It’s clunky searching shared items

As my life gets absorbed into my studies at the Jung Institute, sharing items through Google Reader is becoming a bigger part of my social media practice.  Using the reader to twitter function, my shared items gets posted in my twitter stream and they also get imported over at friendfeed.  I also gather my various shared items in the wifi lifestream category here on this blog.

I learned the value of this practice by observing Chris Brogan and Louis Gray. They have both become my new tech filters of choice. I’ve come to trust two aspects of their practice. First, there’s the editorial decisions they make. They share what they think is important and that shapes a sector of information for me that is not my primary interest.   Second, they are consistent with their practice which means I can trust that their eyes are on the ball, scanning hundreds of blogs and essentially freeing up time for me to focus on my primary field.

My problem (google, are you listening?), is that searching shared items is clunky. Ideally we’d be able to search using the “site:” command in general search, but alas, the pseudo domains that google creates are unsearchable. Yes, in google reader we can search the items we subscribe to, but why should I be limited to search only those items. Lets say I’m interested in finding out what a given person was sharing regarding a certain subject, but I never subscribed to their shared items.

By sharing we know we are making a public act.  Let’s get these streams opened up to general search.  Let’s at least get a search box on the public shared items page that google has so graciously provided us with.