Yaser Sulaiman’s Blog

[Update: I have added two more ways to make your Web browsing useful to others: Tweet and Email]

You usually browse the Web to find something useful to you, but have you ever thought about making it useful to others? The following methods might be obvious to many “power users“, but there is definitely someone out there who doesn’t know them.

1. Hit the “Share” Button in Your RSS Reader

(Yes, I consider reading RSS feeds as Web browsing!)

In many RSS readers, there is a way to share items that you see “share-worthy“. In Google Reader, you can hit the “Share” button (or Shift+S on your keyboard) to share the current item.

In FeedDemon, you can create a new clippings folder and enable sharing it as an RSS feed. To share an item, just add it to this folder.

All what you have to do now is to give the link to that feed to others (by publishing it on your blog for example). Here is my shared items feed.

Remember: don’t overdo it! Most probably, your subscribers got their hands full with too many feeds, and you don’t want to make it worse for them. Of course, you are free to share whatever you like, but as a general rule, the number of shared items should be less than the number of starred items (your private, favorite items). I usually ask myself before I hit the “Share” button: “Will I write about the topic(s) of this post in my own blog?“. If the answer is yes, this will encourage me to share it (but it doesn’t mean that I’ll definitely do it!).

2. Use Social Bookmarking

Not only can del.icio.us be used to save bookmarks on the Web, it can be used to share links and create networks between users, and that is why it is called “social” in the first place. When you come across a special, important, useful, or even interesting website, and you think that someone else might be interested in it too, bookmark it. If you find a user that has similar interests to yours, add him/her to your network, then follow your entire network via its RSS feed.

Remember to share your del.icio.us page with others. Here is my page.

Of course, del.icio.us is not the only web site that offers social bookmarking services. Look for similar services and choose the one(s) that suits your needs.

3. Blog

This might be helpful when you don’t have the time to write a long post. Instead of leaving your blog without updates for the week, why don’t you write a short post containing links to some useful websites, blogs, or articles you recently came across? (I know I should do this more often!)

4. Tweet

Are you on Twitter? If yes, make your tweets more useful and interesting by posting links to useful websites from time to time.

Because of the 140-character limit, you might want to use one of the URL shortening services. I personally prefer Tweetburner because it can be used to track what happens with the links you share on Twitter.

(On a side note, TinyURL is blocked in Saudi Arabia! I was missing a lot of good stuff because of that, but I recently discovered Embiggen TinyURL bookmarklet for expanding those TinyURLs, and it works fine with me!)

5. Email

If you come across an interesting article on some blog and you realize that one of your friends will find it really useful, look around for an envelope icon, an “Email this” link, or a “Send to friend” link and click it to send the link to your friend. Of course, you can send the link from your own email account if you prefer to do so.

Do you have any other tips to make our web browsing useful to others?

a.k.a hit the “Mark all as read” button.

Yes, you will feel bad about it. Yes, you will miss things that are great, helpful, amazing, interesting, and cool. Still, you will survive (at least I did).

Why should you do it? Think about it: How can you find peace of mind when you are being constantly reminded that you have 1000+ items to read? Maybe you are an information junkie, but information overload can have drastic effects. For many of us, life’s just too short.

I used to keep good, long articles that needed concentration unmarked to read them on a later time, but the number of unread items kept increasing. Google Reader automatically marks an item as read after 30 days. So eventually, those articles were marked as read and I never got the chance to read them.

Engadget is a great blog, but I only manged to keep their RSS feed in my subscription list for less than a week. It was just overwhelming to receive around 40 posts/day from a single site. Armed with that little button, I will subscribe to it again.

What if you are not comfortable at all with hitting the “Mark all as read” button? You can subscribe to category feed(s) instead of the main one. This will reduce the number of posts you have to read and will help you avoid the ones that you are not interest in.

If you have 300+ subscriptions and you are able to manage them with ease, or if you don’t mind having 1000+ unread items all the time, then you don’t have to do it. But remember: When things get overwhelming, the “Mark all as read” button will always be there for you (hopefully!).

30: the number of days I set to accomplish the mission.

158: the number of subscriptions in my Google Reader account.

0: the number of unread items I was hoping to reach at the end of the 30-day period.

3780: the number of items I read.

126: average number of items read per day.

255: the number of unread items at the end of the 30-day period.

Conclusion: Keeping up with the Web is impossible!

At first, it was quite easy, but things got complicated as I entered my final exams period. The whole thing fall apart after I spent an entire day without an Internet connection. I tried to make up in the last day, but after reading 316 items, I raised the white flag!

Lifehacker was (and still) the most frequently updated among my subscriptions with an average of 16.5 items/day. It is repeated in the list because I subscribed to their full feed recently.

What should I do now? Maybe I should organize the subscriptions according to their priority.

How about you? How many items do you read per day?

In addition to being a nuisance, spam (junk) emails waste user time, disk space and network bandwidth. On my way back to KFUPM after the summer vacation, a simple idea regarding spam filtering hit me.

It all began with a simple question: “Why don’t you want to see spam emails?“. The answer was straightforward: “Because I’m not interested in whatever subjects the email is talking about“. Then, I started thinking:

We can’t use the subject header of the email because it can be totally unrelated to the body. So, we have to look at the content itself. How about if we extracted keywords that represent the main subject(s) of the email, and then compared them with keywords that represent the subjects that the user is interested in? After that, we should come up with a predicted “level of interest“. If it is too low, then the user will (most probably) not be interested in seeing this email (i.e. it’s spam).

This idea is now the core of my senior project. It will be a research-oriented, AI-related project. Regarding the first phase (keyword extraction), my teammate and I will most probably use some of the available services. We will focus our efforts on the second phase (keyword comparison). We have to figure out exactly how to do it and how to incorporate machine learning in it. We also might improve it by using Bayesian Belief Networks and/or Functional Network classifiers.

Spam filtering is one of the hot topics in the application of data mining and AI techniques. By working in this project, we hope that we can contribute to the ongoing research and develop an approach that will hopefully be taken as a basis for a new filtering technique or as an addition to existing ones.

Phew!! I was so close to forget that I have a blog that needed to be maintained regularly! I didn’t intend to leave my blog for more than two weeks without updating it, but things got out of my hands… sort of!

I had two weeks to spend relaxing in Syria before coming back for my last semester as an undergraduate. For my surprise, my PC there (an old one) wasn’t working properly. I tried to fix it myself but I didn’t have the necessary equipment. I didn’t take to be repaired because I was… too relaxed! I said to myself: “I can survive two weeks without a PC, I only need to go to an Internet café from time to time“.

My first (and only) visit to the café was terrible! The DSL connection was literally slower than a dial-up! I started to panic: “I HAVE TO check my e-mail, publish a post on my blog and update my status on Facebook. I just HAVE TO!“. Then, it hit me: “What if I left everything and tried to enjoy my vacation without worrying about anything related to technology for once?“.

And that was exactly what I did. To tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time I felt this relaxed before. I admit that catching up will be hard (1000+ unread items in my Google Reader!!), but it was worth it.

Now that I’m back online, I’ll continue blogging regularly. I won’t be publishing posts at the same rate as I did in the summer though, because I have a lot to deal with right now