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hpr_transcripts/hpr1027.txt

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+Episode: 1027
+Title: HPR1027: Migrating away from Google Reader
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1027/hpr1027.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:38:17
+
+---
+
+Manjaro
+Hi everybody, my name is Ken Falon and today I want to talk to you about my journey in migrating
+away from Google Reader. Google Reader is one of the best applications out there. It's
+best definitely one of the best services provided by Google. And what it is essentially is
+a way that you can subscribe to a newsfeed if you don't know what that is. It's like a blog
+posting or whatever. And rather than having to revisit the site every time something is posted,
+what they do is they update the RSS, which really simple syndication, feed, which is nothing
+more than an XML file. And your reader, your client, RSS reader goes out and connects to those feeds
+and downloads only the new items that have changed. So places like the BBC or CNN or whoever
+have these feeds and you can read their news items without actually having to go to their
+websites or you can go to the websites by clicking on the link. It's very useful and very
+convenient to think. One disadvantage over the traditional applications that you would have
+on your Linux PC or your Windows PC or your mobile phone is is the synchronization of what you've
+read. So in a typical situation you might work up in the morning, check your news feeds at home,
+then go on to the train, check some more feeds there, and then join your lunch break, you might
+check some more feeds at work. And what's really convenient about Google Reader is that the feeds that
+you've marked as read on one location are marked as read in all the other locations. They
+one thing that they concern me a little bit about Google Reader was the fact that
+the idea of somebody looking over your shoulder. Now remember everybody when you were younger and
+you had lean over your grandpa's shoulder and start reading a newspaper to which he, in my case,
+would roll it up and slap you across the head with it in a friendly fashion saying it was rude to
+do that. And yet at the same time we're allowing complete strangers to look into what we're reading.
+Now it's you know a common thing on the train to identify people's political affiliation by
+the newspaper that they subscribe to and then the same way you can determine a lot by somebody's
+news feeds that they subscribe to. For example the news feeds that I subscribe to contain a lot of
+news sites, BBC for instance, I also subscribe to Dutch sites, Irish news sites and German
+news sites. But to get a balanced opinion I also subscribe to Algebra. So what I noticed was once
+I expanded my list of feeds that I started subscribing to I noticed that certain things started
+changing in my search patterns. And I want to play this speech TED Talk by Ellie Parr Seer
+entitled Beware of Online Filter Bowls. It was a TED Talk and it was watched currently over
+nearly one and a half million times. So I'll just splice that in here. It's of course released
+under the Creative Commons by attribution non-commercials share a like license. So it's TED Talk
+and a link will be available in the show notes. Enjoy.
+Mark Zuckerberg a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed.
+And the journalist was asking him, you know, why is this so important? And Zuckerberg said,
+a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interest right now than people
+dying in Africa. And I want to talk about what a web based on that idea of relevance might look
+like. So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, you know, the internet meant
+something very different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that would
+connect us all together. And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our
+society. But there's this kind of shift in how information is flowing online. And it's invisible.
+And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. So I first noticed this in a
+place I spend a lot of time, my Facebook page. I'm progressive politically, big surprise. But I've
+always, you know, gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking
+about. I like seeing what they link to. I like learning a thing or two. And so I was kind of surprised
+when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it
+turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on. And it was
+noticing that actually I was clicking more on my liberal friends links than on my conservative
+friends links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.
+So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible algorithmic editing of the
+web. Google is doing it too. If I search for something and you search for something, even right now,
+at the very same time, we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one
+engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at. Everything from what kind of computer
+you're on, to what kind of browser you're using, to where you're located, that it uses to
+personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second. There is no standard Google
+anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see you can't see how
+different your search results are from anyone else's. But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch
+of friends to Google Egypt and send me screenshots of what they got. So here's my friend Scott's
+screenshot. And here's my friend Daniel's screenshot. When you put them side by side, you don't even
+have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links,
+it's really quite remarkable. Daniel didn't get anything about the protest in Egypt at all in his
+first page of Google results. Scott's results were full of them. And this was the big story of the
+day at that time. That's how different these results are becoming. So it's not just Google and
+Facebook either. You know, this is something that's sweeping the web. There are a whole host of
+companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo news. The biggest news site on the internet
+is now personalized. Different people get different things. Having the post, the Washington post,
+New York Times, off flirting with personalization in various ways. And where this moves us very quickly
+toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see. But not necessarily
+what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt said, it'll be very hard for people to watch or consume something
+that has not in some sense been tailored for them. So I do think this is a problem. And
+I think if you take all of these filters together, if you take all of these algorithms, you get
+what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is kind of your own personal, unique universe
+of information that you live in online. And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are
+and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. And more
+importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out. So one of the problems with the filter
+bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. And they were looking at the Netflix cues and
+they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some
+movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses. They enter the queue, they just zip right
+out. So Iron Man zips right out, right? And waiting for Superman can wait for a really long time.
+What they discovered was that in our Netflix cues, there's kind of this epic struggle going on
+between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. You know, we all want
+to be someone who has watched Rashomon. But right now, we want to watch Ace Ventura for the
+fourth time. So the best editing gives us a bit of both. It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber
+and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables. It gives us some
+information dessert. And the challenge with these kind of algorithmic filters, these personalized
+filters is that because they're mainly looking at what you click on first, you know, it can
+throw off that balance. And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by
+information junk food. So what this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the
+internet wrong. In a broadcast society, you know, this is how the founding mythology goes, right?
+In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors. And they controlled the flows of
+information. And along came the internet. And it swept them out of the way. And it allowed all of us
+to connect together. And it was awesome. But that's not actually what's happening right now.
+What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones.
+And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the
+editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they're going to decide
+what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just
+keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable
+or challenging or important. This is what Ted does, right? Other points of view.
+And the thing is we've actually kind of been here before as a society.
+In 1915, it's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities.
+Then people kind of noticed that they were doing something really important,
+that in fact you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of
+information. That the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter and that
+journalistic ethics developed. It wasn't perfect, but it got us through the last century.
+And so now, we're kind of back in 1915 on the web. And we need the new gatekeepers
+to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing.
+You know, I know there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google, Larry, and Sergey,
+who, you know, people who have helped build the web as it is. And I'm grateful for that.
+But we really need to you to make sure that these algorithms haven't coded in them a sense of
+the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. We need you to make sure that they're transparent
+enough that we can see what the rules are, that determine what gets through our filters.
+And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't.
+Because I think we really need the internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being.
+We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people
+and different perspectives. And it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a web of one.
+Thank you.
+Okay, so we've decided that we want to move off Google reader. What do we need to do?
+Well, the first thing we need to do is get a list of the feeds and then fairness to Google
+to make this very easy to do. They have a team called the data liberation team within Google
+and their goal is from the website data liberation.org. Users should be able to control the data,
+the store and any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.
+So all you need to do is open up reader, go to settings, reader settings, import and export,
+and right there you will have an OPML file for you. An OPML is an online processor markup language.
+So it's XML format and it basically describes a list of RSS feeds for you. You don't need to worry
+too much about that just because I've got a fetish for XML files, you don't need to cut up in that.
+So now that we've got our feed, the question is how are we going to use that feed?
+Are we just going to simply load it onto our different feed readers and be back into the same
+problem that we had before and things that have been synchronized? Well, there is an obvious
+solution actually when you think about it of things reading messages in one location and
+having them synchronized across the other locations and that of course is the IMAP protocol.
+From Wikipedia again, the internet message access protocol IMAP is one of the most prevalent
+internet standard protocols for email retrieval. The other being post office protocol pop.
+Virtually all modern email clients and service support both protocols as a means of transporting
+email messages from a server. So what it does essentially is if you mark a message deleted on one
+mailbox, when you check on the other mailbox, it's also deleted. IMAP also supports a cool thing
+called offline mailboxes so you can download your messages to an offline store and this is super
+convenient. It's based on certain clients and actually offers functionality that Google doesn't
+provide. Now on my train trip home, they journey passes. It's at a very busy time and it passes
+through the most of the largest business districts and I have a very very poor signal the whole
+way home and often I got frustrated waiting for Google redirect work. Now downloading my messages
+in IMAP, I can have them already downloaded and stored on my laptop or my mobile device ready to go.
+So IMAP is supported by basically everything. Even Microsoft Outlook supports it and Linux,
+Thunderbird, Evolution, KML and Clothes all supported. There's Android clients, I phone
+clients, Windows mobile clients. There's also if you like the whole concept of web mail,
+there's more service providers provide something like Squirrel Mail or something like that to allow
+you to access IMAP via a website. So even if you're away from a client and you're at an internet
+cafe, you can still connect to your news feeds. And any of these devices, if your marker message
+is as read or deleted, then it's read or deleted. And if you want to share it with somebody,
+you just press forward and email it on to somebody else. It's kind of cool. So I was faced then with
+the, I have my list of feeds and I knew where I wanted to put them. The only thing was how I was
+going to get from one to the other. And a quick duck duck go search led me to feed to IMAP,
+that's F-E-E-D, the numeral two and IMAP. And the home page is home.gna.org for such feed to IMAP.
+And from their website, feed to IMAP is an RSS at some feed aggregator. After downloading feeds
+over HTTP or HTTPS, it uploads them to a specified folder on an IMAP mail server and copies them
+to a local mail doer. The user can then access the feeds using mod evolution, Mozilla Thunderbird
+or even a webmail client. The application has been out for a while and it's in all major repositories.
+I had it open running in about 10 minutes and the configuration file is kept in a hidden file
+in your home directory called dot feed to IMAP or C. And it's a fairly simple configuration file.
+It's based on yet another marker plamage if you're into text file marker plamages.
+And so a simple feed might be a consistent minimum of three lines possible before. When you can
+add more items in there, you can even add the ability to download the feed and modify it in some
+way before you process it. If you open up the feed to IMAP or C example, you will see various
+different ways to utilize this. So what you require is, first of all, a name. And that's just,
+for example, canfellon.com is the name of one of my feeds. The URL is HTTP colonforce-canfellon.com
+customer feed to rss. So that's the rss feed itself. Come on from Google reader.
+The target then is your IMAP location. So it's IMAP colon, forward slash, forward slash,
+and the username colon password, at sign, server, and then wherever you want to put it.
+If you've got the at sign, you need to escape it with the percent character and then the ASCII
+field. I chose to put my fields, my feeds into inbox.field fields. And then I met subfolders
+for every group that I had already defined within Google reader. And the only other options I
+set was include dash images to be true. So I wrote actual little parals script to take an
+opml file and convert it into a configuration file feed to IMAP RC file. And so I didn't want to
+be doing that again. So I wrote that there. And thanks to Tlatu over the new world order,
+this episode on gith, March 31, 2010, episode season 7, episode 13. The code is available for
+everybody to download at guitarius.org forward slash opml to feed. So once you've done that,
+you now have a dot feed to IMAP RC file in your home directory hidden. And the next thing you should
+do is go over to your email client and set up the RSS account. I set up a simple throw away account
+that I limit it to 100 megabytes or whatever so that if I forget to check my feed for a while,
+it won't start encroaching all the users. And actually, when I uploaded this the first time,
+I posted the link into the August plan of RSS IRC channel. Sorry, the IRC channel and
+C prompt called me aside to say, oh, did you realize that you have your RSS user name
+and password in the file? So for your IMAP folder, which when you think about it, actually,
+I initially panicked and then I thought, well, you know, here are people I know looking over my
+shoulder. So I have nothing to hide in there. The only reason I'm not putting this into this show
+or the show notes is that I don't want to use as a means for spanners. But at least there,
+I know the people who were in the channel at the time. And of course, I can change the username
+and password if you wish. So once you do that, you should be all set all you need to do is run
+feed to IMAP. And on your email client, you should start seeing the messages starting to appear.
+And if you mark them red on one client, you should see them also been marked as red on the other
+clients. I simply used Chrome to schedule the feed to IMAP to run every two hours as 14 minutes past
+the hour. And that's pretty much it. I've been using it for about a week now. It works out very,
+very well. It's supported by the standard IMAP client on my phone. I've started using
+close email client on my, on all my machines, actually, because it supports this really well. And
+there's a nice simple straightforward client. I did use it on Thunderbird and I also used an
+email. And just to check, I installed it, checked it out on Microsoft Outlook. And it works on all of
+them. So, all and all quite a good, you know, a nice success there. And so if you are considering
+an alternative to Google for Search, I've also been using duck.go for a while. So that's a good
+alternative to that. And if you're looking for an alternative to Google reader, then feed to IMAP
+is a nice alternative that you can take the, the whole functioning of your, what you're reading to
+keep it a little bit more private, if you wish or not. If you, if you don't, you simply publish your
+username or password on a, on a website, disability, sending, of course. So that's it. Thank you very
+much for listening. Hope you got something from this. There will be detailed show notes in
+the episode for this. And also over on my own website canfoundan.com. If you have considered it,
+please consider recording a show here for Acro Public Radio. We really appreciate it. Okay,
+thank you. And tune in tomorrow for something completely different.
+You have been listening to Acro Public Radio. Acro Public Radio does our, we are a community
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