Beer and Blog

Yesterday’s session on dashboards was by far the best beer and blog meet up yet! We had our largest turnout and half of them were fresh faces. I’ve had people tell me that the Friday time doesn’t work for them, so I think we’re going to continue to have Sunday meet ups once a month. I think it will be an every 3 weeks deal, but keep an eye on our calendar to the right or Upcoming for exact dates.

Those that showed up to this week’s beer and blog recieved a little gift—an invite code for the Ginger release of Netvibes. Attendance has its privileges.

Here’s the breakdown on what we discussed:

Dashboard vs. Reader

One of the first things we discussed was the pros and cons of a dashboard compared to a feed reader. Aaron shared that he tried using Newsgator’s syncing to allow him to use a reader on his desktop, laptop, and Blackberry, but ultimately went with Google Reader because the syncing didn’t live up to expectations. He also shared that he enjoyed the river of news approach he got from Google Reader. We concluded that using a dashboard didn’t exclude using a feed reader. For example, I use the email module on a tab I call my Message Center, and when I click on an email, it takes me to Gmail. Thus, Aaron could still read the river of news as a module in Netvibes, and then click on the module’s title if he wanted to see an expanded view of it in Google Reader.

The biggest advantage of a dashboard over a reader is that a dashboard isn’t limited to feeds. I can have widgets and full-on applications running side-by-side feeds for a truly remixed view of the Internet that matters to me.

Importance of Pipes to a dashboard approach

One thing we brought up was what happens when a person is monitoring hundreds of feeds, wouldn’t hundreds of modules be much harder to view than a river of news in a reader? The answer is yes, if you display feeds individually, they will be cumbersome to consume in a dashboard. But, that’s where Yahoo! Pipes comes in. If you consume your feeds regularly, then you don’t need to see 10 items per feed, because you probably saw 8 of them yesterday or earlier that day. I use Pipes to aggregate feeds of a feather to create a super feed, such as combining Read/Write Web, Techcrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, etc. into a single feed called “Lead tech blogs”. I then run that whole feed through AideRSS to rank the posts based on their popularity, which I display as a smaller module on top of the full river of news from the Pipe.

If you’d like a brief introduction to Pipes, I wrote a five part series on Pipes.

Layout and configuration strategies

Your watched dataset will determine how you should aggregate and manipulate the data in Pipes before importing it into a dashboard, which also determines your layout. For example, if you only have four close friends whose blogs you read, then you probably don’t need to use Pipes. You could have one tab with each blog as it’s own column. If you have fifty friends, then you might want to consider using Pipes to pre-process your incoming data to make digestion easier.

Your watched dataset will also determine the layout of your dashboard. I’ve found that I prefer to have one tab per interest, such as a message tab, tech tab, rock band tab, popular web content tab, Portland tab, etc. If you are deep into a single subject, you may enjoy a tab for every high level topic for your area of interest.

Your layout also depends on the screen(s) you are consuming the dashboard from. People strictly using mobile will have to be more selective with their choices as you only get one column. People using laptops would likely prefer no more than 2 modules per column. People using a 32″ LCD on its side may be able to view 5 or 6 modules per column. I know that in the not too distant future, I want a whole wall of screens full of all of the data I need to stay on top of.

The three stages of participation

This is where the conversation started to get interesting. We began to discuss what appears to be three levels of participation that looks something like Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs. At the lowest level of participation a person is creating content. The next level up, is a person using focusing tools to bend the web’s data around them in order to direct their attention, which is what we’re doing with dashboards, feeds, Pipes, etc. Then, a person reaches the pinnacle of participation, which is the self-actualization for why they are participating, which includes topics like transparency, enlightenment, and non-violent communication. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, mostly because we didn’t do more than touch on it at our meet up. I can say that it was a killer discussion and you’ll see much more about this concept in the not too distant future.

Moving forward

Aaron Hockley has tweeted that he will be taking a methodical approach to building out his dashboard and plans to blog his progress. I’ll be keeping my eye on that project, and recommend you do as well. I may have piqued David Frey’s interest enough to build a killer feed reading module using the UWA standards to allow it to work on Netvibes, PageFlakes, iGoogle, and MyYahoo!. I’ll also continue to experiment with my dashboard and the services that connect to it, which I’ll post about from time to time.

If you haven’t started using a dashboard, you should start now while it’s easy. If you still aren’t sure, post your doubts and concerns below and let’s all talk about them.