Marshall's Web Tool Blog

A Podcast About Tagging

2005-10-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

I've just posted a podcast about tagging over at my new site, MarshallK.com.

Feedback Sought

2005-10-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

If anyone feels up for giving me any feedback on the beginings of my new site, MarshallK.com, that would be great. The primary issue in question is the image at the top. What do you think? I'm not happy with the caption of the picture, but feedback on that would be great too. Thanks.

Thinking About Tagging and Web 2.0

2005-09-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

There's a great write up of the thinking proccess behind tagging and (as I read it)the supperiority of tagging over catagorization when it comes to the digital world over at Rashmi Sinha's blog RashmiSinha.com.

There are lots of pithy points made in a short article, and the discussion in the comments section is great. If there's anything in particular to excerpt, it's these two illustration and the article's conclusion.

These two images sum up much of what's written in the original article, but I really suggest you find the time to read it yourself. (And check out the author's bio.) It concludes with the following words:

To conclude, the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does - intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability.

When you tag your digital objects well (for you and others to find) and when the underlying programming of the tagging systems is good (rich, interoperable and portable)...then we're really getting somewhere in Web 2.0 world. Understanding how the thought proccesses in Web2.0 (like tagging) work is essential to pulling this new media experiment off.

So attempting to remix the above quoted article is going to be my contribution to the blogoposium1 event this week. Part of explaing Web 2.0 can be to say the following:

Web 2.0 is in part about using new technology to bring our web-use more in line with the free-form and hyper-efficient working of the human mind. Old systems of communication are inflexable and based on either/or thinking: an object is either type A or type B, people are either information producers or they are consumers, a particular use of an information-object is either the way it was intended or it's not. Now in Web2.0 we have the tools to mark and retrieve objects with an open number of signifiers (like tags), the line between information producer and consumer is far more blurred and transversable than before, and every information object can be reappropriated in as many ways as you can imagine (e.g. podcast audio-search-to-RSS, blog posts tagged into an attention stream, graphic illustrations pasted into a wiki ecosystem's history, etc.) Our brains are capable of amazing things, and now we are building the tools to transcend the logistical boundaries of the information past.

Not exactly an elevator pitch, but when that's what's needed I say: Web2.0 is about moving beyond static web-sites and into web-services that support the creation and consumption of remixable multi-media products by a much larger number of people than have been considered "proffesionals" in the past.

It's complicated, but it's not. The hardest part of adopting Web2.0 practices is breaking old web-use habits that don't serve us well anyway.

Resources: Cognitive Analysis of Tagging article, Blogoposium1 attention stream, explaining Web2.0, Articles I've written explicitely about Web2.0, items online that I've tagged with Tagging and with SocialBookmarking. Article on cognition of tagging found via Elearnspace, another good site.

Technorati Tags: tagging, web2.0,

Explaining Web 2.0 to Non-Geeks

2005-09-26T08:28:00.001-07:00

Thanks for visiting my site. I hope you'll stop by my front page and check out more of what I'm doing. Keep your eyes peeled too for a much needed site redesign!

In a simple, but inspired move, Ken Yarmosh of Technosight has made a call to use tagging and synched blogging to create what he's calling a blogoposium. The topic is 'Communicating the Ideas Behind Web 2.0'. The ideas being that we need to find effective ways to explain what we mean by this concept to people who are still learning the basics of the web - and that we'll be able to best come up with those explanations together. I'm excited about it, as this is something I could really use. I hope that some of my Nptech and portland Network associates will participate as well; just technorati tag your blog posts between this on the subject "blogoposium1" and/or submit articles online by tagging them blogoposium1 in de.licio.us. For further details, and information about how to get a free book, check out this post at Technosight. If Web2.0 is a new concept for you, one place to start is through Technosight's post on the blogoposium...check out the folks who've posted links to their sites and you'll discover a whole new world out there.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, nptech, blogoposium1,

New Podcasts are Emerging Everywhere

2005-09-25T13:37:00.000-07:00

Here's just a sample of some of the newest podcasts I've discovered in the last few days, a list selected to demonstrate the breadth of organizations beginning to employ this new medium of communication.

GM Fastlane podcast The VP of General Motors has been blogging for quite some time. Now he's doing a podcast too. It just makes sense.

Praisecast An online community for religious podcasts and sermons recorded as MP3 files.

American Experience The super popular PBS show is now podcasting.

Feedburner Podcast This is probably the least surprising on the list, but the awesome RSS feed creation/monitoring service Feedburner is doing a podcast. The first episode is up and I really enjoyed it. It's pretty technical at points, but it's a great example of a tech company podcast. Some news about new developments, an interview with an employee and an interview with a big client about their experiences using the service. Simple formula that creates a solid product.

As I've mentioned before I am working on or considering several podcast production gigs right now, but I'm looking for some more small projects to be hired for. What I'd really like to do is teach YOU how to create, record, distribute and promote podcasts about whatever work you are doing. Almost anyone has great podcast material hidden somewhere, waiting to be recorded. And yes, I'll start podcasting myself as soon as I can.

Technorati Tags: podcasts

Wow! Ping Automatically With Feedburner!

2005-09-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

I have been totally excited for the last 24 hours since I read about Feedburner's new automatic pinging service! Here's what it means: Feedburner is an RSS feed creating service. They track your subscribers, make your feed groovy, etc. Pinging means to notify search engines, RSS readers, and other interested computers that you have new content on your website that needs to be indexed. It's a key part of getting your content read, searchable and lots of other things.

Now Feedburner will automatically ping services of your choice every time you make a new blog post! Previously, bloggers had to manually ping using a ping clearing house like Ping-o-Matic or Pingoat (my favorite). Several of my clients were not pinging these services manually because it was just one more semi-complicated step in the blog posting process. (See this post on maximizing your blog traffic.) Still, I really like the folks over at Pingoat and I'll miss them. I guess we'll see if Feedburner's perfomance is acceptable, and if not then I'll go back to Pingoat.

I am very excited about this. I will be transferring the clients who aren't using Feedburner over to a Feedburner feed, and with pinging occurring I will be able to insert a Blogdigger search box. Blogdigger won't index new blogs on accident very easily, it needs to be pinged. And if it doesn't index your blog, you can't use its search box (see my left sidebar) to search inside the blog. Blogdigger is far preferable to Technorati, which is slow and only searches the front page of your blog! So this is very good news.

This is a great example of the kind of application integration that the big guys are focusing on in "enterprise software" suites or "busses." Us little folks have to find the same types of functionality in our end-user web applications if we're going to keep up.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, ping, rss, blog, integration, web2.0, search

Word of Blog, a Promotion Service for Change

2005-09-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

Word of Blog.net is a simple, but potentially powerful service that provides a place for non-profit groups and others to display a linking promotional graphic, or badge, and the code snippet that supporters can copy and paste into their sites to display that badge. Promotional badges are something I've been planning on working on, so I'm glad to find a public repository for them. I'm sure some do gooders are adding lots of the badges at once.

The badges are organized by organization name and by tags, which is very nice. If you select browse, then by tag, you'll see an example of a tag cloud system put to very good use. A tag cloud is an alphabetized list of tags used in a site, but with their sizes varying according to their frequency of use.
Thanks to the Full Circle Online Interaction Blog for pointing to this resource. I found their via the NPTech Meta Feed, a cross-platform RSS feed I created for items tagged nptech, the tag for non-profit technologists.

Technorati Tags: WordofBlog, badges, promotion, nptech

Networked Learning: New Presentation Tools

2005-09-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

The Networked Learning Wiki is a great example of using new tools to flesh out a conference about new tools themselves. Created for a presentation titled Cool Results: Engaging Clients in E-learning, this wiki describes and gives examples of a large list of Web2.0 tools. The presentation itself is available as an audio file and the conversation now continues on the wiki. It's a good overview of the field and a nice looking wiki. I think readers of this site will enjoy checking it out.

Just about any presentation could be given greater depth, longevity and thus impact by working with an associated body of web based tools like this. Judging by the "history" button, participation post-presentation hasn't been huge so far, but things are set up great to foster participation indefinitely. Even if there aren't large numbers of people making changes to the wiki, the possibility of long tail value is certainly there (this blog entry, for example.) As users become more familiar with companion online resources, Web2.0 tools, etc. resources like the Networked Learning Wiki will become increasingly utilized.

Technorati Tags: networkedlearning, wiki, presentation, elearning, web2.0, nptech, multimedia, longtail

Audio, Video Search, Tagging and Community

2005-09-20T01:16:00.000-07:00

Just started exploring Loomia, an interesting looking multi-media search service/community. It seems to bring together many of the most interesting trends in the web2.0 world. Specifically: tagging, social bookmarking, collaborative filtering, automated recommendations (attention data), podcasting, video blogging, search and rss. It looks impressive. I'll have to check it out more when I can.

Thanks for the tip, Geek News Central.

Technorati Tags: search, Loomia, podcasting, web2.0, nptech, multimedia, vblogging, community

Update on my Work

2005-09-19T14:33:00.000-07:00

I don't usually post here about myself, but I've just been away on vacation and thought I'd provide a little update on what I'm doing now that I'm back.

First, my apologies for my broken blog. If you came in through any individual pages, you've seen how messed up they are, though this front page works just fine. I've got some coding problems I need to fix, but I may just switch blogging platforms (and thus URLs) while I'm at it. I'll let you know.

Second, I'm typing this on my new computer. For those of you in the know, I'm sure you appreciate how excited I am to have a little iBook G4 of my own sitting in my house now. That's going to make my work much easier and more efficient. Expect to see the difference, especially if you're someone I am doing work for.

Next bit of news, with my new computer I've gotten a Skype account. I can be called via marshallkirkpatrick on Skype. I hope some of you will drop me a line.

Finally, if you are wondering why I'm not in contact with you yet this week, I will be doing a bunch of work late tonight and will do my best to contact the folks I need to first thing tomorrow, but with some work having been done. My partner and I have taken some much needed time off together (4 days in the woods, 3 days in Portland), but I will soon be back in the action with some exciting new projects to share with you.

Thanks for stopping by! -Marshall

Podcasting Cops

2005-09-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

An interesting example of an organization using the new medium of podcasting to communicate with the public is the NYPD Podcast. It's traffic closure updates, public announcements and a little bit of info on, for example, avoiding identity theft. It's interesting, and just illustrates the wide array of possibilities. You can read about it in a story here, or download it here.

My archive of bookmarks regarding podcasting is here. I'm considering or discussing a number of podcasting ideas right now, ranging from sports to politics. I'd like to get in the habit of regularly podcasting about the work I'm doing. And what I'd really like to do is help some one else set up an organizational podcast for internal communication. So if that's of interest to you...let me know!

Technorati Tags: podcasting, police, cops, web2.0, internal_communication, nptech

10 Tips for Searching Effectively

2005-09-13T13:39:00.000-07:00

Update: The post below has gotten lots and lots of traffic, which is awesome and tells me I should write more like it. Lots of traffic has come from a repost over at Tipmonkies, a related site I recomend my readers check out.

This might seem unexciting to some readers, but I believe others will find it useful. Here's some of my tips for constructing an effective web search, ranging from the most to least simple:

Use quotes to denote a whole phrase you want to search for. Searching for (you know who you are) technology and community colleges will give you different results than searching for technology and "community colleges" or even "technology and community colleges" or "technology in community colleges." Specifically, putting whole phrases in quotes will give you far fewer results - hopefully better ones.

Use the word "not" or the minus (-) sign to exclude searches that have certain words in them. Look at your search results, do they contain lots of articles from the same, irrelevant source? Get better results by adding - and the name of that source to the end of your query.

When trying different search terms, think about the words some one would use to describe their work who is in the field you are researching. Different people use different language, depending on their perspective. Try multiple searches with different rhetoric, or focus on a certain perspective by using terms only its partisans would use.

If you find that the web sites or pages you want are no longer available at their original location - don't lose hope! First, copy and paste the URL into Google and see if the page has been cached. Second, try pasting it into the wayback machine at Archive.org. Finally, you might try the cache function over at Fagan Finder's URL Info.

Search in more places than just Google. Though it's often good enough if you are looking for something specific, gathering information about a general subject is best done with multiple search engines. Check out Jux2.com for a comparison between 3 big engines, Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. See also Clusty.com for search across many other engines.

Google has lots and lots of advanced features that you probably don't remember at any given time. Check out Soople and XtraGoogle for interfaces that will make those features easy to use.

Don't forget specialty search engines like: A9.com to search inside Amazon.com books (then check them out from the library or buy them from Powell's), OneLook.com to search lots and lots of specialty dictionaries and Wikiwax for auto-complete search of Wikipedia, brainstorming style. Or Blinkx.com and Podscope for audio and video search. There are lots and lots of specialty search engines out there. If you'd like help finding some for a particular field, send me an email.

Don't search only when you remember to! Search 24-7 by subscribing to the RSS feed for your search in engines that offer this essential service. Make sure you put your search terms in quotes as needed, select - or not to exclude the junk results you can see when first constructing your search. When I begin researching a subject for any length of time, the first thing I'll do is set up searches to RSS so that I don't miss any breaking news on the subject right up to the moment I'm done. I've written about search to RSS here.

Don't go looking for things more than once, use a social bookmarking tool to save what you find the first time. Describe it with tags that will help you, or other people, find it quickly again later. I recommend Furl.net because it saves a cached copy of each page you bookmark and searches the full text of pages in addition to the tags.

Tags can be searched across lots of different platforms over at TagCentral.net. Think of tags as subject headings, applied by users and usually only one word long. TagCentral makes using RSS for tag searching easy.

If search is a subject of interest, I've bookmarked articles and services that are search related in my Furl archive here. That link organizes them according to my rating system, with the best sites at the top.

Technorati Tags: search, tutorial, tips, metasearch, tag_search, RSS, persistent_search, Google, nptech

Client Feedback from the African American Environmentalist Association

2005-09-08T12:44:00.000-07:00

One of the organizations I've been doing some work for is The African American Environmentalist Association, based in D.C. I helped them spruce up their blogs, installing a variety of new tools and services to maximize usability and ease of conversation, and taught them how to use a few tools they knew about but didn't know how to implement yet.

The group's director just sent me some very nice feedback and I thought I'd share it with you.

You have been great. I don't have the time to go out and learn about what's new out there and how to use it, so your compact help and information have been very useful. I'm so glad you're out there, thanks for the education.
-Norris McDonald, Director of The African American Environmental Association.

If you're interested in seeing what I can do for your organization, drop me a line. Blogs are just part of what I help people with, see the introduction to concepts in the sidebar of this site to see what else I can help you learn how to implement for your work.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, training, consulting, blogs, environmental, african-american, AAEA, African-American_Environmentalist_Association, Norris_McDonald

The Empire Expands: Podshow Starts Acquisitions!

2005-09-06T16:56:00.000-07:00

How's this for interesting news that the world of podcasting is taking off. After receiving a large sum of venture capital last month, Adam Curry's PodShow Network has acquired it's first company. I was shocked, they bought Podcast Alley! With their excellent line-up of shows, and their awesome Podsafe Music Network, adding the super directory and online community of Podcast Alley makes them a real podcasting powerhouse. I am very excited to see what they do in the coming months. Loading their pages is taking forever this afternoon, presumably because of the buzz. We'll see how well they scale up to a large number of users. They have boatloads of money, but if money was all it took, then Technorati would load in a hurry.

Read full coverage over at the SiliconBeat blog.

Technorati Tags: podshow, podcasts, web2.0

Podcasts to Threaten Big Media, Big Media Columnist Says

2005-09-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

PCMag columnist and industry analyst John Dvorak wrote the following today:

There is no doubt in my mind that podcasting is not only here to stay but will also shortly threaten established media broadcast systems. It's not so much that they will all be destroyed by homebrew networks, but podcasts will be taking away just enough listeners to be a major concern.

His column goes on to discuss how fully many people give up listening to commercial radio once they start listening to podcasts. I know I loathe the times I get stuck with nothing but a radio dial in front of me, and I listen to podcast all day long. There is a simply unfathomable variety of wonderful podcasts out there already - niche broadcasting, on demand, time and place shifted and free of the constraints of commercial media. It's great.

Three good places to find podcasts you might be interested in are: podcast directories like Podcast Alley and Podcast Pickle, podcast search engines like Blinkx.com and via other peoples' recommendations - like my Furl archive of podcasts downloaded and podcasts to listen to.

Podcasting is a high-value content channel, I really believe it is. In my opinion, the percentage of podcasts that are worth listening to is much higher than the percentage of blogs worth reading. Mostly because it does take time and energy to make podcasts, more than it does to make a bad blog. But the possibilities for the medium are endless. I highly encourage people to, at the very least, try listening to some podcasts for the first time.

Found via Steve Rubel's MicroPersuasion.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, podcasting, web2.0, broadcast, media

A Check-List of Blog Bells and Whistles

2005-09-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

Why have a blog if you don't gussy it up for maximum usability, promotion power and participation in the conversations that make up the blogosphere? Below is a list of some of my favorite options for advanced blog features, often add-ons that respond to the needs blogger discover they have that aren't supported by their blogging software. In other cases, third party service providers can provide superior functionality.

This post was inspired by one at Suzzane Falter-Barnes' Painless Self Promotion blog, about a consultancy called the Blog Squad who are helping her upgrade her blog. After reading their excellant suggestions, I realized I have a few more myself. So here's a list of add-ons I chose between when advising on the creation or upgrade of a blog.

Technorati Tag bookmarklet. Drop this puppy in your browser's toolbar and save yourself lots of time and help people find your site by tagging each article appropriately.
Feedburner RSS feed. These folks are on the forefront of RSS feed creation. They do a great job and are always pushing the envelope.
One-click RSS buttons, for the major RSS reader programs. Here's a story about creating these buttons for someone, with the code to do it.
Pingoat to tell all the major blog search engines and other parties of interest that you have updated your site and they should come back and index your content again. Key concept, and Pingoat is doing a very good job.
One-click bookmark links for each article via Furl.net and Del.icio.us. The world of social bookmarking is very important, and I think that participation in it is a good means of promotion and increasing your usefulness. Here's my write up on the one-click links.
FeedDigest spliced syndication and side-bar displays of any RSS feeds of interest to you. Here's a post about these tools being put into action to create an alert system for an organization's supporters.
Reputation tracking. You have got to be notified right away whenever anyone is linking to you. Here's how I do that for clients and for myself.
Haloscan commenting and trackbacks. Attractive, reliable, very low cost. Much better than what this blog software includes. Here's my write up when I initially installed this system on my site.
StatCounter, a site traffic monitor that's easy to install and use. It's very useful and has both free and paid levels.
Talkr feed, or blog text turned to MP3 sound files and delivered via RSS. Very simple, good for accesibility, and sometimes very handy for me when I want to go for a walk and get away from the computer but still want to listen to what someone is writing about. My write up on Talkr is here.
E-Mail subscription service. Some people use it, some people don't. I have far more readers by RSS than I do by email, but I still think it's an important option. Here's my write up on adding this service from a company called Bloglet, but thanks to the discussion over at Falter-Barnes' site I'll be checking out Feedblitz.

There are other concepts and tools out there, but these are the ones I think are best developed and the ones I am most familiar with. I am sure this is only the begining, and the future of blog-centric web applications will look very different from the present. But regardless, I want to get what I can out of them now as well as getting an early understanding of the tools before they get too packaged by the big computer guys.

These are the kinds of things I consider when deciding how to advise in the creation of a client's blog. I hope this list is of use to some of you. Feel free to leave other suggestions in case I'm missing anything.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, blogs, consulting, blog_design, wishlist, applications, RSS, nptech

A Story About New Tools Used Together

2005-08-31T18:37:00.000-07:00

Will Richardson, who blogs at Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web, has posted an interesting story about how an individual educator could use RSS, social bookmarking, blogs and podcasts in his everyday morning routine. It's an interesting way to describe how smoothly all these tools work together. If you read it you can imagine what the particular applications and details would be like in your life and work.

One of the key points Richardson makes in his story is that these new tools save you time and don't require a huge investment of energy to use. Maybe others would be interested in writing up a brief narrative about how they integrate said tools in their daily practice.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, narrative, new_tools, RSS, SBMS, podcasts, education, integration

Group Emails in GMail

2005-08-31T02:32:00.000-07:00

Friends who use GMail may not know about a workaround you can use to create a group email. Check it out at Lifehacker, a pretty interesting blog.

If you don't know about GMail, it's Google's free web-based email service and it's the industry standard right now. All other email services, including Hotmail and Yahoo, have been trying to catch up in awesomeness for the last year or so. GMail requires an invite to start an account, but everyone who has one gets 50 invites. So let me know if you'd like an invite.

Aggregators: The New Blogs

2005-08-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

A great article over on Global Voices Online discusses the use of many blogs pulled together to make one aggregated blog. It's a growing trend and a great way to get a robust idea of the state of the blogosphere in any given location. Let's hope the demographics are well distributed as far as who knows to join. Two examples beyond what the Global Voices article mention are Lefty Blogs and ORBlogs, an aggregation of Oregon blogs.

Technorati Tags: Aggregators,Blogs, Groups, Web2.0

Music 2.0: MashupTown via RSS

2005-08-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

I've been having lots of fun this morning listening to some tunes from MashupTown.com, a site hosting some of the best mash-ups around. If you are unfamiliar with mashups, they are new songs created by artfully mixing two or more previously recorded songs together. The end result can be lots of fun to listen to. My favorite one this morning is "Shout Out at the Magic Rocket Man" (link to blog post with link to file) - it's a collage of 4 different classic rock songs. It's great.

I discovered MashupTown via Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, which is a great podcast about podcasts. Curry loves Mashuptown and plays selections from the site nearly every episode. I decided today that I wanted to subscribe to the RSS feed from Mashuptown, to automatically receive new posts and audio files in my aggregator. The site didn't have the general feed link available, so I emailed them and asked for it. I also asked whether they'd like a code snippet for one-click subscribe buttons to the major aggregator services (like I have on my sidebar.) I got an affirmative reply, so hey Art - here's the code you can copy and paste into your site. Thanks so much for the great fun. I'm listening to Mashuptown Radio right now and am finding a few things I'm digging there too.

You'll have to forgive the run on html, off the side of the page. I think that's just how it goes, and it doesn't seem like a real big deal to me. I'll fix it when I find the time to learn how to, but I don't want to break the lines of code up.

I included a link to my explanation of RSS feeds, feel free to remove that if you'd like. Other readers can use this same template to make one-click subscribe buttons on their sites, just replace the Feedburner RSS URL here with your RSS feed URL. Let me know if anyone needs help with that.

<h2> Syndicated Feeds </h2><a href="http://marshallk.blogspot.com/2005/05/introduction-to-rss-syndication.html">(definition)</a>
<p><a href="http://addyourfeedURLhere" title="Subscribe to my feed"><img src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/flchklt.gif" alt="" style="border: 0pt none ;"></a>
<a href="http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://addyourfeedURLhere"><img src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/my/addtomyyahoo4.gif" alt="" style="border: 0pt none ;"></a>
<a href="http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://addyourfeedURLhere">

<img src="http://www.bloglines.com/images/sub_modern3.gif" alt="Subscribe with Bloglines" border="0">
</a>
<a href="http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=http://addyourfeedURLhere"><img src="http://www.newsgator.com/images/ngsub1.gif" alt="Subscribe in NewsGator Online" style="border: 0pt none ;"></a>
<a href="http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://addyourfeedURLhere&tt=CENTRALDIRECTORY&ru=http://rss.msn.com%27"><img src="http://sc.msn.com/c/rss/rss_mymsn.gif" alt="" style="border: 0pt none ;"></a>

Technorati Tags: mashups, mashuptown, audio, mp3, rss, oneclicksubscribe, subscriptions,

How much would you pay for free hosting?

2005-08-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

Humorous, there's an eBay auction running for a "free" invite to the free blog hosting over at Wordpress.com. That site provides free hosting for the excellent blog software you can find at Wordpress.org. The Wordpress blogging software is free, but users must pay for someone else to host their blog. Unless they get a free invite from Wordpress.com. In this case it's someone who has received an invite selling theirs to the highest bidder! So far it's at $35. I thought it interesting that most of the bidders had never made an eBay purchase before.

Funny stuff. Wikipedia has a nice entry about Wordpress.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, blogs, hosting, auctions, eBay, humor

BlogAlert System for Committee to Protect Bloggers

2005-08-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

Over at the site of The Committee To Protect Bloggers (CPB) there has been some discussion recently about creating a system for supporters to reblog key CPB articles about bloggers in danger of imprisonment, state interrogation, etc. That would amplify the calls for assistance for said blogger by creating a support network to spread the word - like what we in the U.S. call a phone-tree. The initial idea was to tag such items BlogAlert in the CPB blog, but I thought it might be nice to have a more automated option too.

What I did was create a new category in the CPB blog for articles to be filed under BlogAlert. I then found the unique RSS feed for that category (thanks to Julian Wolfson, Project Director at Civiblog.org, hosts of CPB and other social justice oriented organizations). I then ran that RSS feed through the awesome new tool FeedDigest to create a javascript code snippet. I formatted everything up as pretty as I could (subjective, I know) and put it the code snippet into my blog template. Now my readers will see any new BlogAlerts in a box in my sidebar - automatically. Nothing's been posted yet, so I've got the box in a quiet place, but I expect I'll move it somewhere more prominently once it gets active.

So...if you'd like to support the cause of free speech on the internet, the right of bloggers to be critical of their governments without being imprisoned or worse - then you too can grab the code snippet below and put it into your blog's template. Then voila, you and your readers will automatically get the headlines of any new BlogAlerts about bloggers in danger. Pretty cool, huh?

This principle can applied anywhere and presents a world of possibilities. Let me know if you'd like any help setting up something like this for your blog or website. You can syndicate search results, items you or others have given a certain tag, etc. etc. I think it's very exciting. So, with no further ado, below is the code snippet you can copy and paste into your blog to get the CPB BlogAlert box for your readers to see. Let me know if you have any troubles. I'll let you know if there are any further developments.

<fieldset style="padding:4px"><h2>Blog Alerts</h2><p>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/DUKSBUZMKE.js"><noscript><a href="http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/DUKSBUZMKE.html">Click for "Blog Alert from CPB".</a> By <a href="http://www.feeddigest.com/">Feed Digest</a></noscript></script><p> <strong>via <a href="http://committeetoprotectbloggers.civiblog.org">The Committee to Protect Bloggers</a></strong></fieldset><a href="http://committeetoprotectbloggers.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2005/8/26/1172112.html">
<em>Add BlogAlert to Your Site</em></a>

<p>

Technorati Tags: committeetoprotectbloggers, blogalert, rss, syndication, tagging, nptech, feed_digest, civiblog

Google Talk: Look Out Skype?

2005-08-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

So, Google just announced that they are offering a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) tool, for making free long distance voice communication over the internet, called Google Talk. It appears to be a direct attack on Skype's huge market dominance. (see Wikipedia on Skype) Contrary to the interests of all humanity, the two systems do not appear to be able to communicate with each other. Bummer. So, a quick survey of the discussion over at SkypeJournal brings us the following information.

Google Talk drops calls, has inferior sound quality and takes a long time to connect (sometimes 30+ minutes! Skype is almost instantaneous). None probably insurmountable problems, though, given Google's resources.
Skype has far more features, greater reliability, etc.
Google Talk works powerfully with GMail, but you also have to have a GMail account to use it!
And I'd like to add that I doubt Google Talk will see, encourage or perhaps even allow, the huge number of enthusiasts to become developers and other key parts of its community. Skype is seriously awesome.

Related: My Furl archive on topic of telephony.

Technorati Tags: GoogleTalk, Skype, interoperability, web2.0, nptech, VOIP

Adding Links for Furl this and save in Del.icio.us

2005-08-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the folks over at SkypeJournal, I've added links at the end of each post on this blog to save the article into your social bookmarking database (SBMS). It's pretty easy to do if you have access to your blog program's HTML/CSS template. At the bottom of this post is my version of the code I borrowed from SkypeJournal and inserted into my own site. I know this works with Blogger, the blog software I use, but the protocol might need to be adjusted a little if you are using something else. I'll bet you can figure it out, and if anyone wants any help - just let me know.

The ideas behind doing this here are two. First, it will make it easier for social bookmarkers to save and share the articles I write - more ease of use and better publicity. Second, I hope it will be another form of evangelism (if you will) for social bookmarking tools in general. Hence my "definition" link to my explanation of social bookmarking tools. Another option would be to link to Wikipedia's definition, though I think mine's better in some ways.

OK, so if you are in Blogger you should scroll down in your template until you get to the short part of the code that denotes the basics of each individual posts. The section I'm referring to ends with:

<p class="postmetadata">
<$BlogItemControl$>

Just below that, I added the following:


<br />Bookmark this post in <a href="http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<$BlogItemTitle$>&u=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" target="_blank">Furl</a> or <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" target="_blank">Del.icio.us</a>(<a href="http://digbig.com/4dxgg" target="_blank">definition</a>)<br />

If you try and use this and it gives you problems, let me know. I switched Furl before Del.icio.us because, though I agonize over this regularly these days, I really recommend Furl as the best SBMS (cached screen shots are hard to beat.)

In case you are curious how the code above was postable in a blog, without the blog software reading the code and trying to follow it - I copied and pasted the code from my template, then replaced just less-than signs with the ASCII for that symbol. That's " & # 60 ; " but without the spaces or quotes. Don't forget to be in the "edit HTML" mode when you put that ASCII in, too, if you are trying to post HTML code like this on your blog. Hopefully that won't complicate any one else's efforts to copy and paste this code snippet from here.

Users do need to be logged into their Del.icio.us or Furl accounts in order to use this, but that is what comes up the first time you click a link like this. If not logged in the first time, the links should work fine the second time users click them. One other thing I've discovered is that blog posts with quotes in them don't save properly to Furl using this method. Let me know of any other anomalies you discover.

Enjoy!

Related: My Furl archive on the topic of Social Bookmarking.

Technorati Tags: tagging, social_bookmarking, SBMS, Furl, Del.icio.us, Blogger, tips, evangelism, nptech, web2.0

A Wishlist for Web Applications

2005-08-24T16:11:00.000-07:00

I love Infoworld Magazine. It's a great look into what the corporate IT world is doing, often translatable into a non-profit and small business context. It's just plain fun for me to read. I know not everyone would enjoy it, though, so I thought I'd "translate" an recent article that highlights some of the changes being made to big, corporate software. I hope and wish that the creators of the software us little people use will include some of these same themes in their offerings.

"Apps Vendors Attack Midmarket" might not sound like a thriller of an article, but it covered some interesting developments in what's called ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software. When I think of things like ERP and CRM, I think of software like Furl, Del.icio.us, Backpackit, Basecamp, GMail, Newsgator/Bloglines and Skype. These aren't literal translations, but I think they are used by smaller organizations to fulfill some of the same functions. Some of the changes the big guys are making are based on innovations from the above applications. Others indicate directions it would be nice to see those end-user applications include.

AJAX, an exciting programming method that ensures, as the Infoworld article points out, "transactions that might have taken five seconds are instantaneous." I believe that all of the above small-apps use AJAX already, except Furl. Wouldn't that be great? It was in small apps that AJAX was born (as far as I can tell), so I hope that older small apps like Furl will adopt it as well. The next version of Hotmail will use a lot of AJAX.
Integration with third-party programs. Skype is reportedly taking big steps to further this trend. It's a big part of what Del.icio.us is all about. Short of using Greasemonkey programming tricks, many other end-user web-apps can't easily be connected with each other. That's a real bummer, because the big guys are all about selling huge, multi-function application suites with everything but the kitchen sink integrated to swap data and work together. Those of us on the tail end of computing ideas still have to struggle to integrate our tools manually.
Data import. This is largely about swiping customers from your competitors, but it could also work as a compensation prize for the lack of integration in small web apps. One new software innovation allows you to put your Skype contacts into Outlook, and checks automatically whether any of your Outlook contacts have Skype user IDs. Why is it so hard for me transfer the whole batch of my Furl subscriptions into a single RSS feed to read in Newsgator? Does it have to be as difficult as it seems to put your Del.icio.us database into your Furl archive and vice versa? Perhaps widespread OPML adoption will resolve this issue in the nearish future.
Custom interfaces. Why not? There are lots of things I'd like to be able to change about the interface of the web apps I use, and so long as those who pay the bills using contextual advertising go ahead and lock-in the appearance of those ads, why not let me make major changes to the interface I interact with when using their tools? For example, I love Furl...but I sure wish I could borrow some ideas from Del.icio.us in the way it works for me.
Loads of new features. The Infoworld article says the CRM maker Salesnet
is coming out with 250 new features to celebrate it's 25th version! If it is truly a viable business model to offer free, web based applications to end-users and monetize on the clicks to contextual advertising (the dominant free app biz model out there, based on Google's) - shouldn't there be more new features coming out, faster? Some of the above small apps are good about this, like Skype (because people love it) and Del.icio.us (because people love it and it's easy to create plug-ins for), but some of them are awful. Neither Skype nor Del.icio.us use contextual advertising for revenue. Does that business model have enough steam behind it to motivate sufficient innovation? Maybe the search industry proves it's possible.

These seem to be some of the key trends in corporate computing right now. I think they are pretty interesting, and I'd really like to have access to them without working for a corporation with a huge budget. I don't need everything to be free, but I hope and wish that we'll see the small applications so many of us use continue to be on the cutting edge of application development. Scalability, or the ability to deal with your own popularity without your computer crashing or your bandwidth clogging, is one of several performance issues. But let's hope that small time players really can continue to offer powerful services based on innovation and collaboration - not just come up with great ideas that can only really be carried out well by the corporate computing world with all it's financial resources.

Related: On the bright side, check out Blinkx. They seem like a company that's really bringing a lot of things together and they've been really responsive to my emails over the last few days about problems. Check out this short audio interview about their awesome product.

Technorati Tags: web_apps, web2.0, Furl, del.icio.us, nptech, innovation, AJAX, integration, customization, newsgator, bloglines, contextual_advertising, Blinkx

Bye-Bye Hard Drive OS - Web Apps to Take Over

2005-08-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

More and more people are talking about web applications (web email, web data storage, web based RSS readers etc.) taking over the old way of doing things - installing software on your hard drive that runs inside your operating system. I know that I operate completely independent of a single computer. I use many different computers all over the town I live in; all my software and data storage is done online or on a thumb drive I carry on my key chain. I only use my computer at home when that's most convenient, and it's often not. I think that's the future of computing, and many people seem to agree.

In the future you will have easy, fast, automatic access to highly pertinent information you've already captured and new information as it becomes available via ubiquitous fast computers in any resource rich place you visit. That future is very close, but you don't have to wait for it. You can learn to use those tools now, as they emerge.

Super-blogger Jason Kottke has written a long blog post that summarizes many of the speculations, arguments and evidence that Google, Yahoo or Firefox is likely to soon offer a web browser that you use for everything. Bandwidth is so fast, storage so cheap, AJAX (if you are not familiar, here's my definition) is so groovy that there is no need to store or run data or programs on your own computer anymore. Likewise, security is better when there is one team of professionals watching one giant database instead of millions of users failing to pay attention to the security of their individual computers. Back-up of data operates similarly.

The information gap between those using these types of systems and those not using them will only continue to grow. I can't encourage you enough to begin employing them in your endeavors now.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web3.0, WebOS, convergence, information_gap, browsers, thin_clients

The Paradoxes of New Tech Adoption

2005-08-22T16:49:00.000-07:00

Just came upon an interesting quote (citation not in front of me) saying basically that the two biggest mistakes people make concerning new technologies are:

1. Overestimating the pace of initial adoption and
2. Underestimating the ultimate impact in the long run.

I found that pretty intriguing relative to the world of Web 2.0.

Work with the Committee to Protect Bloggers

2005-08-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

CPB is a group I'm really excited to work with. I thought I'd mention some of the things I've been doing with them in the last few weeks in case it's of interest to readers.

In order to make it as easy as possible to subscribe to their RSS feed, and thus for their supporters to keep current with their activities, I set up "one-click subscribe" buttons on the side bar of their site for the major RSS reading services. Below those I added a link to my explanation of what RSS is, and a link to CPB's Talkr feed (to hear their articles in MP3 format.)

I showed the group's director, Curt Hopkins, how to access Ping-O-Matic to speed the indexing of new blog entries by search engines (though I now recommend Pingoat instead, as it's more reliable in my experience). I set him up with the Technorati Tag bookmarklet you can find here. We discussed the use of tags to create a collaboratively created attention stream.

I set him up with an account in Furl, with a short lesson on how to use its basic features to save and catalogue web sites he finds in his surfing.

I encouraged him to download Skype, for free long distance phone calls over the internet - anywhere in the world. Hopefully the encouragement and troubleshooting will lead to this being a super helpful tool.

I also created a way for him to be notified automatically when someone new is linking to the Committee's site via a reputation tracking RSS meta-feed: I used Feedjumbler to combine the persistent searches of Technorati, Feedster and Pubsub for the organization's URL.

I think that's most of what we've done so far. Looking at it all together helps give context to the group's director's nice words about my involvement there: "We're very excited at the expertise and experience Marshall brings to our blogging enterprise." Thanks Curt!

Technorati Tags: consulting, committeetoprotectbloggers, web2.0

Documentary:BLOG - Fall in Love With Blogging (Again?)

2005-08-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

Oh I am so excited! I just discovered this fascinating project called documentary:BLOG all about blogging. Go check out the two short clips in their screening room, awesome. I sure hope these folks connect heavily with the folks from The Blogher Conference, this would be a great way to make use of the Speaker's Wiki.

Technorati Tags: documentary:BLOG, blogs, Blogher, video, documentary

Talkr: My Blog In MP3

2005-08-19T13:36:00.000-07:00

In email discussion with someone from another company I was recently pointed towards a service called Talkr. It takes text from blogs and turns it into computer "spoken" MP3 files. There's a $5 per month subscription fee to catch more than 3 blog feeds, but 3 or less is free. It's very easy to use. My blog's feed is the link behind this button:

For a taste of what it sounds like, Talkr's MP3 of my post titled "Google News Adds RSS Feeds" is here.

You can copy the link behind that button, paste it into your RSS reader or podcatcher, and automatically receive an MP3 file of each blog post I write. What more could you ask for, huh? Seriously, though, I do think this will be of interest to some. I know I like to listen to things I didn't get a chance to read, even if it is in a computer voice. And it's a pretty good computer voice. The files are pretty small compared to most podcasts, so they won't take up much space on your MP3 player or take too long to download. I know that there are many blogs I'd like to keep up with, but not enough to read them regularly. If I could just dump the MP3 version into my player every once in a while and listen in between other podcasts when walking the dog - that would be great.

Many things are possible with this. I'll update you when I do more with it, but please do send feedback on how this works for you. The service has some kinks in it: it doesn't play well with Feedburner, it doesn't interact quite like I'd like with Newsgator (feed items don't appear chronologically) and it seems to update the RSS feed far slower than the "hourly" claims it makes. But hey, nobody's perfect. Hopefully those things will change. (Hopefully the folks at Talkr will see this post and it'll help.)

Technorati Tags: MP3, Talkr, podcasting, blogs, RSS, audio, text_to_audio, accessibility, nptech

Interest in RSS

2005-08-17T12:45:00.000-07:00

Lots of people have been visiting this site lately via the Committee to Protect Bloggers, where I am a technical consultant and have a link explaining the basics of RSS. I presume that many of those visitors are coming from this News.com article written by the Director of the Committee. I find that pretty interesting that folks coming from a very tech savvy site are interested in reading a definition of RSS. But the commenters to that news.com article clearly don't understand blogging, either. RSS is pretty hard to understand until you've seen it in action. That's why I set up a demonstration account over at newsgator (see my explanation of RSS to get the username and password.)

So, for those interested in reading more about RSS, I will direct you over to my Furl archive of RSS related articles and resources, organized by my rating of them. (So the best are at the top of the list.) I hope that's of interest, and thanks for stopping by!

Technorati Tags: rss, committeetoprotectbloggers, news.com

NPTech Podcast: Attempt #2

2005-08-16T17:45:00.000-07:00

Ok, here's my second attempt at an nptech attention stream podcast. This time the RSS feed is read by a robot. When I first started listening to robot podcasts, it made me feel funny - but Feedback would be very helpful.

Here's the file. It's about 8 minutes long.

Technorati Tags: nptech, podcasts, robot_podcasts, rss

We Media '05 Conference Scholarships

2005-08-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

I can't make it, so I won't even try, but other folks in the independent, non-profit and academic worlds should go check out this conference and the application to waive the registration fee for a limited number of folks. It looks pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: nptech, conferences

Google News Adds RSS Feeds

2005-08-16T13:10:00.000-07:00

This is good news. Lots of people like Google News, they index a lot of news sources. For some obnoxious reason, they took a long time to start offering RSS feeds for your searches. Finally that day has come, so you can grab the feed URL of any search you do in Google News and plop it into your RSS reader. Then, any time that a new result is available for your search, you'll receive it automatically in your reader inbox. I've always called this persistent search, and it's a key way to stay on top of your field of interest. I've written about work I've done for clients using persistent search a number of places, but primarily in "Persistent Search to RSS Options" and "Stop Wasting Time with Failed Searches."

There are many great search options beyond Google, but given its strengths and popularity, having RSS feeds available there is good news for sure.

Related: My furl archives of articles and services related to search and rss.

Technorati Tags: RSS, Google, Google_News, Search, persistent_search

Podcasting About Great Podcasts

2005-08-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

Oh my goodness, I am so excited. Podcasts are a huge part of my life, but until today I had never posted one before. Here it is. And it wasn't too difficult at all. It's an experimental podcast about podcasts. Talking about how much I love them, using the ones I listened to yesterday as examples. Show notes are below.

Sound quality is surprisingly good, I think, but next time I'll block the nose exhaling puff. And I'll probably turn up the volume, no? Let me know what you think. No music yet, that's the next step. I'm just posting this for now as I learn how to do it. I hope it works out on your end!

After the link to the file are the shownotes (links I discussed in the podcast) followed by a brief explanation of how I did it. I snuck out onto my front porch at my new house so as to not wake anyone, at about 2:30 AM.

Here's the podcast. It's about 15 minutes long, a 15 mb mp3 file. (note: the host I chose, libsyn.com, is getting slammed today. It's taking me several tries to get other podcasts through them as well, so it might take a minute to grab this one. The explosion of users in these new media make scaling up a real challenge.)

Shownotes

Daily Source Code - Adam "The Podfather" Curry's daily news from the podosphere & beyond. August 8th edition a family vacation-cast, recommended primarily (by me) for long-time listeners.
Podshow Network's Podsquad Adam Curry led podcast all-star team, of sorts. Good stuff.
Yeast Radio Not for the faint of heart, highly recommended for everyone else. Did I mention that this is not something that people who are easily offended would enjoy? It really is good though, and it gets better after listening to many episodes over time. Here's a link to the August 8th edition I discussed.
C-Net News.com Daily News Summary Here's the August 5th and August 8th shows I listened to and discussed.
Diggnation - audio and video coverage of Digg.com, the collaborative tech-newswire. See also this blog article I wrote about this whole phenomenon.
Longtail.com is all about the long tail theory.
Slashdot Review is a podcast review of top stories on Slashdot. It's hard to grab the audio files, you have to subscribe to one of the RSS feeds. Once you've done that you are set though.
Gilmour Gang the rad tech round-table. Here's the Aug 8th episode about "attention data." Here's the AttentionTrust.org effort discussed. Skype, the free long distance phone calls over the internet.
Media Artist Secrets one of many interesting shows I discovered through PodcastAwards.com
Wikipedia entry on OPML - the list exporter and more. Read about it on the blog of one of the main developers, Dave Winer. Or check out his occasional podcast, Morning Coffee Notes. Dave was also key in the invention of RSS and podcasting. Some people say he's obnoxious, but considering how fundamental he's been in the creation of one of the most exciting periods in the history of human communication - I think he's damn humble.

Ok, them's the shownotes. Here's the file again in case you missed it. Look for lots more and better podcasts coming from me, darnit.

I need to move on to other things, I'll write more later about how I did it. Here's the super short version, though.

128 mb portable WAV/MP3 player I bought from Radio Shack for $40 on clearance. It records just fine, I think. This little thing is like a limb to me. Is that bad?
4Music's WAV to MP3 converter - trial version. My recorder makes WAV files, you probably want to hear MP3. Easy enough with this.
Audacity to edit a little bit. It's free and easy. Gotta love it. I'd heard about it for a long time, but it really is very cool. Some pain involved with figuring out export/saving, but with a little experimentation it worked. I'll probably blog about how to use Audacity later, if I continue to.
Libsyn hosting. I uploaded to their sandbox, username sandbox password sandbox. It seems to have worked fine. I will probably buy a $5 a month account here. There are several other services like Libsyn, but they seem the most transparent. Lots of my favorite podcasts use them, and they look good.

Alright, this has been a long post. Next time I do this, it will take me a lot less time. Hope you find the info of interest.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, podcasting, audio, reviews, howto,

Using Tags to Create an Attention Stream

2005-08-08T20:26:00.000-07:00

The possibilities enabled by social bookmarking and tagging (definitions) are endless, and something we've all just begun to explore. It's very exciting. If you get in the habit of using these tools well, they will provide so much value for you that you will never want to stop using them.

One of the newest and most interesting uses of social bookmarking and tagging is the creation of what's being called an "attention stream."

An attention stream is like a collaborative newswire. A group of people (co-workers, collaborators, a Community of Practice) decide upon a common tag they want to share for designating items they believe to be of common interest to members of the group. That tag is then applied when tagging blog posts with Technorati Tags, saving news items and web sites in Furl or Del.icio.us, photos in Flickr, calendar events at Upcoming.org, stated goals in 43 Things, or anything else that lets users apply tags like keywords to saved items. This doesn't have to be the only tag you apply to any item, you just include your attention stream tag amongst other tags when you want an item included in the stream.

Nothing will appear in your attention stream that hasn't been put there by another participant in the attention stream. It's a way to send something to a group, but without clogging their email inboxes or getting caught in junk mail boxes. It's very unobtrusive to subscribe to an RSS feed, and you will simply be notified when there are new items in the feed. You can read them or skip them, with very little clutter. There is the potential for outsiders to spam your stream, but if you chose a word or phrase that is unlikely to be used in any other than this very explicit circumstance - then the tag spammers are unlikely to find your stream at all. So don't chose a tag like "technology" or "oregon," but rather something unusual that people wouldn't think to use outside the scope of your project.

Next, you and others can watch the stream to learn from everyone's contribution to it. The simplest way to do this is to subscribe to the del.icio.us RSS feed (definition) for your shared tag; but if that's all you do then you are really going to miss a lot. Another way to watch the attention stream is to search for your tag at TagCentral.net. That will show you items tagged in lots of different platforms, instead of just one.

Finally, if you really want to be able to see what everyone is contributing you can grab all the rss feeds for the various tagging platforms and subscribe to them. It would be clumsy to try and read them separately, so it's best to combine them into a single spliced-together feed. If one person in the community can do this and share it with everyone, that's going to make it easiest.

Here's two examples:

nptech is a tag used to designate content as relevant to non-profit technology consultants, users, etc. The project has a web site that aggregates the things people tag nptech along with original articles and discussion. It started largely on del.icio.us, but people are using it in other tagging platforms as well. See a TagCentral search for nptech.

nptech meta feed (with pictures)
nptech meta feed (no pictures)

The two links above are RSS feeds that combine all the sources from TagCentral, listed on this page. There you can also find a javascript code snippet to put in your site if you'd like to resyndicate the headlines of the attention stream.

threatenedbloggers is a tag being used by The Committee to Protect Bloggers. (To see other tags the group's director has suggested, see this post.)

Two meta feeds for this tag are:
threatenedbloggers tag (with pictures)
threatenedbloggers tag (no pictures)

These meta feeds combine the feeds listed here. You can also go to that link to grab a javascript code to resyndicate the attention stream's headlines on your own site. Right now none of the Committee to Protect Bloggers proposed tags are being used by people other than the group's director. Thus the RSS feed for those tags would give you a look into web content he thinks is relevant to the group, but not content that others find of interest. Hopefully, supporters of that group begin using those proposed tags so that a shared repository of issue-specific online news is automatically compiled.

All the above feed combining was done with lazytom's FeedJumbler, a creation of Marcel Marchon.

Technorati Tags: threatenedbloggers, nptech, attention_stream, tagging, tags, social_bookmarking, Furl, del.icio.us, RSS, aggregation, feeds, newswire, collaboration, research

Pinging Service Switcheroo

2005-08-08T15:24:00.000-07:00

Tired of Pingomatic going down over and over again, I'm going to try and use Pingoat instead. It pings more sites and maybe it will be more reliable. I sure hope so, because people I recommend Pingomatic to are liable to think me less reliable if the services I recommend don't work half the time. Ugh.

If you are unfamiliar with pinging, it's basically letting search engines and related services know that your site has been updated and that they should come and give it a look to update their index of your content. I wrote more about pinging here.

Technorati Tags: ping, pinging, Pingomatic, Pingoat, Webapps, reliability, consulting

Social Media Gone Multi-Media: Diggnation Pod and Vidcast

2005-08-08T14:39:00.000-07:00

How powerful is the potential for new-tech enabled micro media to challenge the mainstream? It was pretty funny to watch ABC News taping the Diggnation vidcast and see the shows hosts ask the ABC folks to grab another beer for them out of the fridge.

This is a great show. Two guys, apparently self-appointed, are video and audio taping their discussion of the newest headlines on Digg.com. Digg is a social bookmarking/social media collaborative newswire, where users download a bookmarklet similar to Furl of Del.icio.us and click it to submit news stories they find on line. Each day, the stories that have received the most clicks make it to the top of the list. It's effectively a community edited tech news source and it's very cool. According to the Diggnation episode I am watching right now, Digg.com just made it into the top 5,000 websites in the world according to traffic monitor Alexa.com.

Diggnation is two guys drinking beer and talking about those top stories. They have a good screen presence and are quite knowledgeable. I grabbed the RSS feed for both the podcast and the vidcast and will use it regularly to keep abreast of tech news. I think a lot of people are watching and listening. Who wants to watch mainstream media when there's stuff like this out there? Having other people vet the best of the mainstream media and add their independent commentary is great.

I'm sure this was inspired by the Slashdot Review, a similar podcast where one man reviews his favorite recent stories from the super-community Slashdot.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were people doing similar things with political news? I'm sure it's just a matter of time. How will those shows compare to things like Democracy Now and Free Speech Radio News? Time will tell, and I can't wait. Update: Check out CommonTimes.org, basically the same type of thing as Digg.com but re more than tech news.

Humorously, the ABC News story (link to video) about Diggnation didn't explain Digg at all - it just talked about how easy it is to find podcasts now with iTunes. Silly mainstream media!

Technorati Tags: diggnation, social_media, digg, social_bookmarking, podcasts, vidcasts,

Two Great Audio Segments on Open Source and Podcasting

2005-08-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

I apologize for not keeping up with my regular posting schedule here, the last week and a half or so have been completely consumed by the most obnoxiously drawn-out move from one house to another I've ever experienced. I expect to be back in the action soon.

In the meantime, I've been listening to a whole lot of podcasts while I move. It's been great. My brain is stuffed with awesome information!

Two that I highly recommend listening to are:

Andrew Morton speaking about his roll as the #2 decision maker regarding the evolution of the open source Linux kernel. 50 minutes of speaking, 40 of Q&A. This is an awesome introduction to how open source software development occurs...and it is a beautiful process. Democratic? Not really, but collaborative yes. This talk is relatively easy to understand and very entertaining.

Adam Curry on issues in Podcasting. Curry does a terrific podcast of his own almost every day, The Daily Source Code, and he speaks at many different forums, but this is the most in depth discussion I've found so far of the history of podcasting, as well as it's past, current and future issues. Curry is key in this exploding medium, his politics are pretty cool, and this is a good discussion. If you haven't listened to it, I'd recommend an episode or two of The Daily Source Code first.

Both of these are from the site IT Coversations, which for computer and internet enthusiasts is simply one of the best things there is right now on the whole internet. I cannot sufficiently express my enthusiasm for the site. It's fantastic.

I hope you'll take the time to check out these audio learning adventures (if you will), they are great for putting on an mp3 player and listening to on a bike ride, but you can listen to them on your computer as well.

Related: My Furl archive of Podcasts Downloaded.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, Linux, open_source, Adam_Curry, , podcasting_issues, podcasting_history

Great Interview on Tagging

2005-08-02T18:33:00.000-07:00

"Using tags like folders is like drawing Venn diagrams with no overlapping circles -- possible, but so destructive of the value of the system as to make the effort pointless." -Clay Shirky

That little pearl of wisdom and many others can be found in a great interview about tagging over at AdamNation.org. Shirky even discusses the nptech tag and says...

Group tagging is the next big frontier, or one of them. This work will include, of course, spam defenses like "Only show me things tagged 'design' by people I know, or people they know." As we know from years of bitter experience, it's impossible to create a source of group-created value with low barriers to entry without also inviting system gaming.

All around a very interesting interview. The rest of the site seems less interesting to me personally. And it's run by the creator of a hosted blog system that comes across as condescending, not to mention that the proprietary tag-based markup language for determining the layout of your blogs elements sounds worse than wiki-code! I really appreciated the interview here though.

Technorati Tags: tagging, tags, Shirky, social_bookmarking, nptech

RSS in Industry: Some examples

2005-08-02T18:07:00.000-07:00

Rok Hrastnik, of MarketingStudies.net, finds more examples of ways big organizations (Disney amongst them) are using RSS to communicate internally. There's no reason why small companies and organizations shouldn't do similar things. As Rok writes, many of these are simple examples based primarily on the superiority of RSS over email. But they are interesting none the less. These are real, powerful tools that the corporate world is puting into practice now. It shouldn't just be them who are doing it.

Intro to RSS

Technorati Tags: RSS, internal_communication, email, nptech

Gender and New Media: Blogher wrap-ups

2005-08-02T17:21:00.000-07:00

In case anyone doesn't know, Blogher, a big conference on women in the blogosphere happened last weekend. Lots of blog posts and photos aggregated by the Technorati Tag blogher. There's a good narrative wrap up over at Crossroads Dispatches, super-geek Mary Hodder (blogging at Napsterization.org ) writes about practical, pro-active responses to gender disparity (and a very useful looking wiki).

It looks like a very well run conference and very fulfilling for participants by most accounts.

Presumably, IT Conversations will post audio files from the event soon, as they were amongst the media sponsors. For now, not much audio that's findable for me anyway. Blinkx.com found 2 results (both men talking about the conference before it occurred) and Podscope.com found zero. I have subscribed to the RSS feed for Blinkx's podcast search for "blogher conference" and will thus know whenever any new audio content is found. Sure can't do that with Podscope!

Blogher is also a great place to find links to women and pro-women blogs. It looks pretty cool.

Related: My Furl archive of items regarding Power Dynamics Online

Technorati Tags: blogher, gender, power_dynamics_online, conferences, blogs

Del.icio.us and Furl Talk for Non-Profits

2005-07-28T12:20:00.000-07:00

The discussion about Social Bookmarking Services continues over at TechSoup.org. Several people are visiting this site from that one today, so regular readers here might be interested in visiting the thread over there for info or to contribute.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, Furl, SMBS, Social_Bookmarking, nptech, nonprofit, TechSoup

Great Podcasts: The Podshow Network

2005-07-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Podcasts are one of my favorite ways to learn and be entertained. I listen to them on the way to work, on the way home, when I walk the dog, darn near every chance I get. And as a result, I feel better informed about my particular field of interest (web tech) and about up to date global politics than a University education ever made me feel.

One of the most interesting phenomena in podcasting today is the excellent network of shows called The Podshow Network. Carefully selected, the Podshow shows are well produced, informative, entertaining and irreverent. Here's a short description of each of them:

The Dawn and Drew Show - The original rock stars of podcasting, this couple of 30 year olds in Wisconsin (?) sit and talk about nothing in particular, often podcasting and sex. They do it twice a week and they have a huge listenership because they are very good at it. Charming, funny and very into audience participation. This is the best example of what personal podcasting can be. The podosphere is now filled with imitators.

The Accident Hash- Mostly music with a high-energy host. Done in tangent with the very impressive Podsafe Music Network, a hub of music offered by musicians for podcasters to play for free on their shows. Very successful so far, and some of the music is quite good. Accident Hash highlights one of the Network's founder's favorites.

The Skinny on Sports - Never listened to it.

The Gilmore Gang - A handful of experts having lively conversation about tech news, often web tech, including many of the things I write about here. If you are looking for more in depth information, this is a great source of it. I really like this show a lot.

Yeast Radio - Madge Weinstein's uber-raunchy but very political talk show. This is a great show that I listen to every time a new episode is released. Sometimes it's silly and pointless, often it's fantastic. Great guests, like filmmakers and artists from around the world. Lots of fun.

Rock and Roll Geek Show -Said to be a music show with very knowledgeable host. Never listened.

The Daily Source Code - Podshow founder and father of podcasting Adam Curry (of MTV fame) hosts a very well produced daily show mostly about podcasting. It's actually very good and I listen to it every chance I get. He also plays mash-ups sent in by listeners (two or more songs mixed together to create a new sound, but playing on the old songs.) If you want to get a great idea of how excited people are about podcasting, check out the first sone played in this episode. It's a rockin' song all about how wonderful this new medium is. It's cool.

Sound Seeing Tours - A great concept, we'll see how well executed it is. I listened to a walk through London the day after the first bombings this month. Kind of interesting. Right now the newest shows are one about a skydiving trip, Adam Curry taking a late night walk through San Francisco, a tour of the Seattle Art Museum and a hot-air balloon ride at "The Jackson Hot Air Jubilee."

So check out the Podshow Network. You can listen to any of the shows on your computer, or you can download them onto an iPod or other portable mp3 player (I got mine on clearance at Radio Shack for $40 and it's totally worth it.)

A list of some of the podcasts I've recently downloaded runs on the left sidebar of this blog, and the full list is available here. Online resources I've bookmarked about podcasting are here.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, podcasting, PodShow, audio, learning, entertainment, comedy, tech,

Newsgator is Down

2005-07-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

Now I know that I haven't posted here in several days, and I feel bad about that, but I'm not a huge company with lots of employees and a healthy budget. I'm just me. Newsgator, however, is a big company and so I would like to be able to go to their blog and read some explanation of why their service is currently down and when I can expect it to return. Their blog gets posted to about once or twice a week, and usually just to cheerlead what they are doing.

To be fair, Newsgator has done some great customer service for me in the past. But as a client said to me last week when del.ico.us was unavailable for several hours, "these tools are unlikely to be more widely adopted until they are reliable and intuitive." Now I don't know about the intuitive part, but doesn't it seem like one Web 2.0 service or another is unavailable almost every day?

When I wanted to figure out what was going on with Del.icio.us, I visited the official blog, found some reference to new servers being added, and posted a comment asking "is this why your service was unavailable for parts of the weekend?" The head of the organization posted a response that said, yes - that's why we were having problems. Thank you!

The Newsgator blog makes no mention of service problems that I can see, and does not even allow comments to be posted! Posts are categorized, but there's only one category: "weblogs" Ugh. Has anybody over there read the ClueTrain or not?

I'm going to keep using Newsgator for now, and recommending it to other people. But I'd love to see a free, web-based RSS reader that was more responsive to the Web 2.0 ethos. I'd like to see them openly discuss their up-time, too, like web hosting companies do.

Technorati Tags: Newsgator, Web2.0, RSS, aggregators, blogs, company_blogs, service, complaints, del.icio.us

Human Rights and New Web Tools

2005-07-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

I spent the afternoon yesterday working with Curt Hopkins, the director of a fantastic organization called The Committee to Protect Bloggers (CPB). They work to raise awareness about people around the world who have been imprisoned or otherwise faced state repression for what they write on their blogs. It's a really important issue. I've been in contact with Curt for awhile and now I've been added to the organization's staff list as technical consultant. Yay!

I'm helping CPB utilize Technorati Tags, Tagcentral, pinging, social bookmarking and RSS. I'm also helping them use tags to create attention streams. I'll post more later about specifics that are reusable for any project. I really hope this will help web users around the world adopt these exciting new tools.

Technorati Tags: CPB, bloggers, blogs, prison, Freedom_of_Speech, International, nptech

Multimedia: New Podcast Search Engine with RSS feeds!

2005-07-20T11:42:00.000-07:00

Blinkx.com is now offering podcast search. That's rad. Somehow this company, as Podscope.com does as well, searches the "full text" of podcasts for your search terms. At least, I think this is what Blinkx.com is doing. It might just be searching the shownotes. One way or the other, it's great. The search interface is really nice too, actually on both of the above engines. However (yay!) unlike Podscope, Blinkx offers RSS feeds for every search. I am beside myself with joy! Now I can be notified whenever any new podcasts are found with my search terms in it, without having to go look myself. Yay! Why does Podscope not offer this? Why does every search engine not offer this? I have no idea.

Blinkx.com is most well known for their TV and video search, offering real clips of TV news shows wherein your search terms are used. It's awesome. They have a limited selection of sources, but it's a pretty good selection. The alternative is Google Video, which searches lots of even local TV news station broadcast transcripts, but has strange things going on as to whether it will show you a clip, show you a transcript or only show you a paragraph of transcript. Hopefully it will improve soon. (Yahoo News offers a video/audio, but anyone whose results for search term "immigration," for example, consist of one item that's 3 weeks old...that service isn't functioning as far as I'm concerned.)

I would write about some comparison searches between Blinkx and Podscope here, but I'm not going to use a search engine that doesn't offer RSS feeds unless I have to. Blinkx is indexing Democracy Now so for now I'm happy. I wish they would index Free Speech Radio News and the A-Infos Radio Project, but you can only ask for so much from corporate America. I'm thrilled they are doing what they are.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, podcast_search, search, RSS, persistent_search, Blinkx, Podscope, joy, video, Google, Yahoo

RSS Confusion Stalls Adoption

2005-07-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

From All Things RSS: Musings on RSS from and Investor's Point of View

RSS is arguably the core of what makes a blog a blog. Being able to review dozens, or more, of posts as they update in real time is central to the value that blogs can provide. Unfortunately, the presentation of both the concept and the mechanics of RSS failed utterly with test participants. And in fact, even the basic idea of RSS ran afoul of users’ fear of unwanted costs and spam.

This sums it up well. If you think blogs are powerful, wait till you start reading blogs via RSS. It will change your world. (If you think blogs are a flash in the pan, I hope you are at least caught up enough to know that voice mail and photocopy machines are here to stay. What part of easy, fast information sharing online seems flaky to you?)

I cannot explain the above mentioned problems with RSS adoption other than as a result of the incredible difficulty of explaining the tool, without walking some one through initial use. It is for that purpose that I created this explanation box. I would love to get some feedback on it. Ultimately, however, I think that walking a person through subscribing to and reading RSS feeds is the most effective way to assist in adoption of this vital, powerful technology.

Related: See my Furl archive topic RSS and Alexandra Samuel's RSSTocracy intro to RSS site.

Technorati Tags: RSS, adoption, nptech

Blog Search Without RSS? No thanks.

2005-07-19T17:27:00.000-07:00

I really like Clusty.com for searching the web in general. The metasearch (many different engines searched), the clustering by topic, the live preview windows (click the magnifying glass in search results) and the inclusion of Wikipedia are all awesome. When search guru Gary Price wrote yesterday that Blogs.Clusty.com is his favorite blog search engine because it metasearches Blogdigger , Daypop , Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse, and IceRocket - I got pretty excited. But the first thing I went looking for was, "can I still subscribe to the RSS feed of my search so I'll be automatically notified of any new search results?" (What I call persistent search to RSS.) Unfortunately, it appears that the answer is no!

Searching for something manually, be it on the web in general or in the blogosphere, is a very inefficient way to gather information. When a project is begun, I believe you should determine some good search queries once - and then grab the RSS feed for those searches. Don't miss new results just because you forgot to repeat a search manually. Don't act based on search results that are as old as the last time you remembered to go perform a search manually. Get all the newest results as soon as they are available on the web after only performing a search one time!

Now, all the above blog search engines offer RSS feeds for their searches, so why do I have to lose that when I do a metasearch? RSSMix can splice multiple feeds into one new feed, wouldn't it only make sense for any blog metasearch engine, like Clusty, to do this as well?

This is such a powerful application that failure to include it in any search service is a huge loss. I really hope that will change. For now I will continue to grab the RSS feeds from each of those services one at a time, perhaps running them through RSS Mix if I need one feed for output, but I sure wish that Clusty created one metafeed for me.

Technorati Tags: blog_search, blogs, search, RSS, metasearch, metafeed, Clusty, RSSMix, web2.0,

Blog Posting Routine for Maximum Traffic

2005-07-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

I've been too busy to post here for the last few days, but I have been thinking about the routine I'm developing for the completion of each blog post. After each time I write a post here, I click the bookmarklet buttons I've dragged to my favorites toolbar for each of the following services:

Technorati Tags, to create the subject headings by which searchers in the industry standard Technorati Tag Search Engine will find my posts. Get the bookmarklet and instructions here.
Ping-O-Matic to let search engines know you've added a new blog post that needs to be indexed. Once you've done this the first time, you can just take the URL of the success page, drag it onto your favorites toolbar, and click on it each time you want to ping regarding a new article. It's easy and fantastic!
Bookmark your article with Furl and Del.icio.us. Having an account, and a bookmarklet, for both is probably a good idea. Go to the unique URL of each new blog post you write, and save it in both of these databases. Describe it accurately, tag it appropriately, and others will appreciate your contribution to the general body of knowledge that's been indexed by readers and writers.

I think that's about it. It's easy once it's routine, and it will make your blog a much more findable and usable resource. Once you have these four bookmarklets set up on your toolbar, you should be able to bop through these steps in no time.

Technorati Tags: blogging, traffic, routine, indexing, services, bookmarklets, SBMS, pinging

Blog Search Buzz- What does the future hold?

2005-07-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

Readers may notice that I've replaced the Technorati search box on my blog with one from Blogdigger. I'll be replacing the Technorati box on all my client blogs as well. I am thrilled that the Blogdigger box actually works, and in a reasonable amount of time. (The rad service over at GrabPERF indicates that Blogdigger is about 5 times faster than Technorati right now.) Blogdigger works especially well in conjunction with Ping-O-Matic, a wonderful service that lets you one-click notify many of the major blog search engines that you've updated your site and it should be reindexed. Yay!

It's too bad Ping-O-Matic doesn't ping Feedster and Bloglines. I'd email all three companies about that, but I shouldn't have to now that I've blogged about it. All three should automatically discover this blog post. Cool, huh?

Anyway, blog search is a huge. Technorati is huge, and having problems scaling up. They say they'll get the situation under control in the next few weeks, but I feel like they've been saying that for awhile.

Meanwhile, the folks over at Business Week's awesome blog called Blogspotting have written a number of stories about blog search that are themselves good entry points into the discussion at a variety of sites. I've left comments a number of places there, and I don't have time to repeat or repost them here. Good articles to read are here, this one is ok, and this is a story with a graph that Blogspotting reblogged.

We'll see where all this goes, but as I've posted at greater length elsewhere, my two top priorities for blog search are these:

Give me Tagcentral.net's variety of tag searches, not Technorati Tag Search's limited number of sources. Give me Clusty style choosable metasearch, only for blogs and tags (give me a live preview window like Clusty too, for goodness sake). Don't give me Bloglines persistent-search RSS feed lock-in (see my comment here) give me search feed URLs I can grab and include in a persistent-search suite for clients. Give me some sort of standard for tagging that isn't going to give me nightmares that Technorati or whoever is going to stop working altogether at any moment.

Is all that too much to ask? I'm sure lots of other folks want the same things.

Technorati Tags: blog_search, blogs, search, service, future, web2.0,

IPod Parody: The Flea

2005-07-14T15:48:00.000-07:00

This 2 minute video, now hosted on the New York Times site, is a pretty funny series of jokes about the cult of the iPod.

One vision of high-tech farming

2005-07-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

Interesting story over at Agriculture Online about teaching young future farmers the basics of GPS, GIS, RFID etc. and their possible application in farming. The story is framed by ads for several huge bio-tech companies. I thought it would be of interest to all of my clients right now, and I imagine at least some of the other readers of this site.

Should new information technologies be harnessed for hyper-quantification of the proccesses involved in getting food to our tables? Or are there some vital qualities that cannot be digitized and are likely to be damaged by decisions made from a purely digital paradigm? I think this is cause for serious concern. I believe there's far more to life than efficiency, and there are more layers and factors that make up true long-term efficiency than huge agro-chemical conglomerates can be trusted to consider.

For the other side of the coin, you can see online technology put to use to resist biotech over at Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN) and The Institute for Science in Society (ISIS).

Technorati Tags: agriculture, GMO, food, farming, sustainability,

North Korea: The Subversive possibilities of Connectivity

2005-07-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

Wow. Powerful post and pictures of an internet cafe inside North Korea over at the Daily NK. It is, of course, only connected to other computers inside North Korea. Strict control of the internet is an important part of authoritarian efforts there, and presumably elsewhere. Just seeing these photos and imagining the circumstances is a powerful reminder of the importance of free flowing information.

Related: See the great news aggregation on North Korea at NKZone.org See also the podcasts (audio files) at Global Voices Online, not about North Korea in particular, but lots of discussion of the frontlines of physical, mental and online freedom.

Technorati Tags: nkorea, nptech, politics, internet_cafe,

Another View of Blog Creation

2005-07-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

I'm working with several clients right now on creating blogs and it's a lot of fun. This made it especially interesting for me to listen to a recent interview by Rok Hrastnik of MarketingStudies.net with blog coach John Jantsch. Jantsch is a small business marketing consultant and his discussion about starting a blog is interesting. It's about 40 minutes long and the link above is to Rok's write up of it, with the download link.

While I had not cared for some of the things I'd read of John's in the past, I was impressed with this interview. I appreciated his emphasis on ClueTrain style openness and creating an educational experience as a way to promote your services, and I liked the way he talked about all relationships requiring investments of quality time and energy.

I really encourage folks to check out other people offering services similar to mine. (I discussed some others in this post.) I think this will help them better understand these new media we are working with, it will help them appreciate the unique qualities of my services, and it may inspire potential clients to work with another consultant. I have hardly begun promoting my services at all, and already I am having a hard time doing all the work that I ought to with the clients I have. That's really exciting. Hopefully it means that Web 2.0 tools are coming into use more and more with social change groups and small biz folks, or at least into peoples' consciousness.

Related: See my Furl archive of articles, websites and services filed under "blogs"

Technorati Tags: interview, blogging, blog_coaching, consulting, John_Jantsch

Yay! Enviros Adopt RSS

2005-07-11T11:47:00.000-07:00

Fantastic news: The Northwest environmental news super-portal Tidepool.org has begun offering RSS feeds. That's really great, as I had previously had to burn a clumsy RSS feed for the site using FeedFire. While that was better than nothing, a real-live RSS feed is much better. They also have a nice simple explanation of RSS on their site. Hopefully this means that more and more environmentalists will start using RSS. It leaves me wondering whether they are also using Social Bookmarking too.

Technorati Tags: RSS, Environmentalists

Syndicating Headlines From Other Organizations: TechSoup.org

2005-07-09T12:53:00.000-07:00

I've just added headlines from the wonderful group TechSoup.org to the sidebar of this site. They are a non-profit tech support group and a thriving community. I hope that adding their site's headlines will add further to the value of the information here and encourage people to check them out too.

Technorati Tags: TechSoup, syndication, nptech

IBM summarizes RSS for their investors

2005-07-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

IBM already has more than 3,600 internal blogs, written by employees for other employees to read. Now the company is utilizing new web tools to communicate with the public as well. A good short description of the benefits of RSS has appeared on the Investor Relations page of the IBM website.

The two IBM investor relations series mentioned above will have an RSS feed to which you can subscribe. What does this do for you? Well, if you subscribe to the feed, you will be alerted whenever there is new material available. There is no clutter in your inbox and there is no need to share any of your personal information to sign up. You read the articles only when you wish—and if you get interested in subscribing to other RSS feeds you will enjoy the efficiency that this open technology already delivers to many others who have a need to stay up to date with a wide variety of news sources.

The creepy corporate world is adopting RSS as a natural matter of course; it would be a huge lost opportunity for them not to. Once you adopt RSS feed reading into your regular information consumption routine, you too will wonder what took you so long.

Microsoft will be including many RSS based features in their future software, but I'm guessing that just like current entry-level RSS tools (Safari, MyYahoo), some of the newsreading functionality will still be far more limited than what's available with a web based RSS aggregator.

Put a web based RSS aggregator together with a social bookmarking tool and you're really in business - able to read, file, access and share a huge amount of content efficiently from any computer online. IBM has it figured out, and they are no friend of justice or freedom - so I hope readers here will adopt these technologies for good work.

Related: See, for example, Google search "IBM and apartheid", and the website for the award winning book "IBM and the Holocaust" .

Found via Moonwatching and Scripting.com

Technorati Tags: RSS, IBM,

Adding GetFirefox Button

2005-07-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

I just added a button to my sidebar linking to the GetFirefox page. The link URL says something about "affiliate" but I'm not registered as an affiliate with the SpreadFirefox.com program.

I love Firefox. I considered not adding the button after noticing that only 25% of my readers are using Internet Explorer anyway, but as a public service to those 25% I decided to add the link. It takes about 2 minutes to download Firefox and it's wonderful. Note, however, that Macs on OS9 are out of luck.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, IE, Internet_Explorer, Browser

Cool Web 2.0 Consultants: You Really Exist!

2005-07-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

Over on the page describing My Services I wrote that I hadn't found anyone who offers training in all the tools I do. I then linked to a number of relatively corporate consultants as examples of who else is in the field. I realize now that it's time to change that page.

There are actually quite a number of people who are offering services similar to mine around the country. And that's very exciting. Especially in the non-profit/NGO world, there are people working hard to get Web 2.0 tools into the hands of great social change and advocacy groups. I've just begun to discover them, but some places you can check out include: NPTech Community, ConsultantCommons, and to some degree CompuMentor (they do a lot of work with more traditional computing, I believe, but they seem great).

I'm also going to revisit the language of one of my stated goals: "To help you be one of the people who knows the most about your field, fastest." I'm concerned that's articulated in a way that's more elitist than I want my work to be. My horoscope this week (via Rob Brezny) concluded that "the astrological omens say it's a perfect moment to decide what you'll do in the coming years to contribute to a world in which white men who speak English don't run everything." I feel like I've found, generally, what I want to do about that. And I need to continue to hone my skills at reflecting those values methodologically and rhetorically.

Much of this rethinking was inspired by checking out the work of Ruby Sinreich of Lotus Media Consulting. She's got a great site and looks like she offers some really fantastic services. I posted a comment to her blog yesterday, then saw in my traffic log that someone from Chapel Hill, NC, where she's from, visited my blog and looked at "my services." I was embarrassed and moved to change it. So thanks Ruby!

Technorati Tags: nptech, nonprofit, consulting, training, Web2.0

RSS feed reading visualized

2005-07-07T17:12:00.000-07:00

It's notoriously hard to explain what it means to read RSS feeds in 10 words or less, so I really enjoy things like the graphic above. It's from Kris Bell, a web designer with an impressive blog design portfolio. I think it does a great job of explaining feed reading in quickly. I'd like to try and find visual ways to explain other web tools too.

Technorati Tags: RSS, feeds, aggregator, explanation, visualization, Kris_Bell, nptech

International Youth and the Web

2005-07-07T15:17:00.000-07:00

Wow, just discovered the site Taking IT Global. It is a very active hub of young peoples from all around the world. I am very impressed, and I hope to find the time to plug in soon.

Found via Andy Carvin.

Technorati Tags: TakingITGlobal, youth, IT, international

Promoting Your Efforts Online with New Web Tools

2005-07-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

I just sent some suggestions to a non-profit group working on online promotion of an upcoming campaign. I've posted them here. Feel free to check them out, leave me feedback, and be inspired by all the awesome things you can do with new web tools!

Technorati Tags: promotion, blogs, RSS, podcasting, discussion,

Cybercafes and Public Internet in India and Elsewhere

2005-07-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

I get very excited about working with clients who do not have internet access at home but who use public computers. Be it at the local university, a cybercafe, or other public resources - just because you don't have your own computer doesn't mean you can't use the internet to do exciting things! In fact, as a new client and I were discussing this morning, there's no reason not to jump from relative computer non-use straight to Web 2.o! It's designed to be easy to use, so why make the clunky old web your computer use learning grounds?

And though such a lack of direct access to resources via private ownership might be looked down upon in some circles, even the elite are growing increasingly independent from their own hard drives and relying instead on data storage and bandwidth of the web itself. John Udell, the lead blogger for InfoWorld Magazine, for example says that even the fanciest new features of the Mac Tiger Operating System leave him unimpressed compared to what web tools were already doing for him.

Today I came across an interesting summary of a study about the use of cybercafes in India on the wonderful blog Conversations With Dina. Turns out that though we read more in the popular US press about cybercafes being used by terrorists (!) than anything else, it is a very important part of popular access to the internet around the world, especially by people outside of the upper classes. No surprises there, really, but it's an interesting study to look at for a more in-depth discussion of cybercafes' importance around the world.

Dina Mehta is an India consultant who writes for WorldChanging (pro-environment activisty type site), for SkypeJournal (group blog about Skype internet telephone, home of the free long distance phone call and something I wrote about here - not to be confused with the official Skype blog), for Global Knowledge Review (see their sample issue, I love this publication!) and the still very active Tsunami Help Blog (a great example of new web tools being put to good use.) Wow! What a busy person doing awesome things!

I know I've subscribed to Dina's RSS feed (definition) and am excited to read what she writes in the coming months.

Related: A great publication about getting connectivity and information technology resources into the hands of people on the margins of power is The Journal of Community Informatics. It's fantastic for academic style articles about these subjects.

See also my Furl archive for topic "International"

Technorati Tags: nptech, cybercafes, India, ownership, publiccomputers, web2.0, DinaMehta

The Flu Wiki: A Serious Application of New Web Tools

2005-07-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Another example of blogs and wikis being put to very serious use will soon be available in the Avian Influenza (Flu) Wiki written about by the progressive public health blog Effect Measure. Here a network of public health officials, observers and others will use the powerful tools of rapid information dissemination and collaborative editing to develop a living database of information regarding a potential public health dilemma. Very cool. There ought to be far more examples like this, and I trust with time there will be.

While tools like blogs and wikis are interesting in and of themselves, they are really all about taking the technical skill out of information sharing processes; allowing experts and others to focus on the information itself - minus delivery obstacles. Beyond ease of use, there are also medium specific features that make this information sharing as uniquely powerful as it is easy. Things like the trackback system, an advanced blog feature that allows readers to easily see where else on the web any given blog entry has been written about. Check out the trackbacks on the article I'm writing about in Effect Measure and you should see a link to this entry here. This kind of automatic gathering of information helps broaden the discussion about the issues.

The possibilities for blogs and wikis are countless. Any important subject that needs to be discussed openly, quickly, or in a collaborative manner could benefit from these and other new web tools.

Technorati Tags: Wiki, Blog, Flu, AvianInfluenza

Found via Stephen Baker on Blogspotting

Interview Posted

2005-07-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

Non-profit technologist Beth Kanter just posted an interview with me about blog coaching. It was nice. Her blog is a fantastic resource that I was very excited to find.

What does Furl call a Tag?

2005-06-30T14:30:00.000-07:00

Just sent this email to Furl after ongoing discussion with Delicious lovers demanded clarification. (Both of those are Social Bookmarking Tools.) I hope they will respond soon. It's a fairly big question, but they've always been good about responding to my questions in the past. Watch this spot for their reply, hopefully!

Help, I love Furl for many reasons, but am having a hard time convincing Delicious users that Furl is as usable. There is a real lack of clarity around the relationship between what everyone else calls "tags" and what Furl uses. I believe that "topics" are the equivalent, is this correct?

What is the Furl equivalent to seeing all items users have "tagged" with a certain term? Is there a way to exclude full text search and just search by topic, or keyword?

Is Furl planning on somehow integrating with the rest of the folksonomic and tagging community? I love that Furl lets Technorati include its search results (and other people too) but the relationship between what everyone else is calling tags and your whole world could really use some clarification. I'll post this email to my blog, so maybe you could reply there. Thanks for your time and your great service.

Related: My Furl archives of articles and websites related to Social Bookmarking are available here.

Technorati Tags: Furl, Delicious, Tagging, Tags, Folksonomy, Integration, SBMS

Blogger Now Hosts Your Images, and Mine!

2005-06-30T13:17:00.000-07:00

Here's picture number one of me, hanging out at the park by the river that runs through my home town. It's a great park. We were having a picnic with my girlfriend's sister, partner and daughter. It was a nice day and then we went bowling.

But that's not of interest to you all! Here's some web news: I just posted this picture using Blogger's own free image hosting service. That's new and very, very nice. There is absolutely nothing to it, you really just use the button on the post editor that didn't work before now. All the more reason to use this free and easy service. Now if they only let you categorize your posts and view by category, then there would be almost no reason for me to consider using other, paid blog software services.

I am currently recommending Blogger to clients with limited programming skills because of the simplicity. It's also simpler for me to focus on the skills I have around training in use of the medium than it would be to develop new programming skills faster than I already am.

Just for kicks, here's one more photo of me. I rarely post anything personal here, but I thought I'd try out the image hosting service and give regular readers a glimpse of what I look like. What does this image say? " Hire me, I never rest?" Hmmm...

We'll see how this image hosting plays out in the long run, how usable it is, etc. I'll probably put one or both of these images in the My Services section and keep an eye on them over time.

Discovered via The Blog Herald.

Technorati Tags: Images, Photos, Blogger, MarshallKirkpatrick

Wickerpedia: The Hard Woven Plant Fiber Encyclopedia

2005-06-30T12:54:00.000-07:00

Anyone familiar with Wikipedia may enjoy this satire: Wikermedia. It made me laugh, anyway. Try doing a search for something random on it. I think it's pretty funny.

How to Find RSS Feeds

2005-06-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

Alexandra Samuel, a fellow RSS evangelist, and I were exchanging some emails last week and she mentioned that many people have a hard time finding RSS feeds that they want to subscribe to. (See intro to RSS if needed.) I thought I'd write an entry here about some ways I recommend that people find RSS feeds of interest to them.

Search by subject in directories and RSS search engines, like Feedster, Feedminer, and 2rss.com

Make sure you know how to recognize a feed when you see one. Common links to feed URLs appear as orange buttons reading "RSS" "XML" or sometimes "ATOM." Sometimes it's just a text link reading something like "Syndicate this site." Those buttons are links that you should copy the URL of and paste them into your feed reader. Sometimes there are buttons to subscribe with one click via your feed reader (MyYahoo, MyMSN, Newsgator, Bloglines, etc.)

Firefox and Safari users will be notified any time a site they are on offers an RSS feed (in Firefox there is an orange button that appears in the bottom right corner of the browser.)

Just about all news organizations, and many sites that have regularly appearing new content, offer RSS feeds. Hopefully this will be more and more true over time. You really can take it almost for granted already, though, that a site with news will have an RSS feed.

All Blogspot (Blogger) blogs have RSS feeds, whether their authors know it or not. Just add atom.xml to the end of the URL and that's the feed for that blog. For example, marshallk.blogspot.com/atom.xml was my default RSS feed, before I upgraded with Feedburner. Now my RSS feed URL is in the sidebar of this blog's front page.

Many sites that should have an RSS feed, but don't, can have a simple one created for them via Feedfire.com. I love that service, but I hope that someday I won't have to use it anymore.

All Furl and Delicious users and tags have RSS feeds. For example, if you want to get the feed for everything I save in my Furl account, you can find that feed URL here. But if you want to just find what I save under topic RSS regarding search, those results and the feed for new ones are here. Likewise, if you want to grab the feeds for everything anyone tags with regarding a particular topic, I recommend you do a search at Tagcentral, where your results page will show you lots of feeds from different tag search engines.

Other people like Gataga, though I haven't used it much. It's a cross platform tag search engine, with search results available as an RSS feed.

Speaking of search, why search for your topic of interest manually, only when you remember to? You can easily set up persistent search feeds in many search engines that offer RSS feeds of your search results. That way, whenever the engine finds something new as a result of your search, you'll see that item in your RSS feed reader! I wrote about persistent search to RSS here.

Soon you'll have so many feeds you'll never surf for news again. The next step is learning how to best organize your feed reader, something I'll write about later.

Related: My Furl archive of everything I save related to RSS is syndicated on the sidebar of this blog's front page, and be viewed and searched here. That content itself also has its own RSS feed!

Technorati Tags: RSS, feeds, search,

Site Redesign: Side-Bar Switcheroo

2005-06-29T12:36:00.000-07:00

I decided while designing some blogs for a couple of clients that I really did need to be puting sidebars on the left-hand side instead of on the right. Several people have told me it is more visually appealing on the left, and more likely to be looked at. I fill sidebars with content that is very important to me, so I want to make sure people look at and use them.

It brought to mind a visual attention study described over at EyeTools Research. They used this eye-heat map to demonstrate that most people who are running ads on the right hand side of their blogs are wasting their time because most people never look there. I wondered upon seeing this wether that's because the right hand side naturally doesn't get attention, or wether people aren't looking at it when there are ads there.

At the same time, the left side doesn't get a whole lot of attention either. So who knows what it means. One way or the other, I think taking my sidebar to the left is a good idea. Any feedback on how it looks now?

Technorati Tags: layout, blogs, attention, design, sidebar, advertisements

Google Shoots Down Mash-Up Of Itself

2005-06-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

So the folks over at XtraGoogle say they've been ordered to take down the site upon orders by Google. Bummer! XtraGoogle was a site that had graphic icons for many of the Google services that are not described on the front page of Google.com. You typed your search term into the box, then clicked one of the services (eg. Google Maps, Google Scholar, Google Video, etc.) and then it took you to the results page of that Google Search.

Why would Google do this? They weren't losing any ad revenue, as the searches ultimately ended up on their page with their ads. Xtragoogle just looked better and was more functional for users of Google's many services. The only thing I can think of it that it was a matter of control. That's a real shame. At a time when other companies are releasing their source code, engaging in collaboration, enlisting their biggest fans instead of suing them, etc. - why does Google keep doing things like this?

Related: Previous article I wrote about Google's new developments.

See also my Furl archive re Search here.

Technorati Tags: search, Google, XtraGoogle, mashup, bully

NPtech: Non-Profit Tech Adoption via Web 2.0

2005-06-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

Just came across a whole community of people working to help non-profit's adopt new tech (via Technorati tag search for non-profit). One of the funnest I've found so far is Peter Campbell's blog, which is a good place to start looking around for like-minded folks. He and his associates (including some folks from TechSoup.org, who I wrote about earlier) are using the tag "nptech" in delicious to create a stream of found web content about non-profit tech issues. Despite my frustrations with Del.icio.us, this is really exciting. The tag "nptech" is now being called an attention stream - items online tagged as related to a particular subject that many people keep consistent watch over (via RSS). Cool. You can view the stream at this Del.icio.us page, or better yet, at this Technorati Tag search page.

I'll start contributing to that via Technorati tags, though I'll be darned if I fire up the old Delicious account again. Of course, if Furl got it together like Spurl does to cross post to your delicious account automatically, then we'd be in business. True cross platform collaboration. But I suppose if you'd prefer to go back to the days when you could only call people who had telephone service from the same companyas you did...

Said group is also starting a site just for this attention stream and related resources, with an as yet undetermined name. Check it out here.

Technorati Tags: nptech, non-profit, attentionstream, collaboration, furl, spurl, delicious

Stop Wasting Time With Failed Searches

2005-06-28T10:22:00.001-07:00

Just reread an article from a year ago called "The High Cost of Not Finding Information" from the publication KM World (as in Knowledge Managment). (found via JohnT's Furl feed) It's a good source of information about the amount of time that knowledge workers waste with failed internet searches. It's really incredible how much time and energy professionals spend looking for information online with zero results!

These stats are from the article:

Knowledge workers spend from 15% to 35% of their time searching for information.

Searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less, according to both Web search engines and our own surveys. An IDC study in 2001 found that only 21% of respondents said they found the information they needed 85% to100% of the time.
40% of corporate users reported that they can not find the information they need to do their jobs on their intranets.

Those these statistics from the corporate world are several years old, I believe that people in the non-profit and small business sectors likely suffer these problems even worse than those more corporate because we used to rarely have access to the information storage and retrieval software that big companies invest in. (Now that's changing with Web 2.0) It is also possible that this time wasting is less of a problem for small biz and non-profit parties because many such people set their standards lower.

Either way, I think that our access to information through search can be vastly improved by a handful of things, including:

learning how to use Google properly

learning search engines other than Google, including metasearch engines, specialty and multi-media search

using persistent search automation to know what information is available concerning your work, as soon as it is available, instead of only finding it when you go look for it manually

saving your information properly the first time you find it: in a web based searchable database with title, key information included as a clipping, and a cached copy in the archive in case the information is no longer available online elsewhere when you need it. For all these purposes, I use and highly recommend Furl.

I believe that tools like these I can make a huge difference in your time invested to work with information that you need vs. the amount of time you waste looking for it in the first place. The search situation in terms of users' success is currently dismal, but it doesn't have to be. The tools are there, we just have to learn how to use them.

Related: See my Furl archive of articles I've saved about search, as well as lots of search engine options beyond Google. See also a previous article I wrote about search and google here.

Technorati Tags: Search, Time, Furl, Google, SBMS, Non-Profit

RSS Digest Update

2005-06-28T04:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's the middle of the night and I can't sleep. Maybe this will help, though. I just got an email from the folks over at RSS Digest letting me know that I don't need to freak out - their service is back up and available again. (See post just prior to this one where I was totally freaking out.) In fact, they will be releasing a new, better version of the service in a week, as described on their site.

Was the temporary shut down an attention getting ploy? I don't think so at all. Their service really is so great that I have every reason to believe it was overloaded. The person who emailed me thanked me for my enthusiasm about their "little service," which I thought was funny. I'm sure it's not difficult to write the code to display an RSS feed on a web site - but that's not something I know how to do. I know about creative use of services like theirs, and how to communicate with people about the possibilities. But I don't know the programming required to recreate that service myself. So to me it's not a "little service" and judging by the number of users they have, it's obviously a big deal to many other people as well.

(To see an example of how I use RSS Digest, check out the bottom of the sidebar on the front page of this blog. There you'll see automatically syndicated the newest items in certain catagories of my Furl archives. It's RSS Digest that takes the RSS feed and turns it into a viewable display for my site. Yay!)

Tragedy! Horror! A Key Service is Overloaded!

2005-06-26T17:20:00.000-07:00

Update: Hello to everyone visiting from Peter's teasing post re this one. While you are here I hope you'll check out the rest of my site. I have since made another post where I stop freaking out (see front page) since the service is back up. Still, if anyone else is interested in ritual sacrifice (per our cult), just let me know.

I am in shock, though I know I shouldn't be. The folks over at RSS Digest have announced that they are too slammed with users to continue their fantastic service right now. They create javascript RSS feed displays like the ones I've got over on the right sidebar of my blog (Podcasts Downloaded, My Recent Furls re Search, etc).

I'm not surprised, as this is an invaluable service. I can't believe that no one else is offering it for free, though I'm sure this is why. Feedroll will give you a script you can copy and paste to display on your RSS feed on your site, but it is unclear whether you get multiple feed displays for their $15 a month subscription rate. Furthermore, they are probably unwilling to create a display to syndicate a feed you don't own. And I love displaying search results automatically by RSS. That's what makes the sites I work with little hubs of the newest information in their fields. (What Rok over at MarketingStudies.net calls RSS Radars)

I am heartbroken that RSS Digest is down. I sent them ten bucks as a donation to help. If you use their service you should too. This will be simple Web 2.0 function someday and performing this it will be no problem. But for now I can't use it on client's blogs and I am so upset about it!

Obviously this calls into question the business model of so many little Web 2.0 service providers, "tell me what you want, I'll create a javascript to make it happen, you link back to me, and enough people will click on my ads that I'll make a profit." Apparently, that's not always the case.

But just like Haloscan commenting provides a great service for $12 per year, I imagine that RSS Digest could move towards a subscription model. So long as they let me display the feeds of other sites beyond my own, I'd pay $10 a month for their service.

Technorati Tags: RSS, RSSDigest, Web2.0, Services, Design, Tragedy

Lawrence, KS: Newspaper Tech Convergence

2005-06-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

Just listened to a wonderful, funny podcasted talk by Rob Curley, the head of online activity at the Lawrence Journal World. It is absolutely incredible how much multi-media content and user contribution they have going on, for a news site focused on a town of 80 thousand! It's a great talk and gives you some idea of the future that news/multi-media organizations may have ahead of them.

One tidbit: every little kid who plays sports in the town has their own web page, with box scores, cumulative stats, an audio interview and a service to compare their stats with any other player! T-ball players, even. It's adorable. And parents can sign up to receive an automatic email or cell phone text message if a game gets canceled. The KU basketball team's section of the paper's site offers to text fans' phones every ten minutes during a game with an update, and last weekend 5,000 people were signed up for the service! Of course there's far more involved than sports, but that's just some of the most endearing.

Technorati Tags: Podcasts, Newspaper, Convergence, Journalism

Technorati Tag Bookmarklet

2005-06-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

Update: bookmarklet can now be grabbed best here. Grab it while you can!

So, in helping someone new to blogging get set up, I came upon a Technorati Tag Bookmaklet that helps avoid all the HTML of tagging a blog post. (See Technorati Tag Search, a great first research step.) Check it out here. Just drag the link on that page to your toolbar, and then click on it at the end of any blog post. The bookmarklet will give you a snippet of code to paste into the end of your post, and voila, you've got Technorati Tags for your blog post. I know I get a lot of traffic from Technorati Tag searches. They are a key part of the new era of popular classification and a great way to relate to information.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, bookmarklet, tagging, tags, blog

Softening the interface: RSS and Delicious

2005-06-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

So, in my everlasting quest to find the best way to explain RSS feeds to new users short of demonstrating them (by far the easiest way!) I have come up with this: (What's an RSS Feed Reader?) I set it up originally for a client, but I think I'm going to use it on my sidebar as well. If you have a blog or website that you'd like to use that link on, feel free to view the source code, copy and paste it in. The linking code is specially written to make the new window pop up the way it does, so please copy the whole code if you are going to use it.

Del.icio.us, a very popular Social Bookmarking tool that people build add-ons to all the time continues to develop. Social bookmarking will rock your world, in case you don't know. Check out this cool new AJAX tool called del.icio.us direc.tor by Johnvey Hwang. It's very cool, if you've got a del.icio.us account. Someday, del.icio.us is liable to surpass Furl and I'll make the switch. It still has a ways to go, though. I'd love to see the features of Furl mixed with the features of Spurl mixed with the development community of Del.icio.us. Is this too much to ask?

One way or the other, I use Furl for now. My entire furl archive is available here and I syndicate via RSS feeds my Furl categories for Podcasts Downloaded, Search and RSS on the right hand side of this blog's front page. If you are interested in social bookmarking, you can see the top rated items in my Furl archive in my Social Bookmarking category here.

Related: Check out the official blog for Del.icio.us. It's going to be a very interesting contest between them and their competitors. I hope that they can cooperate to a degree, as can be seen in Technorati Tag Search.

Technorati Tags: RSS, SocialBookmarking, Delicious, Furl

Beyond search, Google Wallet may challenge PayPal

2005-06-23T13:25:00.000-07:00

Sid Yadiv over at The Daily Rundown just wrote about rumors that Google is going to start on online payment service that will function as an alternative to PayPal. For anyone who has not used it, PayPal is owned by EBay and really is very reliable and trustworthy. It's also very easy. It takes less than 5 minutes to get a PayPal account. It's worth doing.

Google offers more and more services all the time. Check out Google Labs for a peak into one layer of what they are working on. See also XtraGoogle for a shortcut to many of Google's services and Soople for a graphic interface making advanced search queries easier to use. Wikipedia has a great entry listing Google tools that are available.

If you dislike Google's search hegemony (I know I do some times) you might enjoy Clusty, A9.com and Jux2 for searches. All produce very good results, as well as offering cool features that Google doesn't have.

Most interesting is his call for cooperation between Google and PayPal. Collaboration between services should happen far more often than it does. It's a real pain to use different Instant Messaging services, and I really wish there was more collaboration across tagging and social bookmarking systems. Can you imagine how horrid it would be if you couldn't email people who were using a different email service than you? I don't know why competitor cooperation is so rare still online, other than that companies are still stuck in an old paradigm of trying to lock users in to their service alone. It's ugly, and hopefully it's a paradigm that is dying in favor of services competing based on their relative merits.

Related: Don't miss the short film Epic 2015, a funny but informative guess into the future of Google and the web in general.

My Furl archive re Search is viewable here.

Technorati Tags: Google, PayPal, Search, Commerce, Cooperation

TechSoup: A Great Tech Place for Non-Profits

2005-06-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

Just rediscovered the fantastic work being done over at Techsoup, a very high-quality site for non-profit groups. Their forums are very well ran, they offer headlines by RSS, it's fantastic! The people involved also seem to prioritize recognition of the limited budgets and tech that many non-profits have access to. It's a place I hope to participate more in the future. I think many of my readers here would find it useful as well.

Technorati Subject Tags: Non-Profit, TechSoup

LA Times Wiki and A Lack of Understanding

2005-06-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

So the LA Times let users wikify a set of editorials about the war in Iraq this weekend, but since posting the experiment on Friday they have already removed it come Sunday. It was taken down because of defacement! What a shame. For those who don't know, a wiki is a web page that anyone can edit. That's the basic idea, but a good wiki also contains all previous versions of the page, makes it easy to revert to previous versions, and asks users to describe any change they make. With enough eyes on it, a wiki develops wonderfully and spammers and saboteurs are quickly taken care of. They are great for collaborative knowledge and document development, amongst other purposes. I don't think an editorial is a very good use of wiki, but it was removed before I saw it, so I don't know how it played out. The best example of a wiki in the world is Wikipedia (link to English version).

About.com's columnist on US Politics wrote a couple of dreadful articles about the Time's wikied editorials: here (discussing it's launch) and here (on its closure).

Here's what I emailed the columnist:

Hi, re your suggestion that there be a waiting period before you can edit a wiki. I'm a consultant who trains people how to use tools like wikis, and there is no reason for a waiting period or any other kind of control. There was no reason for the LA Times to remove their wiki article.

The way a wiki works is that each reader should make sure the article is in good shape when they find it and leave it (deleting spam in it if necessary, for example) and readers must understand that the content cannot be found in the front page of the article alone, but is found in the whole body of previous versions and page history. Wikis are unbreakable for this reason. If enough people are deleting spam when they come upon it, the system will work just fine. I imagine the Times folks were just scared, and the users were rude, and people involved didn't know how to use a wiki well enough.

Best wishes,
Marshall Kirkpatrick

Of course her spam filter denied my email, so she'll never get it. A discussion wiki space after each of her articles sure would be nice. There's nothing like that, but there sure are lots of ads on the page! I also used the comment space over at A Real Waste of Time's write up on the LA Times wiki to stick up for wikiworld.

These are such simple concepts, it makes me sad that people are so quick to grab hold of simplistic critiques. Yes, the fact that anyone can edit a wiki article means that anyone can deface it as well. But it also means that anyone can fix it. Usually with one button "revert to previous version." Is this really so complicated? Perhaps critics should learn how something works better before being so vocally critical.

Technorati Tags: Wiki, Ignorance, Collaboration

Web 2.0 Blogs

2005-06-19T15:21:00.000-07:00

The world of Web 2.0 is picking up more and more discussion. Two great sources of information about the phenomenon are Read/Write Web and TechCrunch.

Defining Web 2.0 is a challenge still. I define it as the current period of services oriented web applications enabled by ubiquitous broadband, cheap storage and programming innovations like RSS, AJAX, etc. That's the short, high-context version. For a longer, but simpler explanation, see my post titled "Talking Web 2.0: Not Web Pages, But Web Services."

My goal is to get social justice oriented organizations and small businesses into the world of Web 2.0. I think the tools are fantastic - they need to be used by cool folks so the work can be done all the better.

Technorati Tags: Web2.0

Posting equals traffic

2005-06-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted here in several days, my other jobs are asking a lot of my time this week, I've been taking some personal time and I've been working with clients instead of blogging. As a result, I had fewer people visit this blog yesterday (3) than had in a month. (Most days between 15 and 35 people view this blog. I think that's great given that I haven't done any promotion.)

It's pretty clear that posting articles is what gets people reading what you've written. Even older content is more likely to be seen if there is new content brining people to your site. I've been trying to write one post per day for awhile, but the extreme end of the spectrum looks very different still. Anna Marie Cox, who writes the D.C. gossip blog Wonkette, said in a recent audio interview posted on the wonderful siteIT Conversations that she is contractually obligated to write 12 blog posts every day! As part of the Gawker Media blog empire, she's paid ultimately by advertising dollars. And advertising rates rise and are sold according to page impressions, or reader numbers. It is an established fact, not just for me, that more posting equals more readers.

Blogging daily is a hard routine to get into (imagine 12 posts per day! ) but it's something that separates the serious online players from those of us that just use the internet for our various purposes. Both orientations are of course just fine. But establishing a name for yourself and making an impact in online discourse appears to require very regular posting. If your blog is just a support service for your real work elsewhere, then daily posting may not be needed. But either way, it is good to push yourself to try and regularly write about your work, experiences and thoughts. If you are proud of what you do, then it will probably be interesting and valuable for others to read about.

Blog posts need not be very long, and the writing practice is great - since most peoples' writing skills are awful. But adding anything new to your routine, even if it's something designed for easy adoption, is difficult.

As an aside, the Wonkette interview is a great discussion on blogging, politics, ethics and the high-end of the industry. I recommend it for sure.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Practices, Posting, Traffic, Wonkette

2005-06-12T09:41:00.000-07:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Upgrading Comment Systems to Haloscan

2005-06-12T03:20:00.000-07:00

"Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog."

Those words appeared automatically when I used the "easy-install" system at Haloscan to replace the dreadful commenting system that comes with Blogspot blogs. Haloscan is better looking, fasting, simpler to post in and allows anonymous comments even more easily than Blogger does. It also automatically adds trackback features, to show you who is linking to your blog posts. It looks good, a huge number of people have been using it for quite some time, so we'll see how it goes.

Unortunately, I've been having some trouble installing it. The copy and paste code is very unclear, I wasn't able to get it to work. And I consider myself relatively capable. But now I'm using the "Blogger automatic install" provided by Haloscan. I've had to go through that 3 times so far, and I think what I'm going to do now is not trust the instructions when they say I can edit or delete the above automatic posting about Haloscan being added to this blog. So far when I edit or delete it, the comment function goes away. Well, many many people have figured out how to use Haloscan on their blogs, so I'm sure I can too. Hopefully this will be the last we speak of it and it will just work great.

People haven’t been posting very many comments here so far, maybe this new system will make it more appealing. I’d sure like to know more about some of the readers. Like the two regulars in New Jersey and Florida. Who are you people? There are people coming here from interesting places everyday, but I’m really curious who some of the regulars are. I use Statcounter to see who’s visiting and what you are reading. It’s one more web based service that works quite well.

There are so many little services popping up like mushrooms that the competition for users must be getting intense. Probably in part as a result of that, I’ve been very happy with many of the services I’ve found and incorporated into my information input and output practices. It’s really exciting, and I do try to be discerning about what I jump on board with.

But this week has been super blog soup-up week, hasn't it? I'm excited to have a package of services I know how to use - so that I can offer clients advice on what their options are and how to get advanced features on their blogs. Little things, gracefully done, could make quite a difference in a reader's experience. That's my theory for now, anyway. We'll see if feature overload occurs.

Technorati Tags: Haloscan, Comments, Commenting, Blogger, Services, Consulting

Blog Poll with Easy Set-Up

2005-06-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

I'm working with someone who I think might like to have polls on their blog, so I thought I'd try out one custom poll creation service myself first. Now available on the right sidebar of this blog's front page is a poll about the blog's readability and level of detail. It was created in probably 10 minutes through the service Blogpoll.com.

To use Blogpoll you go through a number of different screens where you tell it what you want the different text fields to say, the colors you want, and the size of the display, then it spits out one line of javascript code that you copy and paste into the template of your blog. It's very simple. You can't look under the hood, but that's the trade-off you get for it being so easy. The service makes its money by running ads on its home page.

I did a Technorati search for Blogpoll.com and found that it was created by Charles Coxhead, whose blog Surfarama includes one post about all the different services he's launched. I've used several others, so I have every reason so far to trust that Blogpoll is one of a huge number of handy new services on the web that are worthy of use. Now we'll see if people are interested in it!

Technorati Tags: blogpoll, polls, services, evaluation

Technorati Beta Improvements - Yay!

2005-06-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

Technorati's new Beta release looks like a major improvement on the old Technorati blog search engine experience! It's the best search engine for finding out what people in the blogosphere are saying about any given subject. The service says it is currently tracking 11.1 million sites and 1.2 billion links.

Right away I can see that they have changed the Technorati Tag Search to allow you to look at ALL of the items tagged with your queried subject tag, instead of just the 20 most recent. That's good, because I was about to freak out. Technorati tags are the dominant tag classification system on the web right now, and for them to only display 20 results was a shirking of their responsibility. Not a problem anymore.

Tags are a way that all users can classify things they write or find on the web; subject classification is no longer centralized in the hands of directories, web masters, and other authority figures. Try out any subject of interest to you in a Beta Technorati Tag Search and you'll see what a fantastic research resource it is. Any blogs, Flickr photos (and Buzznet photos too), del.icio.us and Furl bookmarks that have been tagged with your search term appear in your search results.

In addition to tags, Technorati is also one of the best ways to see who is linking to your blog. See my previous post "Reputation Tracking and Rapid Response."

Related: Technorati's founder Dave Sifry's 15 minute talk at the Web 2.0 conference.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, Technorati BETA, Tags, Research, Search

Bloglet: Email notification of new articles

2005-06-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

In recognition of the fact that not everyone reads blogs with an RSS reader (introduction to concepts, if needed) I have installed an email subscription field, via a service called Bloglet. It looks like a very good service, but we'll have to see. I'll subscribe to it myself first.

When training researchers, I would never suggest subscribing to email notifications because RSS is so much easier, more centralized, more organized, etc. But, when training people for promotion, I would definitely recommend using an email notification system because RSS just isn't that widespread yet and you want your content to be accessible. So, if you haven't started using a free RSS reader yet, check out my introductory article and simple demo account via this link. If you still prefer reading your news updates via email, or aren't in the habit yet of using RSS regularly as a primary info channel...then let's try out the Bloglet email system. I hope it will help build the community of readers around this site and new web tools in general.

Technorati Tags: Bloglet, Email, RSS, accessibility, Research, Promotion

The Future of the Web in Flash Short Film

2005-06-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

A friend just turned me on to Epic 2015, a 5 minute short film about the past, present and potential future of Web 2.0 - the keyword being Googlezon. It's pretty funny, and thought provoking. It was made by Robin Sloan of Current TV and Matt Thompson of Snarkmarket (their shared blog), two people who are obviously very hip.

Despite the unexplainable exclusion of any reference to Craig's List, you should totally check out the film. It's actually a very good introduction to the concepts and it's a viable guess as to one possible future of the web. Or maybe it's just funny.

Technorati Tags: Epic2015, Web2.0, Flash, RobinSloan, MattThompson, Snarkmarket, Social Networking, Search

Reputation Tracking and Rapid Response

2005-06-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

In the last week or so I've blogged here about a number of different organizations, including Feedster, Ask Jeeves and a blog called NEI Nuclear Notes. All three found out that I was blogging about them and responded in a matter of hours or days. When I wrote that Ask Jeeves's user comment page on their website was suffocating and insulting, the company's Customer Support manager emailed me a couple of days later. She said, basically, thanks for the feedback, we'll see what we can do. Cool. When I blogged about Feedster's search to RSS function not working the way I needed it to, a member of their company posted a response and told me that it worked just fine. (It does appear to now. Oops.) The Nuclear Notes blog posted a link back to me and now I've been having nuclear industry people visiting my blog a bunch. (Strange.)

You should know when someone online is writing about you, good or bad. If it's bad you should be ready to respond asap if appropriate. How do organizations like this do it? Most commonly, people set up a search through either Technorati, PubSub or Feedster for their web site's URL. (These engines specialize in searching the millions of blogs on the web.) That way, whenever someone posts their URL on another site, the search engines will find it. The searches are set up as RSS feeds (see definition of terms, if needed) so that every time you log in to your RSS reader's inbox, along side new items from all the news sites and blogs you've subscribed to, you'll see if there are any new results for the searches for links to your blog or website. It happens pretty fast, and the faster you can respond the better it looks. If someone is linking to something you've written or if they have nice things to say about you, then knowing about it allows you to further extend the conversation and develop a relationship.

Linking is a big part of what the web is all about, and always has been. I got lots of traffic, and thus participation in discussions, from being linked to by Geek News Central and Marketing Studies.net. We didn't exchange links just for the sake of traffic, but because I wrote about something that was useful to them (a review of GNC's podcast and a link to RSS Mix sent to MarketingStudies.net.) Providing valuable and interesting content is the key to quality linking and online discussion, and the above persistent search engines are an important enabler for all of it to occur - for all of us to get the most out of this medium of communication called the web.

Which one of these blogosphere search engines works best? I don't know, but I do know that they find different results in different time frames. So why not use them all? A good RSS reader will let you put feeds in a folder, so start a folder for reputation tracking and just put as many search feeds as you can in it. It won't do anything but sit there quietly until it finds something new.

Searching for people talking about you is of course just one subset of a larger search strategy you can employ to be similarly notified automatically of search results regarding any subject of interest. Automating and personalizing your information inflow saves you a huge amount of time and energy while exposing you to valuable content streams you would have otherwise never seen. Then, when something important comes down the stream, you can save it in your archive (like Furl.net) for later retrieval. It's pretty cool.

See also: my earlier post, Persistent search to RSS options

Technorati Tags: Search, Reputation, Persistent Search, RSS, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster

Introductory Article Re Corporate Blogs and Wikis

2005-06-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

A great looking blog called WikiSquared (motto: In the world of wikis, everyone is smarter than anyone) just reposted a terrific article titled INFOCONOMY Review of Corporate Blogs and Wikis. It's an interesting and thorough overview of both technologies, and the type of thing (as the reposter writes) you could plop on some one's desk and as an explanation of the phenomena and evidence of the need to adopt.

New info I gleaned from the article included the following:

I really liked the introduction.

THE Internet is evolving, and finally showing signs of delivering some of the interactivity that has been promised since its inception. At the forefront of this evolution are technologies like weblogs (online diaries usually referred to as 'blogs') and wikis (a web page that anyone can edit).

On the future of blogs, the article cites Forrester Research:

Although only around 5% of the online populace regularly reads blogs, Forrester Research likens the current situation to the mid-1990s, when companies were beginning to launch their own websites. Analysts predict readership (predominantly young and male today) and applications will change as more corporate blogs appear. Forrester even envisions a day when all new employees are given a blog URL alongside their phone number and email address.

Something I'd never heard before: Microsoft now employs wiki inventor Ward Cunningham!

On the psychology of adoption:

THE most significant barrier to corporate adoption of blogs and wikis is a psychological one. With wikis, the problem is not getting people to read them but to realise that they can and should edit them too. For blogs, there can be a fear of the candour and honesty which the pages encourage - though this can be their most rewarding feature.

On wikis vs. group email, the article uses this quote:

"A wiki is really a substitute for a group email. 90% of collaboration and 75% of a company's knowledge assets exist in emails, but there is no value for the organisation apart from what people produce from the information." Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of wiki vendor SocialText.

The full article is available here and it's really worth reading as an introduction. I just selected the things that were newest or most noteworthy to me for the above excerpts. The blog WikiSquared looks like something worth watching too, I'm going to add it to my RSS reader.

Technorati Tags: Wikis, Blogs, WikiSquared, <Adoption, Introduction

Persistent Search to RSS Options

2005-06-07T14:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I populated an RSS reader account for someone with persistent searches (definition of RSS, if needed) concerning their issue of interest via a variety of search engines. That way, they don't have to go out and do a search on 18 different search engines every day to see if there are any new results for their search term. They just log in to one inbox and any new results from any of the engines are all fed into that one place. I think it is going to save them a lot of time. And it will make them immediately aware of darned near anything on the web that's relevant to their concerns, in near real time. They're going to be psyched.

In the world of Web 2.0, you shouldn't have to go looking yourself for information you need. Your computer should bring it to you automatically.

I also set them up with a Furl account, so they can save and comment on the articles they find via the RSS feeds. I think it's all going to work out very well and they will have better access to more information, faster. And I think they'll feel less overwhelmed once they get used to it.

Here are the engines I grabbed RSS feeds from:

News Search, General

Google News via JustinPfister.com

Yahoo News

Topix.net

Financial News

Google Alert search site:prnewswire.com

PubSub SEC filings

Web Page Search

Google Alert

MSN Search

Blog, Social Bookmarking, and Multimedia Search

All the feeds aggregated by Tag Central

Google Video scraped by Feed Fire

I think they'll love it. I was disappointed to be unable to get audio search in there. I tried scraping the search results from Podscope but was unable to get good automated links. I've emailed them asking for support of search results in RSS format.

Technorati Tags: Search, Persistent Search, RSS, Competitive Intelligence, Search Engines

More Client Testimony

2005-06-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

Justin Kistner is the Director of Creative Development at The Portland Internet Company. Several months ago I helped him select between wiki (see definition of terms) software options for a non-profit organization that he's on the board of. We then planned the wiki design and training session together, and I trained the members of the group how to use their wiki for internal communication and collaborative document development. We worked well enough together that he has since recommended me to several of his clients as a web site content developer. I asked him to write a few sentences about our work together for posting here. Other client feedback is available at this link.

I began developing websites in 1996 and I've always worked with an assumption that cyberspace is too big for any one person to wrap their brain around. Since I've been in regular communication with Marshall, I feel like for the first time I have a clear picture of what's really out there on the web. His insatiable appetite for information has inadvertently made him the best Internet sherpa I've personally known. -Justin Kistner

Blogs Gone Nuclear

2005-06-06T15:01:00.000-07:00

Came upon a fascinating blog today called NEI Nuclear Notes, owned by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based policy organization that represents the American nuclear industry. It's simple, but very well done. There are 11 contributors, but the vast majority of posts come from one man. There are multiple posts every day, mostly reposts of nuke related news from other sites with added commentary and links to the organization's information about the topics discussed. Each post is tagged with a Technorati Tag, and the site gets more traffic than you might expect!

It's quite an example of high-quality news and information gathering for a political purpose. It certainly makes one wonder what people with other perspectives on such matters could be doing with blogs and related technologies! One way to look for groups that are doing something like that would be to do a Technorati search for the NEI Nuclear Note's URL address, like this, and see who is linking to this interesting pro-nuclear group.

Update: Nuclear Notes detected the link from here to there right away, presumably through Technorati, and now I'm getting lots of traffic today. From nuclear industry folks! How funny. Well, hi folks! Hope you have a nice time here. Please help get us out of this apocalyptic mess we're in, and ask yourself honestly whether nuclear energy is part of the solution or not. Not to preach, but I couldn't help but make one little comment.

Technorati Tags: Nuclear, Blogs, Politics, Environment, Energy, Technorati

Some Search Engines Are Wretched

2005-06-04T18:47:00.000-07:00

Ask Jeeves gets some pretty good search results that Google and Yahoo don't. (Check out Jux2 for a demonstration.) But they don't offer search results in RSS format, so you can't find out if there are any new results just by reading your RSS feeds. Google has the same problem, but there are other services that can get around that problem with them, like GoogleAlerts.

Ok, so that's not the end of the world though. I went to their "send us feedback" link, and they have a 10 question multiple choice form that you MUST answer, or they won't let you submit your "additional comments" typed into the box at the bottom of the list. THEN, if your comments are more than 250 letters long, it cuts off words from the end of your message to make up the difference! I couldn't believe it. It was the worst online customer service experience I've had in weeks. I won't be clicking on any of their ads any time soon. It's noteworthy that they recently bought Bloglines (a very popular RSS reader), and then everybody was bought up by InterActiveCorp, the owners of Ticketmaster. Pretty typical corporate attitude about end users.

You can see everything I've Furl bookmarked under "Search," including other search engine options here.

Technorati Tags: AskJeeves, Search, RSS, Bloglines, IAC, CustomerService

Search to RSS Permutations and Problems

2005-06-04T18:06:00.000-07:00

Update: After the comment was posted below from someone from Feedster prompting me to retry my search, the function appears to be working now. I don't know if it was my mistake or not, but the complaining below no longer seems to apply. My apologies to the company. Go check out Feedster!

Just tried out Feedster for the first time. It's a cool looking blogosphere search engine, but it has one problem that makes it unusable for me.

I really like the way that after doing my search the first time there was an option that read, "many of your search results are from livejournal.com. Would you like to exclude livejournal or search only inside livejournal.com?" When I tried excluding LiveJournal it then told me that many of my results were from Blogger! Cool! Unfortunatley, persistent search results as an RSS feed were available for

"search terms as whole quoted phrase"
search terms as ungrouped words (no quotes) minus results from LiveJournal.com

But when I tried to do my search as a whole quoted phrase (in my case, a 3 word corporation name) and exclude LiveJournal results, the RSS feed was broken! Apparently "" and -site: in the same search query was more than Feedster could handle, and that's exactly what I need. Maybe it will work in an hour, but I doubt it.

Not to be mean, but this is just another example of how all these nifty tools are only as useful as the people who design and maintain them! They even have a "developers' wiki" but it's filled with nothing but links to online pharmacies and other link spam. I reverted the front page back to its pre-spam content, but every other page looks trashed too. What a shame. There are lots of other persistent search to rss options out there, but I sure wish Feedster worked. It looks cool.

Technorati Tags: Feedster,Search, PersistentSearch, RSS, Bugs

State-Machine: Visualizing Statistics and Political Influence

2005-06-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

You should go check out State-Machine.org, make sure you hover over the top and bottom grey toolbars. It's really neat. I'm not sure how it could come in handy, but I'm sure it could.
It's similar to TheyRule.net, something I know comes in handy. Another key service for tracking government action is GovTrack.us.

Technorati Tags: Government, Politics, Money

Podcasting as the Classroom

2005-06-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

Unsurprisingly, someone has started something called The Education Podcasting Network. It looks like there's already a number of podcasts posted there, ranging from shows about English Literature to Elementary School related series. (Definition: Podcasts are serialized audio files intended for being heard on a portable MP3 player, most famously the iPod, but enjoyable via any MP3 player or your computer.)

Portable MP3 players will presumably continue to drop in price over the years (I got mine on clearance at Radio Shack for 40 bucks, and it will work until I can afford to get a bigger better one), and MP3 files will be listened to more and more over peoples' cell phones, so you can expect content to be delivered via subscribably audio files in a large number of fields. Education is a very logical one.

I can't tell you how exciting it is to live in a small town but be able to listen to news from around the world via downloadable audio files. I listen to Democracy Now and Free Speech Radio News every day and The Global Shortwave Report every week, just walking around town or biking to and from work. (You can see what I'm listening to on the right side bar of this blog's front page.)

Being freed from the time and space restrictions of having to listen to those shows when they are broadcast over the radio or having to sit at a computer makes it a fundamentally different experience to listen (the industry calls it time-shifting). Being able to learn similarly via education podcasts only makes sense. I know that I just graduated with a degree in Political Science, but was largely disappointed with the experience. Many methods of learning have worked for me much better than school, and listening to an hour of high quality news from around the world each day followed by 2 hours of lectures from fascinating people while I'm sitting on the bus or doing my dishes...that's an intense state of perpetual education.

People say that most people around the world will experience the internet first, if not only, via mobile phones. All the more reason why information available via audio is key.

Update:Check out ArtMobs, a group of art students producing "unofficial" audio guides to the Museum of Modern Art and other galleries. Very cool.

See also Podscope, a Podcast search engine. Education Podcast Network found via John T's Furl Archive feed.

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Technorati Tags: Podcasts, Education

Podcasting Government or Anything Else

2005-06-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

Super Furler Amy Gahran wrote a great article over at Poynter Online, a site for tech savvy journalists, about the possibilities of offering audio recordings of government meetings and hearings as podcasts. She summarizes a number of different perspectives on the idea, including some arguments against (can you believe there are arguments against it?)

In particular, Business Week's Blogspotting says that listening to podcasts will not be big enough anytime soon to justify the trouble. A very interesting discussion follows on that blog.

Given that data storage is so cheap it may as well be free, and bandwidth is similar in most of the world (the US so far has terrible high-speed internet connectivity relative to other places), there is no reason not to offer darn near everything as a downloadable audio file. The Internet Archive is working to store every media artifact ever made in their digital archives (check out some of Kahle's talks via IT Conversations here) so why can't I download anything onto my MP3 player and listen to it? Of course all government hearings should be audio recorded and available for download online! So should corporate shareholder meetings, speeches at political rallies, and almost anything else!

The concept of The Long Tail is that people will find value in something long after it's original use if they have access to it in a variety of ways. Fewer and fewer people will find something like a government-hearing audio file useful as it travels through media further and further from the original hearing itself, but the Long Tail theory is that this tapering tail of users will in end, make up more total value all together than the value of the original use in the first place. If they are allowed to, and not blocked by things like copyright or technological laziness.

Aside: Check out this audio file (Super Dubya) and be thankful for recordings of government proceedings and the long tail of remixing.

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Technorati Tags: Podcasting, Government, LongTail, Storage, Broadband
TB