Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Talking Iterasi: Save Web Pages Perfectly for Later Reference

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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The Awesome Potential of the Semantic Web

I just listened to the most amazing podcast about the future of the web and semantic analysis. It was an interview with BYU Phd student Yihong Ding, a researcher in what my ReadWriteWeb co-author Alex Iskold calls “the top-down semantic web.” The first 15 minutes of the hour long show are about Yihong Ding’s personal background, the next 15 about his research and the last 30 about his very compelling view of the future.

This interview shows just how much untapped potential remains in the world of web applications. Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there’s a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights.

Download MP3 [50 mins, 23Mb]

Ding’s research combines the application of a manually supplied ontology (set of terms with connections for meaning), automated analysis of the structure of a web page (what’s in h2 tags? that’s probably a section title) and learned meaning after repeated application of the above and correction by the user. It’s fascinating and a prototype should be available in the first half of next year. I hope to get an early look at it so I can write about it on ReadWriteWeb just before public launch.

The vision of the future described in the interview is beautiful. It’s one of the most clear explanations of the semantic web and what some people call web 3.0 that I’ve heard yet. I’m just starting to dive deep into this, so forgive any excess enthusiasm, but I’m telling you – it’s good stuff.

Ding’s vision of a future web not of sites and pages but of “educated agents of meaning” (smart software applications is what I’m seeing), driven by human beings to serve our needs, is a really interesting one.

His conclusion makes me think of Google Custom Search, Lijit (which I must spend some time with) and I don’t know what else. It’s got me on fire, though.

I found the interview through a path you might find of interest. It was highlighted in the blog of Talis, a vendor in the semantic space, in their This Weeks Semantic Web round up. It’s a very rich resource, not to mention a great marketing asset for the company. I found that via the blog of semantic web rock star Danny Ayers. I was reminded of Ayers’ blog and have picked it back up with a renewed interest after seeing it in a list of 60+ Semantic Web Blogs at Semantic Focus, a fascinating looking group blog where, co-incidentally interview subject Yihong Ding is a regular contributor. So we come full circle and have found a whole lot of valuable resources along the way.

How (and Why) to Create an OPML File

I’ve been asking PR people lately to send me an OPML file of their clients’ blog feeds. One person sent me a list of links to their clients’ blogs in an email tonight, but other than that no one has been brave enough to try. This is something that everyone could benefit from knowing how to do. That big blue icon is the proposed icon for OPML, which stands for Outline Processor Markup Language (stay with me here, non technical people!).

An OPML file is an outline. In this case, it’s a bundle of RSS feeds that can be moved into and out of any RSS reader as a group. No matter what RSS reader you use, it can import and export OPML files. It’s real handy. If PR people, for example, would send me one OPML file of all their clients’ blogs and a news search feed for each of those clients’ company names – I would throw it into my reader and have a long term connection with all their news. It would build name recognition if nothing else, but I’d likely find something in there someday to write about too. There’s a billion other reasons to use OPML – just ask yourself in what circumstances you can imagine sending someone else one link or file that contains a collection of dynamic sources on any topic. I know these are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night.

Here’s how you do it…
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Looking for the Best Mind Mapping Tools

I’m a very recent convert to the belief that mind mapping tools can be valuable. After years of sneering at them as vague and superflous (without ever really trying them) I did a one hour consulting gig with the folks over at Imindi a week or so ago.

Now I am hesitant to think about anything without the ability to “write it down” in a mind map. The ability to document the free flow of connected thoughts is just too seductive to pass up when thinking through complex proccesses.

I could use some help figuring out what the best mind mapping service is, though. Here’s my criteria so far – above in an image from MindMeister (which is AWESOME so far). Can you suggest anything I’m missing or favorite tools I should evaluate?
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Case study: Softrax – powering news for financial executives with RSS

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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Prioritizing your reading list and doing rapid niche research using AideRSS

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.

Combining and filtering feeds: Top blogs on video

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… Continue reading →