Monthly Archives: May 2006

Join us for Net Squared live online!

Way too busy right now to post much here, but for those of you not able to make it to the Net Squared conference next week in person – there is another way! Check out http://netsquared.org/remote to see the live online sessions planned. We’ve got people from Bloglines, Creative Commons, Meetup.com and many more fascinating organizations. I hope you’ll check out the conversation and join us for a chat or two.

Links to tag a post: do they get used?

I’ve added a series of links to the footer of my posts that will enable one-click submission of that post to a wide variety of social bookmarking systems. There are many ways to do this, but today I found what may be the easiest – with Twister MC’s social bookmark link creator.

This is a pretty popular thing to do – but do people use them? I always use my browser’s bookmarklet to save to del.icio.us – do you click on these links when you see them? Perhaps it’s mostly a reminder to bookmark a good post. I wonder though if the aesthetic cost of these links is worth the usability they create.

I can see the use of links like this in an RSS feed for sure, using a service like Feedburner’s FeedFlare. In a feed reader there’s not always easy access to a bookmarklet or the unique URL for an individual post – thus a one-click link is great. But on a blog site? Thoughts?

Associated Press partners with Technorati

Here’s some big news, the 440 news outlets around the country that use the AP’s news module will now include a list of the most blogged about news items of the day on their sites and display inbound links to each individual article as discovered by Technorati. I wrote about it over on Social Software – and it will be interesting to see what other people think. I think it’s great – especially for local-issue bloggers. The barrier between traditional and new media is being broken down more every day.

Here’s some free advice: nonprofit organizations wanting to do issue-based outreach with their blogs would be well served to subscribe to the feeds of organizations like the AP, either for search terms or through a filter. For high-priority items, if you’ve got a fast blogger on your team, set up an RSS to IM/SMS alert system for selected filtered feeds. That way your blog will be amongst the first to cover AP stories of interest. That’s how I wrote about the Technorati/AP partnership announcement before any other blogs did.

Interesting note: when this type of alert system sets me to write a particular post and I’m looking to cover the news first, I ping the key ping servers manually with Pingoat to come and index my new post instead of relying on automated pinging systems. Google Blogsearch has found my post about this partnership in its search results, but despite pinging Technorati specifically, Technorati has yet to discover the post I wrote linking to its own blog. Hmmm…

Another note, this on Memeorandum: the Technorati blog post I covered is on the top of the page, this blog – which does not link to the Technorati post but to the Social Software post that does – is second in the conversation, and the Social Software post I made is third. Interesting. A number of conclusions could be drawn from that.

Interview with Robin Good on Newsmastering

Feel like you’re not getting the most out of all the information the web has to offer because it’s just so overwhelming? I really believe that optimizing our RSS reading practices can go a long way, but Robin Good of MasterNewMedia.org offers a more sophisticated vision in which our organizations have dedicated NewsMasters. These NewsMasters focus on using RSS, search, filtering and more to get us the best information on our area of interest as quickly as possible. We just get the good stuff. I like it.

I just interviewed Robin over at Net Squared. If you’d like to hear him explain the big picture of NewsMastering in his own voice and words – here’s a quick sound clip to go allong with the text write up. The full interview has lots of good details and links for online research in general.

Robin Good on NewsMastering (1 minute 30 sec) download

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Akismet installed – spam be gone!

May the lowly wretches who command the bots that spam me be bannished into the darkest part of heck and stuff! I’ve just installed the pro version of Akismet, the spam comment blocker people rave about. It was quite easy to do and if it works anywhere near as well as everyone says I will gladly pay five dollars a month for it. Three cheers for paying for web services! I’m all about it. Imagine how much less advertising there could be if all of us who could would just plunk down some dough for the services these hard working developers have created. Imagine how many more and better services there could be built if innovative folks knew they would be supported financially by their user community if they built something good. Thanks Akismet!