Category Archives: Reviews

Unforgettable (Usability): The SquidWho Login Experience

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As part of some recent consulting work, I spent some time looking at the new people-search engine from Squidoo called SquidWho (it is not Squidoo I was consulting for). SquidWho is an interesting service that may or may not be worth using (in most cases I think not) but there are a lot of things the team is doing very, very well. It’s worth checking out the site’s user experience and use-flow; it’s all quite well put together.

The one thing I haven’t been able to get out of my head in the weeks that have passed since I tried the service out is how easy it was to get started with SquidWho. It’s simple, really – and I was kind of kidding about using the word unforgettable in the title of this post, but I really do keep thinking about it. It’s more like it’s unnoticeable for once!

Easy login is important because there are so many web applications launching every day that yours should be as pleasing to use as possible at every step or you’ll loose out on the use and advocacy of early adopters – at the very least.
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The best investigative journalism in video on the web and how it pays its bills

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Cross-posted from the SplashCast blog because I thought it would be of interest to readers here as well.

One of the promises of the internet is to democratize access to both information and publishing. That democratization, in theory, makes voices outside of the halls of power more capable of changing the world than they would be otherwise. The jury is still out as to how real all of that is. There are lots of people and organizations giving it a try. Good deeds alone rarely pay the rent, though, and a relatively small number of people online want to watch often-depressing investigative journalism when there’s so much fun to be had in other media sectors.

Liz Gannes wrote a good article last week about the monetization challenges faced by Alive in Baghdad, a project she called “arguably the best-positioned citizen news video outfit in the world.” AiB is pursuing licensing deals with major media outlets but advertising doesn’t seem to be a very viable option for sustaining this fantastic project.

Who else is doing great investigative journalism in video on the web? I spent a fair chunk of time looking, and asking other people for their favorites. Here’s the best projects that I’ve found so far. Please leave more in comments so we can all be inspired.
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Prioritizing your reading list and doing rapid niche research using AideRSS

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AideRSS is a service I’ve wanted to make creative use of for some time. It’s neat – you supply an RSS feed and it ranks posts in that feed in order of reader engagement. The company is Canadian, too, and Canadian internet stuff is totally hot.

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.

The best things about Technorati

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Technorati CEO Dave Sifry stepped down yesterday and the news gave cynics another opportunity to talk smack about blog search in general. There are a handful of things I really like about Technorati and I think the company deserves a bit of defense. If Technorati takes a dirt nap, I’ll be bummed for a number of reasons. (I’ve had the phrase “dirt nap” stuck in my head for weeks and am very relieved to have the chance to use it here!)

It’s not the full text search of blog posts that Technorati is really good for. Google Blogsearch is faster if you want to know if anyone has beat you to a story and Ask.com has much better spam control as it only indexes feeds that have a certain number of subscribers in Bloglines (hello, Google Reader and Blogsearch teams). Technorati has created a whole bunch of awesome experimental features, some of which worked and some of which didn’t. I don’t know how many of the people behind much of that innovation are still at the company but I hope things brighten up over there in the future.

What is Technorati good for? First, the Blog Index section of the site is very useful. Go to http://technorati.com/blogs/wtfeveryourelookingfor and you’ll find blogs that have been tagged as a whole, not on the level of a single post, by their own authors. Sort by “authority” (shudder) and you’ll see the ones with the most inbound links. I was talking to a potential client on the phone last week he asked “are there a lot of real estate blogs?” I knew anecdotally that there were, but quickly visiting http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate told me there were more than 12,000 in Technorati alone! The Blog Index makes it easy to see which, by one standard, are some of the top blogs in any niche. It’s not perfect but it’s a good start.

Unfortunately, OPML export of anything more than the first 10 results of these searches isn’t possible. That looks to me like broken functionality and as the company slashes staff I have to worry that there’s little hope of the best parts of the service being maintained or improved upon.

The second cool thing about Technorati is the company’s partnerships with outside traditional large publishers. Specifically, the kinds of relationships they’ve built like the one with the Washington Post. In some sections of the WaPo website, you can see blogs linking to that article displayed in a little box, curtosy of Technorati. If those are sorted a bit for spam and crap then that becomes great stuff. I know that Sphere is providing related functionality on some sites, but it’s not the same. The ins and outs of this sort of service deserve a big blog post in and of themselves.

Finally, the Technorati 100 is a good thing. I know there’s a whole lot of criticism of it and a lot of that is valid. I don’t like the word “authority” and I don’t like measuring authority by links – but linking does mean something and the fact that Technorati shows off a leader board of that metric is worthwhile. FeedBurner ought to too, if the group feels like separating out blogs from the other feeds they publish.

I know that Technorati has been painfully slow at times, the most recent site redesign is awful and the focus on inbound links is overdone – but it’s an important company that deserves support in my opinion.

Will You Consider Using MovableType 4.0?

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MovableType, from SixApart, is one of the oldest blogging platforms on the market but last night the MT team released a new version that’s worth taking note of. It sounds like they are taking a very smart approach; learning from best of breed related apps (many of which they also own) and developing towards where users appear to be headed. (skip to the meat of this post)

SixApart’s Anil Dash pinged me yesterday and said that the basics are this: MT 4.0 will go open source in Q3 and it will incorporate lessons learned from other SA products – the media handling and templates of Vox, the publishing control of Typepad, the scalability and OpenID support of LiveJournal. That sounds very intriguing to me; I’ll be checking out MT the next time I set up any website and recommend that others look at it as well, in addition to WordPress. I hope it’s easier to install and customize. Let’s be honest, that project logo above doesn’t evoke the kinds of smooth user experience that it ought to. There is a WP to MT importing tool available, that’s good news.

Here’s the press release for the announcement and here ‘s Duncan Riley’s coverage on TechCrunch. Richard MacManus, at the MT powered ReadWrite Web blog, has a typically thoughtful write up as well.

MT says it currently powers sites for organizations ranging from “the Washington Post to the Huffington Post, from General Motors to Nissan Motors, Boeing to BoingBoing, Intel to Instapundit.” None of those are particularly elegant sites, but they aren’t messing around either.

If MT can nail the uptime issue that plagues WP on some high traffic sites then that alone will lead some people to switch.

Will MT remain a financially viable product if liscences are free and its pro level support that’s monetized? Sounds like a very good plan to me. Blogging platforms are essentially commodities now, there are enough of them that no matter how good they are few people will pay much for the software itself anymore. Support, on the other hand, will probably always be the kind of value-added service that can serve a vendor well. It will be interested to see if SixApart is undercut in support pricing for an open sourced MovableType. I’d love to see numbers on how this is same type of enterprise plan is going for WordPress.

We’ll see how the open sourcing goes, there is such a strong open source developer community built up around WordPress that MT will probably take some time to build up a signifigant one themselves. One caveat here is that there’s also a strong community building up around Drupal, which bears some resemblance to MT but is arguably not much fun to use. I won’t claim any expertise regarding the open source community (see my friend Dawn’s take on this from that perspective) but I wouldn’t be surprised if some number of people are excited to get their hands on the code developed by the pros at SixApart for not just MT but also Vox, Typepad and LiveJournal – some of which will now be integrated into MT and thus presumably open sourced as well.

One of the things that the company learned from Typepad is that people like widgets. It’s obvious from WP and Drupal that people also like full-scale plug-ins. MT 4.0 will come with a library of plug-ins and 15 preselected profiles with thematic collections of plug-ins pre-installed. That sounds very smart; we’ll see if it’s truly useful and wether different types of organizations truly want and need different collections of plug-ins.

Two-way OpenID support will now be a part of MovableType. That’s great news. SixApart’s LiveJournal was one of the earliest players in OpenID and for readers and writers of large, MT powered blogs to be able to offer OpenID login for authors and commenters is another big step for this important movement. OpenID support is a real bear to install in WordPress if you’re unfamiliar with working on the command line level – hopefully MT implementation will be much simpler. Ease of installation for semi-technical users in general is a big question I have about this new version, it would be great if SixApart worked with web hosts to offer one-click install like many do of WordPress.

Media handling ala Vox will hopefully be improved upon as its ported into MT – that was the one thing I was a little critical of in the release of Vox. Vox is a great blogging product in terms of privacy, aesthetics and social networking functionality, but its much vaunted media handling feels strange to me. Media items are oddly sequestered on blogs instead of being integrated gracefully. That’s the way it seemed to me last time I looked, at least.

The ability to easily modify the look and feel of the admin dashboard sounds interesting to me and the MT appears to offer much more sophisticated reporting and analytics than other comperable products on the market. It’s also got a reputation for being more complicated and less flexible – we’ll see if that’s still the case.

I will definitely check out the new MovableType when the opportunity and need arise – but I’ll remain cautiously optimistic about this old-school software’s ability to update itself and become as elegant as users today prefer.

Interview: Cool Online Tools for Nonprofits

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My friends at NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, are starting a monthly “cool tools you should know” video series and I did the first one with them. I hope it proves useful, not too basic for nonprofits but not too “head in the clouds” either. Links to the tools discussed are below the video player.

If you are in the mood for explanatory video you should make sure to check out this post: The Common Craft Show: A Case Study in Video Awesomeness. Fantastic videos introducing the concepts of RSS and wikis. Not to be missed.


Click To Play

What tools should I share with Holly and the NTEN community next chance I get? I’m sure some of you out there have some suggestions. I’m thinking BlogRovr, which I would use all the time if I used Firefox instead of Safari, Google Gears, the new framework for taking GMail, Google Reader and other apps offline onto the desktop, and maybe NetNewsWire/FeedDemon. Do readers have other suggestions for cool tools for nonprofit folks to check out?