In looking to write about the forthcoming Twitter push notifications tonight, I grabbed a list of the top 35 UX (user experience) blogs, according to Google’s new blog finder feature. (Didn’t know about that? ReadWriteWeb was the only leading blog that covered it.) The algorithm isn’t that great, in terms of ranking, but it took me from nothing to a whole lot of something in a hurry. It was more an experiment than anything else, to see how well Google’s new blog directory search worked. You know what else might prove useful? Googling for “top UX blogs” and finding human-compiled lists like this one from Whitney Hess.

I usually have much more extensive and rigorous processes for identifying the top blogs in a niche, but I needed something quick and dirty tonight. The real bummer? None of these blogs have ever written about the UX of push notifications! Amazing! I’m pinging some UX pros on Twitter though to see if they’ll comment for a write-up.

In the mean time, someone asked me on Twitter “what are the top 35 UX blogs online?” so I thought I’d share my work. Again, this is quick and dirty. But it’s better than nothing. My list so far is below and you can search the archives of all these blogs from this one URL. I even added 9 more from Hess and still nothing! Can you believe Bokardo, for example, has never blogged the phrase “push notifications”??

Identifying the top blogs in a niche is something I sometimes do for consulting clients and you’d better believe my deliverables are a lot prettier than this but it’s 1:30 AM and I’m trying to write a blog post. I made this list and the custom search engine to search years of UX blogging experience in about 10 minutes, in case you’re curious. Boom!

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Last month I wrote the foreword to a new book called The Shift: The Evolving Market, Players and Business Models in a 2.0 World and it’s now available – for free! It’s essentially a marketing vehicle for the very large telecommunication infrastructure provider Alcatel-Lucent, but it’s marketing 2.0 of the best kind: the book makes almost zero mention of the company at all. It just talks about how changes in society and mobile internet devices are combining in such a way that network service providers should offer application programming interfaces to a wider developer community. It’s a really good real, actually.

My foreword isn’t my best writing, but I was proud to have been given the opportunity. I wrote a better article, one I’m quite proud of in fact, this week about an acquisition the company made: Acquisition Aims to Change History for Mobile Apps & Data.

I recommend reading the book if you’re into thinking about these kinds of topics. You can read selections online and if you want, the company will send you a free paper copy in exchange for your contact info. They may or may not call you, I’m guessing, to discuss whether you’d like to buy a big telephony infrastructure middleware software package. Or they may want to talk to you if you’re a developer. Either way, it’s no big whoop and it’s certainly worth it to do all the learning you’ll get from the book. It’s fun.

You can check out the book and its corresponding online community here.

I spent a fast-paced, heavy-hitting hour on the phone today with a consulting client and it was so much fun! I introduced them to the basics about effective blog reading, blog writing, RSS, OPML, Custom Search Engines and using Twitter effectively for marketing and business development. It was intense! The client, who is a recently acquired and very technical B2B service provider, said it was immediately valuable and much appreciated.

I forget sometimes how many people have yet to learn the beauty and powerful value of personalized content syndication and related technologies. I could probably spend all day, every day, getting people excited about it, if I didn’t have an awesome day job. As it is, I do one hour-long phone consultation each week. (Info) To be honest, I’ve got that much time allotted but I’m not filling each week’s hour up. I’d like to though, because I love doing consulting work.

My advice for anyone out there reading who is also jazzed about this stuff? Don’t forget how much opportunity there still is to teach people how to really effectively leverage the basics. It might not feel that way to many of us, but these are still very early days in the history of social web technologies.

I regularly do one-hour long telephone consulting sessions on launch planning and product development. I really enjoy doing that kind of work. My most recent client in that capacity was a pre-launched e-learning platform called Nixty. Glen Moriarty, Psy.D., CEO and Co-Founder of NIXTY, had these kind words to share about our work together. I thought I’d share them here. You can find more information about my consulting services here. Drop me a line if you’d like to discuss our working together.

“Marshall provided us some great insight into our platform and user experience in particular. We had demo’d the product for a variety of different target markets, but we hadn’t really thought through the user experience for one of our main segments. Marshall pointed out this blind spot and then offered several very practical recommendations to tighten up these parts of our platform. In addition, he provided us with some great referrals and pointed us to some hard-to-find resources. I wouldn’t be surprised if one year from now, I reflect back on my conversations with Marshall as being pivotal to our success with acquiring and maintaining users. I strongly recommend his services, especially for those of you who
might be trying to navigate the social Web.”

Thanks, Glen!

Over at ReadWriteWeb, where I spend most of my time, we write mostly news and analysis but some “how-to” type posts. Below you’ll find one of my favorite how-to posts I’ve written lately, originally titled Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web. I thought I’d repost it here in case any Marshallk.com readers missed it and because it’s relevant to my consulting work as well. Clients regularly hire me to advise or assist in the creation of strategic groups of contacts on various platforms. It’s super helpful. Check out this post and you’ll see why (and how).
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Pride is rarely something appropriate to show in public, but tonight in particular and here on my personal blog – I think it’s ok. Yesterday I wrote a blog post that became the 500th story I’ve written over the last 3 years to be featured as a headline on Techmeme. I’m quite proud of that.

If you’re unfamiliar with Techmeme, it’s a mostly-automated “meme tracker” that captures the most discussed blog posts in the tech blogosphere. More than 8,000 authors have made an appearance on Techmeme, but only 4 have made more appearances than I have.

Headline #500 was Sunlight Foundation Receives $4m For Obama Era Data Visualization. I’m glad that was the topic.

The Techmeme leader-board is maintained by robots on Crunchbase. Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan of TechCrunch gave birth to those robots. Thanks guys.

You can click on the image to see the full list, in context.

One of the services that I provide for consulting clients is assistance in recruiting bloggers and social media experts for hire. In the past 2 months I’ve helped 3 companies find company bloggers or community managers. Right now I’m working on a list of 3 to 5 high-quality candidates for a community management position for a very innovative and cool startup.

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.
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