Google’s apps improvements are seeming almost telepathic to me. Yesterday I was thinking (and didn’t write it down anywhere) “Gee, it would be cool if I could annotate shared items so folks knew why I was sharing them.” and suddenly today you can.

Let me just say that it would also be cool if I could add a tag set to each shared item so I can share stuff for work and stuff for friends from the same reader account.

Update: Okay uh… nevermind, the tag thing is already available. Wow.

As you all know, I’ve occasionally written comments/feedback to big blogs I read about their overall content, but since I certainly can’t expect them to respond only to my own feedback and change their tunes (esp. with respect to diet/health/exercise topics which I often find noisome), I’ve started filtering their feeds to my Google Reader myself.

How? With Yahoo Pipes, which is a drag/drop type programming utility specifically for aggregating and filtering feeds and other data on the web. It’s pretty neat and usually pretty easy to use, as long as you’re careful and you test as you go.

I already built a pipe for Lifehacker that filters out posts to do with the “diet” category and the “health” category (and may need to change it to add “cooking”). I also built a pipe for BoingBoing that for now only filters out non-unique posts (by title) but may in the future implement a similar filtering mechanism for certain categories.

Going great guns with both Google Notebook (for tracking interesting links for both personal and professional web research) as well as with Google Reader Shared items.

Just a reminder, you can look at my Google Notebook for Utilities and Sources here.

You can look at my Google Notebook for interesting links, sites and daily reading here.

And the web-version of my Google Reader Shared Items is here.

Or, if you got my actual blog, these links are in the lower right in a grey box.