Rotacoo

I’ve just managed, for the very first time, to get my Google Reader unread count down to zero. And I’m very proud of this achievement.

I’m not the best at keeping on top of my 257 feeds, and having recently moved house I’ve been without the internet for a week or two. So the unread count was waaaaay over 1000, which is where Reader just calls it “1000+”. This is presumably because it thinks you’ve given up trying to read everything.

The reason for undertaking the mammoth task of actually reading my feeds was today’s announcement that top Mac newsreader NetNewsWire has been made freeware, along with web based access via Newsgator and syncing between computers.

I wanted to move my reading to NetNewsWire, but OPML (the standard file format for describing feed subscriptions) doesn’t support keeping a track of what I’ve read. So to make the jump I had to get everything read, and then start afresh. Which is what I’ve done!¹

Oh dear, NNW tells me I have 20 unread posts in the time it took to write this post…

Last night James (the Oxford branch of Google Sightseeing) did a very quick, but thoroughly entertaining, presentation about Google Sightseeing at this month’s Oxford Geek night. You can watch the 5 minute video of his Micro Presentation in mp4 format directly via this link.

Oxford’s premier tech event returns tomorrow night, in the form of Oxford Geek Night 4.

Building on the success of the previous events the night is set to feature many excellent talks on a range of geeky topics including Web frameworks, MythTV and Perl.

I’ll also be giving a short “microslot” talk about Google Sightseeing where I’ll quickly show a couple of my favourite entries from the archives.

We’ve recently been toying with the idea of hiring one or more staff writers for Google Sightseeing, so we’re asking around to see if anybody is up for the job.

We’re looking for someone who has a genuine interest in the subjects we write about on the site, who is interested in researching and writing one or two quality posts a week, which we’d expect to take about 2-4 hours of your time. Obviously you’ll have excellent written English skills, and we’d especially like to talk to you if you’re also a fluent writer in any language other than English.

Is this something anyone would be interested in doing? We’re not looking for any commitments right now, we’d just like to know if you’re interested. Rather than comment here please send an email to james at this current domain name or use the GSS Contact form.

That’s right, Google Sightseeing is the 452nd most popular blog in the world! Well, according to those fine ladies and gents over at Bloglines anyway.

Thanks to everyone who reads us via bloglines, we appreciate every last one of you

Simon, who drew our Heelan Coo logo for us, now has his own Spreadshirt Shop, where you can buy a t-shirt with our logo on it! Go forth and get yourself a “coo” t-shirt if it floats your boat.