The Community Engine Blog: syndication Archives

live.com superior to google personal home page

Live.com wins hands-down when it comes to tracking smaller blogs.

I started off liking Google personal home page. It's neat. You can load RSS feeds and have your gmail account right there. Gmail is the best webmail client I have ever used, though Yahoo Mail Beta comes in a pretty good second.

When live.com came out, I dismissed it. Would it conform with web standards? Would it work on non-Microsoft browsers? The answer to both these questions is yes. Further, live.com performs much better with individual blogs than google.

To see this, look at the following two screen grabs.

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Bud posted this on January 31, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

I quit using my feedreader for a month, but I've started again

I'm back to using a feedreader instead of just simple aggregation sites. We'll see how long that lasts.

So, I quit using NetNewswire, my main feedreader for a month. Why, well as one of the students in our current business blogging bootcamp said, “What about information overload?”

What I had taken to doing instead was setting up aggregation sites. That way, I can share the information with the world easily. Hey, just go to this or that site, grab a feed or an OPML file if you want, but you're not required to know all that stuff. Your plain old browser will pick it up fine. Those aggregation sites also tend to be focused.

What convinced me to start back up with a feedreader? John Nardini, EVP of Marketing at Denali Flavors, makers of moosetracks ice cream came to give a lecture in the bootcamp. He showed how he was tracking competitors in his reader and basically using it to manage his own information space. Well, sounds good. My information space needs cleaning out, though.

Bud posted this on January 23, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA High Octane Blogging Bootcamp 2.0

In the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp, we teach MBAs blogging as an interactive business process. MBAs, create blogs, find conversation partners, execute blogging strategies, and measure success.

Over the past couple of months, I've been developing a new rendition of the high octane blogging bootcamp. We ran the original at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business last Spring. In that bootcamp, 33 MBAs were able to alter the search landscape in Southeast Michigan for queries on the cleaning and restoration industry with 6 weeks of blogging effort.

This rendition will be offered at University of Michigan's Ross School of Busines starting in January and at Quinnipiac University starting in March. In the bootcamp, we treat blogging as an introduction to the interactive web. Teams of participants will have as their project to create a family of blogs around a partner business or their own business. The projects will be judged on the extent to which they follow strategies that build search visibility and traffic.

The bootcamp is broken into a set of seven modules that build on each other. Each module includes an overview, some practical examples, and exercises for participants to complete in service of their project. Here are the modules:

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Bud posted this on December 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Google Reader 2: How I browse the web

Editing is the real trick to manage large volumes of information. To avoid bias, use multiple editing strategies with some referral to raw sources.

My little post on the Google reader prompted a couple of responses inspiring me to lay out how I browse the web. The Google reader is one of many offerings that allows you to follow web sites using their syndication feeds. Essentially, the reader gathers the feeds from each site and presents them to you in one single web page, making web surfing much more efficient because you now only have to go to one page.

If you think of feedreaders that way, then it's clear that the issue is how to construct the most efficient display. This screenshot illustrates my most recent strategy:

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Bud posted this on October 9, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Google Reader, I don't get it

Basically, Google portal beats Google reader as a feedreader.

I like Google's portal pictured on the left. Their new reader, announced at Web 2.0 today and pictured on the right, just does not compare. The portal outperforms the reader on all measures you would think the reader would be better at.

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Bud posted this on October 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

FeedDigest.com — Feed Remixing for Geeks & Resellers

FeedDigest seems to be one of the better services oriented towards geeks and designers for incorporating RSS feeds. I suspect there are still some holes to be filled in this market.

I discovered a service called FeedDigest today. Launched in July, 2005, it has over 10,000 users with each one generating approximately 3 “digests”. Digests are web pages or RSS feeds generated from aggregations of other RSS feeds. Currently users integrate digests into their sites either through javascript or PHP. There is no hosting of digest newspapers, likely due to load and bandwidth issues. The site blog has detailed how they are dealing with the capacity issues brought on by exponential growth over the last few months. Though nothing has been announced publicly, certain of the blog posts suggest that outside investment was secured in the second-half of August. Ten thousand users is a benchmark that Silicon Valley VCs often cite for seed investment.

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Bud posted this on September 21, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

A Tag Based Learning Remix

We attempt to crack the class participation nut by mandating participation in an online self-organizing space. Our aggregation mechanism is based on the tags participants provide for their contributions. This post describes our underlying concept and the variety of technologies we employ.

A perennial classroom issue is student participation. Even if students are enthusiastic, limited time dictates that only a few will be heard in any single session. Limited participation limits instructors' opportunities to find out what students know and inhibits the potential discovery of useful information for everybody. This post outlines a web-based learning remix project at Michigan's Ross School of Business that is designed to remove classroom limits on student participation. The system operates according to a few simple pinciples:

Require that everyone participate.
Move the vast majority of class participation online.
Structure online participation so that it is self-organizing.

We believe our system achieves the first and second goals and makes good progress on the third. On the input side, each student makes fifteen tagged (informally categorized) microcontributions per week by bookmarking sites in del.icio.us and making blog posts in WordPress Multi-User. Multiple times each day, reBlog and the Movable Type publishing platform gather, remix, and present the student contributions based on the tags students supplied.

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Bud posted this on September 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

RSS++, Power Information Consumption beyond RSS

Google's Personalized Home is more than just an RSS aggregator. By combining RSS with discovery, it allows you to stay in touch with the opportunities you have already defined and find new ones.

In remarking on Google's apparent plans to add RSS to their Personalized Homepage (missed by me when I reviewed it yesterday), Richard MacManus makes this remark:

One thing: why are all the bigco's so intent on building portals, when users are more and more using RSS Aggregators as their central means of access to Web content ('homepages' in Web 1.0 parlance)? The answer may be that the portal products of Google, MSN and Yahoo are, over time, turning into RSS Aggregators.
Read/Write Web: Google and MSN's Web 2.0 Homepages

My cut is that we are moving to something beyond RSS consumption in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Let's call it RSS++. RSS++ is the combination of RSS with other information services to make for a real power information consumption experience. RSS is the part where you bring your trusted sources to the table, letting you revel in the walled garden of your community.

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Bud posted this on May 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Review of Google Personalized Home Page

I like the Google Personalized Home Page, but it just provides an artificial sample of what I want to watch to anyone interested. Give me the ability to add my own RSS feeds, and you'll get a real picture of the top things I pay attention to. Oh, and by the way, throw in tagging too.

John Battelle reports on Google's new personalized home page which appears to be called just that, “Personalized Home Page”.

Google is launching the kind of personalized integration tool that many thought they'd never do. At first it was thought to be called iGoogle, but the name is uncertain at this point.
John Battelle's Searchblog: MyGoogle Is Coming Today

Well, I've tried it, and for a proof of concept, I think it is great. Basically, it lets you add a limited set of sources to your main Google search page including Google News, Slashdot, BBC, Wired News, Weather, GMail, and Driving Directions. These fit my “quick hit” information needs.

There are no ads!

But, I would like just one more thing.

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Bud posted this on May 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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