RSS: Not Surfing, Not Searching but Subscribing

The Moonwatcher blog has a great, simple explanation of the business benefits of RSS (don’t be put of if you aren’t the corporate type). The gist of it is that RSS enables you to find key information not be surfing around your favorite web sites, not for manually searching for key words, but by subscribing to content feeds you decide to monitor.

I would emphasize that there remains plenty of room for serendipitous discovery. People whose sites I subscribe to are always recommending interesting items online and scanning my feed reader inbox can lead to some pretty unpredictable places via their suggestions. Likewise subscribing to a search need not lead to a silo or a walled garden. Searches can be as specific or as general as you wish, and so too can your search feeds. Here are some examples:

  • I subscribe to an Icerocket search of blogs for the word “podcasters.” As you can imagine, that creates a huge channel of information that only occasionally do I read a lot of. But items regularly appear when I read the newest items of all my feeds at once. Via that search feed I’ve (a) found a client (b) kept up with the industry news with a wide angle view and (c) gotten perspective into the day-to-day workings of the podcasting culture, as random podcasters’ blogs have passed my eyes on their way down my RSS stream.
  • I subscribe to several searches for my own blog’s URL and my name. Manual vanity searches are ineffective and may do serious damage to your psyche! Now that I’m subscribed to those searches, I have the results delivered to me automatically every day. Even my little blog here gets at least one inbound link just about every day. I am able to participate in those discussions all the more when I know by whom and where I’m being linked to. Plus, if anyone says anything nasty about me online – I’ll know right away.
  • I also subscribe to searches that never or rarely find any results. My favorite example is the search I’ve subscribed to for audio from the Blogher conference. When the conference happened I wanted to hear audio of the discussions there. I searched Podscope and Blinkx.com but didn’t find much at the time. So I subscribed to the RSS feed for the search in Blinkx, and now I have an audio channel feeding into my agregator inbox of new audio about the Blogher conference whenever it becomes available online. I’m certainly not out searching for it on a regular basis, or ever again!

Yes RSS is a really incredible technology, and this is only the beginning. My RSS reader is my personal news desk, bringing the information I need to me from hundreds of different sources into one accessible place. I’ll be writing more and more about RSS related issues in the coming weeks, it’s one of the primary things I’m excited about right now.

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A Week in the WebJustice2.0 Stream: An Overview

Earlier this month I proposed using the tag WebJustice2.0 to designate something online as related to issues of inclusion in Web 2.0 – blog posts, events, images etc. related to the efforts to decrease the white male middle and upper class dominance of this emerging field. You can read about the WebJustice2.0 tag stream here.

This week the tag got some great use. You can always see the newest items syndicated at the end of my sidebar, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed yourself at WebJustice2.0 Feed.

Here’s what was submitted to the feed this week, I think all via authors’ Technorati Tags or readers via Del.icio.us:

That’s a week in the WebJustice2.0 Attention Stream! Feel free to subscribe to the feed and you’ll get these items in your RSS feed reader.

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Blogging: It’s Not Just About Cats Anymore

I find it maddening how widely held the belief is that blogs are personal journals about unserious topics. Not out of any sense of professional pride on my part, but because of the huge loss this represents to organizations that could benefit greatly from a these powerful tools of self-publishing with global reach. (Not to mention authenticity, dialog and the benefits of social bookmarking and RSS!)

So I love it when ever I find examples of serious blogs.

  • Terry Teachout just wrote a column in the Wall St. Journal about the impact of blogs on art criticism. This excerpt via Jeff Jarvis:

    The emergence of the practitioner-blogger has the highest potential significance for arts journalism. Many, perhaps most, of the greatest critics in history — George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Edwin Denby and Fairfield Porter come immediately to mind — were also practicing artists. But with the growing tendency of mainstream-media journalists to think of themselves as members of an academically credentialed profession, the practitioner-critic has lately become a comparative rarity in the American print media. Not so on the Web, which is one of the reasons why readers in search of stimulating commentary on the arts are going online to find it.

    I find myself rather than asking “why aren’t more writers practitioners” instead, “why aren’t more practitioners writing?” The benefits of writing (blogging) about your practice, whatever it is, are innumerable.

  • Harvard Law School now has an official blog for the admissions department. Written by the Assistant Dean for Admissions, the blog’s sidebar reads

    This blog is intended to make the admissions process at Harvard Law School more transparent while providing a venue for those tips, nuggets and ideas that get lost in the wave of information greeting law school applicants.

    Blogging for your organization must be a thousand times, no ten thousand times, easier than getting into Harvard Law School. But if you’re the type who likes signals from authority figures that something is a good idea…

  • So No Child Must Wait is a blog network for surgeons traveling to the poorest parts of the world to perform complex surgeries for children. It appears to be posted to irregularly, which is a shame, but it is a demonstration of one more wonderful use of the technology.

These are just a few of the most recent examples of great applications of this technology that I’ve found. I cannot emphasize enough the potential for communication, visibility, dialog and learning that is enabled by blogging. It’s not just about cats anymore.

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Great RSS Intro Multi-Media

Today’s a good day for online multimedia explaining RSS! Check these out:

If you haven’t read it, I’ve also got my own explanation of RSS and a demo account set up at Newsgator with the username marshalldemo password: welcome. I am so excited about RSS that I can’t recommend highly enough that you learn to use it too.

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Firefox news re early adopters

Zdnet just reported that after one year Firefox has 8%+ of the browser market. Pretty cool. I don’t use Firefox on my Mac, but I wish I did. It’s too slow for some reason, though perhaps getting a newer version would help. Tabbed browsing is available in Safari, the Mac browser, but the huge open-source developer community is not. Getfirefox.com is the place to go to download it if you haven’t, takes about 2 minutes and is very easy.

Update: I am NOT getting paid to talk you into getting Firefox, though I think this campaign is hillarious!

That said, I couldn’t help but notice that my traffic here is very different. Not 8% but 71% of my recent pageloads have come via Firefox/Mozilla. Only 23% through IE. Now my stats don’t go back very far, so a few big reading sessions by Firefox users could dramatically alter this, but I think it does say something. I think it says that Firefox is the browser of choice for early adopters of Web2.0 (probably you if you’re reading this blog). And to be honest, that’s significant. There are many things that don’t translate well between the two. For example, readers here in IE 6 probably see my sidebar pushed way down to the bottom of the screen. I’m working on fixing that if I can, but it’s an issue. Likewise, the Technorati Tag bookmarklet that I was working on awhile ago doesn’t work in IE 7! As we try to make Web 2.0 more inclusive, that means turning people on to it who are still using IE. Heck, I talked to a guy this morning on the phone who’s pretty big into Web 2.0 and he was using IE! So this is something to think about, perhaps mitigating some enthusiasm about Web 2.0 evangelism.

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My Little Circulation Celebration

Well, I told myself I was going to have a little celebration when I hit 100 subscribers to my RSS feed. That happened this morning. Woo hoo! I’m really glad that 100+ of you find the info here of enough interest to stay subscribed. I will try and keep posting things that are useful and interesting. Readers who are unfamiliar with RSS, or who don’t know how life changing it is should check out my Intro to RSS.

Here’s how the numbers break down, in case it’s of interest. I hope this isn’t obnoxious enough that people unsubscribe!

On Convincing People to Blog

Reader IANG posted a comment yesterday asking about convincing an organization to blog. I thought it would be of general interest, wanted to get others’ thoughts and so I moved it here.

I am having a hard time trying to convince my organization (a small non profit) to blog on area of expertise. they seem to think it will require a full time person (based on some comments at a seminar PR folks went to without me) and that it will not add anything to our fairly good PR/Media out-reach we already do. How can I get them to understand the importance of blogging vs. our traditional media outreach?

Here’s my response:

It is very hard to convince someone to blog if they don’t want to. I suggest you find out who in your organization most highly prioritizes open, regular, two-way communication with people in the field. You and they can blog, or just you, about your work in the organization and/or your thoughts on the issues faced by people in your field. It’s ideal to get support and participation from upper management for such a project (though they are apt to take a week to write a 2000 word essay!). But short of that, perhaps your blog could prove its own worth and then move towards the inside of the organization – or into another organization that more highly prioritizes such values.

I think that if you set up a good suite of search and other RSS feeds about your issues, then you will have lots of very timely fodder for regular blogging. If you set up your blog to maximize participation by others (one-click RSS subscription and subscribe by email options, etc. -) then you should be able to establish yourself as a person at the center of the online discussion and a good source of news. (Those are the kinds of things I help people with.)

Perhaps your organization will see the vibrant communication you’ve got going on and make a paradigm shift. People who aren’t familiar with this type of media go gaga over seeing strangers make good comments! That really helps them see that the communication is real and valuable.

It is a time investment, but I don’t think it requires a full time person by any means.

What thoughts do others here have about “convincing people to blog”?

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