Three Things I’m Really Excited About Right Now

The new version of NetNewsWire, Newsgator’s desktop feedreader for the Mac, is fantastic.  I’m not just saying that because I was honored to be quoted in their press release – it’s really a joy to use.  I haven’t been able to test out GoogleReader offline via Google Gears yet, but this new NNW is so nice that I’m struggling to find the motivation to do so.  That’s awful – I will do so soon and will let you know how it goes.  Perhaps I’ll do that when I take some special time to clean up my OPML files – something I’m sure we could all benefit from taking the time to do!

Speaking of OPML files, or collections of RSS feeds if you’re unfamiliar, if you’re a Firefox user you should check out BlogRovr.  I don’t use Firefox (I prefer Safari) but it’s plug-ins like this that make me doubt my decision.  BlogRover lets you upload your personal OPML file of feeds you read, along with a selection of topical feeds they offer that you can chose between and then every time you load a web page, they check to see if your favorite sources have linked to said page.  The viewing options are really nice too, but the concept – wow!  Talk about bringing it all together – yes, please – automate a quiet notification if any of my favorite sources have also written about whatever I’m reading.  Love it!

Finally, speaking of recursive online art – are you familiar with the film Four Eyed Monsters?  It’s not to be missed!  Two artists in New York date for like 6 months without speaking to each other directly, just through art.  Then they make a movie about their falling in love, video blog the heck out of it and get thousands of friends on MySpace.  Feature film debut on Valentine’s Day in theatres across the country, any city with sufficient requests via their website.  I saw it in Portland, loved it.  

The news?  Now the full feature length film is up on YouTube and movie social networking site Spout is running a cost-per-action style sponsorship.  For every person who creates an account on their site, via the FourEyedMonsters promotion, the company is giving the FEM crew $1.  I don’t know if it will work, and I hope there was a base level of sponsorship as part of the deal – but hey, this is cool news.  I urge you to create a Spout account and support these awesome indy artists leveraging online social media!   I learned about this news on the up and coming blog 901am.  I’m going to blog about it over on SplashCast this afternoon and embed the full video blog series along with the full length film.  Yay!

Will You Consider Using MovableType 4.0?

MovableType, from SixApart, is one of the oldest blogging platforms on the market but last night the MT team released a new version that’s worth taking note of. It sounds like they are taking a very smart approach; learning from best of breed related apps (many of which they also own) and developing towards where users appear to be headed. (skip to the meat of this post)

SixApart’s Anil Dash pinged me yesterday and said that the basics are this: MT 4.0 will go open source in Q3 and it will incorporate lessons learned from other SA products – the media handling and templates of Vox, the publishing control of Typepad, the scalability and OpenID support of LiveJournal. That sounds very intriguing to me; I’ll be checking out MT the next time I set up any website and recommend that others look at it as well, in addition to WordPress. I hope it’s easier to install and customize. Let’s be honest, that project logo above doesn’t evoke the kinds of smooth user experience that it ought to. There is a WP to MT importing tool available, that’s good news.

Here’s the press release for the announcement and here ‘s Duncan Riley’s coverage on TechCrunch. Richard MacManus, at the MT powered ReadWrite Web blog, has a typically thoughtful write up as well.

MT says it currently powers sites for organizations ranging from “the Washington Post to the Huffington Post, from General Motors to Nissan Motors, Boeing to BoingBoing, Intel to Instapundit.” None of those are particularly elegant sites, but they aren’t messing around either.

If MT can nail the uptime issue that plagues WP on some high traffic sites then that alone will lead some people to switch.

Will MT remain a financially viable product if liscences are free and its pro level support that’s monetized? Sounds like a very good plan to me. Blogging platforms are essentially commodities now, there are enough of them that no matter how good they are few people will pay much for the software itself anymore. Support, on the other hand, will probably always be the kind of value-added service that can serve a vendor well. It will be interested to see if SixApart is undercut in support pricing for an open sourced MovableType. I’d love to see numbers on how this is same type of enterprise plan is going for WordPress.

We’ll see how the open sourcing goes, there is such a strong open source developer community built up around WordPress that MT will probably take some time to build up a signifigant one themselves. One caveat here is that there’s also a strong community building up around Drupal, which bears some resemblance to MT but is arguably not much fun to use. I won’t claim any expertise regarding the open source community (see my friend Dawn’s take on this from that perspective) but I wouldn’t be surprised if some number of people are excited to get their hands on the code developed by the pros at SixApart for not just MT but also Vox, Typepad and LiveJournal – some of which will now be integrated into MT and thus presumably open sourced as well.

One of the things that the company learned from Typepad is that people like widgets. It’s obvious from WP and Drupal that people also like full-scale plug-ins. MT 4.0 will come with a library of plug-ins and 15 preselected profiles with thematic collections of plug-ins pre-installed. That sounds very smart; we’ll see if it’s truly useful and wether different types of organizations truly want and need different collections of plug-ins.

Two-way OpenID support will now be a part of MovableType. That’s great news. SixApart’s LiveJournal was one of the earliest players in OpenID and for readers and writers of large, MT powered blogs to be able to offer OpenID login for authors and commenters is another big step for this important movement. OpenID support is a real bear to install in WordPress if you’re unfamiliar with working on the command line level – hopefully MT implementation will be much simpler. Ease of installation for semi-technical users in general is a big question I have about this new version, it would be great if SixApart worked with web hosts to offer one-click install like many do of WordPress.

Media handling ala Vox will hopefully be improved upon as its ported into MT – that was the one thing I was a little critical of in the release of Vox. Vox is a great blogging product in terms of privacy, aesthetics and social networking functionality, but its much vaunted media handling feels strange to me. Media items are oddly sequestered on blogs instead of being integrated gracefully. That’s the way it seemed to me last time I looked, at least.

The ability to easily modify the look and feel of the admin dashboard sounds interesting to me and the MT appears to offer much more sophisticated reporting and analytics than other comperable products on the market. It’s also got a reputation for being more complicated and less flexible – we’ll see if that’s still the case.

I will definitely check out the new MovableType when the opportunity and need arise – but I’ll remain cautiously optimistic about this old-school software’s ability to update itself and become as elegant as users today prefer.

Thoughts on Differentiation

Saying the following to a consulting client – what do you think?

“Being in close to a service and seeing all its differentiation is not the same as having that differentiation be appreciated in the market – at some point it just doesn’t matter to most people. Offer an API, partnerships with a number of other cool startup contendors, and a different aura (respecting privacy better than Google for example) and you can at least be much more high profile – perhaps moving from being seen by casual observers as an also-ran to being a Golden Boy.”

Like Marc Andreeson, I think the web is not in a bubble. Everyone from consumers to industry bloggers to VCs – heck, developers and your own company, can use some solid strategy for how to deal with the fact that many of us are doing things that basically look identical from a standard distance away. I think APIs and partnerships are great things to think about in this regard. The parties who engage on those levels will take the time to notice how you are different, and the end result will be a much more visible differentiation as a result of your roll in the larger ecosystem. Del.icio.us and Technorati are examples of this, Twitter is too.

Interview: Cool Online Tools for Nonprofits

My friends at NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, are starting a monthly “cool tools you should know” video series and I did the first one with them. I hope it proves useful, not too basic for nonprofits but not too “head in the clouds” either. Links to the tools discussed are below the video player.

If you are in the mood for explanatory video you should make sure to check out this post: The Common Craft Show: A Case Study in Video Awesomeness. Fantastic videos introducing the concepts of RSS and wikis. Not to be missed.


Click To Play

What tools should I share with Holly and the NTEN community next chance I get? I’m sure some of you out there have some suggestions. I’m thinking BlogRovr, which I would use all the time if I used Firefox instead of Safari, Google Gears, the new framework for taking GMail, Google Reader and other apps offline onto the desktop, and maybe NetNewsWire/FeedDemon. Do readers have other suggestions for cool tools for nonprofit folks to check out?

Last.fm: Another recommendation algorithm acquired

Waking up this morning, I can’t help but think about how the imminent acquisition of Last.fm by CBS is just the next in a series of deals that financially validate the online social recommendation concept.  (StartupSquad has some of the best news coverage of the deal. Last.fm blog post and comments worth a read as well.)  I am very excited about the rumored acquisition of StumbleUpon by eBay as well.

“Users who liked what you’ve cumulatively told me you like, also tend to like these other things.”  It’s a beautiful concept – I mean that I’ve been struck by the beauty of this concept across a number of sites for weeks.  Everyone knows that’s a big part of Amazon.com but it’s also what makes StumbleUpon what it is, too.  My favorite lately has been Pandora.

Recently I’ve heard people say things like “I worked on my Pandora ‘stations’ for months and I’m finally getting a really solid stream of music that I really, truly like.”  That kind of learning by a web service, starting from a point I designate and refining the trajectory based on thumbs up and thumbs down on subsequent movements, strikes me as fundamentally beautiful – especially when it’s music we’re talking about.  I far prefer Pandora’s interface over Last.fm’s, by the way.

The roll of cumulative recommendation versus other core systems of analysis at Last.fm or Pandora isn’t completely clear – but there seem to be two defining traits to both these sites and StumbleUpon:  The interface can be related to very simply (though more complex use is also an option.)  I get access to the fruits of my labor very quickly.

I used to use Furl.net for my social bookmarking – I miss it terribly, in fact.  Furl would look at my bookmarks and suggest not just other URLs, which were less interesting, but it would recommend other users with similar interests.  I could look at each of these and decide whether or not to subscribe to their bookmarks by email or RSS.  Back in the day I chose email; I still get those emails and the signal to noise ratio is stunning, it’s like a stream of pure gold.

It looks like MeFeedia offers something similar to this for video feed recommendations.  The fact that del.icio.us does not offer recommendations seems a huge lost opportunity to me, almost a crime of neglect against my data.  You know that companies that collect loads of my data are going to mine it for their benefit – I want to be able to do the same thing, at least on the simple level of getting recommendations relative to other users.

This post isn’t terribly coherent or carefully crafted as much as it is a series of thoughts on the subject, but no series of thoughts here would be complete without the following.  Service providers, give me access to my own damn data.  I do the work using your tools, you hold the resulting data, you monetize that data for as long as I’m happy with you, I benefit from the act of data creation and secondary impacts like better recommendations over time.  Then I find someone I like better than you and I’m out of here.  Do you get to keep my data?  Not exclusively, no!  Keep it in aggregate if you’d like – but for goodness sake, if you think that holding my data hostage and threatening me with data poverty if I leave you is a way to keep me from leaving your service – well that’s just a totally dysfunctional way to maintain a relationship.

Now I’m angry, thinking and writing about user control over our own data.  VERY few companies are hip enough to this, I don’t think any of the above discussed companies are.  Why should they be until their users insist on control over our own data?

None the less, the CBS acquisition of Last.fm is a big validation of the social recommendation concept.  I’m very excited about it and though I’ve got some big concerns, I am interested to see what a giant media company will do with it.

Changes to the old blog

Unless you’re the feed reading type, you may have noticed that I’ve made quite a few changes around here lately. In addition to my work as director of content at SplashCast Media, I’m also starting to do more consulting on the side. I’ve redesigned my personal site here with that in mind. I hope you’ll poke around the site in its current state and give me some feedback. The two pages that have changed the most, beyond the front page, are the Feedback page about my work and a brand new About page.

My primary goal in consulting is to help people become more effective and efficient in their engagement with existing conversations online.

I’m currently working with Rootly, a news search engine whose recent redesign I consulted on. Now we’re working on messaging and documentation so the company can have an explanation of its services befitting of its awesomeness. We’ll be making our work together a full, detailed case study that other prospective consulting clients can read to learn more about the services I offer. I’m working on a series of case studies and highly recommend this audio interview with Elizabeth Ferranini on the subject.

If you’re interested in working with me to ramp up your participation in new, online social media – drop me a line at marshall@marshallk.com. I’m really looking forward to working with a variety of people and organizations. Thanks for all your ongoing support!