One of my favorite clients that I've consulted with in recent weeks is a Massachusetts based company called Softrax. I helped put together a unique and powerful newswire system for their website RevenueRecognition.com. The site's subtitle is "revenue management resources for today's financial executive."

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.
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I wrote a blog post today over at Read/WriteWeb about a small message posting service called CBox that's being used by a man believed to be the last practicing blogger under Burmese military rule. CBox doesn't offer an RSS feed, which is a real shame. For my post, I thought it would be nice to be able to offer readers an RSS feed they could subscribe to in order to follow the events there via this blogger.

Just because there's not an RSS feed where you'd like there to be one is no reason to give up hope! Here are 3 tools you can use, depending on the circumstances, to scrape an RSS feed from a page that doesn't publish one.
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I keep saying that I'm going to write up a particular case study here about one of my favorite recent clients, the Massachusetts-based accountant trainers at Softrax. We worked together on a major project for their site RevenueRecognition.com. I'm just a few days from having something long to post on it, but I did get a nice quote that I can post now. More on the way about the very interesting work we did together. I like to work with people in a wide variety of industries, these are accountants.

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, Softrax

Thanks Gerry!

I've been getting lots of inquiries about my consulting services since leaving my day job to join Read/WriteWeb and do more consulting - but as they say: just because you've got work now is no reason to stop lining it up for the future. Drop me a line if you'd like to discuss what we could do together.

My friend Justin Kistner has started a blog carnival of sorts that he's calling Advanced Operators, all about working with new tools online. He's had smart people contribute posts on all kinds of topics on their blogs and I thought I'd participate in this round.

The topic this week is "my favorite tools." Justin has posted a good long list on his site (as well as the snazzy picture here that he designed himself!); I decided to focus on three tools in particular that I'm particularly jazzed about right now.
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Marjolein Hoekstra lives in The Hague, Netherlands and writes the blog CleverClogs.org. In the magical world of RSS power use, Marjolein is the High Priestess. She is my mentor and my friend. She is many peoples' friend in the industry.
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Ever since I got into this business, I've wanted to spread the basic tools at the core of what's changing the internet to as many people as possible. Today, my consulting services often end up being more substantial than is appropriate for people just starting to engage with new tools online. In those circumstances, I've been able to offer blog posts to share what I've learned and I often answer questions for people quickly and at no cost.
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A few days after writing the post "10 ways to make remembering to read your feeds easier", a couple of other thoughts have come to mind that I wanted to share in a new post as well.
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After building a rockin' good OPML file for a client last month a classic problem has come up that I want to write about here: how do you stay motivated to read your feeds regularly? I subscribe to far more feeds than most people (3,000+) and am able to stay on top of them well enough. Here are some ways I do it, as well as some thoughts from some friends. Some of these are pretty standard but I hope that at least some are new to you. Please leave a comment if you can suggest other methods - I'd really like to be able to articulate ways we can prevent the all-too-common "info overload" backlash that's leading many people to lose out on a lot of the potential offered by new web tools.
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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.

In answering some one's question about work in online video I made time to fix a resource I had put together some time ago for SplashCast team members - an RSS feed containing only blog posts containing the word "video" from a number of the biggest Web 2.0 blogs online.  It's a handy way to catch all the big, topical stories in the news - or news blogs anyway.  I thought some of my readers here might like it too.

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... (more...)