Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by dmcityview.com After years of swimming against the tide, I finally broke down and bought a tablet last week. While I still feel they have little value outside of watching videos and surfing the Web, tablets are an extremely convenient way to share multimedia content and cut back on paper use. Outside of practical concerns, one perk of purchasing a tablet is Flipboard, an application that turns virtually any Web content into personalized magazines. It’s no coincidence that tablets are roughly the size of the average magazine, and reading Internet content on them is extremely easy. Flipboard takes both those virtues and turns the Internet into a bottomless pit of reading material, tailored to the reader’s interests. Plus, like the random magazines that drift into our lives, Flipboard is a great way to discover content that sits in the periphery of our interests. Launched in 2010, Flipboard allows mobile device users to search the Web and subscrib...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com Last week I survived something I will forever deem the most treacherous act of technological perpetration in my life, full stop. After almost eight years of uninterrupted service, Google shuttered its longstanding RSS reading service, Google Reader. RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds are the paper delivery boy of the Internet. Millions of websites use RSS feeds to syndicate content automatically to website subscribers. Nearly every major website and news distributor on the planet uses this technology to deliver content; CNN, ESPN, Google News, Twitter, Facebook and many, many more. RSS Readers, such as Google Reader, allow users to aggregate and subscribe to these feeds and bypass the need to visit dozens of sites each day for news and entertainment. While Google gave plenty of warning that it was terminating its RSS reader site, for diehard content curators such as myself, it was a devastating gut punch. While Reader wasn’t the most ...