Monthly Archives: December 2005

Feedburner and Del.icio.us: Pulling Threads Together? Maybe Someday

Just a note on something I found interesting, if a bit obscure. Yesterday I listened to this interview with Feedburner’s Rick Klau and he said that one of the things their super-RSS management service is striving for is to pull together data threads from various sources into one viewable location. Just came across one place that isn’t happening yet.

Please forgive any navel gazing here, but I just noticed from my traffic stats that some one had visited my site about an hour ago from Sonny Cloward’s Vermont Non-Profit IT blog. It wasn’t the most exciting post I’d written that they came in through, so I went to the linking blog to see why that post was linked to. It turns out that Cloward had tagged the post via del.icio.us, and he runs his recently tagged posts as links in his sidebar. That’s a common practice and it’s nice to see it in effect.

But I noticed that it wasn’t the post’s permalink URL that he tagged and thus was linked to on his site, it was the URL of the post in my FeedBurner feed. Then, unsurprising perhaps, when I went to the post’s permalink URL and clicked my beloved del.lookup bookmarklet to see who had tagged the post in del.icio.us – it said no one had. And no one has tagged that URL, but apparently Cloward subscribes to my RSS feed (thanks!) and tagged the post directly from his feed reader. So if any of my subscribers tag my posts, that won’t show up in the same (far more accessible) data set as tags from casual readers.

That’s a real shame, and it complicates the new inclusion in Feedburner feeds of “tag this item in del.icio.us” links after every post in your feed. That option is something feed publishers must chose to activate and I think it’s one of several great features they’ve added in the last week. But the fact that it effectively facilitates a fork in my readship data is a real shame.

I just point this out because I think it’s an interesting example of the kinds of things Klau might mean when he says Feedburner aims to bring data streams together in the future.

If, by the way, you are interested in listening to the Klau interview – here’s a few tips. If you are uninterested in hearing about advertising in feeds, skip to about 10 minutes into the hour long interview. If you want to hear about cool stuff Klau believes is coming in the RSS world, skip to about 30 minutes in. It’s quite a good interview and if you follow that link there’s really good show notes. It also includes some basic info about RSS. If it’s intro info on FeedBurner that you’re looking for, though, you should check out Madge Weinstein’s awesome interview with Klau about how Feedburner works in the first place.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

RSS to IM: The Bleeding Edge of RSS, Part 2

I have to confess, few things have excited me as much lately as immedi.at, a new service that will notify you by Instant Message any time a selected RSS feed is updated. Wow!

I’ve written in the past about how to make RSS (definition) a tool for decreasing, not increasing, your information overload. This is the next step beyond pulling high-priority feeds out of bulk folders so that new items in these key feeds are immediately discernible. Some feeds are even more important and time sensitive than that.

For example:

  • There might be times when you want instant notification of anyone linking to your web site or blog – subscribing to the feeds searching for such links is a basic first step, but sometimes an IM might be especially important.
  • You might want to be instantly appraised of any new press releases from relevant government agencies or business, before you publicly address what you believe to be their position on some matter of interest.
  • You may want to develop a relationship with a certain blog wherein you consistently make comments on relevant posts promptly after those posts are made.
  • Think of the application mashups possible! Using Tag Central, FeedDigest, FeedBurner and Immedi.at together, for example, I can get an IM whenever the term “search” appears on Emily Chang’s eHub, or in items tagged “web2.0” in del.icio.us, Furl.net, Technorati or Flickr. Just by visiting the page for this RSS feed: Select Web2.0 Sources on Search and telling immedi.at to monitor that feed. (If you’re curious, this is what is in that feed right now.) I can only imagine what sorts of things are possible…including outside the tech-sphere of topics.
  • Using RSS in general will make you one of the most quickly and thoroughly informed people in your field; selecting key feeds from which to receive IM notification will take that timely knowledge to the next level.

This is a tool with incredible potential. That said, this particular implementation (immedi.at) is somewhat buggy so far. I’ve found that it works far better in Firefox than it does in Safari, and with MSN Instant Messenger far better than AIM. I’ve been in contact with Peter Brown, apparently the lead developer of immedi.at. He’s been incredibly helpful and engaged. That bodes well for the tool, as far as I’m concerned.

But this is a powerful enough way to leverage RSS that I expect there will be several more options available some time soon. As the web world further refines its handling of “attention,” I imagine new possibilities similar to this, currently unimagined, will probably emerge as well.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britanica

New study in Nature magazine evaluates 42 science entries in both sources, checks for errors.

“Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia … but reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica respectively.”

Best comment from Digg coverage of this article: “What I want to know is after they found the errors in wikipedia, did they bother to fix them?”

Related: Best way to search Wikipedia – Wikiwax.com.

Technorati Tags: , ,

The Bleeding Edge of RSS: Part 1

Two RSS services deserve a write up today; one an established service with new features, another an experimental new service worthy of more use and attention. I’ll write about the experimental service in Part 2 of today’s posting.

Feedburner is a fantastic company that provides absolutely essential RSS publishing services. I’ve been using and recommending Feedburner for some time because of features offered for months:

  • Analytics: Feedburner tracks how many subscribers are actively reading your feed, which items in the feed they have clicked through, what feed readers they are using and more.
  • Automatic pinging. While pinging services like Pingoat and Ping-O-Matic are a good way to tell search engines, RSS readers and other services that you have new content on your blog or website that needs to be indexed, Feedburner’s Pingshot service can be set to automatically ping all the major ping services every time you post a new item to your site, and thus to your feed. You will need to make sure that the Feedburner feed URL is findable in your site’s metatags, and Technorati indexes things poorly half the time anyway, but Pingshot is still very effective. My blog posts are findable in every major blog search engine within hours of posting – something that doesn’t happen when pinging is neglected.
  • There are many other services that Feedburner has long offered that are really great; one-click subscribe buttons for all the major feedreaders, a browser-viewable RSS page (not just a page of XML code) effective enclosure delivery for podcasts and ads in your feed if that’s what you like.

But here’s the news about Feedburner. Starting this week, a new feature called FeedFlare lets you add a number of widgets at the end of each item in your feed. My favorites are: email this item, del.icio.us tag this item, see what others have tagged this item as in del.icio.us, number of comments to item displayed (works with WordPress blogs only) and display inbound links to this item via Technorati. There are also other features available. This is pretty cool! They call it “building interactivity into every feed item.”

Feedburner is seeing a lot of success as a company. Today they announced a partnership with the Reuters press agency to publish Reuters news feeds. Feedburner says they now work with 100,000+ publishers who represent more than 6 million aggregate subscribers. Good for them. If Feedburner ever gets bought out by a tech-megacorp, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Blogging and RSS are great for Search Engine Optimization and Discoverability

A few weeks ago for a client I was looking at a large number of web sites for non-profit groups around Oregon and Washington and noticed that not only were they rarely updated and seldom offered RSS feeds, their link structure was utterly unusable. At the very least I wanted to scrape RSS feeds from their sites (using Feedfire.com) so that I could subscribe to updates. Unfortunately, even this was difficult as most of their links were tied to text like dates of events (as opposed to event titled) or to text that had no meaning out of the site’s immediate context (like “for more info click here). I was thinking about that experience this morning when I wrote an article for RSSApplied titled Blogging and RSS Foster Better Link Structure, Search Engine Optimization. It was originally written with a business context in mind, but I think that the basic ideas here could be helpful talking points in explaining why blogging and RSS are important in any context.

All too often, web sites contain links with no title but the word “here.” As in, for more information click here. Though this might make sense to the writer when the web site in question is a series of static, interlocking pages and documents that are navigated simply by taking one step at a time – those days are in fact gone.

Web sites today change frequently, and when they don’t many people become frustrated. Blogging and RSS are the perfect cure for this, as blogging makes changing a web site easy and RSS makes subscription to future changes on a site require almost no investment of time or energy.

Advantages of using blogging and RSS for your web site include:

  • Resources of any type entered as a blog post are created with a descriptive title as the post’s link. This structure lends to maximimum search engine visibility as the text inside links is more heavily weighted when a web page is indexed by search engines. If the first text on your page that is found by search engines is the linked word “here”, you have lost a major opportunity for yourself and others to be able to find that item high in any search results. A descriptive blog post title and link, in conjunction with the well designed metadata called “tags”, will make any item easier to find.
  • RSS subscribers will receive your headline links via their subscriptions. A non-descriptive link is unlikely to be clicked through.
  • A well designed blogging and RSS system will automatically “ping” relevant search engines, RSS feel delivery systems and other services of interest. To ping these services is to send them a message that changes have been made to your site and they should come and index the site anew. Content frequently updated and pinged for will appear much higher in search engine results than static content submitted to search engines just once.

All of these technologies working together (blogging, RSS, pinging, etc.) will help make your site’s content much more visible to the outside public and for your own later retrieval – thus saving time when you need to find something on your own site for later reuse.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

I’ll be Connecting and Blogging for Net Squared

I am excited to report that I’ve been contracted by the wonderful folks at Net Squared to do work as a Blogger/Connector regarding non-profit groups using the web in interesting ways. Here’s what I wrote over there to describe what I’ll be doing.

I’ve been brought on board to act as a connector between different members of the community that could be of assistance to each others’ work and to blog about the kinds of work people are doing around the world.

I’ll be writing and posting some multi-media about the good news and the bad in the movement to make emerging technology a powerful part of the non-profit world.

The organization is largely focused on building participation for a conference in S.F. next May, but along the way the Net Squared site is a great place to learn about new tools for use in social change campaigns. I hope readers here will check it out and get involved. Here’s some highlights from the site that you might find of interest:

  • The conference page is all about the event, which you should consider attending.
  • The case studies page is a great place to learn about what exciting work is being done by many groups around the world.
  • The Community Blogs page is where you can find all the staff blog posts aggregated in one place.

I am beside myself with joy to get to work with this group and I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me to create useful, interesting connections and writing.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,