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Francine - Mar 0, 2013

Just had to let you know I probably wouldn’t have seen this post had it not been in my Google Reder. Though I don’t use it as much anymore to keep up with news sites, but it’s still the place I go to keep track of friends’ and acquaintances’ blogs and do targeted research. I, too, used Zite for a while, but haven’t in a while. Now I use Flipboard to bring together lots of different information sources and discover new content, and while it’s one of my favorite iPhone/iPad apps, there still isn’t something comparable I’ve found to use on my laptop. And, I still use Flipboard to read my Google Reader feeds on mobile.

Google Reader was a great tool because it made gathering and sharing content from specific sources intuitive and easy. It provided us with one place from which to do most things. Today Google have announced that they are pulling the plug on Google reader. In my eyes Google reader had become obsolete four years ago. That’s when I moved to services like Feedly, zite and others. Each of these services was more interesting because it took our feeds but used algorithms to make relevant content discovery faster and more intuitive. Feedly was fun for a while but eventually I stopped using it in favour of zite. Zite was excellent until they decided to downgrade the user experience to a pinterest like interface. I don’t want the kindergarten treatment when searching for information. I want headers, I want a line or two of content and I want to have a lot of information displayed in a small space. Zite fell out of the useful apps category and was deleted from the ipad and iphone as a result. The next project I’m looking at is Scoopinion. They have a plugin which tracks which news sources you visit and which articles you read. Based on your browising habits it recommends future articles. So far it estimates that I have spent 22hrs reading news over the past month or two with over 980 articles. By this logic it should be good at recommending stories that I would enjoy but it is too tabloid at the moment. This is probably due to the relatively small user base as this is a new project by developers in Finland. I love content aggregators that study my habits and give recommendations based on this. It makes the surfing experience more enjoyable. You also don’t suffer from RSS burn out.

Canyoning, a sport you associate with warmer weather and low altitude canyons. In this case they go to Nepal, climb to 4200 meters before spending many hours going down a canyon. That’s quite an adventure. It looks as if most of the canyoning part was filmed with gopro.

This is a french language documentary following a group of people who went to Argentina to go bouldering. You see the challenge of finding new routes. The style is original, more like a film in parts and more classic in approach at other moments.

A refreshing and different look at rock climbing. Mixing humour and the mountains in an original way.

A short fiction by Jean Rouch. Mobile camera thanks to technological advances that made sound equipment portable. This new technology would be used for documentary production.

After doing some research some ice climbers find a spectacular and physical ice climb. We see their progression from a variety of angles as well as the occasional fall.

Cinema Verité - where reality is filmed and conversations are real. Nothing is meant to be set up. It has it’s roots in anthropological studies.

Unseen is a documentary divided in to two parts. The first part is about five individuals who provide tours of various parts of London which they inhabited as homeless person and the second part is feedback and advice.

Return to Siberia from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

A change in pace, no extreme sports. Simple observation.