I alluded to this in my lead sentence yesterday “Kudos to Google Search Alerts.” Search alerts come close to providing syndication by topic, but it still takes me more mental assembling than I would like. Instead of this getting an email with notification for the latest updates in a query (‘Informal Learning’ in yesterday’s example), I’d prefer to access something in my personal learning environment that has my major topics of interest and I then go in there for an organized, highly visual, view of the unfolding conversation from various sources.
I suppose a start would be if my feedreader (and everyone’s blogs that I follow) supported subscription by category and then those were assembled into one “channel”. Alas, this would then still miss out the “here is somebody just entering the conversation who you aren’t subscribed to” and also wouldn’t explicitly deal with the link or comment relationships. However, this would at least keep a more historical thread than a stack of emails with alerts.
What I’m finding now is that I’ll see something in an alert and then have the moment of angst (when realizing it is from someone I already follow) thinking “do I jump over to my feedreader and consume there as I might want to flag for follow-up, plus just flipping the ‘read’ bit, or do I just click on the link in the email alert?” And, feeling either choice isn’t fully what I really want anyway.
The Google Reader functionality described by Jay Cross earlier this week seems to be a part of what I’m reaching for — channels more than individual subscriptions. As does Yahoo! Pipes that I haven’t yet fully gotten my head around. I hope NOT part of this is the periodic blog versus discussionboard debate (for example Paul Fender’s post in December and Tony Karrer’s summary in January) as I want to not make that choice, rather an interface that brings together both when they are on the same topic.
Bottom line: I’m reaching for better ways to follow particular topics, contrast to only particular people or locations.
Ideas?
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