RSS

Sunday, August 30, 2009

The real-world work of Enterprise 2.0

I was struck by two items that surfaced in my RSS feeds this morning.

(Yes, I still use RSS. RSS is nowhere near dead. I understand that armies of people are abandoning RSS for “better” tools but, like Dave Winer, I think people confuse Google Reader with RSS. And, like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I’m fine with the growing abandonment RSS. The more who dismiss it, the more I’ll be the one to uncover useful and relevant content. But I digress.)

The first item featured ZDNet columnist Dennis Howlett howling that “enterprise 2.0” is a crock. “Business has more pressing problems,” he argues,” adding that “the world is NOT made up of knowledge driven businesses.” He concludes…

Like it or not, large enterprises - the big name brands - have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know. In the meantime, don’t be surprised by the ‘fail’ lists that Mike Krigsman will undoubtedly trot out - that’s easy.

It was funny, then, that the very next item I read, from CIO magazine, chronicles how no less an organization than Procter & Gamble produced bottom-line business results through the systematic introduction of in-house social networking.

The goal was simple, and one that seems to have escaped Howlett in his rant: P&G wanted to expand the way its employees collaborate, “incorporating Web 2.0 tools into a single platform to unlock weak and potential ties—employees with common goals or interests who have little to no contact.”

While Howlett rails that most people “just want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on,” P&G saw the potential for social tools to allow “users to create value beyond their usual circles.”

P&G’s systematic approach began with skunkworks projects involving the blogs and wikis Howlett insists nobody cares about. Once the use of those tools became part of the fabric of work, the company settled on a platform, PeopleConnect from Telligent, that employees use “to form and join groups and to interact through blogs, wikis, forums and document stores.” Nearly 12,000 employees opted into the network before the company even formally launched it.

P&G is tracking the results both with metrics the system produces but also with genuine business outcomes. For example, a 150-person team, made up of employees situated in P&G facilities throughout the world, normally came together in about six to 12 months under the hierarchy to which Howlett seems to believe organizations are bound. Using PeopleConnect, it took two. Presumably, that means the results of the team’s efforts will begin generating profits four to 10 months sooner than normal.

P&G’s experience, is not, of course, the only bottom-line benefit organizations can point to as a result of adopting enterprise 2.0. Best Buy has reduced turnover and increased retail worker participation in the company’s retirement savings plan. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance has seen an increase in collaboration. Siemens USA is finding employees establishing knowledge contacts who might otherwise never have met.

Howlett asks, “Can someone explain to me the problem Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve?”

In response, Hill & Knowlton’s Niall Cook—author of “Enterprise 2.0”—lists streamlining internal communication where overload has become the order of the day, getting sales people to share best practices, improving collaboration between people who otherwise would never connect, speeding the delivery of answers to questions.

When companies know the conditions that hinder speed to market, growth, innovation and collaboration, they can explore the options for overcoming those obstacles and adopt the strategies that move them forward. That’s what P&G and a growing number of companies have done—in fact, a study from AIIM notes that the number of companies embracing Enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the past year. I doubt most of them are jumping on a bandwagon, but rather introducing systems designed to improve the bottom line.

I hope that answer’s Howlett’s question.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

RSS workaround for Google News

With no announcement I can find, Google has removed the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of Google News searches. Instead, at the bottom of each results page, there are four “Stay up to date on these results” options, none of which accommodate RSS—even their own Google Reader.

There has been some chatter lately about the death of RSS, but it has been greatly exaggerated. Most of those proclaiming RSS’s demise don’t consider the many uses to which it is put. I also don’t find Twitter to be a satisfactory alternative. I’m aware of only those links I see in the stream when I happen to be paying attention. I can search but will find only those links somebody has thought to post, not everything that matches my interests.

I panicked a bit when I saw Google had removed the subscription option. Would the subscriptions already in my reader (FeedDemon) still capture the latest news items? To my relief, they did. So I copied the URL to one of those feeds, then substituted the keywords for new search terms. I plugged the revised URL into my browser and an RSS feed appeared.

Here’s the syntax:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=KEYWORD&output=rss

Just replace the KEYWORD placeholder with your search term. For multiple words, separate them with + symbols, like this:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=MULTIPLE+KEYWORDS&output=rss

And to get an exact phrase, add %22 before and after your search terms, like this:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=%22MULTIPLE+KEYWORDS%22&output=rss

Go ahead and try them—even with the placeholder words in the examples above, Google’s producing results (at least, as of this morning).

Even easier, though, is to start using Bing for your news searches. Bing doesn’t produce as many results but those it does produce are highly relevant. But Microsoft offers the one-click RSS subscription option that Google has abandoned. Bing also lets you select subcategories, as shown here on a search I conducted for “public relations,” while Google only lets you narrow your search by time (last hour, last day, last week, etc.).

I’m probably going to start using Bing’s news search more often because of this. I’m skeptical of those who dismiss Bing based on the fact that Google hasn’t lost any market share since its launch, growing isntead by taking share from other search engines like Yahoo. Changes in habits are gradual and if Microsoft continues to offer features that make its product more appealing, a slow migration could conceivably occur. After all, there was a time when everyone thought AltaVista couldn’t be toppled, when Friendster dominated social networking and Real had the dominant media player.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Deathwatch Case File #2: RSS

In a post on November 17, 2008, I created the Death Watch list, a rundown of various media whose death has been widely predicted. This is the second in a series of posts that takes a deeper dive into these.

A meme suggesting that Twitter is poised to replace RSS has been swirling through the social media space, but I largely ignored it as preposterous until Steve Gillmor reiterated and expanded on the suggestion in TechCrunch IT post. Gillmor, a contributing editor to ZDNet and host of “The Gillmor Gang” podcast, offers perspectives that bely a remarkable depth of insight into social computing, making his observations worthy of attention.

On this one, though, Steve and all those who came before him claiming Twitter has rendered RSS obsolete, just have it wrong.

Gillmor’s argument boils down to the fact that, as he puts it:

Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS’ lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party.

The basic premise—that other social media channels are better at some of the uses to which RSS has been put—isn’t wrong. But it ignores the fact that RSS is still used for much, much more.

RSS has never gotten the respect it deserves. Always considered too geeky for widespread adoption, RSS appeared to be getting a boost when it was built into all the major browsers (except Google’s Chrome, a massive oversight on Google’s part) with Microsoft going so far as to scrap the “RSS” moniker in favor of the simpler-to-understand “web feeds.”

But the full power of RSS has never been genuinely appreciated. Dave Winer, who developed RSS into its current state, laments in a comment to Gillmor’s post:

It would be interesting if one of the industry conferences invited me to speak about RSS someday. It’s never happened. This is the 10th year of RSS (and) we’ve learned a lot. I would love to share some of it, but this industry has never wanted to hear what I have to say. Or so it seems.

Indeed. It has often struck me that the slow adoption of RSS is as much a lack of enthusiasm by those who do grasp its technical nature as confusion by those who don’t. My feed of Google News items on RSS hasn’t contained any worthwhile nuggests in well over a year. But, as Winer notes in his comment, RSS has become part of the Web’s infrastructure. Whether somebody is adding a portlet to iGoogle or Netvibes or viewing the latest news in a widget someone has embedded on their blog, RSS is at the core of this functionality.

But wait. There’s more. A staggering number of customized feeds have been created with Yahoo Pipes, a simple-to-use tool that lets you mash up feeds. Dozens of feeds have been created in Pipes just to simplify access to Boxee video offerings.

But Gillmor’s argument fails mostly around the notion that a river of news updates is the only reason for using RSS. First, while the news updates I get from those I follow on Twitter are often interesting, but (a) I don’t see all of them and (b) they simply cannot include everything in which I actually have an interest.

My core use of RSS is to stay current on topics about which I need to be conversant. I need to see all of the recent posts to blogs like Danny Sullivan’s SearchEngineLand and Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog, among hundreds of others. I can’t rely on the tweets that fly by covering everything I need to know. For instance, I want to know about every new post by the PR and communication bloggers I follow. I’ll determine whether to read them or not based on my own judgment. I’m not willing to leave it to those I’m following to alert me to all of those new posts because, well, they won’t.

I also use RSS to set up listening posts so I can be aware the appearance of important content that has something to do with one of my clients. I sure as hell can’t count on tweets providing that kind of intelligence.

Besides, you have to figure the folks at Twitter knew what they were doing when they included an RSS subscription functionality for every Twitter account (so you can catch the tweets you would have otherwise missed from any given individual), as well as the results of a Twitter search.

Gillmor concedes (it’s hard not to) that RSS still exists, “casually subsumed as the transport for 140+ content into the social stream. There, RSS items are fed into aggregators and husked for their behavioral signals, packaged as Tweets and sold for pennies on the whuffie dollar.”

But, as Christopher S. Penn has noted more than once on the “Marketing Over Coffee” podcast, Twitter can be a dangerous play if you decide it’s the basket for all your eggs. After all, like Facebook, it’s a closed system and privately owned. Should it run out of money or be shuttered for some other reason, it’s gone—along with your followers and all the networks they represent.

RSS, on the other hand, is dependent upon no single entity. Like HTTP, it’s an open standard that can thrive regardless of the roadblocks that could be thrown in its path.

It’s my fervent hope that, rather than accept the “RSS is dead” meme as fact, the industry recognizes its long-term value and starts listening to Winer and other RSS experts who can help us tap into his full value. Whether the industry goes down that path or not, however, RSS is far from dead. It’s just becoming part of the plumbing.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Cybersquatting 2.0

When FriendFeed announced the availability of “rooms,” my podcast co-host, Neville Hobson, set one up for our show, FIR. We’ve implemented a variety of means by which our listeners can connect, from a traditional discussion forum to a Facebook group, but the FriendFeed room seems to have produced far better results, with 30 listeners joining and robust discussions emerging around links participants have submitted.

As Neville and I were discussing the room before recording today’s episode of FIR, Neville noted that he’d done a Google search and found that there are now about 1,600 rooms—not bad for something that’s been around for less than two weeks. (There’s no way, evidently, to see how many rooms there are directly on FriendFeed.)

Some of these rooms have been set up by companies. Comcast, for example, has set up a room called Comcast Q&A. “Got Comcast Questions?” room administrator Scott Westerman asks. “We’ll try to get you answers.” Frank Eliason, Comcast’s point man on Twitter, is among those posting to the room.

But a lot of the company and brand names that have been assigned to rooms don’t appear to have any relationship to the organizations themselves. Blogger and Bay Area photographer Thomas Hawk, for instance, is listed as the administrator of a room called Comcast. He’s also the only member and nothing has yet been posted there. Hawk also set one up called Amazon. Bwana McCall set one up called Wii. Hutch Carpenter created on called Coca Cola.

I have to wonder how many of these rooms associated with trademarked brands represent a new form of cybersquatting. Companies learned the hard way the cost and risk of letting someone else create domains using their marks, leading them to purchase the domains from the squatters or go to court seeking to have them relinquished. While a company can’t acquire every possible domain—I remember Nabisco’s dismay when, after acquiring every Oreo cookie domain they could imagine, someone registered iloveoreos.com (which isn’t an active domain today)—they can certainly obtain the most basic ones.

Will organizations be forced into the same actions to claim ownership of FriendFeed rooms bearing their marks? Of course, they’ll first have to figure out what FriendFeed is, but as the service grows more popular and more useful, that’s inevitable. In the meantime, I can imagine a land rush of early adopters snatching up every company and brand name in site.

At least this time, if they’re gonna squat, it’ll be in a room.

Update: Turns out Matt Dickman from Fleishman Hillard had a similar topic in mind today—he talks about securing your company/brand accounts in Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Two new approaches to tracking the conversation

My IABC friend and occasional FIR commenter Kris Gallagher, who works in communications at DePaul University, sent along a link to a new service called CrowdStatus.com. Darren Stuart created the site out of a desire to view the Twitter status of the members of a group he assembled. (Stuart is referring to their current status, not their standing in the group.)

Stuart has created an initial crowd that includes several well-known residents of the social media space, all collected in one place.

I can see some use to CrowdStatus. I could put IABC members in one group, people who post great links in another, and SNCR fellows in yet another. Stuart plans to expand beyond Twitter, which could make the service more interesting, aggregating the status of defined groups of people regardless of whether they come from Facebook, Jaiku, or wherever.

But how often would I visit the site to check the status of each group? And an RSS feed defeats the purpose—I can already get that at FriendFeed.

Would this be useful for you?

I’m also intrigued by Shyftr, which I learned about from Brian Solis. Shyftr positions itself this way:

We’ve built a networking community solely focused on feeds. Feeds have traditionally been cumbersome to find. For the most part users have had to scour the Internet in search of feeds that interest them. Now you can find feeds by searching content brought directly to you through the Shyftr network, as well as feeds that other users follow by viewing their feed list. Do you like feeds that your friends or other users are following? It’s simple to “shyft” a feed and add to your list of content you read on a daily basis.

That sounds useful. While Brian worries about the further fragmenting of the conversation, I’m more interested in the discovery of great content.

More services like this are undoubtedly on the way. It’ll be interesting to see which ones stand the test of time.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

FeedDemon’s coolest new feature

This little goodie magically appeared when I checked my feeds today; it’s a feature of the latest upgrade to the standalone RSS news reader, FeedDemon. How cool is that?

Monday, January 21, 2008

Will businesses adopt lifestreams?

I maintain a couple of lifestreams, one at Tumblr and one at Jaiku. The Tumblr lifestream frustrates the hell out of me. I enter the URL of a perfectly valid feed, then check back to find a big red X and a note informing me that the feed could be found. Jaiku finds all the feeds without any trouble.

In case you haven’t heard of a lifestream or aren’t sure what they are, the concept is simple. The various places you maintain a social media footprint by and large all have RSS feeds associated with them. In a lifestream, you aggregate those feeds. People visiting the lifestream can see everything you have done on any of these properties—new blog posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, photos uploaded to Flickr, videos to YouTube, Twitter tweets, the list goes on.

It’s mildly surprising to me that businesses have not considered the equivalent of a lifestream. Company RSS feeds cover press releases and other news. Executives blog. Companies have figured out the value of contributing videos and photos to sharing sites. Some companies are even taking advantage of Twitter. A lifestream would combine every new action on any of these in a single river of company news. Anybody interesting in staying up-to-date on what a company is doing can subscribe to the lifestream feed. It could be a valuable resources to media and the investment community. It seems like a simple enough idea.

I could be wrong, of course; there could be companies already producing lifestreams. If not, though, I wonder which organization will be first.