Reid Dossinger

You may have seen a few things around today telling you that you should help stop censorship and that there's a law in congress that might pass, and if you heard blah blah blah, let me just tell you now that it's absolutely worth your time if you believe that you should be able to post freely on sites like Google, Tumblr and Facebook. Go to americancensorship.org  to get the facts and send a letter to your representative. Hell, I did it, and my representative doesn't even get to vote (related: DC VOTING RIGHTS NOW!). Is there a possibility that the bleak outlook that internet companies are putting forward where content is shut down at a whim possibly huge overstatement? Yeah, it's a possibility. But at the very least, I'm not willing to take the risk of a world where ISPs and copyright owners are dictating the content of the internet. That said...as many times as I've been on the side of illegal downloader (or even provider) of copyrighted material, I'...

Sometime this week (supposedly), Google Reader is going to lose its social feature  to Google Plus. This is a damn shame, since the People You Follow space has been, hands down, THE best social sharing tool I've ever used. In fairness, I think that Reader has been as great as it has been because the number of people I knew who used it was a pretty small group that was limited mostly to my closest friends who have a great deal of insight and share judiciously. But I also love Reader in that it's extremely easy to share, easy to comment, and easy to control privacy, all on articles that you often don't have to leave the interface to read in their entirety. Some of my Reader friends have taken this news pretty hard, and that was my first impression (and really, second through sixth as well), but I'm kind of curious to see what the Plus integration will hold. It's possible that, a month or two from now, we'll be raving about how great Plus is for sharing articles ...

Google announced today that they're going to be discontinuing Google Buzz. That probably won't come as a surprise to most people, who'll probably mostly be amazed that Buzz was still around, but for me, it's actually kind of a disappointment. Buzz had become pretty useful for me, mostly as a better interface for commenting on Google Reader's shared items. The thing is, Buzz could have done a whole lot more. That exact same idea (Reader shares, Twitter and blog incorporation, status messages) could have been implemented in gmail AND been given a separate space. You could have opted out in gmail, but still used the standalone site to interact and share. Their one big misstep was automatically adding friends rather than letting you build those from the ground up. If they had been more patient with it and started with a simple on/off privacy mode rather than trying to force everyone to use it with frustrating privacy settings, I think it could have succeeded. In sho...

One of the things that most makes me feel like I'm beating my head against a wall is when I'm trying to convince people to click reaction buttons like the Facebook Like button or Google +1 button on web pages. I think that most people just don't really think to do it when they read something that they like, but they should, because as Avinash Kaushik brilliantly termed it , it's applause.  Now, I kind of get why people shy away from the using the Facebook Like button: because it shows up on your Wall, has a chance to show up in people's stream and now shows up in the ticker. All of those things are great for people trying to promote their content and get more clicks, but it's not so great for those of us just trying to get feedback on what people are liking and if they're actually reading what we're writing. Even if you're not actively embarrassed to have people know that you like it, it just feels a little more intrusive than a lot of people wan...

I took a little time to browse through the AddThis documentation to see if there was any feature I was missing, and it turns out there was something that I had just been wondering about: adding in Google Analytics code to the end of the URL when someone uses AddThis to share a page on your site. There's documentation on the AddThis site for adding URL parameters , but here's how I modified it to incorporate the Analytics code. In the AddThis code where you call javascript that powers the widget (s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js), add this in: <script type="text/javascript"> var addthis_share = { url_transforms : { add: { utm_campaign: 'AddThis', utm_source: '{{code}}', utm_medium: 'share' } } } <script> The {{code}} will add in the service that was used to share (ie "delicious", "googlereader", etc) in a single word and in all lowercase letters. You're just adding in the st...

I was thrilled today to see this article  today calling for what I think it crucially necessary for Google Circles: a way for people to choose what content of different users that they see. The "follow" Circle is really useless without it, unless you're following a person who ONLY talks about one subject publicly. The way I think it should work is much like the way I have my different Twitter accounts set up: I have a personal account, which is just kind of a dumping ground for my random thoughts, including sports and politics; I have my professional account, where I talk mostly about tech, web services and business and is set up to be completely open, public and findable; and my music account. I mix up the content every now and then, getting personal on my professional and talking about music on my personal account, but I've found that the division works pretty well. But it's still three separate accounts, and while Tweetdeck makes it pretty easy to manag...