By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

User: Taminania
Location: Norway
Occupation: Psychologist

These sound like the character sketch for the lead in a science fiction piece about some dystopian future. Maybe a future ruled through a bot-mediated reality? Sorry, just had to touch on yesterday’s post about that.

The information above is true in fact. She is a social psychologist in Oslo, Norway that goes by the user name Taminania on Google Reader. And she shares about 20 blog posts on average from her subscription list daily. I have never met or spoken with Taminania but she is a rock star in my world. A smart rock star.

She isn’t the leader of a rogue group fighting for survival in the aforementioned dystopian world. She is a passionate psychologist that seeks out high quality content online in her field then shares it online. In this sharing process the door opens wide to accept her recommendations, nearly tacit, that allow those that come across her Google Reader shared feed enlightened.

In every example of the site that I have built to capture and continue filtering her shared feed, and that of about 59 others, I talk about her shares. By filtering the master feed that Taminania creates through daily user activity I am able to glean what I find most valuable and let the rest flow on by.

Example:

I have created a group called Taminania Science. Where I filter down the entire content database to shares from Tamihania, from any publisher and with the keywords – augmented, brain, reality, science, research.

Which currently yields the following results:

1. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
2. Foreign subtitles improve speech perception
3. Why Do We Dream?
4. Are You Treating Your Computer Better Than You Treat Yourself?
5. New Brain Findings On Dyslexic Children: Good Readers Learn From Repeating Auditory Signals, Poor Readers Do Not
6. Geoffrey Cohen on Identity, Belief, and Bias
7. Bacteria in Gut Linked to Obesity; Western Diet a Factor

Compare this list her current (as of this moment)  full Google Reader shared feed:

1. Drop of water
2. To Make Memories, New Neurons Must Erase Older Ones
3. Google *Chrome OS* To Launch Within A Week
4. Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering.
5. How To Easily Automate Backing Up Your Wordpress Blog
6. A New TV Guide for Internet Television
7. The Introvert’s Guide to People

Of all the links in the first list above I am not subscribed to a single of the publishers. I don’t need to be to get the value of their content. However, I do need a guide like Taminania that has an understanding the topics and the drive to sort the quality content from these publishers. The other thing I need is the software to make it happen. In this case I built it for myself and would love to publicly release it. But in the current version it doesn’t scale very well and has a tendency to crash my server. Who can make this happen for everyone?

The answer is simple – Google. What I have created are features and an automated advanced search that pulls from a pool of data. My pool is currently 43k items. Google’s slightly larger. By a factor of 10k or more I am sure.

What I am able to learn from Taminania’s shares in what is clearly not a dystopian reality comes to me from as close to osmosis as a human can get when it comes to information. In this version of the story we are all learners and we are all teachers. The only problem is that we don’t have the tools we need to teach.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Tags: dystopian future , dystopina reality , google reader , google reader shared fed , oslo norway , osmosis learning , osmotic learner , psychologist norway , science fiction , taminania