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.

Wanted to share this one here because I know some of you who read this blog don’t read the SplashCast blog, but this was one of my favorite posts that I’ve put up there in awhile. It’s even got a chart in it – everyone loves charts.

Why Would I Want to Tag Videos?

Here’s three reasons why you might want to tag videos in particular:

1. Personal Consumption You can tag videos into an RSS feed of your own creation, which in the best of situations can then be sent into media tools like iTunes, SplashCast and others. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed in Del.icio.us for videos tagged web2.0 (in this case by myself or other users) and now I can watch them (format permitting, no .wmv) on my iPod. Sweet. I could also create a SplashCast show with this feed and watch it in a feed reader or start page.

2. Sharing With Others Why not create your own video highlights channel to share with your students if you’re a teacher, in your blog sidebar so your viewers can see your favorites (see the top of NewTeeVee, for example, where they use VodPod) or as part of a collaboratively edited news feed like one part of the nonprofit tech community does.

3. Because It’s a Good Idea Who knows what will come next from the innovative people who play with, create and build upon web applications? Video is important, and if you can assign your favorite videos URLs that you can easily access later and distribute by RSS feed now – that’s an unconditional good that will pay off even more in the future than it can today. It’s something like data backup, info asset export, knowing how much money you have in the bank, etc. If you work on the web, then the videos you watch now will be valuable to you later – so tag them!

If you want to give it some love on the way to the full post, go here.

While Del.icio.us is getting some much deserved credit for the release of an intriguing looking API today, one of the most standard and valuable features of the system hasn’t been working all week. Specifically, none of the tags applied by users have been updated for 3 days! This means that if you are subscribed to a particular tag, you’re not getting updates. If you go to a tag page to see what the most recent items given a particular tag have been – you’ll see that there’s nothing new for the past 3 days on any tag.

Del.icio.us Popular is still working, but I hope that the individually tagged items will get fixed asap. It’s an important line of communication for many distributed groups and the last 3 days have been a real loss.

Apparently this is news to the team at Del.icio.us. The most recent comment on the official Del.icio.us blog is from site founder Joshua Schachter, in response to a previous commenter complaining about the problem:

“This shouldn’t be happening, please send a bug description (what urls are are stuck, your userid, etc) to joshua at del.icio.us via email…

Posted by: joshua | Dec 20, 2006 11:03:42 AM”

This is a pretty popular thing to do – but do people use them? I always use my browser’s bookmarklet to save to del.icio.us – do you click on these links when you see them? Perhaps it’s mostly a reminder to bookmark a good post. I wonder though if the aesthetic cost of these links is worth the usability they create.

I can see the use of links like this in an RSS feed for sure, using a service like Feedburner’s FeedFlare. In a feed reader there’s not always easy access to a bookmarklet or the unique URL for an individual post – thus a one-click link is great. But on a blog site? Thoughts?

I think that’s a pretty cool idea. It’s like in SnowCrash where people suck up “intelligence” information freelance about everything, submit it to the Central Information Agency (privitized CIA) and get paid whenever someone pays the CIA to access their intel. Hmmm…maybe that’s frightening.

Regardless, let’s try it.

If people tag their favorite online productivity product, service or application for Web 2.0 style info-management/research with the tag tools4marshallk – I’ll pick my favorite one of the month and the person who submitted it gets one year of premium subscription to any web service of their choice on me, up to fifty bucks. For two runners-up I’ll pitch in twenty bucks towards premium subscription to a web service of your choice. High stakes stuff, huh? I think it could prove more than worth it. And fun! At the end of this month I’ll profile the winners, their submissions and their selected services. Unless I have less than 20 submissions, at which point I’ll extend it to one month from this post. It’ll be great, and did I mention fun? Since it won’t be a for:marshallkirkpatrick tag, anyone can see the submissions here. Heck, if this works well then we could all vote on which submissions are best. But this whole idea might be really stupid, or at least in need of continual evolution.

Update: the tagging has begun! Check out the first submissions at http://del.icio.us/tag/tools4marshallk

I read that Randy was deluged with submissions, so I want to be specific and say let’s just tag a certain type of thing. Here’s some examples of things I love and would have been thrilled to find in a process like this:
blummy.com
MonitorThis
Stephen Downes’ OPML Generator
Feed Digest

Those have all made a big difference in my life and work, so I’d gladly help other people subscribe to some web services they might not have otherwise in exchange for getting turned on to some more things like the above list. What kinds of services might you subscribe to if you submit a winning tool?
How about…
Flickr
StatCounter, or a better blog traffic stat program.
NetNewsWire or FeedDemon
FeedRinse
Something tasty from eHub

Oh there are so many options – and this could be the meme with legs to turn us all on to so many more! I think people should pay money for premium level service of good apps (not internet service! apps on it!) because innovators deserve to make money and financial support = more innovation.

Ok, so that tag again is tools4marshallk – but of course they are tools for everyone, ’cause everyone can see all the submissions.

I do reserve the right to disqualify you if you are submitting huge numbers of stupid links. Maybe this won’t work and there won’t even be 20 after a month? I hope not. Just keep it in the back of your mind when you’re tagging cool things you see.

It’s an experiment, and perhaps one evaluating the efficacy of a hybrid social good/personal gain model.

Tags: Web2.0, collaboration, contests, applications

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be getting much traction. The top stories are ones with less than 10 “huggs” so far. See, for contrast a Spanish digg clone Meneame, which I wrote about a few months ago on Social Software. There’s another system like this for political news voted on, part of a larger network of shared video and audio, that I can never remember the name of or find in my del.icio.us archive. It’s pretty successful too, though.

Why hasn’t hugg.com gotten more participation yet? It couldn’t be more high-profile than Treehugger makes it. I would really like to better understand what makes a system like this work or not work, as I think it’s a great model. Is it viable outside the super geekosphere though?

My guess on Hugg.com is that the darned thing is just not very easy to use. There needs to be a javascript bookmarklet to submit a story, not a form on the Hugg page that you have to go to and click through 3 times. It looks like they are worried about people submitting too many stories – in reality the problem has been just the opposite.

Hugg has been around for more than a month. My new buddy Gillo from TotalTactics.org is one of the top 10 submitters to Hugg and he’s only submitted 11 links. So this system isn’t working. Why not?

Technorati Tags: treehugger, hugg, digg, diggclones, memetrackers, environmental, net2

Maybe if I link to Identity Woman she’ll come save the day and help us out with some ideas or perspective.

• Del.icio.us to add private bookmarks and more
• AJAXian meta search engine for tags

I’m writing 60 posts a month on that blog, so there’s always lots to read, but those are two of the most helpful in terms of research. See also over at NetSquared:

• Social Bookmarking and Vertical Search
• Community Blogs and Power Research: an interview with Lisa Williams

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
research, web2.0,

I’ve tried other systems for this and they didn’t work for me. This also gives me the courage to try other systems like magnolia – cause I’ll save the same things into del.icio.us and furl while experimenting and thus not lose them. Nice!

1. So I can find your post when I’m doing research on the subject you are writing about. Every blog post you make is an artifact available for our collective intelligence to utilize – adding some quality metadata to it is a social responsibility.

2. Be it through Technorati or TagCentral, when I do a tag search for any term, I like to find blog posts, images, bookmarked items and upcoming events that are all tagged with the same term.

3. So I can get some idea what sort of perspective you write from when I scan your blog, I look at titles and tags. Your particular “folksonomy” can give me some idea whether you’re a programmer, an activist, a PR person etc.

4. I like subscribing to tag search feeds on a variety of topics, be it a noun that I have an ongoing interest in (you know, a person, place or thing) or a group concept like the attention streams Nptech or WebJustice2.0.

5. It’s not that hard to do anymore. Whether you are using a Word Press plug-in, any number of Firefox related tagging tools or one of these two bookmarklets I’ve posted – the energy investment required to add tags to your own posts is really relatively low. It’s lower than what’s required to add images to your posts, or several other elements that are not uncommon. In order to get the most out of this medium, it’s a good idea to invest some amount more energy than the minimum required to post text alone to your blog.

Update: Call this #14, but Jonny Baker points out the following. Though some blogging platforms support categories, which apparently are indexed as tags by Technorati at least – you probably don’t want as many categories on your blog as you do specific subject headings/tags for tag search engines to discover you through. Good point!

Top reasons to tag items online with del.icio.us or another social bookmarking tool.

1. “What article/web site was it that I was looking at last week/month/year about that topic?” Your browser bookmarks, organized alphabetically by title or maybe folder if you’re really into it, are not going to answer this question nearly as effectively as an online database organized with multiple tags, title, URL and notes fields.

2. Organize your bookmarks for yourself and send a URL to someone else with one click by including the “for:” tag.

3. Offer other people a chance to discover your suggested resources on a topic not just from the past, but in the future as well.

4. Information overload is real, and RSS can make it worse or better depending on how you organize your feeds. One way or the other, there is now so much information available that failure to organize what you find useful in an appropriate way will lead to countless lost opportunities.

5. Do you like to have a list of links on the sidebar of your blog? The RSS feed for items given any particular tag or combination of tags can be displayed automatically using tools like FeedDigest. This is just one of many ways that tagging and RSS work well together. Furthermore, it’s just one of the many ways that a tagged item is a more manipulable item.

6. Contribute to everyone’s shared knowledge on a given topic. This is so important. See items 1, 2 and 4 in the first list above.

7. Someday soon there will be a tagging system that will:

• integrate with del.icio.us and offer tag selection in a similar manner
• allow varying levels of privacy and permission
• save a cached copy of every page you tag
• perform a full text search of all fields, the full text of the URL and its cache
• include other features not yet imagined.

You’ll be in a better position to use this next system if you learn to use the best system available today, del.icio.us. My Corante Web Hub buddy Otis Gospodnetic may have already created this in Simpy.

At least it wasn’t another top 10 list! Any questions? Feel free to ask in comments, there’s a bunch of people here who can help answer them. For more information on the subject, here’s all the posts I’ve made here on tagging.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
tagging, tags, Technorati, TagCentral, del.icio.us, blogging, web2.0, bookmarking

The secret of these searchable tags is the rel=”tag” part of the code. The rest of the code in a blog tag is just a link to a Technorati tag search for the tag you are applying to your post. You don’t have to link to Technorati in order for your post to appear in a Technorati Tag Search! If you are pinging Technorati (should be automatic, I use Feedburner) and if your site is easily index-able – then Technorati is going to find anything you link with rel=”tag” in it and it should include that in its tag search results. Except Technorati indexing is kinda wack – as in it isn’t 99% reliable.

Nonetheless, it is good to tag your blog posts. People will find your posts and site that way. Here are two bookmarklets below that you can drag and drop onto your browser’s toolbar to create tag code for your posts. The first is for traditional “Technorati Tags” and will create links to Technorati Tag searches for your tags. The second bookmarklet may as well be called a “Tag Central Tag Creator” as it will create links to a search for your tag in Tag Central. Both will get your tags indexed in Technorati!

The pros and cons of using Tag Central? Pros: it pulls in results from a greater number of tag supporting platforms, including Upcoming.org, a social calendering service wherein events get tagged. Tag Central brings in all of the same sources as a Technorati Tag Search – and more. Tag Central also makes the RSS feeds for your tag in each platform very easy to subscribe to. The down sides? Tag Central is slow and ugly. But it’s still the best way to search the tagspace.

If the use of these bookmarklets is unclear to you, my friend Beth Kanter has made a video screencast about how they work.

These bookmarklets could easily be tweaked to link to any tag search for your tags: Icerocket, Eventful.com, Blinklist – anything! And no matter who your tags link to, Technorati should index them just because there’s a rel=”tag” in the link code.

If you want to tweak these bookmarklets, just drag them into a text editor, fiddle away, then put in a blog post or web site and they will be draggable just like these ones.

Here they are!

Update: see also this page for a more refined TagCentral bookmarklet.
TechnoratiTags

TagCentralTags

And for this post…
TagCentral Tags: tagging, bookmarklets, Technorati, TagCentral, search, web2.0, blogging

Please forgive any navel gazing here, but I just noticed from my traffic stats that some one had visited my site about an hour ago from Sonny Cloward’s Vermont Non-Profit IT blog. It wasn’t the most exciting post I’d written that they came in through, so I went to the linking blog to see why that post was linked to. It turns out that Cloward had tagged the post via del.icio.us, and he runs his recently tagged posts as links in his sidebar. That’s a common practice and it’s nice to see it in effect.

But I noticed that it wasn’t the post’s permalink URL that he tagged and thus was linked to on his site, it was the URL of the post in my FeedBurner feed. Then, unsurprising perhaps, when I went to the post’s permalink URL and clicked my beloved del.lookup bookmarklet to see who had tagged the post in del.icio.us – it said no one had. And no one has tagged that URL, but apparently Cloward subscribes to my RSS feed (thanks!) and tagged the post directly from his feed reader. So if any of my subscribers tag my posts, that won’t show up in the same (far more accessible) data set as tags from casual readers.

That’s a real shame, and it complicates the new inclusion in Feedburner feeds of “tag this item in del.icio.us” links after every post in your feed. That option is something feed publishers must chose to activate and I think it’s one of several great features they’ve added in the last week. But the fact that it effectively facilitates a fork in my readship data is a real shame.

I just point this out because I think it’s an interesting example of the kinds of things Klau might mean when he says Feedburner aims to bring data streams together in the future.

If, by the way, you are interested in listening to the Klau interview – here’s a few tips. If you are uninterested in hearing about advertising in feeds, skip to about 10 minutes into the hour long interview. If you want to hear about cool stuff Klau believes is coming in the RSS world, skip to about 30 minutes in. It’s quite a good interview and if you follow that link there’s really good show notes. It also includes some basic info about RSS. If it’s intro info on FeedBurner that you’re looking for, though, you should check out Madge Weinstein’s awesome interview with Klau about how Feedburner works in the first place.

Technorati Tags: RSS, tagging, del.icio.us, data, FeedBurner

Title:
“Tagging Museums Sounds Like Fun”

Google Blogsearch: Indexed in in the search results
Icerocket: Indexed, including the “Technorati Tags”
Technorati: Got it
Technorati Tag searches: Nope. Not for museums, not under folksonomy, not under the tag “tags”.

You want to know something funny, though? This post of mine Video Sharing With YouTube does appear in the tag search results for the tag “tag” – even though I didn’t tag it with the tag tag in the actual post!

And yes, I am pinging them, via Feedburner’s Pingshot service.

Technorati Tags: tagging, Technorati, search

Technorati Tags: museums, art, folksonomy, tags

This week the tag got some great use. You can always see the newest items syndicated at the end of my sidebar, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed yourself at WebJustice2.0 Feed.

Here’s what was submitted to the feed this week, I think all via authors’ Technorati Tags or readers via Del.icio.us:

• Tara Hunt on Mind Camp: Women in Technology
• Passionate Users at SXSW, from the blog Creating Passionate Users
• A write up titled Web 2.0: Beer, Parties and Inequality by Barb Dybwad from the Social Software Weblog
• Beth Kanter on Revenge of the Female Nerds: Myth Busting, her coverage of a talk by Annalee Newitz and sponsored by the Harvard Computing Society
• Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: Blog Carnivals and Community Indicators a post about a call elsewhere for a “Blog Carnival” with the theme of feminism in the 70′s and today.
• New Mythology for Female Nerds – Deborah Elizabeth Finn on the same Newitz talk described above.
• A Short Film About Community Informatics, not really a film but an interesting short article I tagged WebJustice2.0 to get some stuff about class and international issues into the stream.

That’s a week in the WebJustice2.0 Attention Stream! Feel free to subscribe to the feed and you’ll get these items in your RSS feed reader.

Technorati Tags: webjustice2.0, gender, race, class, web2.0, tagging, attention_stream, nptech, net2

Introductions to:

• Blogs
• RSS Syndicated Feeds
• Social Bookmarking/Tagging

Please do check out the intros and share any suggestions for revisions. Readers of my old blog may remember that I had posted there introductions to wikis and podcasting as well. For now at least, I’m just going to concentrate on these three items on the list. The field of Web2.0 tools is so huge that I need to specialize to some degree. I’ll keep reading and posting about various weird tools, but what I really want to be doing with clients is setting them up with the life-changing pyramid of feeds, tagging and blogging.

Feeds can be set up to automatically deliver information on any subject and items of interest can be tagged into your social bookmarking archive. This information then makes great fodder for blogging. It’s a beautiful system, really.

Technorati Tags: introduction, web2.0, blogging, RSS, tagging, social_bookmarking, consulting