Man Is The Media.
YOU Are The News Editor: gReader And Delicious Adds Syndication Features
August 13th, 2009 by Martin
Recently both Google Reader and Delicious offered easy syndication, or ‘re-sharing’ you might call it, of content. I’ve been doing this using RSS feeds for quite some time, but now it seems that finally the need for easily sharing across multiple platforms dawned on the two giants.
Using the Delicious Firefox add-on (which is a must) you can now set it up so that you share public bookmarks directly to Twitter. Google Reader offers more services, including Facebook, and even custom setups for services not listed.
Why is this important?
Well, no man is an island, they say, and your social graph (friends, followers, subscribers, contacts, and what else they’re called) is distributed across several platforms. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could update/share to all of them at once? Sure, and the easier access you have to more platforms, the more rapid distribution you can expect. Essentially everyone is becoming a news editor, selecting the good and important stuff (or the funny and irrelevant junk) and broadcasting it to their network. Essentially everyone is becoming a news network.
Is it dangerous?
The obvious danger is adding to the increasing redundancy in the cacophony media space today. I wrote about quantity vs. quality here. Another thing to consider is annoying the hell out of your contacts. I for one have had a quite a few Facebook ‘friends’ hide me on the their wall because I RSS syndicate my bookmarks, blog posts, tweets, Google reader favorites and more right into my wall. The true downside is that when I finally post an authentic and hilarious status update (which has been known to happen), no one is listening.
More about Delicious’ new features here, and Google Reader’s here. Proceed with caution.
