The Google Reader team hasn't been completely at "Play" of late. They have put in some work too. The latest updates to the popular RSS reader, which I am buried in multiple times a day in an attempt to consume and share the best news on the Web, are focused on the mobile version. While considered small, in comparison to the launch of Play, and continued efforts to make Reader play well with Buzz, the updates have made it both more fun to consume feeds while on the go, but also a lot easier.


Google Reader Mobile (Sorted by Magic)
The two easily-recognizable updates to mobile Google Reader are the introduction of "Sort by Magic", which prioritizes content based on your own interests, and a new, extremely helpful, feature that puts a "Next Item" link at the top right corner of every single feed item, letting you quickly click from one update to the next. This is much how I use the "J" feature on the Web version of Reader to "Jump" to the next item (a few hundred times a day), but built with today's smartphones in mind, including the iPhone, which, as you know, lacks a physical keyboard.

The "Sort by Magic" functionality, missing in the prior Mobile updates, helps to bring the feed items to the top that Google assumes are most interesting or relevant to you, thanks to their watching your reading, consumption and sharing activity over time. While I do manage to read every feed item in my Reader, and never mark all as read, the benefit of getting the "best" updates" quickly on the iPhone is more important than on the Web, especially when you consider a smaller screen, potentially lower bandwidth, or less time. (And yes, these are some of the same reasons why my6sense, a company I advise as part of Paladin, is interesting - although my6sense also sorts social updates, beyond RSS)

Stuck at the San Jose airport this afternoon, on my way to Denver for a connecting flight to Austin for SXSW, I pulled up the new Mobile Reader and found the "Next Item" addition to be a huge help as I navigated my feeds, and shared several out to the link blog. To date, I've primarily relied on my6sense to get my RSS feeds while mobile, and haven't found the Google Reader mobile equivalent particularly compelling. These two updates make the offering a lot more usable for me.

In parallel, I also got a note from Mihai Parparita and Brian Shih on the Google Reader team, saying the company implemented a fix for the desktop version of Reader that should speed boot-up times for accounts with lots of followers (which Robert Scoble and myself fall under). I haven't been grousing about any slowed start times, but will soon check it out and hopefully appreciate its benefits.

You can find the new Google Reader mobile on your handset here: http://www.google.com/reader/i/.

Disclosure: My6sense is an assumed competitor to some aspects of Google Reader, and My6sense is a Paladin Advisors Group client, where I am managing director of new media.

In what the company called Blogger's biggest announcement in several years, Google introduced a versatile template designer this morning that opens up a wide array of creative high-quality designs to the millions of users on the platform. The launch comes in the wake of Blogger's 10th anniversary, and raises the bar in terms of both appearance and ease of customization, guiding Blogger users to leverage new professionally designed themes with thousands of background images, and customization on layout and color themes. The combined package could mean the end of flat-looking Blogger templates, and gives potential WordPress users or switchers a serious alternative.

The new Blogger Template Designer, which launched on Blogger In Draft, features 15 new professional templates at introduction, with more to come, including anticipated user submissions, customized layouts with up to three columns, hundreds of background images via a partnership with iStockphoto, and the ability to change colors and fonts across the site. The package, which I will definitely be messing around with shortly, is an effort to give everyone their own personal look and feel that doesn't appear to be "cookie cutter".


"How people look on the Web is really important, especially if it comes to publishing or blogging," said Siobhan Quinn, a product manager of Blogger at Google yesterday. "We wanted to empower people to create their own unique design, with tools that are extremely simple and powerful at the same time. We believe the blog is your blog, and you should be able to do anything you want with it."

Prior to this morning's launch, the vast majority of existing Blogger templates were created by or impacted by Google's then visual design lead Doug Bowman in 2005. With Doug now at Twitter for a year, and the templates looking somewhat stale, not to mention difficult to parse in HTML (trust me), it is high time for new designs.


The introduction of a few dozen templates for Blogger wouldn't be that much of a big deal, except for the fact the company has leveraged the engineering talent at Google, and applied that to its new design options. As was explained yesterday, every template can be applied to every available site layout, and if users opt to tilt their blog toward one specific color theme or another, care is taken to make sure the text and images are not only readable, but look good.


This customization leverages a new concept of a "main color theme" which as Quinn explained, "lets you shift from one complementary set to another, with an infinite number of palettes in the color spectrum."

Blogger users who tap into these new designs will get the option to modify the existing templates through a Layout tab that lets them apply any template to any layout, including 8 body layouts and 3 footer layouts. You can even adjust the width of any column to get customization down to the pixel. As the sidebars are edited, they present different "drop regions" for Gadgets you may have installed. And if you want to get into the code, there is always the option to muck with the HTML to make it yours. Should you want to add a customized CSS file, you can add that as well, and even remove it later without seeing your blog fall apart, as Blogger uses your code to override their own, not deleting it outright.

With tens of millions of Blogger blogs out there, even if Google offered hundreds of pre-made templates, they would still be recognizable as Blogger hosted. Now, if Blogger users do revamp their blogs with the new Blogger Template Designer, they can take on the author's personality in a new way. Watch this space, as I may be leveraging them myself shortly.

For most of us, resumes are updated with great irregularity - usually just before leaving one job, and just after arriving at another. These resumes also are much more focused on our pasts than our future - highlighting previous jobs and degrees, durations of each stop, and what we think were the most notable accomplishments. In parallel, online resumes that encourage connections, such as LinkedIn and Plaxo, are dominated by connections to previous colleagues and partners found at each position. This leaves the often most-difficult portion of the resume, the objective, as the only major segment that looks to the future - and all the focus on previous accomplishments makes the entire process more challenging for new entrants into the workforce, with little or no experience that matches their goals or potential.

Brazen Careerist, a social network aimed at generation Y professionals, took a look at this gap and has made moves to turn the resume around, focused as much on one's ideas and forward-looking goals as it is on their work history. The site encourages users, who are posting upwards of 100,000 updates a month to the network, to add "Top Ideas" to their resume, where they are given high precedence which can hopefully overcome one's assumed lacking years of experience. These top ideas, like other engagements on the site, are open to comments and discussion from other members, making the resumes not just about these top ideas, but social as well.


The network lies in between the more established social networks of LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn can be rigid and stodgy for an older generation, with Facebook presumably being very casual. Thus, so too is the social, ideas-based resume, a less formal, but still professional way to communicate one's business goals and inspiration.

You can add up to five "Top Ideas", up to 500 characters apiece, and rank them any way you wish, on top of your more traditional resume on the site. (see mine here) If you change your mind as to your top thoughts any time later, you can delete old ones and replace them with newer priorities.


Brazen Careerist is tapping into generation Y's proclivity to be active in social networks, while also presenting them the opportunity to organize their thoughts. The site suggests: "Conversations happen pretty fast on the web, and before you know it, they're forgotten. Effortlessly organize the most important things you have to say so employers, colleagues and friends don't forget just how smart you really are."

I have been working with Brazen Careerist since the beginning of the year, and they are a client of Paladin Advisors Group. The launch of social ideas-based resumes also follows the network's recent overhaul which makes the site much more like Facebook or FriendFeed, letting you post to a "Fan Feed", recommend entries and add comments. The result is a much more friendly and social experience than a LinkedIn, but focused on career mobility, not entertainment.

Will the addition of "Top Ideas" to one's resume help potential recruiters and employers get to know candidates better before reaching out? It certainly can't hurt. Brazen Careerist's moves are welcome in a world of resumes that haven't updated much in a long time.

Also see: Ere.net: For Gen-Yers, the Conversation’s the Resume and TheNextWeb: Brazen Careerist Looks To The Future With Social Resumes.

Disclosure: Brazen Careerist is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am managing director of new media.

Anybody who watches my online activity knows that I try to consume a ridiculous amount of information and filter out the best to you. My most efficient tool for that is Google Reader, which captures all the feeds I am interested in, as well as recommendations from friends I follow. The best of these items get shared. But not everybody wants to read a ton of items as fast as possible, in the order they were received, with no sorting on relevance. With that in mind, Reader is experimenting with a new tool called "Google Reader Play", available today in Google Labs. The presentation of Play is a lot like Apple's Coverflow, showing one item at a time, in full screen. And the more you use Play, it adapts to what you like. (See their blog post)

Some of Play's promise sounds reminiscent of my6sense, the digital intuition iPhone app I help to advise as part of Paladin. Brian Shih, product manager at Google Reader, explained that Play watches your behavior, and tailors itself to your own personal interests.


"As you browse, let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you more stuff that you'll like," he said in an e-mail. "If you want, you can also choose categories and we'll personalize your stream to only show you stuff from those categories."

The technology behind Play has been publicly available in Reader for some time, including the same code behind "Recommended" items and sources, as well as the sorting function they call "Magic". While you don't need a Google account to use Play, if you do sign in, it will be personalized with items that you already like, including items that people you follow in Reader have shared, as well as other items similar to those things you have taken action on before.


The learning process for Reader's Play is based on both implicit and explicit behavior. Without your needing to fill out forms online indicating what you like or don't like, Google will figure out your preferences based on your own behavior - just as my6sense does on the mobile app for RSS and social streams.

Shih says by no means is Play intended to replace Google Reader outright. He says "both Google Reader and Reader Play are about finding and reading interesting stuff online". Play is supposed to be, yes, more fun, while Reader is all about organization, tracking your history and making sure all your items are read. From within Reader, you can view any feed in "Play" by opening the feed settings and opting to "View in Reader Play". (See image on left)

Disclosure: My6sense is an assumed competitor to some aspects of Google Reader, and My6sense is a Paladin Advisors Group client, where I am managing director of new media.