I hardly ever log in to Facebook but each time I do, I find that there are friends whose birthdays I'm glad to find out about. In order not to miss them, I've extracted that information from my Facebook account in to an RSS feed that I can subscribe to elsewhere. I used the wonderful tool Dapper.net to do it. Below are screenshots demonstrating how to do the same thing yourself.

Of course this is just one example of a general principle. I hope you can imagine all kinds of other applications that you would like to get limited access to without visiting them, but from inside your RSS reader.

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The most common topic I give training presentations on is the use of RSS for tracking issues important to various organizations. This has been the heart of what I've focused on since I first got involved in this industry, that hasn't changed. My methodology has changed a lot over the years. It's a happy day when I can add something new to my personal RSS strategy, and thus to the strategy I share with others.

Below is a series of screen shots illustrating the current state of my basic RSS work flow. There are lots of little details, feed discovery and creation techniques and other advanced steps that can be taken - but I'm often asked about the basics. So here they are. I hope you find this useful and feel free to pass it along to a friend. I'll do my best to answer any questions in comments below. If you'd like a personalized research system like this set up and populated with the most useful feeds for your work, let me know. I'm also working with some other people on a giant post coming soon describing all the things I know how to do with a pile of RSS feeds - I have a consulting project that's totally open ended so I thought I'd make a list.

Note that I made this post almost entirely with the application ScreenSteps. It was easy and fun, I wanted to try it and it didn't take too long for me to think of a good topic to try it on.
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I just got a very nice email from someone who found my blog and is interested in moving into consulting as well. I sent them the following thoughts that I think could be of interest to more people than just that one aspiring consultant.

The keys in my mind to being a good and employed new media consultant are:

1. Learn how to do cool new things and blog (well) about them.
2. Let people know that you are a consultant.
3. Make sure you deliver clear value to clients that extends beyond your time with them. Search engine optimization and pageviews are the most common things that consultants try to deliver to clients, but I prefer aiming for education, excitement, comfort with new tools and a sense that they can now be full fledged actors in the social media market themselves. My past clients are now happily reading OPML files I built for them, they see the value of and aren't afraid of Twitter and they have more skills to use in their own work than they did before we worked together. (They are also doing more complicated things like this, in some cases.) I always aim to over-deliver and I don't worry about giving clients almost everything I know - this market is too new and too big to worry about teaching yourself out of a job.
4. Stay visible by consistently sharing valuable information with other people. I don't do that so much on my personal blog these days, but I do it on Twitter, on ReadWriteWeb.com and in face to face conversations.

That's what's worked well for me so far. Do other consultants reading here have other high-level points that they think are important to communicate?

I didn't mention it in that conversation - but I do provide training and advising to other consultants sometimes. (As well as working on projects with clients together.) If you're a consultant interested in some training on the particular things that I'm good at teaching - feel free to drop me a line.

One of my fantasies for awhile has been to hire other consultants for an hour of their training in whatever they do best. I think it would be awesome to do that once a month. Maybe a trade would be good. Oh, the possibilities are nearly endless. It's an exciting time to be learning about the internet.

I'm participating as a guide in an online event tomorrow where we'll discuss how nonprofit organizations can rock Twitter. Hosted by the great nonprofit technology assistance project TechSoup, the event will go on through an asynchronous but scheduled day of forum postings. I'll be joined by Michaela Hackner, Director of Online Strategy at the very cool looking organization World Learning (check them out, looks great!).

What will be discussing?
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I just replied to a great email from a prospective consulting client who asked some questions I think many prospective clients could benefit from reading my replies to. They are posted below as an FAQ of sorts. Readers here in general are more than welcome to provide feedback in comments, any discussion of these strategies is great. None of it is about the content of my consulting, it's about the structure of a typical engagement. If that's not of interest to you then stop reading this post right now!

Otherwise, here are some details about how a typical consulting engagement has been going for me lately. For more details on my consulting services, see this link. If you're interested in working together, I'm not in a position to take on any new large engagements but am always happy to schedule small engagements of the sort discussed below.

If I hire you as a consultant, will that prevent you from writing about our company on Read Write Web?

No, though it will greatly increase the likelihood that another writer would need to cover your company instead of me. If, and it is unlikely, I did write about you on RWW then I would be very open about disclosing our financial relationship and would probably be especially critical of your shortcomings so as to compensate for any perception of bias.

Will you consider working or advising in exchange for equity?
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How useful can social media be for work? This afternoon I had a wonderful time writing a post over at ReadWriteWeb called Toward a Value-Added User Data Economy with the help of probably 15 people around the world, in real time. I started up a live video broadcast on UStream over EVDO from a cafe in downtown Portland, started writing the post on a publicly available wiki and then Twittered both URLs inviting people to join me. Over the next two hours a got all kinds of help, feedback and semi-related conversation to help round out what I think became a very good post. At one point I sent out a message over Twitter requesting that anyone with a background in the philosophy of economics call me to discuss a question I had. Two qualified and helpful new friends called me on the phone and are quoted in the post. Here's the last 10 minutes of putting the post live.
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Super-cookie service MyBlogLog just emailed users to let us know about a new "friend finder" the site is offering. The feature is remarkable because it makes it really easy to add your friends from around the web - without asking you for any passwords! With just a few clicks your friends on services from Flickr to FriendFeed can become your friends on MyBlogLog. I wish everyone did that. Here's a few bullet points on the implementation that could be helpful for other application developers to consider.

• 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.

One of my consulting clients is a company called Iterasi, providers of a browser plug-in that lets users "notarize" a perfect replica of any web page's current state. That includes forms and AJAX states. It's a pretty potent tool and one that I'm really excited to use for my own research...once there's a Mac version available! (Coming soon, they say.) The company is doing a great job of using social media, including a prolific blog that I designed for them and now a series of short videos produced by my former co-worker at SplashCast, Alex Williams. You can read about our very successful use of social media for marketing at our previous place of work in this post.

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.
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I'm excited to unveil my latest consulting project, a fairly extensive RSS-based microsite put together with Sun Microsystems for next week's JavaOne conference. It's called BlogCentral. Turns out today is international RSS Awareness Day! This might have been a better fit for Enterprise RSS Awareness Day last week, but that's ok.

I don't often blog about particular consulting projects because most of the work I do is with pre-launch companies or for internal use only, but consulting is what I spend one to two thirds of my day doing after I finish blogging at ReadWriteWeb.

The Project

After building out a collection of RSS feeds that attendees could use to track the DEMO conference in January, I was approached by Sun about helping build a blog coverage microsite to track discussion of their giant JavaOne conference that starts next week.

This is an example of one end of the RSS spectrum, most use cases are far simpler - so don't be scared!

JavaOne is a huge conference where scores of attendees will be blogging about a wide variety of Sun products and announcements. I worked with Sun to create a page called BlogCentral (hopefully to be moved to sun.com/blogcentral by conference time!) that aggregates all the latest and the most popular blog posts about the conference and 15 particular Sun projects and products. It's like a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what's being written about at JavaOne.

How We Did It

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I was honored to be interviewed by Dave Winer today in a 20 minute podcast about the service FriendFeed and other RSS applications. Winer helped birth a wide range of technologies like RSS, podcasting and OPML (bundles of RSS feeds that you import and export from feed readers). He's a tech hero and I don't know what my life would be like without his work.

Read on for a Flash audio player and links that we discussed.
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