E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Vienna – The K.I.S.S. Approach to RSS / Atom Feed Reading for the Mac

Tags: Mac, MacBook Pro, MBP, Apple, KISS, RSS, Atom, Feed Readers, Windows, Omea Pro, Mac, endo, NetNewsWire, Shrook, Google Reader, NewsFire, BlogBridge, Simplicity, Ease of Use, Productivity Tools, Vienna, Freeware, Knowledge Snippets, Knowledge Tools, Information Tools

One of the things that I have been very conscious about this time around over the last few weeks, while I am putting things together to make my MacBook Pro my default work machine vs. the Windows notebook, is to actually apply the K.I.S.S. principle. Something that perhaps I should have done a long while ago, but that I didn’t. This time though I am learning my lessons and throughout the entire process I am keeping up with that minimalist flavour to get the most out of the Mac without having to clutter it right away.

And when I put myself to the test I knew that things were not going to be easy in certain areas. One of those being using a competent RSS / Atom feed reader client, one of the various essential tools that I couldn’t live without nowadays. On my Windows machine, and over the course of the last few years, I have probably tried out for a number of weeks / months several RSS / Atom feed clients. Most of the times running concurrently to test them out and see which one would make the winner.

For the last few months, this winner has been, still is, Omea Pro. To me, it is one of the best feed readers for offline reading available out there! No doubt! I would recommend it any time to anyone who may want to get things going. Still do. However, on the Mac things are different.

To start with, there is no Omea Pro for the Mac, so I had to dig in quite a bit and try out a number of different feed reader clients that I have been getting through recommendations, performing several searches or just by bumping into their Web sites and decided to try them, just in case. That is how I got to try out endo, NetNewsWire, Shrook, Google Reader, NewsFire, BlogBridge, etc. etc. The list goes on and on and on.

Overall, most of those readers do a pretty decent job. However, none of them cut it for me for one reason or another. Surprisingly for something so relatively simple as basic functionality. Perhaps at some point in time I will detail why each of those feed readers fails to meet my needs at the moment. And this is where Vienna comes into place, because after having played around with for a few days I can share with you all that it has now become my default RSS / Atom feed reader for the Mac.

You may be wondering why, right? Well, because apart from being freeware, which we all know is an attractive option for us all on its own, it also applies the K.I.S.S. principle very nicely: subscribe to the feed, get the subscriptions / articles, read them, flag those you want to keep and delete the others. Believe or not, this is where most of the other feed readers I have tried failed to come up front with what I would call some key basic functionality: delete what you don’t need and keep what you just need.

It may be pretty simple, but you would be amazed as to how many of those readers would not allow you to delete items you are not interested in. You would expect that the tools would allow you to keep things clean and tidy, but alas, it is not going to happen with most of them. On the other hand, Vienna does this job beautifully with just a single key stroke, which for filtering and quickly scanning through feeds is just … ideal!

So much so that I have been using it for the last week or so and it has become one of those tools I cannot live without in my Mac. Just brilliant, how can such a piece of simple software can get the job done without the hassle, the clutter, or complicated features that most of us are not going to make use of. Yes, I knew I was right when I decided to go minimalist on the Mac, and so far the software I have put together to be as productive as ever, if not more, has been working out like a charm. Vienna has got all you ever wanted to have in an RSS / Atom feed reader client and before you pay some $$$ for some piece of software I can certainly recommend you give it a try. I bet you will stop your search there. Just like I did. For good.

Vienna, simplicity at its best on the Mac!

“Virtual Worlds for Corporate Collaboration” by Roo Reynolds

Tags: IBM, Roo Reynolds, Meta Evangelist, Virtual Worlds, 3D Internet, Second Life, Metaverse, Serious Virtual Worlds 2007, Coventry, Dennis Howlett, Flickr, Last.fm, IBM Rocks, Darren Shaw, Daz, Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Capital, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities

During the course of yesterday, one of my fellow IBM colleagues, and very good friend, Roo Reynolds (One of the two Meta-evangelists at IBM), shared over at his blog a very interesting post, where he has gone ahead and shared the slide deck, with audio, that he has put together for the Serious Virtual Worlds 2007 conference event in Conventry, UK.

The title of his pitch was Virtual worlds for corporate collaboration and you would be able to read a whole lot more about it over at his above mentioned blog post. Dennis Howlett also makes a good mention of the slide deck. And I thought I would go ahead and share a link to it over here as well, if you would want to find out some more what social computing is all about and how it is impacting, big time!, the corporate world. For good.

In that presentation you would be able to see how Roo gets to mention a number of different Web 2.0 offerings and the kind of impact they are having in the business world, and, much more importantly, how you can get the most out of it by helping others embrace the tools you get to use on a daily basis. To start with, his entire presentation is reusing pictures from Flickr (Not a single bullet throughout!) bringing strong messages as to why social networking matters for our daily interactions as knowledge workers.

He gets to talk as well about Last.fm (A social software offering I am just about to re-acquaint myself with, specially now that I am starting to use the Mac much more heavily), IBM Rocks (A superb Last.fm mashup put together by one other colleague, Darren Shaw, a.k.a. Daz), Twitter  Facebook (Of course!), as perhaps some of the most powerful social software tools there are out there to help improve your social capital skills, by getting to know what people are busy with, at the same time you get to nurture the different social interactions, something that I have been mentioning over here as well, as one of the crucial aspects for a healthy collaborative experience within the workplace.

From there onwards Roo gets to detail some more on the stuff he is doing around the virtual worlds space, including Second Life and Metaverse, IBM’s own internal dive into the 3D Internet. What is great about the whole presentation from Roo is that he gets to detail how how he has adopted a number of different social computing tools to help him work smarter, not necessarily harder, and connect with those folks who he would closely collaborate very often. And he uses social software to get the job done. Just brilliant!

The Slideshare presentation, which, like I said, contains audio as well, lasts for about 29 minutes and I can certainly recommend it to everyone who is new to the subject of social software and social computing as a very nice intro to the overall topic of how social networking tools are changing the corporate landscape. And for all of the good reasons.

Thus if you haven’t checked it out just yet, by all means, go and have a look into the audio and slide deck or just start watching it through from the embedded link I have included below:

(Great show, Roo! Thanks much for sharing it with us and for showing us that social software is not as difficult, nor complicated, as some people seem to think!)