The internet is an amazing place where the psychographic is king and content is really the queen.

How do I know? Because I have more in common with a British teenager that goes by the handle RandumBoi than I do my best friends.

In my last post about the Bevery Hsu fontspiration Helvetica Cookie Cutters I had a line that highlighted the path that the story traveled to find its way to me. See:

Via -> RandumBoi -> Design Mom -> SwissMiss -> How Blog -> Beverly Hsu

In this list RandumBoi rules as the final person in the chain that delivers the article to me. He’s shared it in Google Reader from the Design Mom blog . . . and you get the idea. This is trusted discovery applied.

To make this happen, I’ve had to create a system for trust. I wrote a web application that I am hoping to open up to the public that shows me content from sources that I trust. These are individuals that I have found some interest in their shared readings and now collect all of it.

There are very few systems that will allow readers to read in aggregate what other members other members are finding interest in. However, Google Reader is one of them. But the problem is, and always has been, Google hasn’t made this process easy.

Their apprehension could stem from publisher anger, design flaws in their application or countenance for mediocre product features when certain development teams aren’t a priority. Regardless of the answer being any of these three or another, I fixed what I view as the problem for myself.

The best part of creating my own solution has been that I’ve been able to apply the notion that – “the news will find me” – Steve Rubel (Seesmic presentation), and replicate it numerous times everyday when I log in to see what my favorite and trusted 100 Google Reader compatriots are sharing.

Trusted discovery is also about extending the life cycle for content. The consumption chain in almost every other application, and most definitely the content sources’ website, would have ended with RandumBoi being the final link – or even before him. But instead of passing off into oblivion, a set of systems to recommend by sharing content has given it new life.

This is where the psychographic begets social intelligence from content sharing and the web can start to truly tap into semantic technologies.

Trusted discovery is only possible as we allow individuals to curate what traditionally was left up to huge news rooms. This is a new era of consumption.

For fun, check out this feed of Steve Rubel’s items, see item 6 – http://www.filome.com/1/SteveRubel.rss.

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Trusted Discovery Applied is a post from: TechStartups.com

If you are a feed junkie and like to take your world in by reading about it in Google Reader then this post is for you.

I am partially one of those people and rely heavily on shared content to shape my world view. Not only shared content from other folks reading and sharing the best but from myself as well.

Occasionally, I find myself traversing the web following link after link and ending up in places that I am not familiar with and in front of me is something amazing that I want to organize into my flow. My flow is Google Reader and the “Note in Reader” bookmarklet is my friend.

Step #1 – Get the bookmarklet

Login to your Google Reader account and go to your  “Shared items”. On the middle right you will see a gray button that titled “Note in Reader – drag me”. Drag this to your browser tool bar.

Step #2 – Find something interesting that you want to share

Navigate to the individual post for the page. Then click on the “Note in Reader” button in your browser tool bar.

Step #3 – Get sneaky!

The button when clicked will open a modal window in the page you are on. When it loads up, however, it won’t grab the full content of the post that you are interested in. It will only grab a synopsis. NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

So, get your mouse finger ready, highlight and copy the entire post. Then paste that sucker in the “Add a note” textarea.

Step #4 – Voilà

Now in Google Reader or any other application that reads your shared feed. You’ve got the post, publisher and link back to the original article!

That’s all she wrote! Get to sharing and create that knowledge base of tacit goodness that you didn’t know that you knew!

Share Articles in Google Reader without Google Reader is a post from: TechStartups.com

Let’s face it, everyday online in your activity you are giving away your knowledge. It is being captured by the cookies on your computer, the search engines that you use and your favorite social networking sites. They know more about you and what you online than you do. It’s time to fix that.

We’re not going to stop them from they are doing, we’re going to start you down the path of capturing your knowledge, consciously. Ha! He said, knowledge and consciously. Next he’ll say, tacit. Probably, but when we get to Google Reader.

There is so much that you learn online during a day that it is impossible to remember most of it. The fact is that most of us don’t really care that it is lost. We should though when what we are losing is in the hands of others that are able to glean insight and predictive data from our behaviors of seeking knowledge online. Look, if you start grabbing this stuff now the future you will thank you.

The knowledge base that we can build today without fancy software or a Ph.D. is a reference tool for now. In the coming years things will get more interesting but for now we need to build the habits.

Below are 7 tools making the most of your smarts.

1. Browser Bookmarking

This is the best tool in the arsenal for capturing just where you’ve been and what you are interested in online.

It’s totally free and been around since the inception of browsing the internet. Get into the habit of taking 30 seconds when you land on a page that you find value in to bookmark and tag the site.

You might never come back to it but if you need it you can keyword search it on your computer.

2. Delicious

Delicious has been a mainstay of geeks, nerds and educators for a long time. It is a free, sophisticated web service that acts like browser bookmarking but is online. Delicious grabs the address of the page you are sharing, reads it, matches it to other users, tags it, creates channels for you and can act as a discovery tool for other related knowledge. The most valuable part is that Delicious maintains the added knowledge linearly.

3. Glue

Glue is a browser plugin from Adaptive Blue that brings a network of confidants with you as you browse the web. It is shallow knowledge base that exists based on your likes and recent browsing history. The lack of permanence isn’t to be feared with Glue. It should be embraced as a way to crowdsource additional content based on current knowledge needs.

4. Flickr

Your personal knowledge base should extend beyond the internet. Take your physical world knowledge and put it online. Flickr allows you to put your photos online and create metadata around them for search, categorization and your own recollection. It is also a great place to put screen captures from the sites you visit online.

5. YouTube

This is for the video hound. If capturing your knowledge is akin to Cpt. Kirk putting together his log, video may be for you. This is a brilliant way for the visual and auditory types to create a resource for themselves. The key with this one is the required metadata that will be needed to create value from it. The most valuable would be to play the video back and create an outline from it. Less than a transcript but more than a title and brief description.

6. Blogging

This is another low threshold way to create a knowledge base that is usable from the moment you begin and portable. Blogging is journaling, the time honored tradition of communication. In this context you are communicating with yourself. Find a popular blogging site or install your own and keep it private when you begin. Give yourself the opportunity to be honest without censorship.

7. Google Reader

This is the most powerful of the lot. It comes as close to capturing your tacit knowledge as we can get while being cognizant of sharing it. Google Reader allows this with an inherently intuitive element in its interface – the share button. It is strategically placed at the end of an article. So that when actually read a user can choose to share it.

This feature allows you to first choose to subscribe to sites via feeds, read a post of interest and then decide if it was of value to you by sharing it. Google stuffs your shared items away for you from day one and allows you to access them with a search feature.

A personal knowledge base in digital format is a powerful tool for you to be able to understand your data trail online. It can give you insight into your interests, the ways that you think and the types of friends that you keep. Think of it as an introspection tool that can pay dividends in ways beyond self-improvement.

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

7 Personal Knowledge Base Tools is a post from: TechStartups.com

You can only neglect your users for so long before they leave you. The same goes for lovers. And I, was in love with Google Reader once.

Then one day I realized Google Reader wasn’t loving me as much as I loved her. So I walked out. We see each other, maybe once a month or so, for short periods of time while we trade feeds.

Reasons

At first she didn’t accept my privacy when I wanted to put authenticated feeds in the system. Then she wouldn’t allow me to have my shared items back when I asked for them. I wanted all of them . . . but she only gave me 20 at a time. What about the thousands of items I had shared with her? Enough. I couldn’t take it any longer. I had to do something about it.

Solution

Two years ago I began caching my Google Reader shared feed so I could access to all the items. Back then Reader hadn’t added any features around sharing like search. But I had it once I was storing the items. What I had created then was a strange knowledge base that I could now query to find content that I found of value and had filtered for myself.

Value

Quickly, I added about 10 more shared feeds from friends and other people that I respected online. After about two weeks I had forgotten about Google Reader and found myself hanging out with my new friends . . . well, hanging with their knowledge bases. Here I was capturing tacit knowledge from some of the people I respected the most for their minds.

Filtering

What was now stored for my querying pleasure was content from the best publishers on the planet filtered by the sharpest people I could find. I began to build other tools around the data like grouping by publisher, sharer, keywords and gobs of new feeds.

I built tracking around it to see how robots traversed the feeds since the actual data was locked in a password protected site. Which turned out not to be that big of a deal since the title links were directed back to the publishers.

By adding new user controlled filtering mechanisms on top of pre-filtered data that was pouring into the system, it became much easier to produce pages and feeds for topics that interested me.

Here are a couple of feeds to demonstrate what I am talking about:

Keyword: http://www.filome.com/key/1/micropayments.rss
Group: http://www.filome.com/group/ksmith/1/Taminania_Brain_Science.rss
Sharer: http://www.filome.com/1/robdiana.rss
Likes: http://www.filome.com/likes/1/08100556675301148205.rss

What Reader is Doing Now

Since we broke up, she’s been adding features but they are all at the feed level and not down to the individual publisher post level. The Bundles that she allows you to create are feed based. Instead of receiving 1 or 2 items of an interesting topic from a few publishers you get all the items in those feeds . . . many more than 2. It’s like being in a forest and finding a twig that you want and your date cuts down 10 trees and hands them to you saying, “Look, I got your twig. Happy now?”

Where Reader is Going

For fear that they are going to be crushed by Facebook and Twitter, Google appears to have put some emphasis on the Reader team and either given the resources or freedom to improve the system. I would even venture to say that members of the Blogger team might be instrumental in some of these improvements. She should look to her friends for support during difficult times.

Where Reader Should Be

I’m gonna break it down nice and easy.

1. Grouping content at the individual post level
2. Feeds for everything
3. Portability of all shared/liked items from the day a user signs up
4. Content shopping cart
5. New UI – 85% of web users don’t read feeds. Get pretty.
6. Open up as a hub for syndication
7. Give publishers real metrics about subscribers, sharers and likers
8. Allow publishers to create community around these users (within Google)

I am still in love, but I have better things to do

My favorite part of her is still the shared feeds. Like perfume they remain long after she has left the room. They add value to the ecosystem and to the lives of those that have access to them. And since Google Reader is sitting on this massive mountain of filtered and expertly curated data, they should use it as their greatest asset in the coming walk-off with Facebook and Twitter.

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

Google Reader Got Updates? Don’t Even Get Me Started is a post from: TechStartups.com