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Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Two new approaches to tracking the conversation

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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

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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?

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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.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

FeedDemon is Free

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Listening to podcasts and reading blogs, you’d think the only RSS aggregator worth anybody’s consideration is Google Reader. I’ve tried it and I’ve stuck with FeedDemon. Virtually anything Google Reader can do, FeedDemon has been doing longer and, in many cases, more elegantly. (Of course, that’s my opinion and everybody should use exactly what works best for them.) One of the best things about FeedDemon (among many wonderful features) is that it’s software that resides on my computer. I can get my feeds and then board a plane and read my feeds while I’m offline. I can also synch my two computers and my Windows mobile device with my NewsGator Online account, so my feeds are current and up-to-date regardless of the device I use to manage my feeds. The ability to share my feeds—the equivalent to the Google Reader’s “share” feature—has been around for a while, and my link blog is based on my FeedDemon news bin.

One obstacle to using FeedDemon has been its cost, around $40, but that’s no longer an issue as of today. At CES, NewsGator (which acquired FeedDemon a while back) announced that all of its consumer RSS products are now free. So there’s no reason to not give it a try. If you’re on a Mac, NetNewsWire—also an acquisition—would be the NewsGator product to download.

The decision to stop charging was based on a desire to increase corporate sales, according to a ComputerWorld report. The more individuals are using the products, the easier NewsGator finds it to make its case to prospective corporate clients.

UPDATE: An article in Digital Inspiration goes into considerably more detail about the advantages of using FeedDemon over Google Reader. I even learned a few things!

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Google blocking Google

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For the last several days, I haven’t been getting updated RSS feeds from Google News. I have a dozen or so feeds set up from Google News search results, which often surfaces some interesting or important information. But for almost a week, zip. Nothing.

After trying several approaches to getting the feeds to show again, I contacted customer support for NewsGator, which owns FeedDemon, the aggregator I use. The response from NewsGator: Google’s servers have “unintentionally” blocked NewsGator. That is, NewsGator’s services are unable to connect to Google RSS feeds. NewsGator is “communicating with the folks at Google” to resolve the issue.

I won’t claim a conspiracy theory here and suggest that Google—host of the very popular Google RSS reader—is intentially sabotaging a competitor. But how long does it take to unblock one company if the blocking was accidental? The fact that I can’t read Google News feeds on FeedDemon is absurd. C’mon, Google. Get your act together.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

An insurance company benefits from employee intranet blogs

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G. Oliver Young is fast becoming my new hero. Every time this Forrester analyst puts out a paper, it provides me with fodder to support my arguments supporting social media in the enterprise.

The latest, a case study detailing the efforts by financial services company Northwestern Mutual to take advantage of social media on its intranet, is particularly important because the company under the microscope isn’t high-tech. In fact, insurance companies are traditionally among the most conservative organizations when it comes to embracing new media.

But Norwestern Mutual jumped into social media with both feet, first invetigating the potential in 2005 and then deploying both employee blogs and RSS.

The company’s blogging effort was designed to achieve three specific goals:

• Efficient and accurate communication from management to employees
• A feedback loop from employees to management.
• Inter-employee communication.

The initiative was pushed by Northwestern Mutual’s Assistant Director of Corporate Relations, Andrea Austin, and taken up by the cross-functional Public Affairs Committee. Several concerns needed to be overcome, though, including fears that internal blogging would sap employee productivity (where have we heard that one before?), issues raised by Human Resources, and security concerns, among others.

Once these were addressed, the blogging platform—Mutualblog—was rolled out. It became evident quickly, though, that RSS would be required to make blogging practical. NewsGator provided RSS functionality for the company.

While the bloging initiative was designed to improve the culture of openness and honesty, the biggest benefits were seen in project and team management. About 70% of the active blogs at Northwestern Mutual focus on project management.

Nobody doubts that the blogging and RSS effort has produced business value but, not surprisingly, it isn’t easy to measure. Still, there is strong evidence that communication has improved and team and individual productivity have increased. Contrary to the concerns expressed by some that employee blogging will drain productivity, Northwestern Mutual’s experiment has shown that it helps address information overload. According to the case study:

Blogging has provided a partial solution to the (information overload) problem, allowing employees —- especially the geographically distributed field force —- to engage new content at their leisure, cutting down on conference calls, meetings, and email overload. The firm has even higher hopes for the recently launched RSS solution, which it expects to help cut down information overload as opt-in emails, newsletters, and corporate portal content transition into the RSS channel.

Next up for Northwestern mutual are efforts to drive greater employee adoption of blogs, bringing wikis and podcasting into the mix, and applying the social media efforts that have worked behind the firewall onto the World Wide Web for external communciation purposes.

The full study goes into considerable detail on Northwestern Mutual’s social media efforts. It costs $279, which is pretty damn cheap for any communicator looking for evidence to convince the powers that be that the naysayers are wrong and, when executed strategically, social media on the intranet produces real bottom-line business value.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

My new link blog and a request

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Having subscribed to several for years, I’ve finally started my own link blog. It was reading Nick Bradbury’s post on attention that finally got me off my ass. Nick pointed out that, in FeedDemon, the “News Bin” lets me not only keep a list of items I want to refer back to, but also publish them via NewsGator (which owns FeedDemon) as an RSS feed. This was so easy I slapped my forhead more than once over not having done it sooner. The feature is similar to one in the Google Reader, but I love FeedDemon and have no intention of switching.

The rest of Bradbury’s post (which Neville alerted me to) is a good read, too, looking at how subscribing to a number of link blogs and then using FeedDemon’s “Popular” report can turn up interesting topics about which many people are talking, helping further refine my ability to focus my attention on what really interests me. So now I gotta find more good link blogs to subscribe to. So I’m asking: What link blogs do you subscribe to?