Portals and KM

Painting of Mardi Gras Indians 2015 #4

Here is a 16" x 20" painting of a big chief at the Mardi Gras Indians Super Sunday (St. Joseph's Day) 2015. It is created from a photo I took at the event. 

   

The best way to easily see most of my paintings for sales is to go to my Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/bill.ives2 - and look at Photos and albums within Photos. I have three photo albums covering my art. One is for discounted pairings under $100.  The other is for most of the rest (over $100). The third is for paintings that I have either sold or ones that
are not for sale. However, if anyone is interested in them I will paint another version for them on commission. I will ship anywhere and have shipped art works as far as Australia.

In New Orleans there are currently paintings hanging at two of my favorite New Orleans restaurants. One is Willie Mae’s Uptown. It is located at 7457 St. Charles Ave., New Orleans, 504-417-5424. Here is a post describing the showing at Willie Mae’s. Another is  Riccobono's Panola Street Cafe. Here is a post describing the showing at Riccobono's. It is located at 7801 Panola Street (504 314-1810). You can also contact me to see more of them. There are also paintings haning at the Albert Brown Salon located at 3424 Magazine Street in New Orleans.  Here is a post about the Albert Brown show with all of the images. You can also find my work at the Salvadorian restaurant, La Macarena located at 8120 Hampson St, New Orleans, just off Carrolton Ave. at Riverbend. Here is a post on it: New Paintings Are for Sale at La Macarena, New Orleans.  The fifth, and most recent, is the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen Uptown at 615 Carrolton Ave. (504) 866-5900. I hung my second show there on April 4. Here is a post about it: New Paintings at Louisiana Pizza Kitchen.

This fall I may be having a second show at Buffa’s Back Room, one of my favorite music venues in New Orleans. Here is a post on the first one: My Paintings Are Up at Buffa’s Back Room, New Orleans. There are also two paintings as part of the permanent collection at Red Gravy, a wonderful downtown Italian restaurant at 125 Camp Street. (504) 561-8844. Here is a post about them: Red Gravy: Great New Orleans Brunch. Our friend, Spider Murphy, plays banjo at their weekend brunches. 

Social Behavior, Usage Patterns, and Adoption: My Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes

This is the seventh in a series of my notes on the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, June 14- 17. This post covers the session, Social Behavior, Usage Patterns, and Adoption. It was led by Nahum Gershon, Senior Principal Scientist, MITRE. Panelists include: Walton Smith, Senior Associate, Booz Allen Hamilton, David Millen, Research Scientist, IBM Watson Research Center, and Sean Power, Consultant and Analyst, Co-Founder, Watching Websites. I have interviewed both David and Walton about their organizations and looked forward to this session.  Here is the description. My notes follow.

“Regardless of how useful an application might be, its success is as much a factor of anthropology and sociology as it is of features and cost. To maximize the chances of success within any application initiative, you need an adoption strategy. Should you roll out the tool company-wide, or create false scarcity by limiting deployment? Should you have an extensive testing cycle, or instead plan for frequent upgrades and invest in feedback tools?



Internet giants like Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Basecamp, and Gmail all succeeded where others had failed because of their unique adoption strategies. In this session we’ll examine successful application deployments—including those of some of the largest and most popular sites on the web—and see how to apply the lessons they learned to our own delivery strategy.”

Nahum asked the panelists to introduce themselves in 140 char or less. Then he asked about where does social media work? Walton began by noting the large numbers of people they are hiring and added that social media can help onboard them. The Federal government is projected to hire over 500,000 people.  How can they be on-boarded?  Social media can help here also. I have written about the Booz Allen effort called Hello. Here the latest (Booz Allen Extends its Collaborative Platform) and here is a summary of the prior ones (Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen: The Series).

David pointed out that within IBM the average employees tenure is under 5 years. Their collective knowledge needs to be shared. Here is a post I did in 2005 of their efforts then (IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications).  They were pushing innovation in this space then and still do.

Walton said that traditional KM only captures a small amount of the collective wisdom. He noted that Andy McAfee yesterday said you need to have it in the workflow and this can capture much more of the collective knowledge.

Nahum mentioned seeing a demo of the Booz Allen collaboration system. Walton said at the time that most of the conversations within the firm are now online and accessible fro sharing.

Walton said that in Hello you can get feeds based attributes and people. This provided great benefits for the individual so it drove adoption.  Nahum asked how do you get people to use e20? How do you drive passion? What about people who say this is just for teenagers?

Sean responded that there are two different worlds of social media. There is the external facing conversation and communities.   You will have 90% lurkers and 10% contributors.  The other is very different when you deal with communities around business processes.  The adoption is much higher for use around processes.

Walton said that 50% of his budget is for change management to get people to use it. He asked for getting the best people from the client practice to staff the change management. They start with business problems. It is not like rolling out a tool like Outlook that is a utility.   Tool selection needs to wait until after business issues have been defined.

David said there is a complementary use that is not always anticipated. When they did social bookmarking at IBM though Dogear it contributed to the enterprise search that everyone uses, not just the Dogear users. (Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise – IBM’s Internal Tagging Tool – Dogear)

Sean said that people always say it is the business issues and not the tools but people still look at tools first. This is especially when the tools have been paid for. Now the people who paid for them want them to be used.

Nahum said he has a corporate blackberry and a person iPhone.  He tends to use Twitter for personal but he asks tech questions on it and gets good responses that he can share that within the organization

Walton said the e20 tools really benefit large organizations.  They are building a first responders community of practice to link these people who are spread across the country to get answers to questions.

Someone asked about pilot vs broad adoption. Walton said that you need to make a commitment that you are not going to stop. People are not going to participate if they do not know if it will continue.  Walton looks at the issue of return on engagement for the participants. People need to find value when they come to the system or they will not come back. Time or engagement is more the cost than actually money for tools. Walton has told me that many of the Hello tools are open source.

David said start with a pilot and be prepared to change and scale quickly.  He told a story about a pilot tool they were deploying. There is some risk in getting involved in tools. He got an email from a user saying that he put all his eggs in the basket of the new tools and hopes it was not dropped.

It was also asked about structure and unstructured data. Shawn said he is a big believer in unstructured data. There are many social media startups. He treats social media initiatives as a startup and they should be lean. He referenced lean methodology.  Most implementations will not be right the first time. You need to be nimble and treat them in a startup fashion.

Walton agrees 1000 percent but with the caveat that you need to listen to users carefully. You need to go beyond the power users and get the reluctant people involved.

An audience member said you need to get to scale quickly to get the benefit. They more people involved the more the chatter.  How can do a managed viral campaign and not be overwhelmed.  Walton said you have to be transparent that it is pilot but invite anyone to participate.  You can be nimble. Walton gave an example of when the Southern command in Miami was seeing a demo of a collaboration system that Bozz Allen developed for the US Pacific Command. When the Haiti earthquake happen they switched form demo to fill system right away.  Walton saw that the conspiracy theorists said that this proved that the US military caused the earthquake as they never could have implemented the system that quickly unless they anticipated the earthquake.

An audience mamber asked how to get middle managers to participate. Walton saoid most of his change managemtn effort is targeted at middle managers. They reach out on how to solve business problems.  Not how to use tools.

Walton said do not pilot by org chart. People do not passion about e where they are on the org chart. Look for issues that people are passionate about that cut across the org chart.  Going across the org chart also helps with viral; message and growth. Also integrate with other systems to get content already entered.

Walton said you need to keep adding better tools. People will not agree to go backward.  Nehum said you need community practioners to monitor and support the community to get what the group wants and to get people to try the system.

Walton related a use case as social can serve as an ambient alert system that tracks events within the enterprise.  There was an issue around a new smart phone roll out.  The IT people responsible for this began to see concerns on the microsharing system long before the volume of help tickets rose to alert status.  They were able to quickly address the issue through the microsharing system and other channels, indicate they were aware of it, and add that a fix was on its way. The speed of detection that microsharing offered turned what could have been a black eye for the IT people.

Walton said sunlight is best disinfectant for bad behavior.  Do not put anything that you do not want your boss or mom to see.

David said some conversations are not just inappropriate but illegal so you need to be able to monitor.  Walton said that getting senior leaders to participate helps because that sets the tone for what is expected and making it known that senior people are listening.

An audience member asked about social media bing seen as waste of time. Walton said that the water cooler has been around a long time. The social tech just makes it more powerful. 

David said that if people are simply reading blogs you have won. You do not have to have everyone writing the blogs.   He also addressed the issue of official vs informal content.  He gave the example of a medical advice system. How do you deal with bad content when it can affect people’s health. They are still working on this issue and medical advice can have big impact.

Nahum said they hope to continue to conversation using the Twitter hashtag – #e2conf-37 for the session. This was the only session I attended that suggested a continuation of the conversation. It is a good idea, especially for this useful session. 

Networks and Communities Connection by TechEmpower

At the suggestion of Tony Karrer and the invitation of Nancy White, I recently joined Networks and Communities Connection. It is a content hub started by Nancy that collects and organizes information around communities and networks. Tony runs a similar content hub, elearnng learning. His firm, TechEmpower, supplies the platform for both hubs and a number of others.

I spoke with Tony recently. He said that the goal is to provide a vetted source for content around a topic for the benefit of the readers and the writers. The contributors are selected and monitored by the site leader. This gives readers a trusted resource to explore new content on the topic in an organized way as it emerges.

These topic hubs go beyond the typical content aggregation sites as they also provide additional benefits to the contributors. The site can generate greater exposure through its key word optimization, bring in new readers and help organize the content. This last feature is what is especially unique.

If you click on a blog on the site it goes to a page that provides content from that specific blog nicely organized along a number of dimensions. There is the latest and the best according the site algorithms. In the key word column, the content on the blog is organized according to keywords grouped by concepts, tools type, and year. So you and your readers can see your content key words exposed and organized. Clicking on any one will take you to the blog posts relevant to the key word. This same listing of key words is also displayed on the individual contributors blog. You can see mine if you scroll down the left column, along with a link to the Networks and Communities Connection site and the ability to search the site.

The same format is carried up a level on the home page to organize the content of all the contributors. When I looked last week, the post selected at the top of the best post list from my blog was Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers. There is confirming evidence on this rating as this post was also the most popular of my posts syndicated at Social Media Magazine.

At the moment, you will only see a limited number of the most recent blog posts from my blog on Networks and Communities Connection as Typepad does not currently allow access beyond these. WordPress also limits access but Blogger is more generous and provides all historical data. Tony is working to expand this coverage.

I think these content hubs offer a great service connecting reader and bloggers. I look forward to participation.

BlogBridge Integrates Twitter with Its Latest Release

Recently I caught up with Pito Salas, founder of my favorite RSS reader, BlogBridge. I have written about BlogBridge before (see Filtering RSS Feeds: BlogBridge BlogStarz and BlogBridge's Support for Reading Lists). Pito said that the latest release, BlogBridge 6.6, comes with Twitter support. This makes a lot of sense as Twitter is often used to share blog links. After all, what can you do in 140 characters? Now I like Twitter but see it primarily as a way to point to things. I find interesting stuff through Twitter. A RSS reader is another way to discovery stuff that you can then share through twitter. Here is a screen shot of the Twitter function in action sending out a Tweet with a short form link and a message.

Pito provides two scenarios on how Twitter and BlogBridge can work together.

In the first case, a person gets the news from blogs and likes to keep a presence on Twitter. One of the things people tend to often want to Tweet about is an interesting article or bit of information that they saw in one of the many blogs they follow. If they are using BlogBridge 6.6, they simply choose ‘Tweet This’ while reading the blog, and up pops a box, with the shortened url pre-populated. They type in their comment and press OK and away goes the Tweet.

In the second case, a product manager, PR person, techie, or any kind of info-junkie will want to know whenever their product or topic is mentioned in any blog. So they use BlogBridge and have standing searches through the BlogBridge SmartFeeds feature for the topic of interest. Today, if their topic of choice is mentioned on Twitter, they would also like to know this. With BlogBridge 6.6, they can simply create a Twitter SmartFeed, and find the mention.

SmartFeeds came out in a prior release. They allow you to define any number of criteria and tell BlogBridge to keep an eye out for certain information and collect it together in your SmartFeed. Criteria include: article, feed or guide, title, text, date, pinned, read/unread, rating and others. You can create as many SmartFeeds as you like. Below is a screen shot of the Smart Feed set up window.

Other recent features include the ability to add a post that comes up through Blogbridge to your own blog. You can display feeds from a photo site like Flickr in a photo album format. There is also the ability to tag a post with del.icio.us without moving out of BlogBridge. Here is a screen shot of this feature.

BlogBridge is both Open Source and free. There are some paid premium features for the real information junkie but most people, me included, do well on the free version. It runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac (my version). It has scored as best RSS reader for Linux on some recent surveys.

Here’s an “Introduction to Twitter” video that Pito recorded that will give you a visual introduction to the new stuff. This is smart move to integrate two content discovery tools as they did with del.icio.us. Pito also writes a great blog that covered my Twitter week posts ☺

Unexpected Benefits of Phonetic Alphabet Keep Appearing

I have written a number of times on this blog and elsewhere that the phonetic alphabet was the greatest ever breakthrough in information technology. Here is a great blog post, Why Text Remains King of the Web, by Steve Rubel that documents some more reasons.

Steve writes: “I am starting to believe that despite all the hype around online video, text remains King of the Web. Why text? There are at least five reasons...

It's scannable - according to Jakob Nielsen users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average site visit and 20% is more likely

Three letters: SEO - For all that Google Universal Search has done to elevate video, search results are still largely made up of text and everyone wants better SEO

The workplace - It's much easier for cube-based workers to read text on the screen and get away with it vs. watching long videos. Watching videos (even work related vids) screams "slacker"

Mobile Devices - Yes, of course you can put a video on an iPhone. But it's work and requires planning. Text is easier to pull up in a nanosecond

Distribution - Nothing flies like text. It's so easy to cut and paste it and send it somewhere or to clip and re-syndicate it via email, RSS or social networks

I don't know about you but I love text.” Thanks Steve. I do too. I agree with all his points. I often get links to videos but I do not play them because the audio would bother others around me so I save them for later, and sometimes forget about them. However, I can silently read text as soon as I get it. This possibility was not always considered, as we shall see below.

Now the ancient Greeks who came up with the phonetic alphabet probably did not think about these implications. It is the invention that keeps on giving. As I wrote in Deloitte Declares We Are in a “Media Democracy,” the concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science among other things. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. The first thing put into text was an epic poem but soon text inspired documents appeared. But there is more.

Like many great inventions, the uses of text slowly evolved. In fact, it appears that reading was often done aloud until after the 6th century. Ivan Illich relates that St. Augustine refrained from reading after his brothers went to sleep for fear of waking them. After the 6th century, silent reading became more commonplace, and such techniques such as tables of contents and indexes first appeared. These new devices allowed for random access to text information, a concept we take for granted now. Now people were free to read their emails and blog posts without disturbing their neighbors. What will be next for text?

Blog Friends is Closing Shop on Facebook

I went to check on the Blog Friends application on Facebook and found this message, “Dear Blog Friend, We're very sorry to announce that Blog Friends is to close down.” This is a sad development. They were hoping for 100,000 members and only got 27,000. I was one of the 27,000 and thought it was a good thing. The note added:

“Although it appears simple on the surface, Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow. It also is pretty original in the way it combines your extended, fuzzy social network and your interests as filters for your blog recommendation River.”

Well it seemed a good idea. They said that they now need to rewrite it as a Facebook independent application. They many changes to the Facebook application caused a lot of maintenance on their part. I wonder if this will happen to others who hoped to join the Facebook gold rush. Good luck to the Blog Vreinds team. I hope they make a come back.

How Healthy is Your RSS Feed? Try Feed Validator

Jack Vinson sent me a link to this RSS feed evaluator. The site said. “This is a validator for syndicated feeds. It works with RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. It also validates Atom feeds. To use it, simply enter the address of your feed and click Validate. If the validator finds any problems in your feed, it will give you messages for each type of problem and highlight where the problem first occurs in your feed. If you're unsure what a message means, click the "help" link next to the message for a fuller explanation. Despite its relatively simple nature, RSS is poorly implemented by many tools. This validator is an attempt to codify the specification (literally, to translate it into code) to make it easier to know when you're producing RSS correctly, and to help you fix it when you're not.”

This is a useful free tool and much appreciated. The results are every quick. It said my feed was valid but found some minor errors that I contacted Typepad about. Typepad said:

"The feed for your blog is valid. The validation report is pointing out some warnings in the feed, but the warnings will not prevent your feed from being read by most feed readers. Please let us know if you have any other questions." So they were saying no big deal. Okay but if any of you have troubles with my feed please let me know. web 2.0

For Lazy Bloggers: Your Personal, Automated Blog Reporter

Yesterday, I talked about a tool that automates a piece of blogging- social bookmakring links but this is going over the top. Do you want to write a blog but do not have the time. The answer is here. It was bound to happen. As the press release said; “Free Auto Blogger, a new software application from Advanced Interactive Marketing, allows bloggers to quickly and easily build power blogs on any subject. If you've always wanted your own personal reporter to filter and post relevant news stories on your blog, Advanced Interactive Marketing's Free Auto Blogger is your software dream come true.”

It goes on to add, “Many people who want to build a blog of fresh content just do not have the time or resources to do so," says Larry Brunken, co-founder of Advanced Interactive Marketing. "With Free Auto Blogger, you can set loose an automated blogger bot that can build content-related posts into your blog automatically every few minutes."

And I thought that a blog was about the personal voice of the blogger. I suppose you get to pick the categories. If you want to sign up go the free auto blogger site. I wonder if they auto delete comment and trackback spam. I wonder what Google search will think of these blogs. To be fair it does said that you can add your own commentary to these auto bot created stories. business blogs

Feedburner Statistics for July

I use Feedburner for my RSS feed and there are about 1500 – 1700 subscribers. The majority of subscribers simply read the feed (or just collect it) since all of the content is there. Feedburner does let you see which items cause someone to click through to the actual blog. Here are the top ten posts that caused a click through in order. The RSS readers were most clicks came from are Bloglines and Google reader.

Web Design Principles from the BBC
Adding Del.icio.us and Digg Links to Your Site…
More Enterprise 2.0 Studies- McKinsey …
Will Second Life Out Pace “First Life”?…
Putting Ads in Your RSS Feed?
Business Impacts of Web 2.0: Part One
Who is doing what with Social Media? – …
Litchfield Jazz Festival Line Up for 20…
Good Typography Suggestions
Blogs and Wall Street

Feedburner also has siite statistics now. It reported 292 average daily visitors for July with 11.0% direct, 74.2% searches, 14.8% other sites. It seems that StumbleUpon is the top site that people come here from after searches. It also reported 442 average daily page views. The stats are very similar to what Site Meter and Typepad report. The top four pages viewed in order were the home page, restaurant picks, trends: KM/portals, and then in fourth place the top individual post for July was Barbeque of the Carolinas: East and West, North and South. This is appropriate for the season. There were some other restaurant reviews in the rest of the top ten.

It makes sense that that top ten sites from feeds are more related to the business content and the top ten from searches are more related to the food guides as most searches engines like my food posts.

If you are not using Feedburner and Site Meter I would suggest you add them. They are both free, at least for the basic service. web 2.0 business blogs

Filtering RSS Feeds: BlogBridge BlogStarz

Do you have so many RSS feeds that you have trouble organizing them and putting them in priority? Here is a feature that might help from BlogBridge, my RSS reader. BlogStarz is a way to rate each RSS feed you subscribe to. BlogBridge will provide a recommended rating based on a number of factors and then you can accept or override this rating. Then you can adjust your reader to only take feeds that rate above a certain level. Before I get to BlogStraz in more depth, let me give you a bit of context for those not familiar with BlogBridge.

It is an RSS reader designed for power users but the basic features are also accessible for basic users. BlogBridge allows you to create guides (essentially reading lists of favorite RSS feeds on a topic). This allows you to categorize your RSS feeds and group them into more useful and usable portions. This is something that I recently wrote that del.icio.us needs to do with their tags. So I have guides, subsets of my RSS feeds, on the following topics: blogging, food, knowledge management, web 2.0, collaboration, and innovation. Each guide has my favorite blogs on the topic in a manageable format. If a guide gets to big, I can break it into logical sections through new guides. Building on the topical guide concept, BlogBridge also offers reading lists complied by experts on a topic. You can select any of these reading lists and have them easily imported into your BlogBridge reader as a guide. I created the one on knowledge management.

Now to the BlogStarz. BlogBridge’s recommended rating is displayed above each feed in the form of silver stars. You also see any final ratings that you have selected yourself in the form of gold stars. If you click on a feed for a site, you will get a popup box. If you click on the BlogStarz tab, you get more details on the recommended ratings. They are based on scores on five factors: activity, inbound links, keywords, views, click throughs. Then you can make a final rating, shown, in gold based on this input and your own opinions.

One of the cool features is that you can easily adjust the relative weight of each of these five factors in determining the recommended rating. There is a sliding scale going from 1 to 0 for each. You can then tell BlogBridge to only show feeds above a certain rating. BlogBridge will only uses your own ratings to make this judgment, which is a good decision. The BlogStrarz tab will also show the Technorati inbound links for each feed along with the scores on each of the five factors with their weight also displayed for easy reference. web 2.0

Over 200,000 visits to Portals and KM

I see from Site Meter than I recently passed 200,000 visits to this blog since I installed it in 2004. Sounds like the mileage on a car ad. I had actually been writing the blog awhile before I discovered Site Meter so there were a few more visitors before it started counting. Thanks to all the readers who found their way here. The majority of visitors still come through search engines according to Typepad, primarily Google but not limited to it by any means. Of course some sites get this traffic in a single day. I have been averaging 376 visits a day since the start but it has been on an upward trend in the past four months. Feedburner says I have 318 subscribers today, there are others who come in through other means. If I read the Feedburner stats correcrtly, it seems that only about 10% of subscribers click through their RSS feed to the actual site and get counted by Site Meter. These click throughs are more likely to occur on the enterrprise 2.0 and web 2.0 posts during the week than the food and music stuff on the weekneds. Don't be so serious, try the fun stuff, and come to visit more often and leave comments :). Seriously, I do really appreciate your time. Let me know how I can make this site better for you. I would still write this blog if no one came but I am pleased that people actually do come. The third anniversary will be this May. business blogs enterprise social media

Who links to You?

This is a follow on to my post yesterday about transparency. There are many ways to find out who is linking to you without the added transparency that mybloglog.com offers.

If you simply want to know who is linking to you there are many choices. Who Links to me is a site that aggregates many of these tools. What is interesting is the wide diversity in results. Here are the recent results on my blog as an example.

Google Page Rank for this page: 6
Yahoo! has found 39,200 links to this site.
MSN Search has found 1,928 links to this site.
Blogrolling.com has found 16 blogrolls that contain this link.
Google Backlink Search: 1,540
Alexa Traffic Details: did not work
Technorati Search: 489 links (or 219 links from 123 sources
Icerocket Search: 137 sources
Del.icio.us Bookmarks: no history

I guess I should set up something in del.icio.us. I do not do enough to promote this blog. Do you know of other tools? What has been your experience?

How much transparency do you really want?

The web has a great ability to generate transparency and people who have similar interest to each other. I recently got an email from uPlayMe, “a free social networking application designed to link people with similar tastes in musical artists, songs or genres... Once installed, the uPlayMe application automatically scans for music recently played on your computer or iPod and then connects you with other uPlayMe users who share your music tastes. The program continues to run in the background, constantly updating your matches based on what you're listening to.’ I did not want to have a tool want to have a tool making these connections but I am sure some people do and it will be successful in today’s web psyche.

David Gurteen recently alerted an email group that I belong to about Mybloglog.com. As Davd said it, “allows anyone with a weblog or a personal website like mine to build a proper community around the site - you could say a bit like MySpace for bloggers!... The first shows a list of people plus their photos who have recently visited my site - they of course need to be members of MyBlogLog - and if you click through you get to see their profiles.and a whole load more. The second panel shows the top five links that readers have clicked on.”

His comment generated a flurry of responses on the pros and cons of such a tool. One with concerns came from Mathemagenic that featured a link to Jill Walker’s blog post on the tool.

Jill Walker is an associate professor at the University of Bergen, and who does research on how people tell stories online. She talkd about mybloglog.com recently and said it is “a site that provides stats about your blog and that also has a social network thing set up…I can upload my photo and specify that I read Boing Boing or Water Cooler Games and from there, others can see I’m “in” those “communities” and so on…but there are certainly websites I visit that I do NOT want my image permanently afixed to so everyone who visits that website thereafter can see that I was there.”

Now I always assume that my internet activities can be tracked if someone really wants to. Look at the use of Google searches in legal proceedings. I do not go places that I would not want to be public information. However, I think that services should make their users aware of the transparency their services generates so people can make a conscious decision on what they opt into. Jill’s blog post has a number of comments that allow you to pursue the issue further. In fairness to Mybloglog, they are trying to respond to concerns such as Jill’s.

Here is more on the issue from Mathemagenic that alerted me to Jill’s post.

Add Wikipedia Search to Your Blog

You may noticed that if you scroll down the right side of my blog, just after the subscribe link your find a wikipedia search box that works. You can add this to your blog also. I found it from Dave Taylor's blog. John Maloney pointed to his work. Dave responds to questions from bloggers and others in his Ask Dave Taylor blog.

Apple has a Blogging Tool, too.

We knew it would happen. Blog tools are now being provided by the big software providers. Apple is now offering a blogging tool. Microsoft does this with the new version of Sharepoint so the two big guys in platforms and giving you tools to blog. Apple’s blog tool is called iWeb and it comes free to dot mac users. It seems more focus on personal blogs with Apple’s great media intergation. Microsoft provides its tool as part of Sharepoint which it practically gives away to Microsoft customers. It is more of enterprise tool. Here is some of what Apple says about its tool on their iWeb site.

“Let iWeb help you build a beautiful website in minutes using Apple-designed templates. Just choose a website theme that fits your style. Each theme offers page templates for “About Me,” photo album, blog, podcast, and movie pages, so you’ll always have the perfect place for your content. Use the iLife Media Browser to drag in your photos, movies, and podcasts, then simply type over the placeholder text on your page template, and click once to publish to .Mac.”

This media integration could be fun. “Every website needs content. Your podcast page needs audio. Your photo page needs images. Your blog needs links to your favorite music. And that’s why iWeb needs the iLife Media Browser. Using the Media Browser, you can access all your iLife content — photos, video, audio — without leaving iWeb.”

Thanks to Nancy Dixon of Common Knowledge for pointing this out.

BlogBridge's Support for Reading Lists

BlogBridge, the free RSS feed reader, has enhanced its reading lists feature. As Pito Salas defines it, a reading list is “ a collection of Feeds, usually about a single topic, which someone has put together for the benefit of others.” This allows you to make more intelligent decisions on what feeds to subscribe to. BlogBridge has asked experts in different fields like Dan Gillmor for journalism to develop topical lists for them. I served as one of the their experts and created a list of knowledge management blogs.

Anyone can create a BlogBridge Reading List. All you need is a set of feeds on some topic that you want to make available to a friend or to the whole world. As the site explains, “All you have to do is to create a Guide that contains the Feeds that you want to include, and with a single checkbox, publish it as a Reading List. Once BlogBridge syncs with the (free) BlogBridge service, your reading list is assigned a hyperlink that only you know. You can decide to just give it to your Mom or put it up for the whole world to see. It's up to you.”

So it has the transparency of del.icio.us with some structure. This is a wonderful feature that goes beyond the more awarkward list that you make through del.icio.us. I can see it workign find for a business that wants to share ists with clients or inside the firewall as a knowledge manageemnt system tool. They provide a screencast showing how to publish a reading list. They also offer instructions on how to subscribe to a reading list.

Bloggapedia – A New Directory of Blogs

Bloggapedia provides a directory of blogs. It also offers tools, resources, information, and news about blog stuff. Their blog just started so this must be a new service. It's free to register and submit your own blog or perhaps others, rate other blogs, and participate in their Bloggers Forum. They pre-registered my blog and asked me to update the description so I did. Who knows how many other people they also pre-registered?

The Bloggapedia blog had a useful story about Pluck now providing a blog content aggregator service to newspapers and mentioned Newstex’s similar service to orgamizations. I have been part of Newstex and their blog on demand service since January and it seems a good idea. It is too early to determine economic benefits.

I browsed the Bloggapedia directory and it is clearly in the ealry development stages but they did have some good blogs in many categerois such as cooking with the following four that I have written about before. Accidental Hedonist, Chocolate and Zucchini, Saute Wednesday, The Amateur Gourmet so they are making some good selections so far. Perhaps it will grow into something useful

Two Good Looking Tools: Jotspot and iPressroom.com

Occasionally, I check out my context sensitive Google Adsense Providers since they are supposed to be related to my content. I recently looked at two tools that may be useful to people who like to write blogs. Jotspot and iPressroom.com.

Jotspot seems to be the Typepad of blogs, at leas that is the impression you get from their site. They advertise it to be as easy as Word and you can start it up in a few minutes. They even offer a free wiki. I liked their explanations of what a wiki is – “A wiki is a website designed for collaboration. Unlike a traditional website where pages can only be read, in a wiki everyone can edit, update and append pages with new information, all without knowing HTML.” and what you can do with it such as the following (in their words)

- Create an intranet - Publish company information, such as news or employee guidelines.
- Project management - Schedule project deadlines, assign tasks, and define product specifications
- Document collaboration- Multiple users author documents with aid of version history and MS Word integration
- Coordinate a non-profit agency - Utilize event calendars, discussion forums, blogs and other apps
- Collaborate with virtual teams - Communicate with remote contractors or clients
- Track software bugs - Log defects and build custom querie

They offer an applications gallery from things their customers have done. At least these people get how to market their tool. So many new software companies do not understand that the key is to make it simple to use and to provide plenty of ways to use it to help a business.

iPressroom seems to be doing the same approach with podcasts. They go a step further and offer marketing services and consulting to support you business related podcasts. They too outline benefits as they say:

- Access a motivated, technology-savvy audience of 5 million (and growing).
- Leverage niche audio programming to support cost-effective advertising.
- Build a subscriber base of participating customers.
- Use podcasting to cross-sell/promote other products and services

And they have a blog, Internet-PR-News-Blog.

Feedo Style – Free syndication for your blog

Feedo Style is a free service that allows webmasters to add up-to-date themed content to their website and blog from any XML feed on the web. Feedo Style transforms feeds (RSS and ATOM) into news boxes and tickers that can be personalized and included, with a simple copy and paste, into any web page. I went to their site and it does seem like something to check out if you want this type of service. I am syndicated by several others using some type of syndication tool but this is the first free one I have seen that would allow me to do the same thing. I am still thinking about how I might personally use it but I can see a use for many types of blgos and web sites that want to have these feeds popping up for selected sources.

Gianni Milanesi of Feedo sent me the link and told me about this service. I do not write about everything that people send me but this seems like a useful service to pass on. “Disclaimer” I have no relationship with the firm, it just seems like a good thing.

BlogBridge Reading Lists

Pito Salas told me recently that the big new thing in BlogBridge is Reading Lists. BlogBridge is a great open source blog reader and aggregator. Reading Lists are a set of RSS feeds from blogs or other sites which someone else is maintaining, as OPML. They aggregate content from multiple sources. It is like a high powered blog roll that can be easily managed, modified, and shared.

BlogBridge can create a Guide for a Reading List that someone maintains and have in automatically populated based on the list of blogs that are part of the Workgroup. As the list expands, BlogBridge automatically and dynamically tracks it. It automates a lot of the technical stuff that would be hard for people like me. There is also a useful Cleanup Wizard to eliminate duplicate feeds.

This is a good way to share and track knowledge. Here is a post by Robin Good on the Blogbridge Reading Lists and an interview between Robin and Pito that very clearly explains it all, including the benefits and what BlogBridge adds to it.

BlogBridge also offers a list of blogs on a topic by “BlogBridge experts.” I provided the list of blogs on knowledge management. My co-author, Amanda Watlington, did the one on search engine optimization. They now offer the ability to make these more useful as reading lists. I am going to explore this more and will write more on it later.

Yahoo! Small Business and Six Apart

Yahoo! Small Business and Six Apart have aligned to allow you to Integrate Movable Type with your Yahoo! Small Business-hosted web site to create a related blog. Here is another reason to have a blog if you are a small business with a web site. Six Apart is trying to make Movable Type easier to use for those who want their own blog software. I just use their hosted service, TypePad, but then I am not a tools guy.

Thanks to Will Thalheimer of Work-Learning who recently started several blogs to support his small business, Will at Work-Learning and the Work Learning Journal.

NewsGator and Feedburner Join Forces

Two of my favorite blog tool companies joined forces as announced on October 11. I use both of these tools. The founders of both firms, Greg Reinacker, and Dick Costolo, are also cases in our book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide, so I have had the pleasure of getting both of their takes on the future of the blog market. .

As the Newsgator - Feedburner press release stated “The combination of FeedBurner and NewsGator provides the richest possible RSS platform for online publishers,” said J.B. Holston, president and CEO of NewsGator. “Online brands can now not only offer the richest aggregated content solution available, but also monitor the audience’ response to the offering in great detail. As Nielsen recently reported, RSS users are three times as valuable as regular online readers.”

The press release stated the key benefits of the partnership:

• Search statistics and post ratings identify which topics drive the most traffic through your users’ aggregators
• Detailed measurement of performance criteria including readership trends, ad performance, feed item popularity and syndication circulation metrics
• Ability to insert targeted and time-sensitive ads using a flexible management engine for RSS feeds
• Comparisons of Web-based readership to RSS feed readership
• Strategies for building inventory utilizing a comprehensive database of RSS feeds
• Bandwidth absorption and protection from traffic spikes and repetitive polling

I stripped out some of the marketing language from the traditional marketing spin but this does seem like a good thing. I see that Newsgator has been on a recent shopping spread as they also picked up NetNewsWire.

NewsGator Competition

NewsGator is hosting a competition to see who can develop the most innovative application using the NewsGator Online API. Competition details are located at their site. They recently announced the public availability of the Online API for both commercial and non-commercial use.

As their site related:

The competition runs from September 12 through midnight (MDT) November 11, 2005; winners will be announced on December 5th.
• Submission categories include: Windows applications, Mac applications, and cross platform/web/mobile applications.
• In each category, the first prize winner will receive either a Dell Latitude D610 laptop or an Apple Powerbook G4 (winner’s choice).
• Second prize for each of the three categories is an iPod nano.
• Entries will be judged on usability, presentation, functionality, usefulness and originality.

There is much more on the site. Good prizes. Even though my nerd score recently climbed two points to 8 out of 100, I think I will sit this one out. I use NewsGator and like its integration with Outlook. NewsGator CEO, Greg Reinecker’s Weblog is a case in our book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide.

BlogBridge 1.11 – RSS Reader and Blog Aggregator

Blogbridge is a RSS feed reader and blog aggregator with great flexibility. I have been using it the last few weeks. It is especially designed for the power blog and web site reader who wants to track specific topics in the Internet and needs to organize the incoming content, as well as discover new blogs that address their issues. The opening screen layout is a three panel; display. The left panel offers guides, or collections of feeds that you group and name. The middle panel provides the feeds within the selected guide and the right panel provides the post with a selected feed. You can rate the value of each feed from 1 to 5 and then sort by rating allowing you to see the most important ones only if you limited time.

Blogbridge also allows you to set up smart feeds that bring in material on a specific key word or phrase from such resources as Flickr, Technorati tags, Feedburner, Amazon, del.icio.us, or your own collection of feeds. This allows you to discover new sources of content from these resources. If you are using another RSS reader it is very easy and quick to import those feeds into Blogbridge. Blogbridge is also free so there is little risk in trying it.

I like the smart feeds. I set up two Flickr feeds. One on Italy, as I was recently there, and another for Cambridge to see what is going on in my current home town. You click through to the source to see the complete flies of each photographer.

The founder of Blogbridge is Pito Salas who was one of the early groupware developers. We have met on several occasions and he is very interested in user feedback. Pito’s Blog is one of the cases in our book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide.

Live Journal – Built for Networking, Not for Broadcasting

I am finally getting around to my minutes of the Berkman Thursday Blog group meeting on Live Journal. Thanks again to Josh Ain for leading this session. This was my first introduction to Live Journal and I was impressed with a tool that is very targeted to the needs of its audience. Other blog tools should take a look at their focused approach for their targeted audiences.

Live Journal is known as the blog tool for teenage girls and the demographic support this with 67% of users (who report gender) are female and the middle of a classic bell curve in age distribution with the peak at 16 – 17 years. You can create a friend’s list and see the friend’s lists of others. It optimizes contact with small groups of 10 to 25 people rather than broad distribution of content to a mass audience. You can create posts that only your friends can see and explicitly exclude people, like your parents.

Live Journal started in 1999 and has been bought by Six Apart, the people who own my blog tool, TypePad. I am not going to switch but I was impressed with how they effectively serve their audience. Over seven million Live Journal blogs have been started but only around 2 million are active now. It is open source and the basic package of features is free to users.

Enterprise Blogging – Traction Software

I recently talked with Jordan Frank of Traction Software. He said that they started in the enterprise weblog space in 1996 but did not get heavy into marketing until 2002. KM World has a nice write up in “Enterprise blogging and beyond.” It includes RSS, authentication, and IM notification. There is a list of features on their site. It appears to include features to support enterprise work projects. It allows published content for both private and public projects. Published content can be read, edited, classified and erased by authorized users from Web browser. There is a strong permission system and built in search. A lot of the benefit is found in reducing email and allowing for a more efficient communication system. I look forward to learning more about it.

BlogBridge Experts

I heard from Pito Salas at Blogbridge that they are asking experts in different spheres to tell their 5 or 10 most useful blogs in a certain category. Then they provide BlogBridge users with a one click way to follow the same blogs.

Pito asked me for recommendations in knowledge management. Fortunately my own personal knowledge management system, my bog, allowed me to just get the names for a post I already did on the topic, Some Knowledge Management Blogs.

Here is an explanation about how the Blogbridge experts work and becoming a BlogBridge Expert. They are looking for experts in different fields.

Bubbler – Drag and Drop Web Publishing

Here is an interesting idea I heard from Renee Blodgett. The new publishing tool, Bubbler, provides web publishing with the ease of blogging. You can build a regular Web site or a blog. It is designed for the small office/home office/consultant market. It is another example of the impact of blogs on the Web. Bubbler offers audio podcasting and video presentations. Both of these capabilities would be good for low cost e-learning modules. It also provides messaging to send instant messages, invite input from others, and receive notification when updates to sites are made are made. There is also file sharing to further support collaboration.

This suite of tools seems especially useful if a small business or consultant wants both a Web site and a blog which is frequently the case. A number of the people we interviewed for Business Blogs: A Practical Guide. For example, Pito Salas, head of BlogBridge, blog and RSS reader, writes a blog and maintains a web site. He links from the blog to the BlogBridge site and from the Web site to his blog. The two communication channels complement each other. The blog offers longer, more informal conceptual pieces. The site offers facts and other self-contained product information. As his thoughts become more formal, he moves them from the blog to the web site. There were many others with this complementary combination. Here are just a few:

Rosa Smith is a weight loss coach who runs the paid subscription Web site, Mind Over Platter and the blog, ThinkingThin.
Greg Reneicker of NewsGator, complements the company site with a blog in his name.
Buzz Bruggeman writes Buzzmodo and Buzznovation to complement his Active Words site.
Renee Blodgett writes the blog, Down the Avenue, to compliment her site for Blodgett Communications.
Kathleen Gilroy writes a blog in her name to complement the Otter Group site.
Anne Stanton writes the President’s Update to support her firm, the Norwich Group.
Yvonne DiVita writes the Lipsticking blog to complement her Smart Marketing to Women Online site.

Any small business with a web site should consider a blog to complement, not replace, their web site if they want to establish closer connections to their customers. Bubbler provides a means to have both in the same tool.

Bloglines CEO promises top Blog Search by Summer

Steven Baker and Heather Green write, for Business Week, the blog - Blogspotting – “where the worlds of business, media, and blogs collide.” In a recent post on Bloglines, Baker wrote, Mark Fletcher, the CEO of Bloglines (now a division of AskJeeves) “says that his company will release a blog search engine this summer which will surpass the likes of Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub.” Is this like Joe Namath saying he will win the Super Bowl? It remains to be seen but there is certainly opportunity in the blog search and trakcing area. I use a variety of tools which all serve useful purposes. However, especially in the tracking space there is a lot of variety of findings. Google lists about eight times the numbers of links to my site as Technorati. Now I know that Technorati is more time bound which explains part of the difference. TypePad lists about three times as many visits to my blog as Site Meter. Feed Burner is a wonderful tool but it only captures data on the RSS subscribers which go through it. This number is likely less than half of that traffic for me. I also show up very differently in the searches of Google (the best for my blog), Yahoo, AOL, etc. for the same terms.

These are all great tools. I use them to great benefit and the blogs of Feed Burner, Feedster, and Pub Sub, along with other blog tools, are each cases in Business Blogs: A Practical Guide. The blog tool and service market is in a rapid growth mode and it will be interesting to see the winners emerge and who can provide the most comprehensive set of tools. NewsGator (another book case and my RSS reader) recently bought Feed Demon. What’s next?

Thanks to Josh Rosenthal of iQuest for pointing out this story. Steve and Heather write a good column and Steve even lets you download the notes from his interview with Bloglines.

Setting Up a Custom Blog Content Syndication

There are several ways you can syndicate relevant content from other sources to appear on your blog. This allows you to not only get stuff from other sources that is relevant to your interests, but it allows you to share it with others and make your blog site an aggregator of content addressing your areas of interest.

Amanda Watlington at Blogs and Feeds provides one example using Feedroll, a free service for syndicating RSS news feeds on your website or blog. Her syndicated content is on the left column if you scroll down a bit.

John Maloney at KM Blog provides another example through the MyST Technologies platform. There are several content syndication topics in the right column of his blog under the heading Collabria Briefings. These include Communities of Practice, Business Blogs, and Social Networks.

This syndication is just one of a growing number of enhancements to blogs, such as audio, video, and tagging. I think it is only the beginning.

More Movies of Blog Activity – TekFlo Cyber Map

Peter Gloor is making great progress at TekFlo. Peter and his team have now developed TeKFlo Cyber Map. It shows blogs and web site in dynamic context, enabling the blog or web site owner to find the relationships and links of their blog/site or others in the blogsphere by discovering their connections to well-known “Landmark" web sites and blogs (e.g.. Slashdot or the New York Times. He has created four new sample movies of blog activity to illustrate this feature using the TekFlo mapping capabilities. They are available to view at the TekFlo site. The movies include:

1.Politscape:
40+ Days of links between New York Times and slashdot.org, dailykos.com, atrios.blogspot.com, instapundit.com, freerepublic.com, powerlineblog.com.

2. Mainstream vs. Geek News :
40+ Days of links between "New York Times and slashdot.org

3. How geeky is Dailykos?
40+ Days of links between dailykos.com, New York Times, and slashdot.org. You could do the same to see how geeky you are vs. more traditional news focused by seeing whether you are closer to the New York Times or Slashdot.

4. How geeky is Portals and KM?
In this case my blog is the victim and you get 40+ Days of links between Portals and KM - billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/, New York Times, and slashdot.org. Needless to say, I am more aligned with the NYT in keeping with my nerd score of 6 out of 100.

How to Pick Blog Software – Jessica Baumgart

Jessica Baumgart wrote a list of considerations for choosing blog software. She said it’s geared primarily for her professional colleagues, since many of them keep asking her about it, but it can be adapted for almost anyone.

Marc Orchant is Video Blogging at Demo 15

Weblogs, Inc. has brought video blogging to the Demo 15 conference at Blogging Demo.com. Marc (The Office Weblog) is reporting real time and provides coverage of the presentations of new software. The Demo conference is a showcase for new technology products. There are around 70 companies participating and each has agreed that they will not pre-release the product they are showing for the first time at this session. Each one has six minutes to present and about 600 to 800 people attend. Many are venture capitalists and the rest are mostly industry writers and analysts. Since this is the fifteenth year for the show, Demo@15 has invited many alumni from the prior sessions.

The six minute format works well for video blogging as the presentations try to be entertaining and concise. I looked at the Homestead "cover" of American Pie which brought the audience to their feet in a standing ovation, a great use of video blogging.

New Blogs Tools at Demo Conference – Mike Walsh

Mike Walsh shared this list of several new blog related software companies at this year's Demo conference in Scottsdale. He covered these tools: JotSpot, Bubbler from Five Across, Perspectives from iupload, Pluck, BlogUnit. See his post for details.

Mike noted the “buzz word compliant descriptions” of the tools and added that there are usually “quite a few bloggers at Demo and their postings give you the real skinny on "what's hot" and "what's not." Use Feedster to find the people who blogged the conference.”

Feedburner on Podcasting – from Brad Feld

Brad Feld writes that Dick Costolo and his team at Feedburner “have been on the front lines of the podcasting explosion.” Brad says they have great metrics on the growth and dynamics of podcasting. Dick recently put up a post on RSS Metrics, Podcasting that Brad feels is must reading for anyone that’s into RSS and/or podcasting. Andy Carvin also used Feeedburner, combined with audioblogger to set up his Gates@Central Park group podcast blog I posted on yesterday.

Brad Feld is a venture capitalist who writes the blog, Feld Thoughts. I learned about his blog from Al Essa, CIO at MIT’s Sloan School. Al has several blogs himself, including NOSE - Navigating Open Source and Technology Innovation which contains his reflections and experience being a CIO at an educational institution.

Podcasting Reading List – Lisa Williams

In preparation for this coming Thursday session on podcasting at the Harvard Berkman Blog meeting, Lisa Williams has set up a reading list of interesting articles and posts about podcasting at del.icio.us. She writes that every del.icio.us tag has an associated RSS feed, so if you want to keep up with what's added, you can subscribe to the tag, podcast 101. Lisa especially recommends the Wikipedia entry on podcasting and Podcast Alley, a podcast directory. Jessica Baumgart recently posted the agenda for this Thursday session. I will be attending this session and writing about it afterwards.

New Release of BlogBridge

Pito Salas announced another evolution of BlogBridge, to release 0.7.1 with some important improvements. BlogBridge is a blog and RSS reader that allows you to find and filter a lot of content quickly and effectively. Two unique capabilities are a set of heuristics to filter out old feeds based on a variety of factors that the user ranks and the ability to tap into a variety of web-based indexes to find and evaluate potential resources. As the announcement states, the major new features are

“You can indicate your personal rating by clicking directly on the BlogStarz! for a certain Feed. You can see the effect of this, because the BlogStarz are silver when they are indicating BlogBridge's "recommendation" and gold after you click on them to record your rating. This allows you much greater and easier control over the filtering and presentation of Guides. In the future we will use the community's ratings as one more factor in determining our recommendations.

Guides are now sorted, Unread Guides first, then by the number of Starz. This makes it easier to quickly review the most important Feeds first based on how much activity they have had and also how highly they are rated. Both the sorting and Feed and Article display.”

The latest version is available at their BlogBridge site.

iUpload's Personal Publisher – Organizational Blogging

I took a look at iUpload's Personal Publisher, a hosted blogging platform for organizations. As their site comments, “With Personal Publisher, an organization can use a blog or a group of blogs to engage its customers and partners in conversation, or staff, project teams, etc. can easily communicate, collaborate on ideas, and organize and share knowledge.” They allow organizations to create a series of their own branded blog sites that members of the community can build themselves.

Blog content can be added by email, from their mobile phone, as well as from their computer. I think this feature will be useful in many places, but especially in places where computers are not as available such as the Middle East. This is the tool that is being used to develop an Arabic language blog tool. Renee Blodgett has nice description of this effort. I commented on it yesterday.

Aggregation is also built in through RSS and ATOM, like many blog tools. The difference here is that you can work the aggregation across and within the blog community you develop for your organization. You can group your blogs by categories and other means. In addition to comments, you can send invitations and forward stuff to a friend. There are some other nice features like integrated search and spell checking which I would find nice.

Stowe Boyd on Microsoft Blog Entry

Here are some useful comments by Stowe Boyd on the challenges Microsoft faces as it enters the blog tool market.

Microsoft on Blogging – You knew it was coming

As Renee Blodgett reports in her blog, Down the Avenue:

“Microsoft's MSN division is expected to take the wraps off its MSN Spaces blogging service this week. MSN Spaces is positioning itself as a direct competitor to blog-creation and hosting tools, such as Blogger, Blog*Spot, LiveJournal and TypePad. Microsoft plans to also pitch MSN Spaces as a way to allow users to more easily share photo albums and music lists as well.”

The Yahoo news story by Mary Jo Foley added that MSN also is beta testing a service called MSN Blogbot, which is a blog-search service.

Down the Avenue is a great blog to watch and I added it to my RSS feed. Here are her thoughts on blogging. She compares her blog to her mother’s kitchen as a warm place to engage in conversations. Like many bloggers that I have talked with, she engages in blogging more for a sense of community that to promote her business. I think this is where the passion and commitment comes from.

Nice Aggregator Discussion and Review - Jack Vinson

Here is a nice summary by Jack Vinson of key issues for aggregators and a discussion of many of them. I will not repeat his useful thoughts as I recommend that you look at the whole thing. Jack also links to a further discussion on aggregators by Jim McGee.

I use Newsgator as my aggregator but also have some Pub Sub subscriptions. The two compliment each other. I use Google and Feedster for traditional search and have Feed Burner as my preferred RSS output vehicle. Each provides something of value.

Feedster – Focused Search through RSS

I had a very useful recent conversation with Scott Rafer, CEO at Feedster, who took the time to explain its capabilities to me, a non-technical person. If you already know Feedster this post may not have new stuff but if you have not used it this overview may be a useful introduction to a high powered search tool. Feedster only looks at information in RSS feeds that are specific to single items within a web page such as a blog post whereas most search engines such as Google look at the entire web page itself and not at the RSS feeds. This allows for great precision in the search results.

In addition, Feedster focuses on current stuff. It is ideal for people who are already knowledgeable about a topic and want to keep up with the latest stuff in domains that are rapidly changing such as politics, news, sports, technology, etc. It does not provide the top ten for all time for novices, an approach that often could describe other internet search engines. Feedster’s search engine hits over a million sites about every 45 minutes to find the new stuff. It now documents new items for over 15 different types of internet sites such as traditional news (e.g., BBC New York Times) and blogs,

Because of the proliferation of RSS outside the blog world, Feedster recently launched a blog only search for those who want to limit the targets. As Scott Rafer said in the press release:

“Feedster’s harnessing of RSS is changing search and the expectations of Internet searchers,” said Scott Rafer, CEO of Feedster. We launched blogs.feedster.com in response to user demand to offer blog search results separated from the news and e-commerce information in our system.”

Feedster also offers an array of blogs to address different needs. Scott Johnson on Feedster has been the main voice of Feedster since its beginnings. Other blogs include Feedster Hacks, run by Steven Cohen which offers insights to the developer community and posts hacks sent to Steven. Feedster Support is the vehicle for user support and answer questions emailed to feedstersupport@feedster.com. In addition, individual employees have their own personal blogs which are listed on the Feedster web site.

BlogStreet Browser: Charting Blog Linkages

I recently discovered BlogStreet Browser: A tool for browsing weblog neighborhoods, by exploring links between related sites. You can put your URL in the BlogStreet Browser and it will create a display containing your URL in the central node, with links to the first 10 related sites in the surrounding nodes. Double-clicking on one of the surrounding nodes will expand the graph to include further related sites. You can see those who link to those who link to you, like a LinkedIn social networking display for blog connections. Clicking on the 'inf' icon above a central node will display a hint window containing a link to the site and the most recent items from the site's RSS feed.

I tried my url and got this display. The blogs in it are generally ones I know. Some of the blogs have linked to me and others are famous ones that I have linked to but I doubt have linked to me. The criteria for the “first ten related sites” is not clear nor is there much other explanation. The link to “more instruction” was dead.

It is an interesting idea and fits within the general question of how to analyze blog communication and how to rate blogs. However, the current version seems to only be an illustration of possibilitiies since the criteria for actual links are not clearly defined. I stumbled on to this by first talking with an academic friend about Technorati. She said that similar rating systems such as the Social Science Citation Index are used increasing in academia to rate people by citations and then evaluate their promotion and tenure based on these ratings.

I mentioned it to Shimon Rura who pointed me to CiteSeer, one of these academic citation tools. On the same web site, I found the BlogStreet Browser and a way to look at links in Google. I am interested in learning more here. I assume the academic ones are more accurate than the blog ones since people’s career’s are being influenced by them.

There is also the Social Science Citation Index mentioned above, which allows you to determine if a research article was cited by any other scholars. I need to look at it further. Here is a more detailed description from the Kennedy School Library at Harvard:

"SSCI is an indexing and abstracting service for close to 2000 scholarly journals in all areas of the social sciences. It also provides citation information that indicates where and how often an author or article has been cited in the literature. A new feature lets you link to the full text of articles whenever they are available electronically. Look for the "view full text" label in the abstract for that access."

FeedBurner now has Forums

I have been using FeedBurner to get a handle on some of my subscriber activity. I recently talked with again with Dick Costolo, the CEO about the service and what’s new. They are starting Feedburner Forums for users as their blog, Burning Questions, announced last week.

Feedburner allows me to look at what my RSS subscribers are doing with my site, at least those who go through Feedburner. There are now enough going through FeedBurner (over 30) that I can extrapolate to the others. I can see what percentage only read my posts in their own feed and do not hit my site, and thus do not show up in other ways.

I also see how many click through to the site itself and what posts cause them to click through. The most popular one for click throughs, The Semantic Web Meets the Blogosphere, referred to a paper that can be down loaded and had little comment from me. This is no surprise but interesting to see.

I can also see what RSS feed services are used by my subscribers as well as what browsers are being used to hit my site.

Properly Counting Your Hits in an RSS World – Shimon Rura

Shimon Rura recently shared some clarifying thoughts to the Berkman blog email group on how to accurately count your hits in the world of RSS. I found his thoughts very useful and want to pass them on. Shimon is currently developing a new blog system, Frassle, which includes many advanced content management and taxonomy features. The rest of this post contains his own words in response to question from some one who recently installed RSS and noticed their hits go way up.

“Links in the RSS feed don't normally get hit when the feed itself is downloaded. It's possible that someone could design a reader that did this for some reason, perhaps to pre-fetch pages for offline reading, but I'm sure this behavior isn't widespread.

If you're seeing lots of hits since RSS, I'd suggest you analyze the new traffic into two buckets:

1. The RSS feeds themselves. These will get a lot of hits, since someone who might have only visited your site once a day or week might instead be having an aggregator visit you every hour. An inconsiderate aggregator might even be configurable to hit your site every few minutes; you should treat these the same way you treat other abusive automatic page fetches.

If your RSS feeds have substantial content and few links into the rest of your site, readers may be able to get all their news via RSS without browsing into the rest of your site.

2. Links from RSS. This is harder to isolate from log files, but refers to links people click from the stuff they see in their RSS aggregator. These are regular web pages, but because people are reading updates in the aggregator they are more likely to go to these pages. You can count this as bona fide additional reader interest.

Therefore, to analyze your traffic gains I suggest you count hits to your RSS feed(s) separately from the rest of your site.”

Thanks Shimon.

BBC News Wiki Proxy – Integrating Wikipedia, Blogs and the News

Thanks to Synesthesia for pointing me to this very creative integration of old media, wikis, and blogs to provide more context to the news.

Here is what Julian wrote:

“New media activist Stef Magdalinski has produced a great example of the way new technologies allow people to interact with broadcasters in different ways – the News Online wikiproxy. The site proxies BBC News online and does the following things to pages retrieved through it:

• retrieves a page from News Online, and regexes out “Capitalised Phrases” and acronyms. It then tests these against a database of wikipedia topic titles. If the phrase is a topic in wikipedia, then it’s turned into a hyperlink. This way you can see in-context links to definitions of terms or background information on topics discussed.

• uses the technorati API to add a sidebar of links to blogs referencing the story – this way from the same page as the story you can see who else is talking about the story

Julian links to an example in a report on UK politics. I looked at the example and found this a great integration of old and new media. But I could not find links to any blogs as referred to in the second bullet. Perhaps there were simply none for this story.

How to Pick Blog Software – Jessica Baumgart

Last week several of us from the Berkman blog meetings had a discussion with another Harvard group - WWW ABCD. Jessica Baumgart continued to shift the web focus of the screen projected for the audience on to match what we were saying, as well as contributing herself. One of the interesting stops was this post she did on how to pick blog software. She also created notes of the meeting itself.

In her post on picking blog software, Jessica mentions that she found lists of blog platforms at About.com: and Weblogs Compendium. She goes to provide a very useful list of criteria to consider when picking blog software.

Online Research Browsers – Marcus Zillman

Thanks to Josef Imrich of Media Dragon and Blogfather for a link in to Marcus Zillman's paper on research web browsers. He left it as a comment on my post on “Discourse at the Boundary between Conversation and Publication.” I am putting this post in to give the link more attention as it is a very useful paper that introduced me to a number of tools I was not aware of.

Implementing RSS - Mathemagenic

Thanks to SoulSoup for Pointing to a post by Mathemagenic on issues in implementing RSS. I can see many issues in implementing blogging within an organization, some similar to those in implementing knowledge management. On the other hand I had thought of implementing RSS as a “no brainer.” After reading this I can see that you need to be careful about it as well, just like any new technology. Here is this one section of the post but there are many more details in the complete post.

Lessons learnt
• Think of strong arguments that explain/illustrate why with RSS things could be done differently (ideally examples should be taken from the context of people in your audience).

• Think of existing examples of RSS feeds that would be interesting for people in your audience. Not necessary job related - finding an RSS feed of hot vacation deals may do the trick.

• Think of possible uses of RSS internally (ideally if you can get a support from a couple of different departments, so it can illustrate a need for RSS from different perspectives).

• Get someone without a Blogger reputation to speak. Ideally someone without a weblog. Ideally talk about RSS before you scare people with weblogs.

Way Path – Topic Streams and RSS Feeds

I was looking at blog books in Amazon and came across Way Path. Way Path’s Topic Streams “automatically aggregate topic-specific information feeds with content from around 3 million weblogs. We're still perfecting Topic Streams in the Waypath Labs. Keep an eye out for changes, as well as new Streams. Topic Streams are available in RSS feeds, as well.”

They offer among other things, Movable Type Plugin

“This is a plugin for Movable Type that works in the MTEntry context and inserts a "related posts from Waypath" section, containing links to and abstracts of posts that discuss similar topics to ones in your weblog, even when those posts aren't linked to yours. It's a great complement to trackbacks and blogrolls.”

They also have a blog. It covers: “Contextual Navigation, Semantic Search, and all things Waypathic.” It is very techny in a personal way if you like that stuff.

Dennis Kennedy at the Blawg Channel offers this comment on Waypath. "The Waypath It! Bookmarklet is a great example of the family of cool and useful little tools known as bookmarklets. " He goes on to say, Here's the money quote:

"Waypath shows posts that are discussing the topics in the story that you were reading, not just posts which link to the story. That means that you get posts from bloggers who may be linking to the BBC or NYT version of the same story. And it works on those interesting fringe stories that no one is linking to at all. Neat, huh?"