photo credit: gualtiero

A few people have asked me recently why so many of my Tweets or Facebook Updates have “Reading : ” and what it means

I’m an avid fan of Google Reader for consuming the RSS feeds from various sites and keeping up to date in a single location. One of the features in Google Reader is the ability to “Share” discrete items. Basically this means that I have read an article and would like to share with your followers. If you are interested you can see a list of the items that I have shared here : http://www.google.com/reader/shared/RossGoodman.com

Here’s where it gets interesting … the shared items can be read on the page above or can be consumed as an RSS feed, yup, my RSS feed reader also produces RSS feeds.

Next comes the service from TwitterFeed.com which will take an RSS feed and will update either your Twitter or Facebook pages. I selected twitter as it’s the tool that I use more. One of the options you have is to add a standard prefix to these updates, I selected “Reading : “.

I then use the twitter application for Facebook which replicates my tweets into Facebook – job done.

But – why did I chose the “Reading : ” prefix?
This is because I have hooked in a number of different services including favourite images on Flickr or my bookmarks on Delicious etc.

Twitter

I have invested a lot of content to Twitter this year.
This is primarily due to the convenience of the platform racking up almost 1200 updates in the year here.

Flickr / Photography

I can’t find a way to get stats for the year so here are my top five photos:

Web Site / Blog

By far the most popular post on the site was the photos page here.
Second most popular page is the “About Me” page here.
As for the blog entries themselves they rank at:
1 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Conditional Prompts
2 – Crystal Xcelsius – Filtered Rows From A Filter Component
3 – Modelling Change In Your Dimensions
4 – Business Objects XI 3.0 New Features – Change Data Tracking
5 – Dimensional Modelling – Facts
As you can see here the site only really started getting traffic last January so that gives me 17300 page views.

Personal Stuff

Obviously the biggest news of the year was the passing of my daughter Emma.
Celebrating the Life of Emma Berry Goodman
And the year ends on another low point with the passing of another member of my extended family.
George Miller – Footballer | 1939 – 2008

As you know I love Twitter. OK there are some things i find annoying, the lack of groups is one.

The main thing is the lack of uptake amoungst my “real” friends and colleagues. OK, this is in part due to the short sightedness of most customer sites using WebSense or proxy rules to block it. I have just been further depressed by Twitter Local a great site that shows you the geographocal location of tweets. I have seen similar sites on the macro scale, for example: TwitterVision gives you a world map with tweets appearing all over it.

Twitter Local works at the other end of the scale, you give it a location and a radius and it shows you “local” tweets. So, why am I depressed: I can only find two other twitterers within 5 miles of me!

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