google reader versus netvibes

I recently switched my browser homepage and overall RSS reader solution from netvibes to google's reader. For the most part, I'm happy with the switch, even with netvibes' recent rollout of their 'ginger' version and the social networking capabilities that come with it.

As Myer has heard me admit over and over, my guilty secret is that I often choose design aesthetics over functionality. The two aren't mutually exclusive of course, and I'm sure if you talk to any interface design specialist they'll talk your ear off about the beauty of a well designed functional interface. That said, I'll still sacrifice features for beauty in most cases. I'm guilty! For example, I develop websites in Firefox because it is far and away the best suited for the job: an extension called firebug is most of the reason why this is true, but the whole extension architecture available to firefox just makes it the most functionally robust browser out there. I'm typing this blog in Safari however, and I do most of my browsing here. It just looks so nice, and even though it lacks the huge feature set of Firefox, the interface design is amazingly clean and simple.

So I'm going against my instinct a bit by adopting google reader. I did find a skin for it that makes it look pretty - using it under safari is very nice. Ironically it was made by the guy who designed the logo for Firefox. I miss a few things about Netvibes functionally and interface-wise however:

1. In netvibes, each feed has its own space on the page, so I can see at a glance what has been updated, and I like browsing by source like that. Google reader mashes everything together on one page and provides two options for viewing: the full post, which means you can see at most two or three posts at once; or a squished list with the first few words of the post visible, like gmail. I'm opting for the second view so I can see more of what's new at once, but that brings me to the second thing I miss:


2. In netvibes, I could mouse over the title of a collapsed blog post on the front page and up would pop a lovely little AJAX floating summary near my mouse. All I had to do to quickly skim the first few paragraphs of all the new entries on my page was mouse over new posts. I could quickly get a sense of the things I wanted to read and click in from there to read longer posts. With google reader it's a bit more cumbersome - I do get to see the first few words of a post, but that rarely gives me a good sense of what I'm about to click into. In a perfect world, writers would write functional titles and opening sentences to give me a great idea of what I'm getting into. Course, that's not the case!

I'm sure this all sounds incredibly picky - but having a good interface to work with can be the difference between getting use out of a tool, and throwing the tool to the wayside. I have a feeling I'll be sticking with google - if only for the really fun 'share' feature. Also they pretty much own my life these days, so you know.

be kind, rewind

Tonight I saw Michel Gondry's new film 'Be Kind, Rewind.' Going in to the film I was expecting a certain level of artfulness and humor that had been hinted at in the trailers and from what I knew of his previous work. What I didn't expect - what I was happy to find - was a social film with activism and community at its core; a vitality and humanity I've only seen in films close (in both history and ideology) to the events of May 1968, in particular Truffaut's 'Stolen Kisses.'

Stolen Kisses is a special product of a time just after student uprisings in France and all over the world had in some cases come close to toppling whole governments. You can feel a sense of an excited "what's next?" being collectively whispered throughout the film, and particularly represented in the young Antoine Doinel. It's an incredibly optimistic film, just on the edge of an emerging era and culture.

Be Kind Rewind gave me this same impression - but rather than simply attempting to recycle a forced agenda of revolution and optimism, the film seems as though it simply has no choice. It articulates itself essentially in the language and grammar of now: the trailing edge of globalized culture, which is no longer an impending and dreaded model trickling its way through our lives, but a critical and essential matter of the way we live. What is really interesting to me is that the way the film (and I would argue, culture on the whole) reclaims the conditions of globalized culture for the people is by the acute territorialization of culture. It's very important that we're witnessing the interactions of a specific small town in New Jersey, that we're seeing a microculture interacting with itself, but also and I think very critically, that we see it interacting with global culture.

Throughout the film we are constantly aware of a shared media reality - this small community acts it out by staging 'ghostbusters' or 'driving miss daisey' etc. This community takes ownership of the culture that has been disseminated from Empire, and which in this film is represented by the empire state: New York. Gondry does a wonderful and effective job in telling what is a recent story, and what stands to characterize this emerging century: the decentralization of cultural power and ideology. It sounds terribly cliche to speak of the 'youtube generation' for example, but it's worth pointing out that we're at a unique point in cultural history that is putting notions of authorship and authority that are really fairly young into question.

I had a short conversation with someone at the SPARK festival recently about how their students apparently had no qualms about drawing from a 'democratized pool' of sound bits and software tools, with absolutely no regard to authorship. He was lamenting the fact that he'd hear the breakbeat from 'funky drummer' in his student's music, and that they had no knowledge of its origin. My response was that I find this kind of loss of authorship extremely exciting, and I think it's representative of a potential for the creative act to re-emerge as a fundamentally community activity. Rather than looking at art and artwork as a product of individual genius, we are learning to understand it as a cultural communication. Be kind rewind understands this, and I was incredibly happy to see it articulated in such an ecstatic way. The film says "do" - and that's what we're doing.