I’m getting back into using Google Reader. I took a few months off (mostly) because of my fascination with FriendFeed but found that everytime I opened Google Reader I was getting smarter than by reading TechMeme or FriendFeed or Twitter.

There’s real meat in the 600+ blogs I subscribe to (and 500 friends on Google Talk bring me even more news).

Anyway, I’ve been trying to write a note on each blog I share. Today I looked at that and realized it’s a blog about other blogs.

If you notice that I’ve been blogging here less lately, it’s because I’ve spread my attention out to other places. Hope you’re enjoying this because I only share things that impress me and now that I have the ability to put a note on each item I share, hopefully you find that more useful too.

Yesterday I did a couple of interviews at Facebook’s headquarters that’ll be up over the next couple of weeks. But in between I stopped at Chris Putnam’s desk. I’ve known him since he was 16, living in Atlanta (he showed me a web service he built so that people on the Internet could listen to him practice his piano). Anyway, he’s the guy who built Facebook’s video system. Interesting that he has three monitors on his desk. One of which shows how many videos are sitting in a queue waiting to be encoded.

That got me to ask him what’s some things that would help his encoder out and also give you the best possible quality on Facebook for video.

He said that making your videos 606 pixels across would keep his encoder from having to scale down your video size. I did a Google search on 606 pixels and haven’t found anyone else that’s shared that data.

Which shows one of the reasons I blog: to get things into Google so I can pull them out later.

Ahh, the interesting things you learn by asking questions of the geeks who build the technologies we all use. Thanks Chris and Facebook for a most interesting day yesterday.