Author Archives: Marshall Kirkpatrick

China Web News Roundup

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Several items of interest today re China, where a number of regular readers live. I love it when people from China visit this site. Perhaps primarily for the rest of us, here’s some links to interesting news today about China and the web.

I imagine we’re going to see a lot of very exciting web-related things come out of China. I hope that the Chinese web will help the world become a more just place.

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NPTech Meta Feed Update

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Several months ago I was excited to find out about an attention stream for non-profit technologists that utilized the tag “nptech.” Althought begun in Del.icio.us, I found that the tag was being used in many different platforms to tag many different kinds of online content – from photos to upcoming events. There’s discussion and aggregated content over at at http://nptech.krazy.com. I thought it would be helpful to create an RSS feed that pulls together items tagged nptech from all the sources listed at Tag Central.net. I should probably update the sources to include podcast tags.

The aggregated feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/NPTechMetaFeed.

So it’s been about 2 months now since that feed was created, and I realized last night that I should probably share some statistics from Feedburner.

There are currently 21 subscribers to the RSS feed, NPTech Meta Feed.

That number has grown steadily in the last two months. (graphic coming in a minute)

The articles most clicked through so far are:

LATechSurvey.pdf (12 clickthroughs)
How about a nonprofit related application? (7 clickthroughs)
theses8.12.low.pdf (7 clickthroughs)

To be fair, two of those are pdf files, which had to be clicked through in order to be read, as pdfs don’t appear in an RSS reader. Other links people have clicked through the most to comment on or otherwise do more than just read include:

Scuttle: de.lirio.us
Michael Stein’s NON-PROFIT TECHNOLOGY BLOG: Bread and Butter 2.0 (I liked this one a lot.)

This week’s most popular clickthrough has been a podcast on IT Conversations about non-profits blogging. Unfortunately, whoever bookmarked it in Furl appears to have bookmarked the download link and not the podcast’s permalink – so clicking through just gets an error message. That podcast, titled Non-Profits Blogging can be found at http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail439.html

Ok, so that’s a run down of the NPTech Meta Feed so far. I’ll try and write a similar blog post every from time to time. This is a good example of a community of practice creating an attention stream using a tag.

These statistics were gathered via the wonderful folks at FeedBurner. If you are curious about the ins and outs of how RSS works and how these stats are gathered, you can listen to Madge Wienstien’s great interview with a FeedBurner exec.

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Meet the Sploggers

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Any time a new medium emerges with a low barrier to entry, people are going to try to make easy money off it. Online that means spam. Spam doesn’t just mean email, though. There’s Tag Spam, blog comment and trackback spam and Splogs, or spam blogs. Splogs show up all the time in the RSS feeds I set up for searches. It really bums me out. The splogs appear to have valuable information about whatever search term you’re looking for, but they are really just worthless attempts to get you to click on ads or click through to another site or to raise the inbound link profile of another site. It’s wretched, and there are so many of them! Since Blogger in particular is free and easy to use, many people are just filling the blogosphere with crap. I have my ideas on how to deal with it, but I’m writing today to point you over to an interesting article titled “Meet the Sploggers”. It’s a description of the goals and tactics of just a few current sploggers out there. It’s a pretty interesting read, I think.

For the record, I think that one way to deal with splogs is to find ways to integrate attention data into filters for our search results. For example, I could say “show me only those resulting pages that have been flagged as spam by less than 5 unique readers.” or “show me only sites that people from more than 2 continents have spent at least 30 minutes on in the last 3 days” or some variation of that. There are ways to game systems like that too, but it becomes more of a burden to do so as these obstacles are built up.

Finally, check out social-recommendation enabled search engines like Wink.com. Tools like this, and social bookmarking, will allow you to just search inside the validated worlds of your trusted friends. Obviously limitations exist here, and you’d want to wander out into the wilderness in many circumstances, but for the cleanest search results…you may want to look to a “walled garden.”

Ultimately, I believe that search to RSS is one of the most powerful tools in the Web2.0 sphere. It automates the rapid discovery and delivery of key information. It is a powerful means of getting and staying on top of your field.

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Firefox MailTo: Fix

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Isn’t it frustrating when the contact info on some one’s web page is just a “mailto:” link that makes your desktop email software system pop-up when you click on it? Are you one of the many people who only uses web based email, like Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail? Well, for Firefox users there’s now a solution. Check it over at the Download Squad’s write up of a tool that allows you to change your browser settings to open your web mail account instead when you click a “mailto:” link.

BTW, I’ve been really bummed lately but Firefox is just moving so so so slow on my Mac that I’ve been using Safari instead. Anyone else having a similar problem? There’s so many incredible things that can be done with Firefox, I’d really like to get it working for me again.

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Blog Alerts: Bloggers in Trouble

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This morning I added another section to the sidebar here, called Blog Alerts, from The Committee to Protect Bloggers. The CPB is a group that raises awareness about bloggers around the world facing state or other repression because of what they’ve written on thier blogs. You should really check them out. This BlogAlert system is something I set up for them and had on my old site. It’s a system by which the director of the CPB can write a post and put it in his category “Blog Alerts” and will thus appear automatically in the BlogAlert sections of any supporters’ web sites who have resyndicated the RSS feed for that category. You can grab the code snippet via the link at Add BlogAlerts to Your Site. This is an easy way to help spread the word quickly about bloggers in trouble. (I used Feed Digest to turn the RSS into javascript-to-HTML, very easy to do.)

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Wiki Resources Galore!

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If you are unfamiliar with what a wiki is, I explain it like this: it’s a web site that anyone can edit, where all previous versions of every page are viewable, and where users can recieve automatic notification whenever a page of interest changes. Wikis are used for collaborative knowlege and document development. The best introduction is Wikipedia, the biggest wiki in the world. If you visit that site, make sure you click on the tabs at the top of each article and give a good look around.

There’s a fantastic looking conference underway yesterday through tomorrow in San Diego, called WikiSym 2005, the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis. The online resources available alone are terrific. The workshop page for the Wiki Spam session alone looks worth a look. I’ll be looking over this site as much as I can before I facilitate a discussion about wikis at a TechSoup online event later this month (Oct 24-28).

I found out about WikiSym via the blog of Ross Mayfield, wiki-guy extraordinaire and head of the wiki heavy-weight company SocialText. Ross is a charming guy and is providing some good, live coverage of the conference.

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