Who needs Ani-nouto when you can harvest the power of Web 2.0 and make your own? It’s like a salad bar.
Google Reader always seemed like something that require extra coaxing to make this idea come true. Honestly a lot of Google feels like something stuck in eternal Beta land that while you know, deep inside your soul, you can do all kinds of awesome things, you just don’t know what that would look like.
Just to bring up the love-to-hate-but-lovely Russian Author again: yes, it’s like hot-linking. But it’s hot-linking of love. And you can’t really share the love with a local feed reader like you could with Google Reader or some equivalent. The cloud is warm and nice (so far), hop on in. But I suppose it’s just a matter of preference.
Now, Google Reader is definitely imperfect; one problem is just how the heck do we aggregate feed of feeds in a meaningful way? Google doesn’t really push it either when the potential for this is huge. A big problem is also in the implementation. It’s not obvious, and the difference between a tag and a folder is not clear at a glance. And you need to do both to take full advantage of it. For example, if you’re Hinano and you want to share with us a bunch of stuff relevant to you but you know some of your friends don’t care for the local news and some of your friends don’t care for Asian MMORPGs that are kawaii desu, then you could actually filter your shared posts by tags, and share them as separate feeds. If you got the time to play with it, it’s quite powerful.
There are other problems–unless it’s a feed, you can’t really index it via Google Reader. Bloggers still need things like Animenano to discover new blogs–new as in age, not as in “I haven’t seen this before.” And it can turn into an expertise-indexed feed much like the present crop like 9 Rules. But at least this gives the users the control over whose feeds to follow, out of those of us who bother to click and tag our Google Reader shared posts.
The more important and the problem everyone runs into first–you can’t re: on a shared post. And that’s fair–when you see something interesting coming through you RSS reader, it isn’t like you can reply through it. To reply, you have to visit the post directly and post in the comments, or link to it via a reply blog post or the equivalent (like a Google Reader shared entry note). But Google Reader doesn’t allow people to reply to a shared entry’s note by sharing it again. At least this way no one can say “why are your comments locked” because, dur, you aren’t suppose to do that!
Still, I’m all for share-and-share-alike over indexes. I’m not sure if it provides any tangible advantages for readers and bloggers but it’s one more tool to add to your arsenal in dealing with the internet. It’s something relatively unique but at the same time it feels like it can replace something some of us are already doing. Maybe it’ll add to your routine, or maybe it will simplify it. I don’t know.
But at least use a reader. Srsly. Can be anything. I’d love to find alternatives to Google Reader that has this capability.
Lastly, this is my public anime feed. I guess I’m going to make an effort to share crap. :3
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