Six Sites

Recently I’ve been moving my sites like Six Sites and my blog off of Tumblr and on to Chyrp. But what is missing from the switch is my Tumblr Dashboard, which allows me to “follow” other Tumblr sites. While I could certainly still use the Tumblr Dashboard just for this view, I’ve been playing with creating my own, that allows me to aggregate not just Tumblr sites, but any site I wish.

The question becomes, what is the difference between a newsreader and a dashboard? For me it is all about the context. I see newsreaders as applications like Newsfire or Google Reader where I aggregate all of the sites I’m interested in. Where I go to be in the know, where I go for my news.

On the other hand I see a dashboard as stream of information that is crucial to me. In other words, if I were to only look at one site each day, this site would be it. I could (and usually do) just put these information into my newsreader. But a common problem with newsreaders is collecting so feeds that viewing it becomes an overwhelming task to wade through. I often miss the top sites I want to read each day.

What’s Next?

Ages ago I asked if there is a need for a new newsreader and I still believe there is. I want a newsreader that feels more like the New York Times and less like Google Reader. Easy to read, published daily and portable. But at the end of the day it is news, something I will do during idle periods. Something I do to be more informed, more educated, to discover something new.

Now I also want a personal dashboard. Something more transactional. A collection of data that I want to review each day (or several times each day), but not something I want to spend a lot of time doing. Something I can glance at quickly and stay up to date with things that are happening that are specific to me. Perfect for the mobile context, when I have short bits of time and want to keep up.

Some of things that come to mind that I want in my dashboard…

• My favorite sites that I read daily.
• My Twitter @replies.
• Any new comments on Flickr, Vimeo or other media sharing sites.
• Any new comments on my blogs or other places I publish to.
• Any Basecamp, Backpack and other collaborative site content
• Maybe any occasional alerts from other sites that I’m getting as email, sites like LinkedIn, Dopplr come to mind.

Frankly, this is something that Garrett and I have talked about extensively for Leaflets 2.0. But we have been split on whether Leaflets should be about following about publishing or about both. A question that is still lingering.

For now, I’m going to try and pull together at the very least a Tumblr Dashboard replacement, who knows, maybe it will evolve into something more.