Yes, it’s great to be able to download my feed items and read it on the plane without Internet connection (since I am not flying Virgin). I even “starred” some entries I want to respond to.But why can’t I mark items “read”? It’s an “online only” action - that does not make sense. When I go back online, Google Reader will perform synchronization anyway; why could it not remember “read” status and sync it?

The above rant is half a year old. I typed it up and decided not to post it. Now I am finding myself offline for a few days again, and can’t believe Google still hasn’t fixed this shortcoming.

Why is it a big deal? If you have hundreds of items in your Reader, I seriously doubt you will use Expanded View and scroll through everything. I found the only way to stay productive with Reader is to use List View, scan titles (OK, a combination of titles and author), and when all done, click “Mark all as read”. I don’t want to reprocess the same items again and again.

The error message says I can do this once I am connected again. But it’s too late, by then my Reader list will be a mix of already seen and new items. In other words, I am scr***d.

What really baffles me though is that I haven’t found any references to this problem online. Am I the only one finding this a major productivity killer?

Update (3/14): Now that ReadBurner, a cool tool to determine the most shared items in Google Reader became the news du jur, let me just point out that you can’t mark an item ’shared’ while offline, either. Not as frustrating as losing “read”status, just an annoyance. Google, please fix Reader!

Related posts: Unofficial ReadBurner, louisgray.com, Adam Ostrow, CenterNetworks and SheGeeks

Tags: Blogging, feed reader, Google, google gears, google reader, news feeds

It just dawned on me that I’ve never announced my Shared Link Blog, so most of my regular feed readers don’t know about it. It’s a selection of items from my Google Feed Reader, has it’s own URL, and while it’s not included in my feed, if you click back to the blog, you can see the current items in the sidebar:

• What Google hates and loves: Why Wikipedia is taking over search results (OnoTech: Ethan Stock on Technology)
• Largest Adobe Flash crash in the world (IT Project Failures)
• Wachovia: $211 trillion “word-processing error” (IT Project Failures)
• Business Social Networking Key for CRM in 2008 (The Social Customer Manifesto)
• New Enterprise Software? Can It Be? (Software Safari - Premium Blog on Application Software)
• Why you need Connectbeam? Hear it from people out in the field… (Connectbeam blog)
• Is Your Money in Your Mattress? (Ridgely Evers)
• NetBooks plugs a big gap (Irregular Enterprise)
• Dismissing a whole continent? (Vendorprisey)
• Leopard is the New Vista, and It’s Pissing Me Off (Oliver Rist/PC Magazine) (Techmeme)

Tags: Blogging, feed reader, google reader, link blog

It’s funny how your feed reader can juxtapose random, unrelated items, yet making them look like a thread:

Jeff Nolan discusses how BMW is experimenting with the IP protocol to network automotive controllers.

The engineers found that IP could well suit the real-time requirements even of safety-critical applications.

Jeff’s conclusion:

In many ways modern cars are beginning to resemble PCs with standard I/O and integrated networking.

(Mumbling to myself: that’s what I said when I made the lifetime mistake of buying a first-model-year Volvo S80 T6 in 1999 … not a car, but a computer network on wheels. Consequently, nobody knew how to fix it)

But, no, I am not talking about the BMW Crash just below Jeff’s post… it’s just a Big, Fat Billboard, publicly crashing on Times Square. Feed Readers have their funny ways

Tags: bmw, cars, feed reader, google reader, Humor, volvo