Monthly Archives: March 2006

Writing elsewhere rounded up

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Quick links to a few posts I’ve made elsewhere recently that I think are particularly interesting:

How and Why to Use FeedBurner

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One of the basic steps in setting up a blog that makes the most of the medium is getting an account with Feedburner.com. No matter what blogging platform you use to write your blog, there are good reasons why you should use Feedburner. Below are some reasons why, followed by some steps on how to use the service.

First: What is Feedburner?

The simplest answer to this question is that Feedburner republishes your RSS blog’s RSS feed (or any RSS feed for that matter) to make it much friendlier, more powerful and more useful.

What am I going to get out of this?
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Interview with Lisa Williams, Part I

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As promised I’ve posted an interview with OPML blogger Lisa Williams, though we didn’t find much time to talk about OPML! Instead we talked about her community blog project, h2otown, which rocks. And her power use of search and RSS. It was super fun and informative. Hopefully we’ll get to catch up and do an interview about OPML soon, which is why I contacted her in the first place!

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Another crisis management tool

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I love http://immedi.at and use it all the time to get IM mssgs whenever select RSS feeds are updated. Just learned about another option, http://www.rasasa.com. This one will send you an IM, unless you’re offline. If you’re offline then it will send your cell phone a text mssg, unless you’ve said you don’t want to be texted at the time, then you’ll get an email.

Picture this scenario: environmental watchdog group prepares to do a press conference regarding heinous corporation. Moments before press conference, corporation posts press release trying to preempt watchdogs or otherwise changing the circumstances. Boom, watchdogs get IM or text message with update on new circumstances as they approach the press conference. This capability just seems essential to me. And there are so many other uses possible!

Down sides:

  1. Your RSS feeds still have to be well chosen or constructed, including search feeds and scraped feeds if applicable.
  2. RSS feeds often get published more than once between new items, for whatever reason. For example, writing this post was interrupted for a second by an IM notification of a “new article” that I had already read just because the feed was republished.
  3. Steve Rubel points out that this sort of service would work best if he could set a thresh hold for notification. He’s a PR guy, so he’d like notification when for example 20 bloggers have linked to his client’s site. That makes a lot of sense and seems like something that could be implemented in a number of places along this process.

Tell me if you think I’m crazy, but I love this kind of stuff.

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Issue tracking pumped up: A search – Rss- OPML service

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Check out Monitor This, a fabulous service that builds an importable OPML file of RSS feeds for any search you input – in 22 search engines at once! It looks great. I’ve just subscribed to some searches this way and we’ll see how it goes.

I was told about this by Lisa Williams, with whom I began an interview this morning. (I love it when people are down for long IM interviews!) It’s a real good interview, too. Lisa is awesome. I love her approach to research – and not just because it reminds me of my own but with different tools. We haven’t really even begun to talk about OPML either – and that’s the reason I asked her for an interview.

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