FeedDemon - first impressions

Having used RSS Bandit for over 2 years I recently became a Google Reader convert, largely because of the ability to read it from any machine. What I missed was the offline stuff and I still needed to keep Bandit for internal feeds. So with the announcement from Newsgator that FeedDemon is now free I thought I'd give that a go.

I like the interface, it's clean. I kind of miss the three pane view of Bandit (UPDATE: I discovered you can have a three pane view in FeedDemon too), but then there's more space for the posts. What I really miss is the posts being marked read as I browse down the newspaper view (both Google Reader and Bandit have this feature), I have to keep remembering to mark the items read.

The alert message is attractively implemented and I think the fade is better than the toaster animation of Bandit that jerks my screen when my machine is busy. I like the ability to get alerts syndicated every 30 mins rather than when they arrive.

One of the killer features that kept me on Google Reader is sharing feeds I find interesting. These pipe straight into the RSS Reader widget on my blog. I can do the same with Newsgator online, and now I can do it through FeedDemon. I created a few categories for clippings - architecture, social software and notable; but what do I pipe into my blog. I can use Yahoo Pipes to join the feeds. I like that I can clip web URLs and not just feed items.

I don't like the fact that the toolbar for each feed (mark read, flag, delete, clip etc) is at the top of the feed. I only know what I want to do once I've read it! Doh!

In all other respects there doesn't seem to be much to choose between the three. I'll shun Google Reader for two weeks and see how I get on.

Is IBM snubbing Second Life

I didn't pay much attention to the use of Second Life at Lotusphere 2007, so I don't really know what sort of reception it had. However, I thought this year might be good time to give it a go, as much to have the SL experience as to learn something about the Lotus products.

However, as far as I can see there is no SL Lotusphere 2008, which means that IBM didn't get enough from 2007 to make it worth their while this year. What's more interesting is the complete silence on the matter. I've done a little digging to see if anyone is talking about it and nothing!

What does this say about using Second Life for business? Something to avoid?

Update: Someone pointed out this post, so it appears that IBM was doing stuff in SL after all, but with no fuss. Odd!

iriver's ebook reader

The device looks sweet. What service will they have to back it up? Where's the iTunes to this? What's the deal with publishers going to allow them to do?

iriver's E-BOOk reader - Engadget

iriver's E-BOOk reader

Enterprise Wiki

We're starting to take a look at Wikis again in EY. I first looked at wikis about 2 years ago when I set up a MediaWiki based wiki on an experimental server. I charted some of that course on an old blog. My conclusion from that time was that Confluence offered the best enterprise solution - reference my post Mediawiki is not for enterprise (to which Ross Nelson added some interesting comments on SharePoint2007); also At-Last-ian in this blog.

Although we have several repositories of information/knowledge that resemble, in varying degrees, a wiki it appears that the time of the true wiki (what is that?) may finally have arrived. The challenge is developing a solution that fits both with our current and future architecture (Enterprise Architecture) and our strategy around Knowledge Management.

I'll post more as we go.

UPDATE: The reason I ask what a true wiki is, is that so many solutions try to cover a large functional part of the social software domain rather than just being a wiki. Look at this quote from the Blogtronix web site (I pick this as an example, not to single this company out, even Confluence looks vulnerable to this charge):

BlogtronixEnterprise is the first service to offer secure Enterprise 2.0 blogs with wikis, RSS, document management, CMS, communities and corporate social networking built on the Microsoft .NET 2.0 architecture.

I don't want another DM solution, I already have a CMS and blog platform, so how can I seriously consider implementing this.

Then there's another class of solutions that are available online only. I don't think EY is ready to trust another organisation with its data in the way that solutions such as CentralDeskop and PBWiki require.

Prediction markets

It's always interesting to read what other organisations are doing, and Google seems to do this sort of thing a lot and well.

Google’s Lunchtime Betting Game - New York Times

In the last two and a half years, 1,463 employees have made wagers with play money (Goobles, as in rubles) on questions like: will Google open a Russia office? will Apple release an Intel-based Mac? how many users will Gmail have at the end of the quarter?

Found here - The Obvious?: Prediction markets