Various services have different ways for users to separate their “friends” into different groups, viewable by topic, category or type of connection. Facebook is making changes today to make it easier to break your Facebook Newsfeed into groups. That’s going to be very important. The best Twitter applications offer group functionality that the site itself doesn’t. MySpace offers no such feature, yet. The Facebook news prompted us to try to articulate the value of group creation online. By better understanding the value that groups can deliver, we can better strategize our creation of groups.

First we’ll discuss four ways that small groups separated from a full river of news can help you use the social web more effectively. Then, for context, we’ll briefly contrast this with the value of the full stream of information. Using both together is more useful than merely limiting the full stream to a manageably small group of sources on a given topic or of a certain priority.

Forgive me if this is all obvious to you; I know it’s not to everyone. Even if it is, I think there’s value in discussing fundamental qualities of emerging methods of communicating. The assumption in discussing these values is that you’re an ambitious knowledge worker. If that’s not the case then this logic may or may not apply.

The Value of Groups

Prioritization

Pulling high-priority sources out of the full stream and putting them in a special place enables you to catch more of the high-value information those sources publish. Why lose valuable messages in the whole sea of marginally valuable information that we all have access to? High value sources don’t always publish high value information, but the increased likelihood of their doing so warrants putting them in a special place so that the unusually high signal-to-noise ratio they offer is maintained.

Below: I follow thousands of people on FriendFeed but have about 100 people who often discover or make news early in their own group.

Context

Different words and links have different meanings in different contexts. When subscribing to a large set of sources it’s sometimes easy to forget who or what certain sources are when their content comes barreling down a full stream of information. Placing sources into contextual groups helps put messages in context, adding meaning and offering insight into the significance of some content.

Right: I’ve got a list of 300 tech industry analysts on Twitter pulled into a separate group in Tweetdeck. It’s good to know that when I read these messages, they are coming from professional analysts.

Intimacy

We’ve all got far more connections online than it’s realistic to maintain closely. You may be familiar with the concept of the Dunbar number. Researcher Robin Dunbar argues that 100 to 150 is the approximate natural group size in which everyone can really know everyone else.

Serious users of social media often maintain far, far more connections than that, though. What can you do? Strategic creation of groups facilitates social contact disproportionately frequently relative to contact with the entire list of our social connections. That disproportionately frequent contact lends itself well to greater intimacy.

Left: The ReadWriteWeb writers’ chat, an invaluable resource for us in a world swimming with social connections.

Speed

Some sources of information are more important to be up-to-the-minute with than others. Strategic creation of time-sensitive groups allows you to have those groups alone delivered in a way that fits their time-sensitive nature. You don’t want to be interrupted by updates from every source of information you have any interest in – but some sources are worth being interrupted by.

Right: High-priority RSS feeds delivered by IM.

The Value of the Full Stream

Many people are tempted to solve information overload by cutting back on the number of connections and subscriptions they are signed up for online. We argue that this is a mistake; group creation can help capture some of the same benefits of cut-back without incurring the loss of benefits felt by restricting a well-populated stream of information.

Serendipitous Discovery

Do you cancel your cable TV subscription just because you end up not watching most of the shows that are on at a given time? (Maybe with Hulu you do now.) Probably not. Channel surfing is a way to discover new things.

So too with the web; it’s better to have too many options than not enough. Subscribing to a source of information substantially increases the likelihood that you’ll see something good from that source.

Just don’t worry about reading everything. Scan what you can and let fate bring you value from a bulk of undifferentiated information. Problem solved.

Weak Connections

All of us have some social connections that are stronger than others. There’s value in those weak connections, too. Welcoming people into your full stream of social information is how weak connections are built and maintained.

Reciprocity

Some people say that social media makes almost everyone famous, at least to a small group of people. One definition of fame is a circumstance where the number of people who care about what you’re doing is more than you are capable of paying attention to yourself. Online, though, we can all pay a little passing attention to the people who are paying attention to us. People appreciate RSS subscribers; they like friends on Facebook and Twitter. If someone follows you, it only makes sense to follow them back. (I need to follow my own advice better on Twitter.)

If a person isn’t terribly important to you, just don’t include them in a high-priority group. Interact with them when you get the chance. They’ll appreciate the reciprocal connection, though

That’s one take on the strategic value of groups and the full stream of information. What are your thoughts on this topic? Have you come up with any other super-useful ways to build, manage, or find value in groups online? We’d love to hear about it!

Title photo: Your Days РDecember test Group : 31 D̩cembre 2006 by Nawal_ CC on Flickr

Last month I wrote a post at ReadWriteWeb titled “The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter.” It was all about a service called Mailana where you can plug in any Twitter user name and get a chart and graph of the other Twitter users that the user in question has had the greatest number of reciprocal public @ conversations with. It’s a way to systematically identify the influencers of the influencers in any field (on Twitter).

Just to prove to myself that it works in any field, I did a search of user descriptions in Twellow for the words “veterinary medicine” and found one of the top Twitter users in that field. I then ran her username through Mailana and was able to discover 13 people that she speaks publicly with most regularly on Twitter. It was pretty cool.

And so I present for your drag-to-toolbar pleasure…

Mailana – The Twitter Social Network Analyzer.

Please use it for good and not evil. And don’t let anyone tell you that there aren’t serious use cases for Twitter.

You can join me on Twitter here.

Earlier this month I interviewed Techmeme’s first hired human editor, Megan McCarthy, over on ReadWriteWeb. I think McCarthy’s job is a fascinating one and a good indicator of some future trends on the internet. For whatever reason the interview didn’t get as much traction as I hoped it would upon first publication, so I’ve decided to republish it here to make sure readers of Marshallk.com get a chance to see it as well.

One of the issues we didn’t discuss in the interview was the intersection of gender and technology. That’s one I try to think about a lot though, and if it’s of interest to you too then I’d suggest you check out this two year old article I wrote about women on Techmeme and the new ReadWriteWeb Custom Search Engine of Tech Blogs Written by Women.

And now our interview reprinted…

Techmeme is a semi-automated site that tracks the hottest conversations among tech blogs each day, with updates every five minutes. It’s one of the most innovative efforts in news gathering today. In December, Techmeme hired its first human editor, freelance writer Megan McCarthy.

McCarthy tends the gears of Techmeme, makes sure the content on the site remains of high quality and helps ensure the inclusion of new and important voices. It sounds like an awesome job and one that has probably never existed before – a half woman, half robot, news gathering machine. How can you get your blog on Techmeme? What’s in the future for the site? We asked Megan in the following interview.

The Techmeme Editor’s Job Each Day

Marshall Kirkpatrick: What do you do all day? I imagine you standing next to one of the most awesome news discovery machines available, tending it, making sure it keeps running smoothly, and looking out beyond its reaches to feed it things it hasn’t gotten to yet itself. Is that an accurate picture?

Megan McCarthy: That is fairly accurate, actually. I make sure that the news on Techmeme represents an accurate, current, and full overview of what’s happening in technology right now. So, that’s trimming back stories that aren’t relevant, adding in viewpoints that ought to be heard, etc.

Marshall: Can you tell us a little bit about your personal background?

Megan: My personal background is a little varied. Prior to [writing for] Valleywag, I bounced around a few different jobs and places and never really found a niche. I lived in Hawaii for a few years, had various office drone jobs and other gigs to pay the bills (Nanny, bartender, coffee server). But I loved following technology and reading about what was happening in silicon valley – and I’ve been a news junkie since I was young.

News Selection and Twitter Tips on Techmeme

Marshall: So, did your coming on board “break” the “objectivity” of the site?

Megan: Techmeme is biased and has been so for a while. If you read Gabe’s post announcing the addition of an editor, he makes that point.

What do you think, though? What changes have you noticed since I joined?

Marshall: I have noticed no changes to story selection, perhaps less wonky stuff. I’ve always considered Techmeme a very reliable source of news and I think you’re doing a good job continuing that tradition – but there were certainly some people who grumbled about the human touch being formally introduced, an editor.

Megan: I think some of those people might grumble about anything.

Marshall: How can new bloggers get indexed on Techmeme?

Megan: We just introduced a program where people can tip relevant posts to us through Twitter. Anyone can tip any post they think is relevant to us.

Marshall: How is the new Twitter tips program working out? I see a lot of stories go up with thanks to Twitter, quite a lot – is it changing the face of the site substantially? Changing the content?

I see a handful of people getting thanks over and again, I imagine there’s limited participation so far but how does the algorithm determine whose tips to accept and whose not to?

Also, a lot of people are sending tips regarding their own stories – is that ok? Even mainstream media outlets.

Megan: I don’t think it’s changing the content overall. Many of the stories that are tipped are ones which are worthy of a Techmeme headline. Not everything that gets tipped to us gets on the site. There are two situations that I can think of where the tip program does affect the content: It can help surface breaking stories faster, and if there are two similar stories from different outlets and someone cares enough to tip a certain one, that will probably effect which one ends up as a headline on Techmeme.

As for people tipping their own stories… personally I’m not completely opposed to it. If a writer has a breaking story that he or she wants to let us know right away, that’s a good way to do it. But, they should keep in mind that their twitter handle will be credited with tipping us to the story. If “Thanks: Marshall” showed up next to every Techmeme headline you get, people might put two and two together and think that you really like your work.

To my knowledge, the identity of the person tipping the story has no effect on whether or not it will show up on the page. It’s about the post itself.

Marshall: Well, if shame and loads of people saying “you’re an f*ing jackass” was sufficient deterrent to anti-social behavior in social media, then…[indecipherable, record of this part of the conversation lost forever.]

Megan: Ha. Is he though?

Marshall: Oh I’m sure he is. ANYWAY. Is accuracy taken into account on Techmeme?

Megan: Accuracy is absolutely taken into account on Techmeme. That’s one of my goals, anyway. If there’s a post which has a lot of buzz around it, which turns out not to be true…

Marshall: What does that look like? Are you like “Steve Jobs is NOT out at Apple, I don’t believe those reports! Story…gone!”

Megan: Or, a story that says “Steve Jobs NOT out at Apple” gets published next to the earlier, erroneous rumor.

Marshall: Then you yank the false story?

Megan: Either yank it or surround it with stories pointing out *why* it’s false. Sometimes the false rumor becomes a story itself and yanking it can be jarring. We want our readers to be able to visit the site and know what’s going on in technology – to know what people are talking about. The earlier rumor would probably be replaced as the top story by one with the correct information, but yanking it without giving our readers full context of the overall arc might be a bit jarring.

Marshall: You have to be reading a lot of these stories in great detail. What time does your work day start and end?

Megan: I start around 7:30ish and end later than that. News never stops!

The Future of Techmeme and Other Aggregators

Marshall: So, everyone wants to be an aggregator these days. All the young kids are like “mommy, I’m going to grow up to find recommended stories for an online news publisher.”

What kinds of things do you foresee becoming points of leverage for content aggregators and news discovers in the future?

Megan: I think a reliable real-time web is going to have the greatest impact on aggregation services. I’d love to be able to see stories from sites as they’re published, without a lag.

I hope that quality, accurate, and speedy stories get rewarded by receiving more attention – and that new voices are discovered and make the media chorus sound fuller and stronger.

You were asking me about my electric sheep dreams.

Marshall: Are you a cyborg?

Megan: Depends on my mood.

Marshall: At least between 7am and 7pm?

Megan: That sounds about right. This is super-nerdy, but reading an overwhelming amount of news is something that I rather enjoy doing.

Thanks to Megan McCarthy and Techmeme for doing this interview and doing the things they do each day – help us find the hottest conversation in technology. We appreciate it. You can find Megan on Twitter as well. Photo at top by Scott Beale

1. Use other peoples’ lists before building your own.

A few weeks ago I wrote a giant post titled How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet on Any Topic. It was a big hit and if you haven’t seen it yet, I’d recommend checking it out. It’s all about how to discover the top online blogs writing about any topic, how to find their most popular posts (according to their readers), how to search against their archives as a reference source and how to connect with the authors elsewhere around the web, on Twitter for example.

Jason Falls wrote a similar post a few days later that offered some more good advice, though. One of the biggest things I took from Jason’s post was that there’s no reason to start building a list from scratch, as I showed readers how to do in my post, when you can find existing lists of resources already created. Jason used Alltop as one of his sources of sources, and though the interface there is not good for regular use, someone has done a whole lot of work finding good blogs on a variety of topics. There’s no need to reproduce that work if you’re interested in one of those topics.

Additionally, Googling for the terms list of blogs about topic X will often lead you to existing lists. I’ve also begun exploring Delicious pages like http://delicious.com/tag/list+blogs+eco, where you’ll find links people have tagged with the words list, blogs and eco. Shazam!

2. You don’t have to search against static lists

Google Custom Search engines are really simple but are one of the most powerful tools I started working with last year. I’ve got probably 30 of them that let me search top blogs on a wide variety of different topics.

Whenever I find or make a list, I always consider turning it into a CSE. Did you know, though, that you can make a CSE that’s automatically populated using an OPML URL? Check out http://www.google.com/cse?cref=http://www.google.com/cse/tools/makecse%3Furl%3Dwww.readwriteweb.com/topeducationblogsgreatposts.opml&loading=1.

You can switch out the OPML URL in that link and search against any OPML file you’ve posted or found online. That way if you update the OPML file, you’ll automatically update the sources included in your Custom Search Engine.

Big thanks is due to Marjolein Hoekstra of Clever Clogs for teaching me that, as she has so many things about RSS.

3. Finding industry people on Twitter is easy.

I’m hesitant to share this one publicly, but what the heck. Have you looked at Twellow? It’s a search engine that searches the user bio fields of peoples’ Twitter profiles. That’s cool, but there’s an advanced search feature that’s even cooler.

Let’s say I want to find people who work at any of the Semantic Web companies listed in RWW’s Top Semantic Web Companies to Watch lists of 2007 or 2008. I just opened my browser to those posts, drug the company names off onto a text editor and then did a little find and replace to create this search query:
http://www.twellow.com/search?q=(Freebase)|(Powerset)|(Twine)|(AdaptiveBlue)|(Hakia)|(Talis)|(TrueKnowledge)|(TripIt)|(Calais)|(Spock)|(collexis)|(Irion)|(Knowledge+Concepts)|(Garlik)|(Zotero)|(Celtx)|(Reveltyix)|(ZoomInfo)|(Kirix)|(Rearden+Commerce)|(OpenQabal)|(ThoughtExpress)|(Lifestrea.ms)|(Ontos)|(BooRah)|(Swotti)|(Inform.com)|(Siri)|(Evri)|(UpTake)|(Imindi)|(Faviki)|(Zemanta)|(HeadUp)|(Daylife)|(SemantiNet)|+(ThoughtExpress)”>http://www.twellow.com/search?q=(Freebase)+|(Powerset)|(Twine)|(AdaptiveBlue)|(Hakia)|(Talis)|(TrueKnowledge)|(TripIt)|(Calais)|(Spock)|(collexis)|(Irion)|(Knowledge+Concepts)|(Garlik)|(Zotero)|(Celtx)|(Reveltyix)|(ZoomInfo)|(Kirix)|(Rearden+Commerce)|(OpenQabal)|(ThoughtExpress)|(Lifestrea.ms)|(Ontos)|(BooRah)|(Swotti)|(Inform.com)|(Siri)|(Evri)|(UpTake)|(Imindi)|(Faviki)|(Zemanta)|(HeadUp)|(Daylife)|(SemantiNet)|(ThoughtExpress”)

I then scanned through those search results for people who appear to work at those companies, opened their Twitter profiles up in new tabs, added them as friends, then captured all the tabs as a slideshow I could share with the rest of the team. Just like that we were all following a bunch of people who worked at top semweb companies. You could do the same thing to jump in quickly to any industry’s community on Twitter.

Those are some of the most useful research tactics I’ve discovered lately – how about you? Feel free to post useful stuff right below in comments!

Lego maze photo CC from Flickr user Anvilon

What would a job like that involve? If you’re a startup company reading this post, should you hire a community manager? To explore this question in general, I’ve reposted below a post I wrote this Spring at ReadWriteWeb. It’s titled Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers? I’ve posted it in full below for the benefit of casual readers, but the original post has been read by more than 10,000 people, 69 of whom left comments, many of which are also worth reading. I should also take this opportunity again to thank the 22 people who contributed their thoughts to my research on the article.

If you’d like to learn more about the particular community manager role I’m trying to fill, email me at marshall@marshallk.com. This position in particular is best for someone on or willing to move to the East Coast, but that may not be 100% essential (and other companies will be looking to hire for similar positions in the future) so… if you’d like to do this kind of work now or later, drop me a line. Whether this kind of position is of interest to you or not, I hope you’ll enjoy the following discussion.

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world – being social is becoming an important full time job.

“Community Manager” is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang’s growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.

What Is a Community Manager?

A community manager can do many things (see below) but the most succinct definition of the role that we can offer is this. A community manager is someone who communicates with a company’s users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

True believers can’t emphasize the importance of the role enough. John Mark Walker, the Community Manager at CollabNet articulates this perspective well: “I firmly believe that the community manager should be one of the first hires – right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corporate marketing people.”

Not everyone sees it that way, something that causes substantial distress for people in the supply chain who are advocates for the CM role. “Start ups and all companies that exist online need to be looking at a community manager as a salaried position,” said Dylan Boyd of eROI. “We have been working with big brands and it kills me when they just give ’social media’ to someone that already has 10 other roles…At Omma Social last month in NYC that topic came up asking all the people in the room from Big brands if they had a community manager. 90% of them did not and are still trying to find out how to spec out a job description in order to hire for it.”

Dissenters: Community Management Does Not Need to Be a Full Time Job

Others see community management as something that doesn’t need to be a full time job. “Community management is essentially a public relationship issue, so whoever picks up that gauntlet is on point for representing their company to the rest of us,” consultant Peat Bakke told us. “It doesn’t have to be a specific person or a full time job, but it is part of starting and running a business, almost by definition: if you’re in business, you’re doing community management whether you like it or not.”

Some would go so far as to call an explicit community manager position a bad idea in the early days of a startup. Darius A Monsef IV, Executive Editor & Creator, COLOURlovers.com told us he thinks that in the early days founders need to be in the thick of managing their own communities.

Jonas Anderson voiced concern about community managers being caught between loyalties to the company and its users, while being tripped up by employer nondisclosure agreements. (Others though, such as former BBC blog producer Robin Hamman, point out that having a community manager can greatly reduce legal risk when a company engages extensively with its users.)

Startup founder Sachin Agarwal splits his time between community and other work. Though he wishes he had more time for this kind of work, a full timer isn’t necessary, he says. “Our contact us page encourages people to ask each other and post on other sites before coming to us – we’re happy to help, but I’d wager that other users know how to get the most out of our site better than even we do.”

Similarly, Twine’s Candice Nobles says after some consideration being given to the position, her company found that their users have been incredibly self-organized and regulating so far.

While those thoughts might seem valid, consultant Dawn Foster emphasized that for some companies – making one person ultimately responsible for community work can be essential. “For startups where community is a critical element of the product or service,” she told us, “I think that a community manager should be an early hire. Without a community manager, the frantic pace of the startup environment can mean that the community gets neglected simply because no single person is tasked with being responsible for it. This neglect could result in failure for the startup if the community is critical.”

Can Founders Manage Their Communities?

We talk to a lot of CEOs on the phone here at ReadWriteWeb and we’ll try to be polite in answering this question. Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta answers this question diplomatically. “The [community manager] role can be played by one of the founders early on, but as the project grows you need a person that knows how to listen,” he told us. “Founders have a vision and might be a bit stubborn about what their product represents and offers (that’s why they are founders). Someone a bit more distanced might be much better community manager since he has a lot more empathy for users and their problems and can relay that to developers and managers. And vice versa.”

Pete Burgeson, director of marketing for online marketplace crowdSPRING says that a good community manager can help raise the voice of the users themselves. “We want to be able to build a platform for our community to have a voice, showcase their talent and become as active in speaking for crowdSPRING as we are speaking for ourselves.”

Still others believe that users may not want to talk to the founder or a community manager, but some one with tech chops and focus. “I think a startup should put a developer in the community as opposed to a ‘community manager’”, Rob Diana told us. “Even though the developer may not be as good of a communicator as a marketing guy, there is a different type of understanding of what people want.”

What Does A Community Manager Do?

There are many ways that a community manager can benefit a startup company and it often varies from company to company. Eva Schweber, co-founder of CubeSpace says “it depends on the community and what needs to be managed…the style and distractability of the folks in the startup, how they like to collaborate with peers and how they define their peers.”

It’s a complicated job, but one that can help bring cohesiveness to the life of a company. “Any opportunity to interact with the community forces one to think about the product/feature considerations and ramifications of one choice over another,” says Nagaraju Bandaru of SmartWebBlog. “In many ways, community manager is the evangelist for company’s products and the voice of the customer in internal discussions. It’s critical to react to online discussions with skill, consistency and aptitude; The role is hard to understand from outside but impossible to miss once a startup is in execution mode.”

This coherent communication can have business development benefits as well. This seems to us to be one of the most important benefits of the position. Graeme Thickins, VP of Marketing at doapp explains:
“Their world includes the online community that represents both prospective customers/users, as well as strategic partner companies, possible future investors, future employees, and more. Perhaps thinking in terms of a ‘listening manager’ would help a lot of startup founders better come to grips with what this job is all about.”

Carol Leaman from AideRSS says investing in a community manager position has helped her company “gain maximum benefit from our early adopters and growing base of users, as it’s a key link between them and our development team. NOT having someone on this full-time would impede our growth and success. We consider ourselves fortunate to have both realized this need early, and to have found an amazing Community Manager to fill the role.”

Does that have to be one person in particular? AideRSS’s Melanie Baker explains that specialization is as appropriate in this role as in others. “While especially at startups there’s a shortage of bodies and it’s all hands on deck, not all hands are best suited to all activities,” she said. “No one would want me writing code, and I wouldn’t necessarily want just anyone talking to frustrated users, for example. It’s also totally a hybrid role. My background involves marketing, web, QA, and writing, and I use all of it as a community manager. Someone with a more specialized background can certainly learn what it takes, but might have a hard time wrapping his/her head around the customer service/marketing/business analysis/tech support/software testing/documentation/journalist needs of the role.”

“You need someone who understands the fundamental distinction that while you want to grow your user base, a user base does not equal a community,” Baker said. “The best success involves growing the former while making every effort to evolve them into the latter. Because communities grow themselves organically a lot more easily than user bases do.”

Isn’t it ultimately about marketing? Kim Bardakian, Sr. Communications Manager, at the wonderful music site Pandora put it this way: “Pandora just created this position about four months ago and it’s been INVALUABLE to our company, in such a short time! It’s opened a whole new world of communications for us! Lucia Willow fills that role for us and she’s great. With the iPhone/Pandora launch on Friday, the Twitter network and followers were making tons of buzz! It was very exciting.. ”

Is Community Management the New PR?

Hutch Carpenter points to an example of community management leading to extensive new media press coverage and saving money on PR.

Others see PR evolving towards a community management type of role in this increasingly social world. “I particularly liked the reference to PR as ‘public relationships’, interjected Kathleen Mazzocco ClearPR. “[That] conveys the directness and transparency of today’s new PR. How can it not be given the open conversations going on? That’s why Community Managers are the critical new PR position.”

PR has long got a bad rap, though, and if PR pros are going to get into social media (they are already here in large quantities) then there may be some challenges to their ability to play a community management role. “The idea of a ‘community manager’ is a good one as long as that person has the freedom to discuss the negatives as well as the positives of the company’s efforts,” says Dave Allen of Nemo Design. “If we consider all the aspects of social media as PR 2.0 then I would argue that it is a very important position given that companies would hardly have gone without PR 1.0. I posted a top 10 list of what you might call a ‘community manager’s’ activities might be like here.”
(Disclosure: the author has a consulting relationship with Nemo)

Is This Worth Paying For?

Why would a busy little startup spend precious money on this kind of role?

“While a Community Manager isn’t the same as a traditional PR role, ideally they should work together,” says Meredith from A Little Clarity. “Startups are in a blur; often they’re being run by engineers with VCs looking over their shoulders — they don’t know from community managers; so there should be some accountability, and that’s the tricky part. Do you measure connections? Responsiveness? Transparent ‘public relationships?’ Whatever it is that your company will value, get it out there and agree on it, because one thing startups don’t always have is time to do it right after getting burned.”

You want tangible? Semantic web researcher Yihong Ding will give you tangible! He says that community managers are tasked with tending the most precious asset that many startups have staked their future on – user content.

“As we know, most of the Web 2.0 companies are built upon user generated content,” he told us. “Philosophically, User Generated Content is embodied human mind. This embodied mind is generally the fundamental asset for the company. Maintaining a proper community so that users may embody their mind with high quality is thus a central issue for the growth of the company. The duty of community managers is to supervise and maintain the high-quality production of the fundamental mind asset used by the company. Therefore, I would say that community manager is a critical job title for most of the Web 2.0 companies.”

We agree with Yihong. User data and community content are the foundation that web 2.0 style innovation and company valuations rest on. Failing to focus meaningfully on tending those assets is a foolish choice.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this conversation. We hope readers will contribute their thoughts in comments below.

CC photo by Flickr user ItzaFineDay.

That’s how I phrased a deliberately vague question on Twitter, and it got some great replies by email and on FriendFeed! Twenty people replied, many of whom are community managers, others of whom have hired community managers and a couple of others are cautionary or cynical. It’s a great discussion!

Most of these thoughts are unique and very worth considering – even if they don’t all agree. I’m going to turn these replies into a coherent (and weighty) post on ReadWriteWeb in the morning but I thought I would post them online first and let people knock them around a bit more first. Would you like to respond to any of these arguments in the finished post? If so, please leave a comment here and make sure you tell me where to link your name to.

The final post has been put up here, thanks to all who participated.

I was planning on putting these up on a wiki first and encouraging people to go over there and make edits for replies – I’ve done that before – but then I thought that sounded like a missed opportunity. So here’s a discussion that will turn into a blog post – your thoughts are formally requested…big thanks to the people who have already joined in. I’ll include my own thoughts in the final post.

PS. Big congrats to Drew Olanoff, who was just named Community Manager and Evangelist for Strands.com today!

I do think that startups need community managers, but that being said it depends on the community and what needs to be managed. A lot of what I do at CubeSpace is function as a startup community management, but that is very different than the work that Dawn does. I think it depends on the style and distractability of the folks in the startup and how they like to collaborate with peers as well as how they define their peers. I am not trying to be cryptic, I have just worked with a range of startups who need different kind of support and community management.

I would be happy to have a longer conversation with you about this if you are interested. It might also be a good session for http://www.sideprojecttostartup.com/.

-Eva

Eva Sari Schweber
Chief Cat Herder
CubeSpace, Your WorkSpace Community

Read on for the rest of the discussion

Hutch Carpenter points to a blog post about how a good community manager saves money on PR and has other benefits.

http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/smart-social-media-marketing-caleb-elston-and-toluu/

interacting with bloggers saves money on PR

I firmly believe that the community manager should be one of the first hires – right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corp. marketing people. I have my reasons and am happy to get into details.

–
John Mark Walker
Community Manager, CollabNet

http://www.collab.net/

Just saw your Twitter post about community managers. Pandora just created this position about 4 months ago and it’s been INVALUABLE to our company, in such a short time!

We are very active on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc. I’d be happy to have you speak to our Community Manager if you’d like. It’s opened a whole new world of communications for us!
Lucia Willow—she’s great and has a great, fun online voice.

With the iPhone/Pandora launch on Friday, the Twitter network and followers were making tons of buzz! It was very exicitng.. that we even posted a haiku contest for some free Pandora swag to the Twitters!

Kim Bardakian

Sr. Communications Manager
Pandora

Someone else sent in a link to a slide deck regarding The Costs of community managers

http://www.cybersoc.com/2008/06/my-slideshow-fr.html

Community management is essentially a public relationship issue, so whoever picks up that gauntlet is on point for representing their company to the rest of us. It doesn’t have to be a specific person or a full time job, but it is part of starting and running a business, almost by definition: if you’re in business, you’re doing community management whether you like it or not.
Peat Bakke peat.org

If by “community managers” you mean someone that keeps track of what is happening in a certain community, then yes, startups need a community manager. Especially if that company pays attention to social media. Social media is so important for many companies these days, but the sheer volume of information that is shared can be a problem for them. I think it takes at least one person in a startup to “keep an ear to the ground”. That person should be reading feeds all day and paying attention for appropriate information and content. That person should be writing a blog and listening to their other networks. A social network community manager should learn about what is happening in that company’s field every day and report it to their team.
Doug Coleman

I think it’s an important *function* to be filled, but it’s not necessary to have a position dedicated to it. I think it’s a matter of resources – I know some firms that have a full time head very early and some keep it to an intern after they’re 100+ people. But it is important to *do*.

I fill it in between the other things I do – vendor relationships, inbound inquiries, sales calls, balancing the books, etc. I do wish I had more time/resources to it, however – I’m much more reactive than I am proactive. dawdledotcom is our username on a variety of sites, from Twitter to CheapAssGamer to all sorts of sites in between.

I use Summize and Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying, and we have a board on GetSatisfaction (empty for now, but ready to be used). Our contact us page encourages people to ask each other and post on other sites before coming to us – we’re happy to help, but I’d wager that other users know how to get the most out of our site better than even we do.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Sachin

–
Sachin Agarwal

I put down a lot of thoughts about community building last week on Rick’s blog: http://siliconflorist.com/2008/07/08/community-the-secret-sauce-of-a-successful-internet-startup/

My opinion on community managers is that they are OK when you’ve established a community. Not for just launched startups. You need to be in the thick of it managing your own community in the early days.

Cheers,

-D

Darius A Monsef IV

Executive Editor & Creator

www.COLOURlovers.com

It depends on the startup. For startups where community is a critical element of the product or service (Twitter, open source product, etc.), I think that a community manager should be an early hire. Having someone in place and responsible for managing the community helps make sure that the company is responding to the needs of the community. Without a community manager, the frantic pace of the startup environment can mean that the community gets neglected simply because no single person is tasked with being responsible for it. This neglect could result in failure for the startup if the community is critical. In many startups, the community manager can wear another hat, too. I worked at one startup where I was the Director of Community and Partner Programs, since partners were a big part of the community. Other logical combinations include some marketing roles, social media (blogging / podcasting), developer relations (for developer communities) or website development depending on the skills of the person in the role.

I think that each startup needs to decide exactly how critical the community is to their particular business and use that information to decide when to hire a community manager.

My 2 cents.

Take care,
Dawn

–
Visit my blog at http://fastwonderblog.com
—————————————————————————–

Marshall, that’s a story I’d like to read! Great benefits could be gained by establishing links between a startup and it’s followers, early. However, the community voice needs to be free The community manager would need the suport of the community. There is a danger that a community voice in management would have split loyalties. Maybe even tied by NDA’s. This would make him/her more of a hostage (worse case). If these fears, as well as the benefits, can be voiced and talked about there is great merit to your idea.

Best wishes

Jonas Anderson

Start ups and all companies that exist online need to be looking at a community manager as a salaried position. We have been working with big brands and it kills me when they just give “social media” to someone that already has 10 other roles.

As a “start up” ourselves, or at least always in our minds as one, we watch and participate in the online communities a lot. We have someone on our team in the marketing dept that gathers all of the mentions and
conversations RE eROI and reacts to some as well. This of course is also beneficial to us as an agency to know and understand how to listen, measure, and use this service to helping our clients get the word out on campaigns that launch.

At Omma Social last month in NYC that topic came up asking all the people in the room from Big brands if they had a community manager. 90% of them did not and are still trying to find out how to spec out a job description in order to hire it.

So yes if a start up wants to gain traction they either need to hire someone or dedicate someone to the tasks.

two cent rant over

Dylan T. Boyd | VP Sales & Strategy
www.eROI.com | Inc. 500 Company

There are certain startups needing community managers – those addressing consumer bases with products that need their constant engagement, feedback and course correction.

This role can be played by one of the founders early on, but as the project grows you need a person that knows how to listen. Founders have a vision and might be a bit stubborn about what their product represents
and offers (that’s why they are founders). Someone a bit more distanced might be much better community manager since he has a lot more empathy for users and their problems and knows how to rely that to developers
and managers. And vice versa.

Andraz Tori, CTO
Zemanta Ltd, London, Ljubljana
www.zemanta.com

A startup community manager would probably have the title Marketing Manager
or VP Marketing…or maybe they raised a little bit too much money.
N: Mark Grimes
W: http://www.ned.com/

an internet company these days should have three legs:

1.) the money backers + revenue focus
2.) the rockstar tech devs
3.) the community advocate + social media expert

It’s my opinion that the money backers alone want build old-skool products not suited for the new web (b/c they see it as too much risk). The tech guys want to build all this fun stuff, but tend to allow feature creep, don’t think of revenue front-of-mind and often don’t actively participate in the mediascape. I couldn’t do anything without the former two, but I feel as though my input is highly valuable as to user interface, industry trends and community feedback.

I’ve got more if you want it.

Best,
Mark* (@povertyjetset)

Mark Schoneveld
Community Manager
www.xlntads.com

From FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/e/f8ae0b05-6dd9-1ea1-b19a-5220ad810f3d/Thinking-of-writing-a-story-about-whether/

I think it depends on the launch strategy, either to open it up and build community from the start (in which case you definitely would need one) or if you’re going for the super secret beta aspect (in which case you would still need one but would probably call them something else). – Matt Dickman via twhirl

We’re building an Independent Business Platform with a community element, but we’re not sure how that piece will take off. So, for now, each person on the team owns a piece of the product and we’re essentially the community manager for that piece. So far I love it – it’s a great way to get the honest feedback I need on BizUnite. – Sonciary Honnoll

Can someone provide a link to an explanation RE how “community management” is different than “customer service” if the latter is done properly? Or are we talking about the same thing? If so, then yes, every company–no matter the size–needs a community manager/customer service manager/customer advocate of some sort. – Ken Sheppardson

Marshall — We thought it about for a while at Twine and definitely had the need in the beginning stages, but ultimately decided to hold off. Why? It’s actually pretty amazing, but the community started self-regulating, in a very mature and consistent way that we were pleasantly surprised by. We still check in constantly and our team is obviously very active in Twine, but I am curious what other startups are doing. The community is running smoothly now, but we have to see what the future holds… – candice nobles

I think a startup should put a developer in the community as opposed to a “community manager”. Even though the developer may not be as good of a communicator as a marketing guy, there is a different type of understanding of what people want. – Rob Diana

Update: Give it a try, this video may or may not play for you. It was recorded using Jing Project, an application that’s simple to record with but maddening to use once a video is loaded. I get several emails a day saying I’m approaching the bandwidth limits of my free account. I have no idea how many times it’s been viewed or how close I am to that bandwidth requirement though. I can’t resize the file itself to fit into a smaller player, no one has answered my email requesting information despite previous requests from the company for me to try it out again and apparently the only solution to my problems will be to give them a $160 for a year’s subscription. I think I’ll be trying out ScreenFlow instead. But give it a click below, maybe you can watch this video!

• This doesn’t just work with early adopters. Most services have you “add friends” by asking for your email password because that’s where most of the online world has most of its friends. It’s creepy though and a bad practice to do that. MyBlogLog can grab the “Friend of a Friend” (FOAF) data from your public profiles at services like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace – hardly a tiny set of bleeding edge users. Your application could consider doing the same. Think also about using the new GMail contacts API.
• There’s still no “add all” link. In what I assume was a silly oversight, there’s no link to “add all” when you pull up your friends from these networks. You have to add them one at a time. It would be nice to be able to select all and then deselect a few. That’s no small thing, it would make a big difference in growing the service and I assume they will fix that soon. As it is, the list of 20 friends at a time gets mixed up a bit like FriendFeed recommendations. Implementation of both are clunky though and could scale much better by presenting more options at once and displaying more information about users you are prompted to add as friends.
• Service discovery could be faster. MyBlogLog is “discovering friends” via the public profile pages you filled out in your MBL profile. That process presents you with a long list of services from around the web and asks you to fill in the part of profile URLs where your username goes. Everyone should check out how Lijit discovers new accounts from other sites. It asks you “what is your most common username” and then searches to see where it can find an account with that username. You then confirm or deny each one and can enter exceptions to your standard username on any particular service. It’s really smooth and smart. I wish MyBlogLog and everyone else did it that way.

Almost every service on the web wants to connect users with their friends elsewhere, for aggregate activity feed displays or “viral introductions.” There are some best practices emerging for doing that, though. Companies looking to implement such features should take a look at oAuth and at Niall Kennedy’s recent post on user authentication best practices. If you want to see something cool about MyBlogLog, I’d also recommend checking out the BlogJuice bookmarklet. You’ll like it, I promise.

I’ve been hesitant to write about Iterasi here just because I generally don’t write about consulting clients (though I did in my last post too, so maybe things are changing). Alex did a short video interview with me that went up yesterday, though, and I realized after watching it that I should make sure any readers using Windows know about it right away. It’s really useful! I want to use it and will officially give them a hard time for not having the Mac version done yet, as I told them many bloggers would. Seriously, I’m anxious for its imminent completion.

Below is that video we did together about one way I want to use Iterasi. Here’s a page of links to press they got for their launch, which I advised on. At the end of this post is a screencast demonstration of the product’s functionality, which was produced by Rick Turoczy of Return Corp (and the fantastic local blog SiliconFlorist!). I tried to produce a screencast but had issues. Hire me for overall strategy and RSS work and you’ll be very happy – don’t hire me to produce screencasts!

Read on to watch the videos.

If you’re a Windows user, check out Iterasi and let them know what you think. I want the product to be in tip-top shape when a Mac version comes out that I can use.

This interview shows just how much untapped potential remains in the world of web applications. Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there’s a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights.

Download MP3 [50 mins, 23Mb]

Ding’s research combines the application of a manually supplied ontology (set of terms with connections for meaning), automated analysis of the structure of a web page (what’s in h2 tags? that’s probably a section title) and learned meaning after repeated application of the above and correction by the user. It’s fascinating and a prototype should be available in the first half of next year. I hope to get an early look at it so I can write about it on ReadWriteWeb just before public launch.

The vision of the future described in the interview is beautiful. It’s one of the most clear explanations of the semantic web and what some people call web 3.0 that I’ve heard yet. I’m just starting to dive deep into this, so forgive any excess enthusiasm, but I’m telling you – it’s good stuff.

Ding’s vision of a future web not of sites and pages but of “educated agents of meaning” (smart software applications is what I’m seeing), driven by human beings to serve our needs, is a really interesting one.

His conclusion makes me think of Google Custom Search, Lijit (which I must spend some time with) and I don’t know what else. It’s got me on fire, though.

I found the interview through a path you might find of interest. It was highlighted in the blog of Talis, a vendor in the semantic space, in their This Weeks Semantic Web round up. It’s a very rich resource, not to mention a great marketing asset for the company. I found that via the blog of semantic web rock star Danny Ayers. I was reminded of Ayers’ blog and have picked it back up with a renewed interest after seeing it in a list of 60+ Semantic Web Blogs at Semantic Focus, a fascinating looking group blog where, co-incidentally interview subject Yihong Ding is a regular contributor. So we come full circle and have found a whole lot of valuable resources along the way.

An OPML file is an outline. In this case, it’s a bundle of RSS feeds that can be moved into and out of any RSS reader as a group. No matter what RSS reader you use, it can import and export OPML files. It’s real handy. If PR people, for example, would send me one OPML file of all their clients’ blogs and a news search feed for each of those clients’ company names – I would throw it into my reader and have a long term connection with all their news. It would build name recognition if nothing else, but I’d likely find something in there someday to write about too. There’s a billion other reasons to use OPML – just ask yourself in what circumstances you can imagine sending someone else one link or file that contains a collection of dynamic sources on any topic. I know these are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night.

Here’s how you do it…

There’s lots of ways, but most of them take too long or don’t work as well as they ought to. Start a Netvibes account. Any RSS reader will export an OMPL file, but Netvibes makes it easy to make a little one that contains just a few select feeds. Create a new tab. Click on the “add content” link in the top left of the page. Add an RSS feed. Then add another RSS feed, and another and another until you’re done. Then click on “settings” in the top right. Then say “backup” and export in OPML format. UPDATE: If you’ve updated to Ginger in Netvibes, you can now find your OMPL file via Add Content- Add a Feed – Export

A file will land on your desktop. Here’s one to check out for an example: econews.opml Save Link As that baby and it will land on your computer.

Open it with a text editor like textpad or whatever is on your computer – not Word! Go in and look at the file. Change the title of it. You can see what the structure of an individual feed looks like in this format – outline type=”rss” title=”VibeAgent Blog” text=”VibeAgent Blog” xmlUrl=”http://www.vibeagent.com/blog/?feed=rss2″ htmlUrl=”http://www.vibeagent.com/blog” / See that? DON”T BE SCARED!

Change the title so it’s not “Netvibes OPML” – give it a good title. Now delete any extra items that got in there by mistake. Don’t break anything but go ahead and do it. Now, do a Save As and call it mytitleofmyfilethingy.OPML. Give it the .OPML suffix.

Next, send it to me, or to whoever you want to send it to. You can send it as an email attachment or you can put it on your server and just send a link, that’s extra nice.

SOME PEOPLE will laugh at me for suggesting that you do it this way. I don’t care, though, no one is using OPML as is so there’s no time for purists. The above method will work just fine. Get comfy and you can do new and exciting things with OPML.

Now I am hesitant to think about anything without the ability to “write it down” in a mind map. The ability to document the free flow of connected thoughts is just too seductive to pass up when thinking through complex proccesses.

I could use some help figuring out what the best mind mapping service is, though. Here’s my criteria so far – above in an image from MindMeister (which is AWESOME so far). Can you suggest anything I’m missing or favorite tools I should evaluate?

Imindi isn’t doing it for me yet. It’s an alpha level service that should be substantially improved when the team is able to make some updates, but for now I want to find something that works better for me. Imindi is cool because it’s going to be really social, it publishes RSS feeds, supports OpenID and includes Del.icio.us integration. The ability to embed a live map in an iframe is neat but it would be nice if it were a Flash widget that scaled or if I could scroll in this iframe (can’t figure that out). There’s a whole lot more that they are working on as well, the back end is striking, it’s largely the front end that’s not usable enough for me right now.

It doesn’t allow for data export, though. That’s a deal breaker. Navigation and color differentiation between levels and types of relationships is weak, I want some AJAX where there isn’t any yet, the pagination for nodes with more than 6 connections is annoying, etc. Also, just in order to make a more informed decision (and to make a blog post about it on Read/WriteWeb) I want to evaluate some other mind mapping tools. First stop, http://del.icio.us/popular/mindmap

If you’d like to make any suggestions for important criteria or mind mapping tools that might meet these criteria – I’ll follow up here on what I figure out.

Softrax came to me with almost no experience in using new web applications and by the time our work together was done they had a topical OPML file, a system to easily aggregate industry news on their website and a solid initiation into the web 2.0 experience. This case study is an example of one sort of plan I help clients strategize and implement.

The problem

The RevenueRecognition website has quite a lot of content on it but the company felt that it wasn’t dynamic and timely enough to retain as many of their first-time visitors as they would like. They knew just enough about RSS to know that it might be the solution to their problem.

The solution: a short version

Here’s the short version for people familiar with the concepts. If this is new to you, read the next section below for a more detailed explanation. To summarize: I built the company an OPML file for their industry by finding feeds, scraping feeds from sites that didn’t have them (most in the accounting world) and turning email lists into RSS feeds.

I showed them how to choose and use a feed reader. Then I set them up a work-flow that would allow them to populate sections of their website with news simply by tagging items of interest in their feed reader with the social bookmarking service Del.icio.us and syndicating the Del.icio.us RSS feeds for various tags back onto their own site. Check it out, that’s what’s happening in the grey “news” box front and center on RevenueRecognition.com. The descriptive text on the left side is from the “notes” field in del.icio.us. I’ve also put an image of that part of the page below.

This turned RevenueRecognition.com into an aggregator of the best news in their industry, giving them a chance to become the go-to resource of choice for people interested in what’s happening in the world of accounting.

I also advised them on how to appropriately excerpt third party content and briefed them on their options for in-house creation of original content.

Feedback

“Marshall provided us with a very effective and manageable system to bring a wide range of relevant news content onto our site. He did a great job managing the project – it required minimal technical resources and was very cost-effective. Our percentage of returning visitors and our depth of visit metrics have both improved since the implementation.”
-Gerry Murray, Director Corporate Communications for Softrax.

The solution: non-technical explanation

Here’s an explanation of the work I did with Softrax, without the acronyms. The company provided me a list of their favorite websites they visit for news about accounting and search terms they use to search for topical news. I also identified the most authoritative accounting blogs for them.

I then put together a system that checks all of these web pages, news searches and top blogs for any new information available and delivers it automatically to one place, an application called a “feed reader.” I showed Softrax a variety of different feed readers they could chose between and we discussed the benefits and disadvantages of each. It was easy for them to try out each one by loading a file I built for them with all their web page feeds into each feed reader. We talked through the basic features of a feed reader over the phone while we both looked at screenshots I sent them from my computer.

Once a feed reader was chosen (FeedDemon in this case) I showed Softrax how to organize and filter all the information coming in. We set up a simple system by which they could “tag” any news item that they wanted to display on their web site – with just a click and a typed-in description of the story, it is sent to appear as a link with descriptive text on the RevenueRecognition site (see image above).

This content is kept up to date without ever touching the code of the page itself. It couldn’t be simpler, and yet it’s quite a powerful system.

Why: Why would you want to put a bunch of links on your site that lead off site?

There is so much information flying around in the world today that the role of information-curator, “cool hunter” or trusted collector is becoming an increasingly powerful one to play. Some of the top blogs on the web, multi-million dollar media companies now, are far more focused in vetting the best information from all around the internet than they are in doing their own original reporting.

Obviously original content creation is important – but the point is that if you can offer a timely collection of high quality resources in one place, you can play a leadership role in your industry. People will come back again and again to see what you have had the time (or the technology) to discover. I believe the system we set up will lead to significant increases in visitor retention, and thus increased sales of their services, over time. (See feedback quote on this above.)

If Softrax can populate its news section to the satisfaction of its visitors – then come sales pitch time, it will have the added advantage of having already established itself as capable of adding value to the work lives of potential customers.

Additionally, in and of itself, the creation of a system to pull accounting industry news into one place automatically gives Softrax a first-mover’s advantage on any number of events that other companies may have to search for manually or wait on industry press to report on.

How we worked together

My work with Softrax consisted of a number of conversations on the telephone, time spent assembling resources for them and troubleshooting the initial implementation during testing. I used Grazr set up on a wiki page to demonstrate how an OPML file works and screenshots of various feed-readers in action to discuss their functionality and relative merits.

All of this ended up working wonderfully; after each conversation on the phone my contacts at Softrax remarked that the technology, our plans and the power behind it all were becoming clear and clearer. Eventually they had such a firm grasp of this relatively complicated chain of applications that I only had to answer passing questions while they took the lead with the project.

The final implementation isn’t perfect yet, but it’s pretty darned good. The company’s website and relationship to industry news have changed radically; they now have the infrastructure and the strategy to establish themselves as a go-to source for accounting industry news. As a result, they’ll have more opportunity to put their products in front of prospective customers and more credibility as an established “value adder” when they do so.

This is but one example

My work with Softrax is just one of my favorite recent examples of consulting work I’ve done. I’ve also been doing online product usability and market analysis and assisting in forming launch strategies. There’s lot of things we can do together – including just talk about what you’re doing and how new tools and emerging players on the web could help you do it better. If you’re interested in working with me on a project or on an ongoing support basis just drop me a line. Contact info can be found at the top of this page.

AideRSS scores each post by the number of comments it received, number of times it’s been tagged in del.icio.us, inbound links from a number of blogsearch engines, etc. Thankfully, it scores those posts relative only to other posts in the same feed. So while a post on TechCrunch with 20 comments might score a 5 out of 10, for example, a post on Marshallk.com with 20 comments would score a 10 out of 10! Unfortunately, and this is a big dissapointment, AideRSS is just plain wrong far too often – reporting, for example, completely inacurate numbers for several posts in my feed. Come on AideRSS team, fix these problems. So it’s nothing to bet the bank on, but there’s some real potential here and as a rough guide it could still be useful today. I’ve contacted AideRSS to ask why they are getting things wrong as often as they are.

That’s all well and good, it’s a good way to see which of your posts are getting the most reader engagement (at least via these gestures being measured) and the widget that AideRSS provides is a neat way to highlight your most popular posts – but I know there’s a lot more that’s possible here.

Tonight I tried something unusual, at least it seemed that way to me. I plugged the RSS feed for items I’ve tagged “toread” in del.cio.us into AideRSS. It worked! It appears that the service figured out which were the hottest items in my feed. What a handy way to prioritize! I could grab scored RSS feed from AideRSS, including “good posts”, great posts or only the best posts. Here’s a widget displaying the best posts currently in my “toread” feed, according to AideRSS.

Isn’t that cool? Obviously it would be nice if users could define the number of characters and items displayed in that widget and the metrics used don’t capture anything personalized – but nonetheless, I think there’s some real potential here. (The numbers fetched aren’t always accurate, either – hopefully that will improve.)

Here’s an idea I thought of previously: say you’re looking to identify some of the top blogs in real estate. (Woo hoo!?) I would recommend starting at http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate and sorting from authority. There’s an export in OPML link there, which unfortunately will not give you anything other than the top 10 blogs in that category no matter what you try to do, but you can import that OPML into AideRSS. You can then see the hottest posts in each blog, in other words: you can get a feel for what that blog’s community of readers takes interest in. So Technorati+AideRSS = easy identification of the biggest interests of top niche bloggers’ reading communities. Sounds invaluable to me.

These are the kinds of ideas I help come up with and implement with my consulting clients; though we wouldn’t want to depend too much on a tool that’s as loosely accurate as AideRSS is today.

If this general idea is of interest to you, perhaps more for personal use than marketing purposes, see also Rogers Cadenhead’s recent post on APML – Attention Profiling Markup Language. I tagged it in my blog and shared items feed, which you might like to subscribe to.

Thanks for reading.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarshallsTopBlogsOnVideo

That feed above contains articles from the following blogs that contain the word “video”
TechCrunch, Mashable, Gigaom, PaidContent, ArsTechnica (all top web 2.0 generalist blogs) and my personal blog Marshallk.com

If you’re real interested in online video, I’d also recommend reading Beet.tv and NewTeeVee.  (What other video focused blogs would people here recommend?)  Every post in those blogs is about video though, so I kept them out of the aggregate feed above.

How does it look?  Check it out at the end of this post, after the “more” link.

Here’s how I made that feed.

I identified domain leaders in my topic of interest.  If you don’t know how to do that, one starting place is to go to http://technorati.com/blogs/MYTOPICOFINTEREST and look around there.

I grabbed the RSS feed of each blog and spliced them together using the wonderful service FeedDigest. One of the many options there is to filter for a “search query.”  I entered the word video there.  This service does a lot (including displaying the feed live here in this post) and I gladly pay $50/year for it.

FeedDigest produced a combined and filtered feed for me.  I took that RSS URL and entered it into FeedBurner because it makes everything pretty, it lets me make lots of changes to the base feed without disrupting the readers’ experiences, etc.

Then I posted here about it so share this info with anyone interested.  Just imagine how much fun you could do creating feeds like this for yourself or your friends!  The folks at SplashCast like it quite a bit.

Want to see the output?  Check out this link…

One was a 3 to 1 preference for working with teams, but doing that work from home! I have to admit, I love working from home – but I also love face to face time. It’s indispensable. I don’t think that goes without saying anymore, either.

Check these excerpts from the international comparisons:

“As for the regional differences, American professionals were more likely to enjoy working alone, and prefer to send e-mail rather than calling a person or leaving a voice mail message. They are also more comfortable with audio, video and Web conferencing technologies than people of other regions and tend to multitask the most when on conference calls.

Europeans thrive on teamwork more than their counterparts elsewhere and prefer to interact in real time with other people. They are more likely to feel it is irresponsible not to answer the phone and want people to call them back rather than leave a voice mail message. Professionals in the Asia-Pacific region, more so than anywhere else, want to be in touch constantly during the workday. As a result, they find the phone to be an indispensable tool and prefer instant messaging to e-mail. ”

Sounds like something that could behove us all to keep in mind when communicating internationally – but how true are these statements? Robin Good told me in a recent conversation that making statements about all Americans was like making statements about all fish. Personal observations re cultural differences in communication would be more than welcome…

Of all the collaboration technologies that were studied,3 three were more commonly present in high-performing companies than in low-performing ones: Web conferencing, audio conferencing and meeting-scheduler technologies. Web conferencing was cited by respondents as the most commonly present tool. (High vs. low performance was based on a split for companies based on their performance index, which was derived from items measured in the questionnaire.)

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)

Technorati Tags: DOPA, MySpace, Christian, web2.0

Check it out:
Old PostCarbon.org site
Today’s PostCarbon.org site

Doesn’t it look more proffesional, serious and credible? The difference on the most basic level? Rounded corners and darker colors. More than just a trend, rounded corners show that you care. I think it was a great move.

There doesn’t appear to be a direct link to their blog anymore, just posts headlined in a frame at the bottom of the front page. I think that’s a real shame and it’s the second Drupal site by a nonprofit I’ve seen that doesn’t have a direct link to the front page of a blog on the front page of the site. I think that’s bad. But overall, nice new look for a very cool group.

Again, the interview about their work is posted over at NetSquared.

Technorati Tags: nptech, drupal, postcarboninstitute, interviews, blogging