Just wanted to let folks know, I’ve got limited availability today as we had a new niece born late last night.
Personal Update: Family Expansion
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“Web 2.0 for Non-Profits” Event Underway
Hey folks, check out out this week’s TechSoup event on Web 2.0 tools for non profits. It’s a series of forum discussions hosted by a variety of interesting folks in the field. I wrote about it in a previous post. I’ll be hosting threads on wikis and RSS tommorow.
Technorati Tags: nptech, non-profit, web2.0
RSS Syndication: What, Why and How?
RSS Syndication is a key element of the emerging Web 2.0 world. Once you start using it to keep up with your favorite organizations, news sources, current events issues and other online phenomena – you will never want to go back to the old habits of “surfing” the web. Neither will the people who visit your organization’s site. Thus it is very important to make RSS feeds available for your news updates and other updated matierial. This will keep users up to date and coming back to your site, helping focus them on you despite the huge number of options available to them online at any time.
If you have never seen what the inside of an RSS aggregator loooks like, I’ve set up a seeded demonstration account over at Newsgator.com that you can view. Username is “marshalldemo” and pass word is “welcome”
Check out some of the feeds coming into that account to get an idea what sorts of things are consumable via RSS.
Various Concept Intros
Introduction to RSS (my intro)
Alexandra Samuel’s RSSTocracy (A general resource site, with introductions)
Why You Should Use an RSS Reader (Another intro)
Examples of RSS in Use
More Enterprise RSS Examples (how a variety of organizations are using RSS, plus this site is a great resource in general. The podcasts are super interesting.)
Update on the NPTech Attention Stream MetaFeed
Check out an RSS feed that’s collaboratively created by and for non-profit technologists! I’m the publisher of this MetaFeed.
Tips on Using RSS
Getting Your Feed Reader Organized My article on info-overload and how RSS can help.
Adding One-Click Subscribe to RSS Buttons to Your Site (One example)
RSS Tools You’ll Want to Use
Feedburner
The best RSS feed hosting service, also has lots of great supporting features like automatic pinging and subscribe by email.
http://feedburner.com
Feed Digest (for splicing multiple RSS feeds into one, turning a feed into an automatic HTML display for you site, and lots more)
http://feeddigest.com
FeedFire creates scraped headline feeds of sites that don’t have their own RSS feeds. A little clumsy, but works way better than nothing.
http://feedfire.com
Ok, I hope this is helpful and interesting. I do hope you’ll check out the world of RSS, it’s really revolutionary and will dramatically increase your effectiveness if you use it well.
What Are Trackbacks?
I was just sent an email asking “what’s up with trackbacks?” I thought the info might be of use to many readers here.
Trackbacks are a way to say “I posted a blog post about this post of yours, so I’m going to leave a trackback to connect the 2 posts.” It’s like a citation for a particular post. It solidifies the conversation by allowing readers to follow links to other places online where any given topic is being discussed.
Trackbacks usually have to be created by hand. Your blogging or commenting program may have an option to send a trackback to some one else’s blog. Many blogs include URLs in each post for you to send a trackback if you want to. (Mine here for example.) Some blogs will automatically detect trackbacks elsewhere (links to your post).
When you post a trackback, you usually select a snippet from your article linking to the one you’re making a trackback to. I think this is an important chance to show what unique perspective you offer in the discussion, not just to say “I’m some random person linking to your blog.” In other words, it’s cool to offer some value in your trackbacks.
Your text snippet and the trackback URL of the post you are what you need to make a trackback.
Some people have turned off trackbacks on their sites because of trackback spam. This is an even bigger problem than comment spam for some people. That’s true probably in part because there’s not generally an expectation that trackbacks are going to clearly be valuable, relevant contributions to the discussion. People often put no thought into writing them, so when we read them we often don’t read them closely and realize they are spam. It’s probably easier to send out trackback spam than it is to send comment spam too.
All of this is likely to change in the near to mid term future as people figure out how to maximize connectedness and conversation while minimizing technical barriers and spam. But for now, that’s what I know about trackbacks. Let me know if you need help sending them to sites you are citing.
Technorati Tags: trackbacks, blogging, links, conversation, web2.0
Blogger Sentenced to Prison, Lashings
Sign the petition to keep Iranian blogger Omid Sheikhan out of prison
From the Committee to Protect Bloggers.
Omid Sheikhan has been sentenced by the Iranian court to one year in prison and 124 lashes.
Omid was first arrested last year, confined for two months, including one in solitary confinement, and tortured, due to his blog which featured satire on the Iranian situation.
When he was brought to court on October 8 he faced different charges, due to the fact that even in the Iran judicial system it would have been difficult to convict him on charges relating to his blog. Instead, he faced, and was convicted on, charges stemming from “morals” violations, including “having unlawful relations, drinking wine, corruption of morals (for having a birthday party) and possessing satirical pictures of Iranian politicians.”
Now this blogger in his early twenties will be beaten half to death and join Mojtaba Saminejad as a felon in the general prison population. The Iranian government should be as ashamed as the Iranian people no doubt already are. Please sign the petition for Omid.
Omid now faces a second trial, presumably an appeal, not unlike Arash Sigarchi’s.
In addition to signing the online petition, please consider visiting the Committee to Protect Bloggers website. There you will find the code to put this graphic and link to the petition on your own site. The Committee also has an RSS feed you can subscribe to so as to keep up to date on issues like this.
Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, web2.0, nptech, Iran, prison
Technorati Tag Troubleshooting
Ok, so some folks are still having trouble getting their bookmarklet set up to be indexed by Technorati’s tag search. Below is the bookmarklet.
For some reason it appears that some users are getting code that looks like this:
a rel=”tag” href=”http://
instead of like this: a href=”http://…” rel=”tag”
Now I don’t know why this bookmarklet would give you code unlike what it gives me. I really don’t. My first guess is always to wonder wether it’s a PC/Mac thing. Are folks who are using PCs getting that funky code and Mac users are getting the correct code when they push the button? Any javascript experts out there with suggestions?
Ok, I’d really like to get this figured out and move on. This should be a big time saver once we get it taken care of.
Technorati Tags: bookmarklet, technorati, tagging, javascript
How to be Found by Technorati
Several people have been asking me why their blog posts are not appearing in Technorati search results, even after they use the Technorati Tag bookmarklet I wrote about earlier this week. (Clarification: I didn’t create it, I found it on an old web site that has since gone offline, but I had it archived in Furl.net.) Here’s what’s going on….
When you write a blog post, it has to be indexed by search engines in order for it to show up in the search engine’s results. Google goes nuts and crawls all over the web indexing like crazy – but that doesn’t mean that Google or anybody else is guaranteed to find what you’ve written. Even if you link to someone’s page, that doesn’t mean they’ll discover that until someone travels that connection – be it an indexing robot or a visitor who leaves tracks through your traffic monitoring program. (Technorati tags are really just a particular way to link to Technorati, but they still have to index the link.)
The way to get indexed quickly is to do something called pinging. You can set up (or I can set up for you) your blog to automatically tell the blog search engines (like Technorati) “Hey, look over here, I have new content for you to index!” Pinging is big business but it doesn’t have to be complicated for bloggers.
The best solution right now: use Feedburner.com for your RSS feed (a great idea for many reasons) and use their Pingshot service to automatically ping the top blog search engines. This will include Technorati and shebang – you’re Technorati Tagged posts should show up very soon after you post them in Technorati Tag Searches. Update: This post is appearing in Technorati 10 minutes after first posted.
There are alternatives, like Pingoat, but now that Feedburner offers this service it’s a not an issue. Depending on how quickly you find this post, Technorati may not have indexed it yet. But I wrote the previous one just this morning and if you click on its tags you’ll see that Technorati found it within 2 hours.
Let me know if I can help you with this or if it’s still confusing. Also, let me know if you would like to hire me to get your blog all souped up for maximum traction with all these new tools. There are many things that can be set up once and that you’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of without thinking about it in the future. My blog optimization rates are reasonable and you’ll be very glad we did it.
For now, I’m going to go back and link to this article from the original post about the bookmarklet. I should have told readers, “don’t forget to ping!” Once all your ducks are in a row you’ll see that this stuff is easy and powerful to use.
Technorati Tags: technorati, tagging, RSS, blogging, search, bookmarklets, pinging, ping, Feedburner, consulting