d just screwed up on live TV.

I nervously launched into my routine, which began with a joke involving three pieces of candy.  I was supposed to hold up three fingers when I mentioned the candy, but I was so distressed with how things started that I forgot to hold up two of them.

The one finger I held up was the middle one.

In slow motion, my eyes moved to the upheld digit, and a look of sheer terror crossed my face when I realized that I’d flipped off everyone watching.  Doing that as an adult would've been bad enough, but it’s infinitely worse doing it as a kid.  The middle finger held a mystical quality back then, and raising it - even accidentally - was a very bad thing.  I was pretty sure that raising it on live TV would mean a lump of coal come Christmas morning, and possibly even eternal torment in the place with the guy with the horns.

To my surprise, nobody mentioned my one-fingered salute after the show, and I never got in trouble for it.  But somewhere deep down, in the same place I store my guilt over setting off those stink bombs in third grade, I just know I'll eventually pay for flipping off my home town.

Techmeme Search Update

Techmeme now supports returning search results as RSS, so I’ve updated FeedDemon’s Techmeme search definition to enable quickly subscribing to Techmeme search feeds in FeedDemon.

Here's how to use it:

1. View this page in FeedDemon, then click here to install the updated Techmeme search definition
2. Click the Subscribe button, then type the keyword you wish to search for and click Next
3. Select "Techmeme" from the list of search engines and click Next
4. Select the folder you want to place this feed in, then click Next
5. Click Finish