Interview with Lisa Williams, Part I

As promised I’ve posted an interview with OPML blogger Lisa Williams, though we didn’t find much time to talk about OPML! Instead we talked about her community blog project, h2otown, which rocks. And her power use of search and RSS. It was super fun and informative. Hopefully we’ll get to catch up and do an interview about OPML soon, which is why I contacted her in the first place!

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Another crisis management tool

I love http://immedi.at and use it all the time to get IM mssgs whenever select RSS feeds are updated. Just learned about another option, http://www.rasasa.com. This one will send you an IM, unless you’re offline. If you’re offline then it will send your cell phone a text mssg, unless you’ve said you don’t want to be texted at the time, then you’ll get an email.

Picture this scenario: environmental watchdog group prepares to do a press conference regarding heinous corporation. Moments before press conference, corporation posts press release trying to preempt watchdogs or otherwise changing the circumstances. Boom, watchdogs get IM or text message with update on new circumstances as they approach the press conference. This capability just seems essential to me. And there are so many other uses possible!

Down sides:

  1. Your RSS feeds still have to be well chosen or constructed, including search feeds and scraped feeds if applicable.
  2. RSS feeds often get published more than once between new items, for whatever reason. For example, writing this post was interrupted for a second by an IM notification of a “new article” that I had already read just because the feed was republished.
  3. Steve Rubel points out that this sort of service would work best if he could set a thresh hold for notification. He’s a PR guy, so he’d like notification when for example 20 bloggers have linked to his client’s site. That makes a lot of sense and seems like something that could be implemented in a number of places along this process.

Tell me if you think I’m crazy, but I love this kind of stuff.

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Issue tracking pumped up: A search – Rss- OPML service

Check out Monitor This, a fabulous service that builds an importable OPML file of RSS feeds for any search you input – in 22 search engines at once! It looks great. I’ve just subscribed to some searches this way and we’ll see how it goes.

I was told about this by Lisa Williams, with whom I began an interview this morning. (I love it when people are down for long IM interviews!) It’s a real good interview, too. Lisa is awesome. I love her approach to research – and not just because it reminds me of my own but with different tools. We haven’t really even begun to talk about OPML either – and that’s the reason I asked her for an interview.

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What’s been in my ears

I’ve been listening to some pretty good podcasts lately and thought I’d point readers here to some of them and the resources around them.

  • Who’s the #1 blogger amongst people who have identified their favorite reads in the new Technorati Favorites system? Steve Rubel, a prolific blogger who covers the new PR at MicroPersuasion. He did a great interview with Brian Oberkirch of Weblogs Work, just posted today. He talks about blogging his brains out and the emerging roll of blogs in PR. About 30 minutes long, it’s a good listen.
  • After being told by Dave Winer in comments here to stop worrying and listen to his most recent podcast on OPML 2.0 explained in an understandable way – I admit that I do feel a lot better. I don’t think his explanation is as accessible as he thinks it is (I’m going to try and write up an even more straight forward one here asap) but if you are interested in OPML it’s a great thing to listen to. It’s at this link: OPML 2.0 Podcast

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Yay! I’m going to SXSW

Just found out that I’m going to be able to attend the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin next weekend. Some face to face time with web-friends sure sounds like fun. I’ll also be doing some interviews for Net Squared.

I’ll also be at NTEN’s Non Profit Technology Conference in Seattle later this month. Just thought I’d let you know. Pretty exciting stuff. I feel pretty lucky to be able to afford this kind of conference hopping right now, so if you’re at either of these make sure to look me up before the winds of fortune change and I’m stuck in my bedroom working in my pajamas again.