ResearchBuzz

Wondering what people are passing around at Google Reader? ReadBurner, at http://www.readburner.com/, is here to help. The site monitors “several hundred” linkblogs (there’s a link to show them, but it gave me a 404 error) and filters for the ones that are shared by multiple people on Google Reader.

You can review currently-popular items, look at “upcoming” items (ones that are getting hot, I guess), things that are popular this week, and things that are popular over all time. (RSS feeds are available for everything. Happy sigh.) You can get lists in several different languages, in several different levels of detail (from nothing but a headline and a link to getting the complete item within the list (very cool.) Even just the basic text and summary shows a lot of details.

The items listed here tend to be very tech-heavy, but I got no problem with that. If you’re less interested in the items themselves and more in the people behind them, you can check out the top linkbloggers, sources, and authors. (Cory Doctorow, what a surprise! :->) Clicking on a name gives you a list of what they’ve linked/generated/contributed.

From What’s on the blog, it looks like this service is fairly new, but I like this. Absolutely chunking a few of these in my feed reader. Check it out!

First Google’s new book search features and now some upgrades to Google Spreadsheet. Like I’m ever going to get seven hours of sleep again in my life.

I have actually been using Google Spreadsheets a fair amount at work. It’s not as full-featured as Excel, but I don’t often create spreadsheets that need so much horsepower. And there’s something handy about knowing your spreadsheet is as close as any Web-enabled computer.

I was very happy to see that Google Spreadsheets now has AutoFill, which is for me the official “feature that most quickly becomes annoying when it isn’t available.” Especially when you’re filling in date ranges. Google has made the best use of its Web connection by hooking in AutoFill to Google Sets. Remember Google Sets? Refresh your memory at http://labs.google.com/sets . With Google Sets you can enter a few items that are similar (colors, candy bars, cities) and Google Sets will try to fill out your list with more similar items.

Enter a few similar items in your Google Spreadsheet, and select that range of cells. Hold down CTRL (if you’re using Linux or Windows) or ALT (if you’re using Mac) while you’re clicking and dragging on the small box in the lower right corner of the cells. Google will try to fill the range of cells you’ve covered with similar items. I found it worked really well for colors, though Google couldn’t cover the entire range I selected. It went a little bonkers when I started entering book genres, and introduced a couple of non-English words. But other than that the Google Sets offering worked pretty well.

Google Spreadsheets has also introduced new data import features which allow you to import RSS feeds, HTML, comma- and tab-delimited files, and text-delimited files. You can get all the skinny on those import functions at the Google Docs documentation. The import function that really caught my fancy was the feed import function.

The syntax is =ImportFeed(URL, [feedQuery | itemQuery], [headers], [numItems]) . This basic query will fill my spreadsheet with a list of recently updated or added items at Project Gutenberg: =ImportFeed(”http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/today.rss”) . Perhaps I only want the last five items from the feed, and I want to include headers instead of only the data. The syntax would look like this: =ImportFeed(”http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/today.rss”,,true,5). (The two commas together are because I don’t have a feed or item query in use here.)

Let’s do a project. Say I want I want to keep a tally of new DVD releases, and use it in Google Spreadsheets so I can share it with other people and we can make notes (”Seen it,” “I want to get that one”, “Huh?”) I go poking around for an RSS feed of new DVD releases and find one at Rotten Tomatoes.

I enter this RSS Feed into Google Spreadsheets ( =ImportFeed(”http://i.rottentomatoes.com/syndication/rss/new_releases.xml”, , true, 100) ) and presto, I have a listing of the latest DVD releases. But I only have as many as are in the RSS feed right now. Ideally I’d like to be able to save an accumulate items as they are listed in the feed. Feedcatch might work for that — but I’m not sure if Feedcatch is still functional. Anyone know?

Once I have the data, I can publish it in several ways, including creating an embeddable IFrame for a blog. Further, I can specify a range of information to embed, not the whole feed.

This embedded frame will automatically update as the sheet itself updates.

As I think about it, I think that the ability to import HTML files might be pretty fun too. Say I was Tim Carter of AsktheBuilder.com . I could import a Google search result that gave me the pages indexed in the last 24 hours that contained the string AsktheBuilder and pulled out all links on that page:

=importXml(”www.google.com/search?as_qdr=d&q=askthebuilder&num=100″, “//a/@href”)

There’s crud in these results — it’s ALL the links on the page, after all — but this might be a useful way to monitor for pillaged content, nice comments, etc. THEN you add a column next to the first column that pulls titles from the content you’ve found, giving you a quick way to glance over search results. (Like so, where the column is A35: =importXml(A35, “//title”)) Unfortunately you’re limited to 50 functions per spreadsheet (FIDDLESTICKS!) so there’s a limit to what you can import.

I could and will spend a LOT of time playing with this. If the spreadsheet offered filtering functions, many more amazing things could be done. Who needs sleep anyway?

I used to read the New York Times quite a lot — this was several years ago. Eventually I just trailed off. It seemed like I was spending more time logging in than actually getting anything read. Now NYTimes.com is making My Times available, which is a portal (AAAAH! NOT THE P-WORD!) for Times content. I might have to do some more reading. You can check it out at http://my.nytimes.com/ .

I dusted off my ancient account and logged in. And actually it’s quite a bit more than NY Times content — as you can add RSS feeds and other content modules from all over the Web. When you first log in you’ll actually have a pre-populated page with all the usual portal favorites (weather, stock quotes, etc.) Choose Add Content to start making the page yours.

The front part add content page has three columns: one of Times content, one of stuff from around the Web (BBC, Yahoo, etc.) and one of widgets (photo browser, movie showtimes (?!), etc.) (You can also add RSS feeds of content that the NYT doesn’t list. Do that from the home page.) Be sure when browsing available content to explore the tabs on the left, which will give you access to more in-depth NYT items. These tabs are divided into topics and show the New York Times’ offerings and then suggestions for other content from around the Web. The eager recommendation of other stories in addition to the Times’ own makes the NYT look generous, confident, and smart. Good on you New York Times.

Anyway, moving the content around the page is as simple as click and drag. A nice feature is that you can add additional tabs to the main page; so you could have several sections divided out by category. (Gee, just like a newspaper.) As a matter of fact, if you didn’t have TOO many to read, My Times would make a very nice RSS feed reader. I’m going to have to try that for stuff I don’t want to check every day.

The only oddness I found about this site was the search for sources. I did a search for sources relating to Google and while I got Google News from the NYT as a search option, I also got pointers to NYT’s China news section. Since Google/China have recently been in the news, I can sort of see it, but I would rather see search blogs, official blogs from other engines, etc. in my search results. A search for Yahoo brought more expected results.

Lots of content, very responsive, easy to use, might be a useful feeder for low-moderate numbers of RSS feeds. I think My Times might be a portal I actually like.