Making Subscription Options for the Grand Rounds Med-blog Carnival

In September I wrote a blog post about reading RSS feeds for, if not at, your work. (“Reading Blogs at Work: Why You Should Do It & How You Can Make it Worthwhile“) One of the things I discovered in writing that post was the fantastic weekly carnival of medical blogs called the Grand Rounds. This wonderful series has been running for more than 4 years now and many of its participants put great care into their hosting efforts. When it’s their turn to play host the solicit, search for, organize and sometimes summarize an awesome selection of the best posts on medical blogs that week.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any way to subscribe to an RSS or email list of those posts – and I’ve looked really hard! Tonight I’m preparing for a presentation I’m giving tomorrow to a medical tech and civil liberites organization and I really wanted to make such a subscription available for them. So I bit the bullet and made it myself. It was not as easy as I’d like and is going to take a few minutes each week for me to maintain – so if any participants are here reading this and would like to take it over, I’ll show you below not just how I created the feed but how you can help too.

Read on for RSS and email subscription options and step by step instructions describing how this was done. I hope the first commenter from the medical blogging community who stops by will break my heart by showing me an existing RSS subscription option that I just haven’t found yet.
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Would You Like a Job as an Online Community Manager?

One of the services that I provide for consulting clients is assistance in recruiting bloggers and social media experts for hire. In the past 2 months I’ve helped 3 companies find company bloggers or community managers. Right now I’m working on a list of 3 to 5 high-quality candidates for a community management position for a very innovative and cool startup.

What would a job like that involve? If you’re a startup company reading this post, should you hire a community manager? To explore this question in general, I’ve reposted below a post I wrote this Spring at ReadWriteWeb. It’s titled Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers? I’ve posted it in full below for the benefit of casual readers, but the original post has been read by more than 10,000 people, 69 of whom left comments, many of which are also worth reading. I should also take this opportunity again to thank the 22 people who contributed their thoughts to my research on the article.

If you’d like to learn more about the particular community manager role I’m trying to fill, email me at marshall@marshallk.com. This position in particular is best for someone on or willing to move to the East Coast, but that may not be 100% essential (and other companies will be looking to hire for similar positions in the future) so… if you’d like to do this kind of work now or later, drop me a line. Whether this kind of position is of interest to you or not, I hope you’ll enjoy the following discussion.

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

communitypic.jpgYou know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world – being social is becoming an important full time job.

“Community Manager” is a position being hired for at a good number of large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang’s growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.
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How to Keep Track of the Margins of Your Blogosphere

I contributed a tutorial session to the BlogOn Expo Summer 2008 last week that I thought could be of interest to readers here. It’s titled “Tracking the Margins of Your Blogosphere and it’s all about a method I use to keep an eye on the most important news from sectors I am marginally interested in. The whole Expo should be worth some of your time, the last one was quite good.

I feel conflicted about the decision I have learned that the Expo has made to do a publicity deal with Izea/PayPerPost, who are scumbags. I can understand why the Expo would do so and I can understand why armies of beginning bloggers would work with Izea. However, I do not like the idea of advertisers paying for blog coverage and I do not believe them when they say disclosure is required. See image below, click for full size.

Why did I contribute to the BlogOnExpo? I didn’t know about the Izea partnership until after I already had and I’m not sure how big a deal it is. I do want to be clear though that I am in no way in support of Izea.

That said, I hope you like the content that I and a number of other bloggers contributed to the Expo.

Changes: I’m Joining RWW Full Time & Getting Married!

I’m making two exciting announcements tonight.

Personal

Most important, I’m getting married to my partner Mikalina! Many of my work contacts here on the blog haven’t met Mikalina but many of you have. She’s wonderful and I love her very much. We’ve been together for more than 4 years already and she’s studying to be an environmental engineer. Or a ceramicist – she’s a rock star in both and hasn’t decided what to do about it yet.

We’re looking to get married pretty darned soon, I proposed to her last weekend when we were vacationing on the Oregon Coast.

Yay!

Work Changes

Readers here may or may not have known that I have only been working roughly half time at ReadWriteWeb since I came on board there in September. That’s now going to change.

The other 30 hours each week has been spent doing consulting, for more companies than I can count right now.

I absolutely love consulting – but ReadWriteWeb is growing fast and site editor Richard MacManus has offered me a great full time position as his VP of Content Development. I’ll be working there full time on a number of initiatives that we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. For now we’re saying that I’m going to be working on premium content, publishing systems and all-around magic, some of which will be behind the scenes. I’ll also continue working in my capacity as lead writer there, so you can expect roughly the same output from me as well.

I am really excited about getting to bring some of my other ideas to fruition with a team of good people and Richard’s support, though. I’m very proud to have been part of the team at RWW that helped the site move from being the 27th most linked-to blog on the web up to #9 today. (Take that Mashable! And look out, ICanHasCheezburger, we’re coming to get you next! I kid, kind of.)

Consulting

I’m really going to miss the rush of consulting, but in order to stay fresh and in touch with the market, I will continue offering one 1 hour consulting session per week. Those sessions are fast paced and a lot of fun, so let me know if you’re interested in scheduling one. Feedback from past associates and clients can be found here.

Did I Mention That I’m Getting Married?

Thanks for all the interest and support that friends have offered here and privately. I’m very excited to be moving into new stages in the two most important parts of my life. I think many of you will really like what you see us come up with over at ReadWriteWeb. The joy that will come from the transition in my personal life will be much less public but I thought I’d let readers here know about it too.

I’m Making Changes – Get Your Consulting Now If You Want It

Late next week I’ll be announcing a change to my work life. It’s exciting stuff that I hope readers here will appreciate, but it will lead to a major reduction in the time I spend doing consulting work. I’ll be finishing up projects that have already begun (if I haven’t discussed this with you don’t worry about it) but I won’t be taking on new projects after next week.

I honestly love consulting and will continue offering limited one hour sessions periodically, but I will no longer be spending half of my time on it. I’ve got another opportunity I can’t pass up.

In other words, if you’ve been thinking of getting in touch with me for a high-energy, rapid-fire one hour session about product usability, market positioning or launch planning – now’s the time because the pipe is going to be far more narrow very soon. I’ve been doing three or four one hour sessions per month for the past year and people love them. Let me know if you want to do one next week by email at marshall@marshallk.com

Otherwise, hang tight for some news next week. It’s nothing earth shaking but it should be pretty exciting. Thanks as always for your ongoing support.

Do Startups Need Community Managers?

One of the things I’ve been advising clients to do a lot lately is consider hiring a full or part-time community manager to communicate closely with their users online. I thought I’d write a post about why community managers are good to have, but then I thought that instead I’d ask it as a question. Do startups need community managers? If not, I’ll stop suggesting that so many of them make that type of hire!

That’s how I phrased a deliberately vague question on Twitter, and it got some great replies by email and on FriendFeed! Twenty people replied, many of whom are community managers, others of whom have hired community managers and a couple of others are cautionary or cynical. It’s a great discussion!

Most of these thoughts are unique and very worth considering – even if they don’t all agree. I’m going to turn these replies into a coherent (and weighty) post on ReadWriteWeb in the morning but I thought I would post them online first and let people knock them around a bit more first. Would you like to respond to any of these arguments in the finished post? If so, please leave a comment here and make sure you tell me where to link your name to.

The final post has been put up here, thanks to all who participated.

I was planning on putting these up on a wiki first and encouraging people to go over there and make edits for replies – I’ve done that before – but then I thought that sounded like a missed opportunity. So here’s a discussion that will turn into a blog post – your thoughts are formally requested…big thanks to the people who have already joined in. I’ll include my own thoughts in the final post.

PS. Big congrats to Drew Olanoff, who was just named Community Manager and Evangelist for Strands.com today!

. . .

I do think that startups need community managers, but that being said it depends on the community and what needs to be managed. A lot of what I do at CubeSpace is function as a startup community management, but that is very different than the work that Dawn does. I think it depends on the style and distractability of the folks in the startup and how they like to collaborate with peers as well as how they define their peers. I am not trying to be cryptic, I have just worked with a range of startups who need different kind of support and community management.

I would be happy to have a longer conversation with you about this if you are interested. It might also be a good session for http://www.sideprojecttostartup.com/.

-Eva

Eva Sari Schweber
Chief Cat Herder
CubeSpace, Your WorkSpace Community

Read on for the rest of the discussion
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5 Minute Intro to Yahoo Pipes

I’m in the San Francisco airport flying back from a wonderful Foo Camp where I lead a discussion about RSS power user tips. It was a lot of fun. Several of the attendees had never used Yahoo! Pipes, one of the most powerful tools in the RSS toolbox. I told them that I too didn’t really learn to use Pipes for a long, long time after I first discovered it because it seemed too complicated for my poor little non-developer’s head. Once I was shown just two buttons to push in the service, though, I found out that some great results are actually very easy to achieve using Pipes. Just seeing some one do the simplest things there makes it a lot less scary. In that same spirit, I offer the following 5 minute screencast demonstrating 3 simple things you can do with Pipes. I hope it emboldens you to learn how to do even more with the service, but even if you only feel comfortable doing this much – I believe it will still prove very, very useful. Plus it will keep your toes safe (you’ll know what I mean after watching the video below.
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