My old favorite web service for turning a list of feeds into a bulk-importable OPML file has recently gone offline but today I found this one: http://reader.feedshow.com/goodies/opml/OPMLBuilder-create-opml-from-rss-list.php

Oh does that make me happy. I found a list of the top 25 business web app startups or some such thing today and of course I sent the link to Fancyhands, asking them to go grab the RSS feeds for each of those companies’ blogs or press releases. They did so, like magic, then I plopped those puppies into the form on the page above. It’s a simple function to perform, but it’s a nice time saver. Now I’m ready to subscribe to them all and keep up to date with important developments in those companies. Thanks, Internet!

I’ve been so focused on the user experience of Google’s new social network Plus that I haven’t thought very much about the big picture, I must admit. Listening tonight to an interview with Plus designer Joseph Smarr on the IEEE Podcast it became clear to me that for at least some of Plus’s leadership the goal is not to win social networking outright, or to kill any competitors, but to disrupt the social networking economy with a big enough, good enough and popular enough service that the walled gardens (Facebook in particular) are forced to open up interoperability enough that their users can communicate with the significant enough number of people in their lives that use a different social network. Back in the bad old days, customers of one phone network couldn’t call customers of other phone networks, then people couldn’t email out-of-network. Today people can’t be social across networks, but few people mind because everyone they care about is on Facebook. Plus is a big push to change that. Interoperability will be better for the open web and thus better for Google. It should also be better for consumer choice and satisfaction, in the long run. As long as Face-oogling or whatever doesn’t become as frustrating in the future as dealing with phone companies is today. But they do have interoperability!

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it this way before. I hope the plan works. One more cool thing about Plus.

I’d post a link to my Plus profile here but I wrote this whole post on my phone, sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house, in the dark. (Cutting sod that’s grown over my walkway.) I’m not hard to find there though and am lots of fun to talk to, I promise.

Last Spring I was weeding my yard and thinking “what new fields of data online could I gain programmatic access to, subject to some analysis and then use for strategic advantage?” Blog comments came to mind as an under-utilized set of data: structured, publicly available and created as a result of casual gestures online. BackType came to mind because that’s what they did at the time, search for comments left by a particular person. I thought about a lot of different ways I could analyze or filter feeds of blog comments, cross referenced with other sets of information or delivered through various interfaces. Most of my ideas didn’t come to anything.

That’s when I thought “how about I take a list of high-priority individuals, track their comments around the web and use that as a way to sniff for news?” I used Robert Scoble’s Twitter List of Most Influential People in Tech, but it could have been any list of people with home page URLs published in a public, predictable place. If I was a geotechnology beat specialist, I might have used (heck, maybe I still will) a list of geotech industry specialists.

Source of data, available programmatically, with a structured field with which some data can be filtered out from others based on some criteria, criteria data-set available from another source already. Put all of those circumstances together and you’ve got an opportunity.

That’s what I did, as described in this post on BackType’s acquisition today by Twitter. That feature is probably as good as dead, now.

I just thought I’d share that thought-process here. I think about things like this all the time, but especially when I set aside some time for my brain to think about it. You can too. Publicly available, structured data enables all kinds of strategic possibilities.

I am a big advocate of low-cost virtual assistant program Fancyhands: $35 per month for up to 15 tasks requested by email. I’ve posted some pretty complicated requests over the last 6 months or so that I’ve been subscribed. People ask me about the service often, so I thought I’d show readers here how it’s been going over the last few months. It’s been interesting. Like so many things in life, I think you may get out of it what you take the time to put in.

Below is a picture of my email inbox, with a search for the Fancyhands threads. Below that is a more detailed discussion of each request, but the high level take-aways seem to be: I’m not remembering to use anywhere near my full quota, many of the tasks I request aren’t working out so well but the ones that are working out have been great.

You might think: Marshall, you need to make simpler requests – those are the ones that get the best results. But you’d be surprised at the crazy requests I’ve gotten great results from in months past! Like: send me a spreadsheet of every daily newspaper in the US, its name, its location and its URL. No problem! That was great. I think it depends largely on who happens to answer my request on the other end. I’ve gotten some really sophisticated responses and some really frustrating ones. Continue reading →

I read someone say on Twitter the other day that they really appreciate it when bloggers just share news on Twitter if it’s short enough it can be reported in 140 characters or less. Writing a post about it for nothing but pageviews, when you really didn’t need to go on and on is just poor manners.

So now I will just Tweet news when it’s short – and I’ll include a link back to this post explaining why for the first few times I do that. Maybe. What do you think of this idea? It does neglect RSS readers, Facebook users, etc. There is that. If it decreases the amount of click-bait BS around the web though, that could be a net win, no?

Quick photo! Testing testing!! New WordPress iOS app!

People are freaking out about iPad super-app Flipboard (a very nice RSS reader, if you’re not familiar). I don’t get it. I love the power of feeds and I like Flipboard a lot. As a content creator, it sounds like a blessing to me. The service even shows the ads we put in our RSS feeds. (I just looked, ours are there.) What’s not to love?

I suppose people say it robs publishers of pageviews. Here’s the math I do in my head. If 1 million people read 10 of your articles and 5% of the time they will click through to see your site itself – that’s 500,000 free pageviews you just got. Did you have some other plan in mind that would bring those million people to your content but with a higher conversion rate? Did Flipboard cannibalize your existing plan? I suspect that’s not how it goes down – instead 1m people are exposed to your content that wouldn’t have been otherwise. That sounds win-win to me.

Who am I to say this? I do publish content for a living. Though I don’t own the business I do it for – I have led the growth of that site from a 3 person staff to now 15. Publishing tech news content. That’s where I’m coming from.

I love finding Twitter lists like a good curated collection of Anthropologists or GeoTech pros and subscribing to the links they share on Twitter inside Flipboard.

Maybe there are concerns that I’m missing. Somebody tell me the rest of the story.