i've been thinking and playing with feevy for the last few days and am trying to answer what should be an easy question: what is feevy?
1. blogroll: at the most simple level, feevy replaces the blogroll. feevy is a list, a public list, of some of the blogs i read.
2. RSS reader: feevy serves as a RSS reader. (what's RSS? read lee lefever's "RSS in plain english.") since i've had feevy, i have stopped using bloglines.
3. visiting voices: so much of blogging is narcissistic - here are my daily observations! here, via flickr, are my daily photos! here, via last.fm, are my favorite songs! here, via library thing, are the books i read! through feevy, other bloggers, their words, and their pictures become part of my blog. to a certain extent, the me! me! evolves, a little, to me! me! we! we! we! and that's cool. i really like how, with feevy's help, a significant portion of the words on this page are written by people who are not me.
4. blog portal: feevy is not exactly a blog portal but it makes creating blog portals very, very easy. david has been pointing many bloggers to one example - parlamentarios.info - a portal of spanish representatives who have blogs. excellent! someone interested in the US 08 presidential race should create some similar blog roll with democratic candidates on the left and republican candidates on the right - and with easy scalability to allow for alternatives to the two party machine. with about an hour of work, you would have an easy way to track blog posts from 2008 US prez blogs.
there's more. there's much more deeper considerations like the way feevy changes blog reading. it's one thing to read blogs from bookmarks, it's another thing to read blogs via RSS. well, it's yet another thing to read blogs via feevy. there's deeper considerations like the way feevy changes our tracking of blog visitors. anyone who has used feevy plus some kind of tracker like statcounter knows exactly what i am talking about. and then there's deeper cultural considerations like the fact that feevy was developed not in silicon valley but in spain and that its original base community is spanish speaking.
but it's a long weekend and i'm in santa cruz so family and fun calls.
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11 comments:
Yes... I use to say that blog technologies are made for individuals... but we -almost people grew inside latin cultures- dont know how to be individuals, we are "persons". And the difference makes a world. A person is not just an individual is an individual and a set of relations, reflexes of the others, complicities... if an individual is a tree, a person is a piece of an ivy, when the ivy gets feed every part of the ivy feels better. The one is multiplied through the net.
Feevy wants to be a tool for give the bloggers the choice feeling part of the great ivy or almost make theirs emerge and discover by theirselves that there's no kind of zero-sum game in blogosphere as some blogstars and ranking systems seems to think or even promote.
Feevy is blogsphere from the point of view of a peasant mediterranean culture: there is no closed tribe because there is not only a feevy for you and your friends. Each one has hers/his, and anyone has subtile differences, new faces, new connections with other worlds...
Its difficult to explain, and my English is horrible... but what I wanted to thank is mainly this sensitivity you have for understanding the subtext under the tool. No architecture of information is innocent, neither feevy. But feevy is almost well intentioned :)
I've been thinking about some of these things too since using feevy to make a blog portal page on my blog. I like the sidebar thing you've got going on, but think it runs down down down too far, and you lose your archives and whatnot way below it. I think it's better as a sidebar when there are fewer blogs in it.
I've also had more incoming links to me from you since you installed the feevy, so it's definitely driving traffic in different directions (unless you're just clicking me like crazy!). And yeah, the way it makes things more social and multivoiced is very cool.
I was thinking also that to the extent it replaces blogrolls, the whole technorati incoming link thing gets disrupted since your feevy link doesn't count.
And final thought -- though I could see it replacing bloglines, I read too many blogs that update many times a day, plus feevy doesn't give you the full post, so I don't see it as a replacement for my use of Bloglines.
Definitely a wonderful program.
This sounds fascinating. It would be useful to some of us at USF if those of you who are conversant in such new developments might on a regular basis meet with those of us who would like to be for some short hands-on demonstrations. Might such be institutionalized?
Nancy,
About Technorati you are absolutly right. Technorati is the tree... and we didnt want to feed the tree :-) so we decided not to interfere feevy in tr ranks or accounts...
About the size and number of blogs in your feevy, there is an option in your "manage" page for just showing the N more updated. Probably you will have not the same blogs that in your reader... but i mean that having 40 of 50 blogs in your feevy dont have to make unendible the post page :-)
Because, as feevy reorders blogs putting on top the most updated, the user dont need to look for who is updated, just at the first look they will see what updatings are in your network
nancy and david - yes, my feevy sidebar was waaaaaay too long. i just changed it to include only the most recent 15 entries.
david - i hope feevy will add new ways for users to easily customize their feevies. so far, changing my feevy from all entries to the last 15 was extremely easy.
michael: YES.
i'd love to talk to you more about this. when i was in grad school and when i was at UW, i was part of digital media working groups. we'd basically read a shared text and discuss it. but i'm much more interested in what you are talking about: sort of informal gatherings for hands-on demos about new media. it would be great if a) it included folks from around campus and b) it included students.
let's talk.
Yes! I promise it!
Today I met Javier (the interaction designer of feevy) and we have started to design a "white feevy"... I hope we will have it during next weeks.
And Fernando (the graphic designer of the feevy blog) will prepare today or tomorrow a little "how to" on "liquid feevy" personalization.
And after that... Coloured feevys coming soon!
David,
I have a feevy experience to share with you! Two days ago I wrote about PostSecret. I recently found the blog after receiving the first PostSecret book as a gift. THEN, today I was looking at your feevy, and to my pleasant surprise, I saw that a blog you have listed, The Bicycle Diary, wrote a post about PostSecret too! I probably never would have found his/her post and read it if it weren't for feevy! It was so great to read another's perspective and experiences with PostSecret. Needless to say, I am really enjoying feevy! Yay!
Brianna
brianna - excellent!
the bicycle diary is written by a USF student named hunter who is doing a blog-related indepedent study this semester. between you and him, i am now convinced that i gotta check out postsecret!
i love how feevy helped make this connection.
My beautiful feevy can do no wrong. Well, that's not exactly true. David's feevy presents headlines crisply and elegantly. But over at Darwin's Cat they are odd and hard to read. I assume that the feevy code interacts with different templates in different ways and that mine is one of the blogger templates with which the mix is unstable???? I'll ask DS next time I see him stridely purposefully through the halls of UC 5th.
michael - greetings from boston!
i saw your feevy and, um, you are right - the design looks strange. you either are a genius hacker or you single-handedly broke feevy. let's talk about this when i get back.
but in the meantime, may i suggest going with the "classic" feevy - that is, the black one, not the liquid version. i think classic feevy has the least amount of design bugs. but david knows better - so i will click this link a few times so that david will magically appear and help us with your feevy.
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