Today I was excited to speak at BoCo, a great new conference developed by the Boulder Tech Community, especially Andrew Hyde. Rick Turoczy was there, among other awesome Portlanders, San Fransiscans, and Boulderites. It  was a sunny day and there were beautiful mountains all around. The morning sessions dealt with food and music and were very wonderful to listen to.

I spoke about Cyborg Anthropology, which is the study of human computer interactions and how technology affects the way in which we communicate with one another.

We Are All Cyborgs

When you read this, you are acting as a low-tech cyborg, because you are using a computer to view text that I have written. My writing is stored here in my website, part of my actor network of external technological devices that, when taken together, comprise my technosocial self. As cavemen, we began skipping evolution by crafting spears instead of growing teeth. We began making hammers as extensions of our fists.

My social self is part technology and part human. My technological self does a lot of networking for me through my social networking profiles and my Google search results. So do yours (if you have them). My technosocial avatar of a self networks for me when I’m not there.

Distributed Social Selves

Each piece of my distributed social identity leaves a geological trail of past self that my present self can interact with. These all comprise my future self, which your future self or selves will most undoubtedly interact with. The online optimization of self, when coupled with the analog optimization of self (i.e. real-life networking, person to person) is the creation of a stable identity that is uniformly distributed and presented all over the web.

Technology Resembles Magic

Technology is almost magical. Like the scrying pool of the past (or of fantasy novels), the iPhone or computer monitor allows us to view anything anywhere in the world through YouTube and Twitter, News sites and Facebook. We can summon up an image with a simple spell (a simple text entry into Google search or Twitter search) and we can extend our speech and ears across very large distances in seconds with the mere touch of a button.

Technology Gives Us Superpowers

Technology, when used well, gives us amazing superpowers. We are like gods, until we forget to charge our batteries. We are like gods, until we forget to upgrade our devices to the most recent operating system or device number. Our external prosthetic devices turn against us when they get old. Our old clothes go out of style. Our brick phones make us get laughed at in the streets.

From Physical Transportation to Mental Transportation

In the same way that cars transport our physical bodies, computers and cell phones transport our spiritual bodies. Don’t like the word spiritual? Use the word mind instead. We’re increasingly entering into a world of mental machines - mental transportation devices. These devices transmit our thoughts invisibly to others. They are taking up smaller amounts of space, until vehicles, who require increasingly large highways.

Mental Traffic Jams

We have traffic jams, too. Mental traffic jams. Jams on Twitter. Twitter fails. Rush hour around important events and deaths and wars and crises. We can now have multiple views of the same event.

Telephonic Schizophrenia

When telephone technology first came out, people felt it was crazy. The idea of going into a room and speaking into a machine sounded schizophrenic.

More

There is more: enough to fill up a hour and a half speech, but I’ll leave that to you to see the next time I speak. Until then, you can follow me on Twitter @caseorganic, or you can check out BoCo.

I organized a session at this weekend’s WhereCamp Portland called ‘Geolocal AutoScribing RSS Feeds’, and began the session by drawing a big grid of Portland’s quadrants on the white board. I labeled them NW NE SW SE, and then began drawing circles all over the place. The circles represented ranges of ‘hearing’ that a mobile device might have to RSS feeds. I pointed out that as one progresses from street to street, quadrant to quadrant, one’s phone should understand this and automatically subscribe the user to the geolocal RSS feed for that area. That way, data can be very relevant and contextual to the area.

I explained this in the concept of a video game. In order to optimize load time, the content of a video game loads relative to the user. Data streams load from nearby places into the user’s dashboard and notification bar, or ‘feed reader’. There are two types of feeds — the global, overarching data streams of the game, and the feeds that deal with timely events. James Whitley of GoLifeMobile described

While I don’t have the time to transcribe the entirety of the session right now, I will say that we talked about a number of things. We discussed some of the apps that currently exist for Geolocal RSS, namely:

1. Geourl
2. Everyblock
3. Fireeagle
4. Icecondor
6. Britekite
7. Twitter
8. Palatial
9. Shizzow
10. Meta Carta
11. Carrot 2

People, Places, Things

Paige Saez pointed out some of the philosophical ramifications of place, and how the concept of place is constructed. I pointed out that a person can be a place, or an event can be a place. This moved into a discussion of the shift from responding to place (as traditional place is often immobile and very contextual) — to making a place (due to the light modernity and the ease with which place can be arranged) — to people as place (people as an experience, place as an experience, people making place).

We all discussed various use cases of why/where/when/how Geolocal AutoSubscribing RSS Feeds might come in handy. I noticed that the use cases presented by the group members were strongly tied to cultural, beliefs and experience. I think a point was made concerning the structure of systems. I pointed out that a Go board is empty when starting a game, and as the game is played, the Go board allows some structure while allowing many permutations of forms and ecosystems.

Twitter functions in a similar manner. The system allows short turns, similar to Go, and each of these turns contributes to the overall shape of the game. Twitter allows people to be treated as place, and allows people to visit segments of a place, or turn off that place from entering into the environment of experience.

Use Cases

“I’m new to this city/here on business, and I have three hours to do something cool — what is around me that is useful/interesting? What people share my interests?”

“I don’t know this area and need good food.”

People become a location when they’re tied to experience.

Whether you don’t know the area or you do, it can be useful to be able to quickly understand the social/placial cartography of the area.

I forgot who it was, but the system was joking labeled, “a gateway drug that gets you to engage with your neighborhood. That gets you to the people who can make the best recommendations”.

Theses are Geographical conversations. They’re also technosocial conversations, because it’s not the website that has the data, it is the people in the area. But to get to those people easily in a short period of time can often be helped along by technology, RSS, geolocal decides. So, in a way, content is people and people are content.

Community Custodians

Then the discussion went back to video games such as ‘Ultima Online’. We discussed the roles of ‘Gatekeepers’, or ‘Custodians’ that help people into a foreign online territory. Custodians continue to preform these orientation tasks is because it gives them a tremendous sense of use value.

Robots have been programmed to act as gatekeepers to new techniques and experiences, but many have failed (See Microsoft’s “Looks like you’re writing an E-mail - can I help you?” Wizard). It can be noted that humans are matchmakers, not machines. However, a machine can help one human reach another by breaking the boundaries of the distance and time that it takes for those two humans to travel to see each other in the real world. For instance, there is Yahoo! Answers that uses real people to connect Answers to Questions, and Wikipedia for collaborative knowledge creation. Places facilitate conversation, but they must be inhabited by meaning first.

We talked about the semantic web next, and ubiquitous technologies that ID markers and tags might bring. We talked about subscribing to tags instead of feeds (some blogs do this already as a more dynamic/fluid replacement for categories).

Planned Serendipity

We talked about a new kind of serendipity, in which fortuitious and existing social connections and meetup in locations that were predefined as as “excellent” could happen, without all of the hassle of being introduced to a new location. But some objected to this new kind of social relationship. Paige pointed out that it this new kind of serendipity would reduce the organic excitement that unplanned serendipity provides.

To which I pointed out that the modern person is disassociated from a peer group or community, and generally cannot talk to one another on the street. In this way, technology could recolonize the public space with actual social connections instead of shells. Paige, of course, had an excellent point. It is very exciting to come into serendipitous contact with others, but how can one tell if that serendipitous contact will be enjoyable? It is often difficult for a person to walk up to another and ask to hang out. It is sometimes easier with the computer as an icebreaker. When personal music devices isolate people from each other on the street, and laptops isolate one from another at coffee shops, and people cannot look in each other’s eyes on the street, or give another a high five, perhaps it is a clue that we have become afraid of the company of one another, or shy, or disassociated.

Every day we walk down the street or ride bikes or drive cars, and though we are doing the same thing, we cannot speak to each other while doing this. Twitter has allowed a certain type of backchannel to traditional modes of communication that allows for many to communicate with each other on a backchannel while doing the same thing at the same time.

Four Dimensional Search Methods

We talked about fourth dimensional search as a form of data on top of the traditional data flow of real life. Technically, geolocal autosubscribing RSS feeds could be considered forth dimensional data.

Geolocal feeds would allow one to gain information, getting an accumulation of information. doesn’t eclipse the actual experience of getting that information.

Someone blurted out the title of a “New Tech, New Ties”. How cell phone information is affecting us.
The landscape has scaled but we haven’t. Suburbia is so decompressed that huge amount of non-space connect it. These non-spaces take the form of highways and airports and airplanes and bus stops. The inner city — the walking spaces — have many landscapes to them. Stores have microlandscapes everywhere. Food courts compress low-resolution versions of the experiences of other countries into their culinary offerings. Already we have a surplus of landscapes - we have so many that we can’t pay attention to them.

So these landscapes must be filtered. Anselm pointed out a term he invented: “Hygradeing — we filter for the best of the best and leave the rest.” He gave the example of a bag of trail mix being passed around a campfire. All of the good things get taken by the first few people that have access to the bag, so that the rest of the campers have less access to variety.  Naturally humans are able to weed out what is good or not good and unsubscribe from the rest. Geolocal feeds can only work if they have high enough quality. Twitter allows one to block feeds that are not interesting or relevant by simply ‘unfollowing’.

We’re Urban Nomads on limited time scales. We have a limited time to access and filter relevant information. Like actions must be compressed together. We’re changing — growing our own gardens and becoming different people, and

Technosocial synchronicity by topic, location, and person can result in synergy. I’m using the Masuda’s 1979 definition of the word synergy, which is used to describe individuals with similar interests pooling towards a common goal.

Silo Sites

It was O’Reilly that said that Internet is becoming one large database.

The hub sites have been created now. Data has been submitted and receptacles have been created for most data types. One does not have to build a silo but a thing that collects and reechoes. Let people subscribe to a geography and re-echo it back to them.

We’re all living here — there is just too much data in the way to be able to hear each other. This is the period of trilobites. Filter feeders. API’s. Mashups. Yahoo! Pipes. Combined RSS feeds. Dynamic content. Relevancy and efficiency means integrating people instantly into a community of relevant data.

One of the more accessible practical applications of these ideologies could be a simple wake-up device. If you’re on a train and you fall asleep, your phone knows where you are and rings right before your stop to wake you up.

WhereCamp Portland was an excellent and invigorating event. Perhaps some of these discussions will

WhereCamp Resources:

From Hazelnut Tech Talk:
WhereCamp PDX Resources | A Combined Yahoo! Pipe for Pictures, Tweets, and Session Notes.
Wherecamp PDX | Paul Bissett on Illuminating the Dark Geoweb.

From the Portland Tech Community:
WhereCamp PDX Roundup
WhereCamp PDX Takes on PacManhattan (Includes an excellent video by Adam Duvander.
NowWhatPDX. A community about social change developed almost entirely at WhereCamp Portland.
Rules for PacManhatten.
Drop.io WhereCamp Portland Resource Drop.

Relating to Geolocation Studies:
DorkBotPDX.
MakerLab.
CyborgCamp (Dec. 6th, 2008).

Blogs about Online Communities:
Dawn Foster writes high-quality posts about the care and feeding of Online Communities on a regular basis.

————–
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

In the analog state of PR, people would have to manually check out how many times a brand was mentioned in newspapers by hiring a bunch of people to clip out the actual articles from the newspapers. If one’s clippings were really great that week, they’d have a big stack of paper.

Clipping New Media:

Some of the first industries to capture digital data real-time were hedge funds and other financial firms. They used something that resembled an intelligence dashboard — where different streams of data were needed to make complex decisions. The dashboard allowed users to see many different stocks at once, and companies were able to create a sort of proto-feed that showed many different ecosystems of data at once.

Intelligence Feeds Today:

Now, services like Netvibes and Yahoo! pipes can be mixed together to offer companies real-time intelligence feeds that show what their competitors are posting on their blogs, what people are saying about them on Twitter, and their overall online presence — all in one place.

Making these intelligence dashboards takes time and research, but the value added (not to mention the time saved) by the implementation of a centralized data source is immense. Also, it’s powerful enough for agencies that manage multiple clients, because the entire system fits into one browser window with a series of custom, labeled tabs.

Currently:

All brands have an analog version of this, and some have a digital one — but all brands need it. Google Alerts is a temporary solution that is gritty and granular. It does not have the customization capabilities that Yahoo! Pipes and Dapper have. Intelligence dashboards are capable of handling the data generated by global and local brands as well. They can monitor Flickr photos, news items, blog posts, ect. Basically, any piece of dynamic content that moves online.

—-

Resources

One of the best brand managers out there is Portland’s Dawn Foster. She has a collection of excellent resources (like Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks) on her blog, Fast Wonder. She’s actually the first person who introduced me to Yahoo! Pipes.

 

 Hazelnut Tech Talk Episode 11 [23:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (423)

Click to Subscribe

Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Troy Harlan, wherein we talked about information gathering, filtering and consuming (naturally,) human factors, trilobites, reading at 2,000 words per minute, INTP’s, striving for objectivity, The Black Swan, hunches, and why it’s better to “have no map at all than have the wrong map”—all recorded on the road from St. Johns to downtown Portland.

Oakhazelnut.com is getting a voice to tell some stories with.

Bram Pitoyo (if you don’t know of him, make sure to check out Link En Fuego) and I are working on a series of tech talks that touch on what’s going on in the Portland Tech Scene. We’re creating this podcast series to better show off the amazing ideas and people of Portland to the rest of the world. We’re also doing this because we love talking to people and getting to know how they’ve created such amazing ideas, networks, and projects.

Podcasts take time and effort, but we’d like to be able to release one every week, with a different person or idea as the main subject. If you’re interested in participating in one of the podcasts, please contact Bram or I at hello@oakhazelnut.com or brampitoyo@gmail.com. Or, simply message us on Twitter. I’m @caseorganic, and Bram is @brampitoyo.

See you soon!

It’s been a big week in Portland Tech, and it’s still going strong tonight with the Demolicious/Portland Web Innovators event at Cubespace. What is Cubespace? Rental office space for start-ups, consultants, and freelancers. What is Demolicious? 5 project presentations, 10 minutes per project. It basically means that a bunch of innovative people in the room, watching, sharing, and presenting prodigious pre-beta/beta/live web projects. Good stuff. Gone is the era of stale doughnuts and flatlined agendas. This stuff is groundbreaking, interactive and sweetopian.

There’s also beer here, provided by MyStrands, a social/community/aggregator startup based on music sharing (currently in Beta edition, but I can send you an invite).

There’s probably about 50 people here. A lot of faces from last night’s Gary Vanerchuck event at Portland’s ad agency Weiden+Kennedy, and W+K’s Monday Lunch 2.0 Event.

If you’re curious about what’s going on in the Portland Tech scene, and want to join in on some of these events, check out the next events at Yahoo’s Upcoming! website. (The next Lunch 2.0 Event is on July 16th at Souk!)

Presentation Map:

* Kevin Chen, Metroseeq
* Don Park, Do-it-yourself Friendfeed
* Matt King, Interface Content Management Framework
* Mounir Shita, GoLife Mobile
* Lev Tsypin, Green Renter

The first presenter is Kevin Chen of Metroseeq

“Metroseeq is a location-based search engine that aggregates offline deals,” says Chen.

The ability for users to be able to find information from both offline and online sources effectively is the difference between Citysearch and Yelp.

But there’s more - the website also digitizes coupons. Chen tries to demonstrate this with a manila envelope full of paper coupons, but accidentally drops them all over the floor. It’s great, because shows his point even more. Then Chen navigates to the screen, where coupons for each listed business have coupons available for online users. It’s very nice.

Number two: Don Park, with Do-it-yourself Friendfeed

He’s working on solving the problem that everyone faces when they join social networks and have to re-enter all of their social connections. “When you’re joining a new social network,” he says, “you want to bring your friends with you.” Everyone’s data is locked up in different silos. There’s the Twitter silo, and the FriendFeed silo, and the Digg silo.

The key is to drain the silos and bring the dis-separate user data into one place. Use an RSS reader to to it to conveniently track it, and you’ve got your own personal mini-PR system at your fingertips. Brilliant.

Park’s XFN Spider project utilizes the attributes attached to a user’s friends on Twitter, Digg and Wordpress to map out other connections and links associated with those users. The spider can show the blog, Facebook profile, news sources and other pointers that contain the user’s profile/identity attributes, and consolidate them in one resource list.

“Your friendview in Twitter only allows 50 ids to display at one time,” says Park.  “A spider can index all of those ids…far past the 50 it allows in its display.” Attach an RSS reader to this process, and you’ll be able to read every RSS feed that your friends are reading.

The spill-over of extensive blogroll links on Wordpress and other Blogging sites can be put to good use by using attributes to track data.

He then uses Firebug to “inspect” one of his friends in Twitter. The whole sequence of links becomes a fractal. If someone The RSS does the updating. “You don’t have to depend on any other location to do the updating.” The speed at which you gain information is And it can go infinite levels deep. That’s a lot of Web 2.0 fractals. The downside? It’s kind of slow. But what is slowness compared to a social media site that’s often fail whaled?

Try it out at: http://donpark.org/spider/

Presenter numero tres: An Interface Content Management Framework, presented by Matt King

“I’m going to show you a content management system that builds content management systems.” he says. He then states that he’s going to build a fan site about the A-Team, because it rocks, and that he’s going to build the website in the next 10 minutes. He then brings up barebones interface. “Just to show you that I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve…” he points to the projection screen, “there’s no pages here”.

So he starts by adding a page. The audience watches.  Click. Click. This page is done.  “Lets hit save,” he says, “then we’ll add a page about the show, I guess.” He points out that you don’t have to assign a slug or a template. The site will do it for you.

The he does a pages about the A Team’s Van, because “the van warrants a page in and of itself, because it’s so cool.” Users can use templates to pull content in from the CMS.

The structure of the pages is easily modified, with the database automatically updating the url structure. Pages can also be infinitely nested.

King begins to add some dynamic content for the episodes and the characters. He does it this by adding models. “You can add as many as you want,” he states, explaining that “Models are the dynamic content of your site.”

There’s more. You can add as many fields to your content types as you like. You can upload images if you want.  Add a location and the database will automatically give you an address and will geocode it. (this system reminds me of an ultra-fast, ultra light version of Drupal).

Once the page structure has been created and set, one can instantly start adding content to it. Models can all be associated with each other. This part is kinda meta-style.

Season:

Associations: “has many”

Volia.

Like some sort of computer chef, King previews the site. “And then we’ll go to the page here,” he says, and “out pops a really nice page.” Watching King make a website is like watching a chef make something, put it in the oven, pause the camera, and take it out again, completely finished. Except there’s no baking time.

“Okay, I cheated. I did the templates beforehand”. The audience laughs.

“Go to seasons,” he says, ” and Pick a season. We’ll actually get to see what episodes are associated with it.”

Lastly, when you add content it instantly gets an API. King says that they used this for a few flash-based websites. The websites didn’t even need to use html, “just our API”. Nice.

Q+A:

“Is this internal only?”

“We’re trying to make this a base camp-type setup for it, so that you can sign up and get an instance of this development”.

“As long as we can get a website setup for it”, says King’s partner.

Matt King’s website is here, in case you feel like checking it out. He’s done a variety of other tech experiments. Perhaps you can use Don Park’s spider to find them all.

Four: Mounir Shita, from GoLife Mobile

He’s presenting a mobile application platform for mobile applications. He shows a Traffic Camera Widget.

He accesses the platform on a sort of mobile device emulator. Then he swaps out the data source object without changing the code. “You can tie these UI components to different devices,” he says, “like switching one component traffic feed (Oregon) to another (Arizona).”

Simplified overview of the platform:

A widget contains UI components. UI components are attached to sources.

Platform layercake:

XML (standard Internet), SMS Vado (cell phone), HTML (iphone)

(Gateway)

(Virtual Widget Layer)

Action Layer (Show lists) (Show traffic information) (View article) (Write article)

(Personalization layer) (Content enhancement layer)

(Data Access Layer).

Simple use case: Person x wishes to find closest Starbucks. But a mobile device should also figure out where friends are. Mobile device will go and figure out where friends are and recommend a location on the basis of nearness. The device will then tell you where location is, how to get there, inform your friends of your trajectory, and smoothly handle any details, should they arrive.

A mobile device should also show you the menu options, deals, and drink selection of the location as well.  Dynamically. You shouldn’t be telling every single application what you like and what you don’t like. “it’s very very semantic”, he points out, “you’re plugging in very very small semantic codes that plug and play together”. On the whole, these semantic codes help mobile nomads get together on the fly.

It’s as semantic as a roving a meeting maker that negotiates meetups across dynamic time and space, as if the entire geography were a mobile, roaming office.

The website meta tag states that “GoLife Mobile is erasing the barriers between the physical and electronic worlds. We let your mobile device get to know you, so it can…” Well…you know. Here’s the website, if you’re intrigued.

Finally: Green Renter, presented by Lev Tsypin

Green Renter is a database of Green buildings available in the Portland area. Tsypin states that this database is location-agnostic. It has data values for the Portland area because it was birthed here, but should expand to encapsulate every real estate area.

There’s a featured building, and a cetegory for renters and owners. A real estate site that satisfies a eco-niche. A nice feature of the site is that it provides a list of features like:

The Building’s surroundings…

Community resources (i.e. libraries nearby)

Services (i.e. grocery stores nearby)

Public transit nearby

Car share vehicle nearby

Bike lanes/paths nearby

Park/open space/wildlife areas nearby

The same type of list is available for building materials, like non-toxic concrete mix, and bike racks.

All of these categories and feature layers aggregate together to form the context of a ‘Green Score’, a scoring system similar to Google’s Quality Score or Page Rank. Over time, this will hopefully spur the community transparency and ethics which will lead to more green buildings.

Something Green Renter wants to include in the future is a glossary for their green categorization system. Including this glossary allow the side an educational/resource component for those who with to learn about how to find/develop increasingly sustainable and environmentally friendly buildings. It’s like the etiquette of a website that’s been correctly structured according to W3C standards or SEO code.

Visitors can utilize an aggregate map of all buildings in a given area and filter out which buildings have vacancies or not, or which buildings have LEED certifications for green building.

The site also has a blog that links to green events that are happening around town. In this way, Green Renter can bolster the education and awareness of its community of readers, but can also connect those readers to other individuals who are also interested in living in sustainable architectures.

The add building feature allows users to  add commercial or residential property to the site, with property details, contact info, pictures, and renting or leasing information. It’s like a social network for the buildings themselves. Each building with its own avatar and characteristics. Pretty nifty.

The founders also own greenowner.com and are looking into develop that, but feel it is more important to really nail down a niche before going on to develop other things.

When addressing the massive market share that Craigslist holds over the rental/leasing market, Tsypin says that “if you post your green building on Craigslist, you can provide a link back to the site so that your viewers can see all of the green features and details of the building.” In this way, Criagslist and Green Renter can form a symbiotic relationship with one another. A Craisglist listing for a Green Building can function as a starting point into a extended database full of information about the given property, hosted by Green Renter.

And yes, the site supports OpenID.

GreenRenter is alive and well at http://greenrenter.com.

In Essence…

There is, of course, much more to say. I’ll leave you to analyize the nitty gritty stuff and add details. I left out a lot of important things, but it is late and there are only 110 hours in my workweek to get things done.

As always, I am blown away by the things that are happening in the Portland Web Community. Something amazing is happening in Portland. I’ve never seen anything like it. Everyone I meet is always working on something so interesting, and has an positive and innovative mindset on their shoulders. I’m eager to see what’s next.

Special thanks to Portland Web Innovators, Cubespace, and all those who presented. Impressive awesomeness. Bram Pitoyo inspired me to do this write up, but this pales in comparison to his precise assemblages of brilliant journalistic data.

Thanks for reading, and please excuse any inaccuracies incurred based on my Strands-sponsored state.

If you’re on Twitter, I’m @caseorganic. I’d love to follow and meet more of you.

If you currently use them, RSS feeds are a great way to accumulate timely information from reliable and influential sources. RSS feeds are one of the best ways to keep up on social trends, new tech gagets, people, and business ideas. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, there’s a 3.75 minute Commoncraft Video called RSS Feeds in Plain English.

One of the most useful ways I’ve been able to use RSS feeds has been through the use of an RSS aggregator as a search engine. My favorite platform to use is NewsFire (click to download) for Mac, but other RSS readers exist for Windows, Linux and Gmail.

The best part about Newsfire is that it has a search feature at the bottom right corner of the screen. The search tool allows many blog posts to be searched through at the same time.

This search feature can be used to search through all aggregated RSS feeds.

Categorizing Data:

Newsfire makes it easy to categorize data into groups. I chose Lifehacking-type blogs, Tech News, Design News, SEO, Marketing, Business Development, Usability/Architecture, Local Portland Groups, and Mail/Personal. I grabbed mail my mail from Gmail and my @caseorganic Twitter ID from Summize.

The only limitation is that you cannot rearrange the categories. This will hopefully probably be fixed with NewsFire’s next release.

The key to using RSS as a Search Engine is going out on the web and finding the best sources that aggregate the best data, and then storing it all in your NewsFire feedcapture device. Then, wait for the data to accumulate. Go to NewsFire –> Preferences –> Feeds, and set “Delete items” to “Never”. If you use Spotlight, you can enable indexing of content so that you can use Spotlight to search your feeds as well.

With this structure in place, I can search my RSS reader for “local SEO”, to check news related to these terms. Another option for maxxing out your RSS reader is to subscribe to Twitter topic feeds via Summize. That way, you not only get the topics that are being blogged about, but what everyone in the world is saying about those topics.

Dezignus.com uses an orange construction to link the user to feedburner for RSS. RSS as symbol capable of being mutated into another form that seems completely unrelated except in color is a sign that the RSS has become so understood by Dezignus’s demographic that is can be alternately presented with no confusion to the user.

Incredible. This happened very quickly since the dawn of the RSS feed. “Although RSS formats have evolved since March 1999,^[4] the RSS icon (”“) first gained widespread use in 2005/2006″ (RSS - Wikipedia).

This ad was on an SEO 2.0 Blog

Watch the ad, click on the RSS feed, and then visit the site in the future. User recidivism rate goes way, way up. Ad targets users who don’t want to deviate from their blog reading but wish to read in the future.