Tag Archive for 'rss'

Identi.ca Reply Sniffer

Published
by
Dawn
on July 2, 2008
in rss
. 7 Comments

It looks like a few of us are starting to play with Identi.ca. It’s just like Twitter, but without the community and without any real tools to support it :-)

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to track @replies. I’ve put together a quick Yahoo pipe that will catch at least some of your replies. This is highly experimental (pre-alpha stage maybe). Welcome to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe.

I’ll try to make some improvements to it over the next couple of days, but in the meantime, feel free to leave me suggestions in the comments on this post.

Usage:

  1. Go to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe
  2. Enter your username and click “run pipe”
  3. Grab the RSS feed output

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

New Legion of Tech Widget and Pipe

Published
by
Dawn
on April 3, 2008
in rss
. 0 Comments

I thought it would be cool to track all of the various Legion of Tech activities. I started with a Yahoo Pipe that pulls together blog posts, Twitter conversations, and Flickr images that mention legionoftech, startupalooza, igniteportland, and barcampportland. I also used the rss feed from this pipe in a nice little sidebar widget. You can see a copy of this widget in the sidebar of this blog.

Legion of Tech Pipe Usage:

Use the Widget:

Embed this code in your blog:

<object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0″ width=”240″ height=”421″ id=”sBADltts1AiEEpQ5V”><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” /><param name=”align” value=”middle” /><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always” /><param name=”quality” value=”high” /><param name=”movie” value=”http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/10792/load/BADltts1AiEEpQ5V.swf” /><embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” src=”http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/10792/load/BADltts1AiEEpQ5V.swf” width=”240″ height=”421″ wmode=”transparent” align=”middle” allowFullScreen=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always” quality=”high”></embed></object>

Advanced Tracking Usage:

You can also use this pipe to track any other keywords from blog posts, Twitter, and Flickr with a custom csv file

  • Create a custom csv file with a new line for each keyword you want to track and put it somewhere that can be accessed via a url. Make sure there are no blank lines in your csv.
  • Go to the Legion of Tech tracker
  • Enter the url of your csv file and run the pipe
  • Grab the rss feed output

Feel free to leave me any feedback or suggestions to improve the pipe or the widget.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

FriendFeed Stats and Analysis

Published
by
Dawn
on March 26, 2008
in rss
. 6 Comments

Internet Duct Tape recently posted an interesting analysis of a bunch of different FriendFeed stats broken down into 5 trends. I won’t cover them all here, but there were a few points that I found particularly interesting.

Twitter accounts for almost half of all items on FriendFeed, and 90% of the items come from the top 8 services (Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon). Anecdotally, I’ve noticed this trend within my own feeds. In fact, the Twitter traffic was so overwhelming that I decided to filter it out entirely with a FriendFeed Minus Twitter pipe.

I was also surprised and sad to see that Ma.gnolia was in the bottom 1% of services used. I like it so much more than del.icio.us, and it seems to also get a lot of usage from my friends. We must be atypical when compared to the broader group.

It also looks like FriendFeed is addressing some of the comment issues, starting with the ability to send an @ response directly to Twitter when someone comments on a Twitter item in FriendFeed. Now, if they would only find a way to do it with other services, like blogs. It would be great if a comment on a blog post in FriendFeed would also find its way back as a comment on the blog post. Ideally, I would love to see FriendFeed find better ways of dealing with comments so that I don’t need to use the FriendFeed Comment Finder pipe that I created to make it easier to find comments in FriendFeed.

While I think that FriendFeed is cool, I find that I have a hard time using it. So much of the information is duplicated for me. I already have feeds of people’s blogs, Ma.gnolia links, etc. I do find interesting things that I have missed in my regular feeds, but I haven’t quite decided if it is worth the time invested.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks

Published
by
Dawn
on March 23, 2008
in rss
. 1 Comment

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Yahoo Pipes lately (some would say slightly obsessed with using them) to hack up RSS feeds and tweak them to be more useful for me and others. Justin told me it would be a good idea to pull them all together in one page to make it easier for people to find them, so I created the Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page. You can find it conveniently located in the Fast Wonder Blog menu bar, and I’ll try to keep it up to date with new Yahoo Pipes.

Solution to Missed FriendFeed Comments: FriendFeed Comment Finder

Published
by
Dawn
on March 20, 2008
in rss
. 4 Comments

A bunch of people have been talking about how FriendFeed allows people to comment on content within FriendFeed. This means that we have to log into friend feed every day and scour for comments, which remain fragmented from the source of the content. I can’t fix the fragmentation, but I think I have part of a solution (implemented as a Yahoo Pipe, of course).

The FriendFeed Comment Finder attempts to find content with comments or that people have marked as “liked”.

Important Caveats:

  • Consider this highly experimental right now. Suggestions are welcome!
  • FriendFeed has really convoluted feed structures, and this pipe is implemented in a crappy way right now.
  • The feeds from FriendFeed seem really truncated with only the few most recent entries appearing. If you are using something like NetNewsWire, you should set persistence for x days, and not until they disappear from feed.
  • I also suspect it might be missing a few comments, but haven’t been able to isolate this from the above problem. If you can find a pattern, please let me know.

To use the FriendFeed Comment Finder, enter your FriendFeed username, click “run pipe”, and then grab the RSS feed from “More Options”. Note that I think it is only picking up recent comments.

Related Fast Wonder Blog Posts:

FriendFeed Minus Twitter

Published
by
Dawn
on March 18, 2008
in rss
. 9 Comments

I am apparently obsessed with Yahoo Pipes (again). Aaron Hockley just wished for a way to get a FriendFeed, but without all of the annoying Twitter posts that overwhelm the feed. At that point Todd Kenefsky walked by and said, “I bet you could do that with a Yahoo Pipe.” Obsession resumed … bedtime postponed.

I just had to oblige. Use this FriendFeed Minus Twitter Yahoo Pipe to get a nice little RSS feed of your FriendFeed without the million Tweets. Simply grab the RSS feed from your “friends” page, enter it into the box on the pipe, and grab the rss feed output :-)

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Yahoo Pipes Twitter Reply Sniffer: More Improvements

Published
by
Dawn
on March 17, 2008
in rss
. 10 Comments

The switch last week from TerraMinds (the service appears to be dead) to TweetScan for the Yahoo Pipes Twitter Reply Sniffer had a couple of unintended side effects. For people with twitter account names that are also common words, the new sniffer delivered way too many false positives. I realized that TweetScan completely ignored the “@” sign, which I didn’t think was a big deal at the time. With a Twitter account like @geekygirldawn, I didn’t notice any issues; however @verso noticed. I was also having a hard time pulling the date out of the TweetScan RSS feed last week for some reason. It was obvious today, which means that they added the date to their feed, or I completely missed it last week when I was tweaking the pipe. Either are good possibilities, since I made the tweaks to the pipe in about 5 minutes while talking to a couple of Legion of Tech board members and waiting for the board meeting to start.

This new and improved Twitter Reply Sniffer explicitly includes only references to your twitter account name that are preceded by the “@” sign. For any of you who liked seeing every reference to your twitter account name, you can easily clone the pipe and remove the filter for @accountname.

I’ve also added a time stamp to the end of every title so that you can easily see exactly when each person replied. If you don’t like the time stamp, you can also clone the pipe and remove the loop right before the pipe output module.

Thanks to Ms. Fishbones for suggesting the improvements and for pointing out the typo in my blog post about the new version of the reply sniffer from last week!

I also wanted to thank Justin Kistner at Metafluence for creating the first rev of this pipe. He came up with the idea to do this and found the services that made it possible. I cloned his original version and have been making minor tweaks along the way that seem to have taken on a life of their own as things like this frequently do.

Here is the new version of the Twitter Reply Sniffer. I think that your rss reader should automagically pick up the changes if you were already using the old Twitter Reply Sniffer.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

    Corporate Blogging Tips

    Published
    by
    Dawn
    on February 23, 2008
    in blogging
    . 2 Comments

    I recently wrote a fairly lengthy post about Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business, which talked about corporate blogging. While I was writing it, I kept thinking of many more tips for creating successful corporate blogging strategies, but you can only fit so much into one post. I thought it would be good to do a follow-up post to elaborate on corporate blogging. I wrote a similar post, Corporate Blogging 101, in October of 2006, during my time at Intel, but many things have changed since then, so I thought that I would talk about it again now.

    I think we are finally moving past the era where people thought of blogs as a consumer phenomenon, where discussions focused on kids, pets, weekend excursions, and other personal topics rather than serious corporate content. Now most companies are past the question of should we blog and on to the discussion of how to write more effective corporate blogs.

    Guiding Principles

    If you haven’t already read my Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business post, you should take a short break now to go back and read it. Specifically, I covered these guiding principles, which apply not just to blogging, but to other forms of social media as well:

    • Be sincere
    • Focus on the individuals
    • Not all about you
    • Be part of the community
    • Everyone’s a peer

    Each of these 5 guiding principles has already been described in detail in my other post, so I won’t spend much more time on them here, but they are important for corporate bloggers to keep in mind.

    Strategy and Vision

    Blogs are still just another piece of the corporate communications puzzle (although an increasingly important piece), so spending some quality time thinking about what you want to achieve with your overall communication strategy and how blogging fits into that strategy is a good place for companies to start. You don’t want to use your blog to just pimp your products or talk about press releases. A blog can be used for so much more. Think about the areas where you want to lead the industry and the topics that you want people to think about when they think of your company. Use your blog to become a thought leader in the industry by sharing your expertise on those broad topics that are important and relevant to your company.

    Think about who should be blogging on your corporate blog. It is easy to pick your top 5 executives, and give them access to the blog. In some cases, they might be the perfect people, but they aren’t always the best choice when it comes to accomplishing your goals for the blog. Go back to your discussion about your strategy for the blog and the topics that you want people to think about when they think of your company or your products. Who in your company has expertise in those areas? Do you have someone with great ideas? Are there any evangelists or other employees passionate about those topics? If so, recruit those people to contribute to your blogs. Someone passionate and smart, but outside of the senior management ranks probably has more time to spend on the blog and might just come up with some innovative and interesting ideas.

    You should also branch out a little into the realm of unofficial / personal blogs. Encourage your employees to have their own blogs where they talk about their areas of expertise. I frequently blog on various Jive blogs (Jivespace developer community blogs or our corporate Jive Talks blog), but I also blog here on Fast Wonder on various topics related to social media, online communities, and other technology topics. Having a personal blog has a number of benefits, including giving us an excuse to learn and research new ideas. Quite a few Jive employees have similar blogs, and I like to believe that some people think that we have interesting things to say, and Jive benefits from having smart people discussing their expertise outside of official work channels. There is also a caution to go along with this. You don’t want to create a personal blog that is too focused on your company. If all you talk about is your company and you cover all of the same topics as your official blog, it just looks forced and insincere. You need to branch out and cover additional topics; show that you are a real person and not just a corporate shill.

    Making it Happen

    After the initial excitement wears off, it is easy for companies to neglect the corporate blog. We just forget to blog, and before long, no one has posted in a month (or two or three …) In some companies this isn’t a problem. If you already have a bunch of prolific bloggers neglect may not be an issue, but for the rest of you, and you know who you are, it really helps to have someone “in charge” of the blog. This person isn’t responsible for writing all of the content, but they can responsible for herding and nagging in addition to making sure that some specific strategic topics are being addressed on the blog. Justin Kistner has recently been helping Jive by providing this service for us for Jive Talks (in addition to many other things), and I do this for our Jivespace developer blogs. The role is part strategist and part mother hen (it isn’t all that different from managing communities), so you have to find someone who can think strategically about your industry and the right topics while they follow up obsessively to make sure people are actually posting to the blog.

    The Other Details

    Blogroll. While the content of the posts is the most important part of the blog, do not neglect the other little details that can make a difference. Make sure your blog contains a blogroll linking to other bloggers you respect; not to have one is really bad form (refer back to the guidelines: Not all about you). Link to the people that you read, the other thought leaders in your industry, and other blogs that your employees write in your blogroll. This goes for your personal / unofficial blogs, too. All blogs should have one, and if you don’t want to put it in a sidebar, you can create a separate page devoted to your blogroll.

    Sidebars. Spend some quality time thinking about your sidebars. Add items that make it easy for people to find older content on your blog: search, tag cloud, recent posts, popular posts, etc. Don’t forget to include links back to other key parts of your website including information about products, press releases or other news, and events where people can find you. Include some fun stuff in the sidebar, too (Flickr photos, twitter posts, etc.) Don’t let your sidebars get too cluttered, but do make sure that you include helpful, relevant, and interesting content in them.

    Analytics. You will want to know how many people read your blog, and exactly what they are most interested in reading. Make sure that you install some kind of analytics package; for example, Google Analytics is free and easy to embed. This will tell you where your visitors came from and which posts they are reading. You can use this information to determine what people are most interested in. Don’t forget to also pay attention to your RSS feeds for those people seeing your content in RSS readers. Do not use your blogging tool’s default RSS feeds as your primary blog feeds. Always run them through a service that provides more information and statistics about who is reading your blog. Feedburner is a great (and free) tool to get more information about the people subscribing to your feeds.

    Hopefully, these tips will help a few people make their corporate blogs even better. Keep in mind that you will make mistakes along the way. Learn from them, keep writing, and continue to make incremental improvements.

    Corporate blogging is a complex topic, and there will never be one magic formula that applies to all companies. Based on my experience, these seem to be some of the most relevant tips, but I’ve probably missed a few things. What are your corporate blogging tips?

    Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

    Yahoo Pipes: Track Twitter Replies with RSS

    Published
    by
    Dawn
    on February 12, 2008
    in rss
    . 3 Comments

    Justin put together a really cool Yahoo Pipe, Twitter Reply Sniffer, to track twitter replies today using TerraMinds. You can read all of the details on his Metafluence blog.

    I will admit to being a complete Yahoo Pipes addict, and I couldn’t just be content to use his pipe without hacking on it and tweaking it a little bit :-)

    I added a date / time stamp to the end of the title so you can also see when the reply was sent. I also filtered for duplicates. Honestly, I wouldn’t expect them, but Twitter can be flaky sometimes, so I wanted to be sure. Feel free to take a look at my tweaked pipe.

    Question for my readers: For some reason, Yahoo Pipes strips out the leading 0 in the y:published time fields. 0:2 is displayed instead of 00:02. Anyone know how to easily add the leading 0 back in on single digit numbers? I know that I could use pubDate, but it’s too long and the format isn’t very nice.

    Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

    Tips for RSS Feeds, Yahoo Pipes, Attention, and Netvibes

    Published
    by
    Dawn
    on February 6, 2008
    in rss
    . 4 Comments

    Lately, I have been obsessed with RSS feeds. More accurately, I have been obsessed with all of the cool things I can do with Yahoo Pipes, AideRSS and other tools that make my consumption of RSS feeds even more efficient. There are so many great blogs, people, sites, and more that I want to read, but you can only effectively pay attention to so many things without sacrificing things like sleep in order to keep up. I designed a Top Blog Posts pipe to help me find the posts that were getting the most attention from others using AideRSS as a filter. This is a great start, but having a way to prioritize information in your feed reader can also make a huge difference. This is where Netvibes comes into the picture.

    I’ve been using Netvibes since mid-2006 (I found the first reference to Netvibes on my blog back on August 11, 2006), so I hadn’t really thought much about how I read my feeds until recently. Justin was in the process of putting together some intelligence dashboards for the execs at Jive to keep up with industry news, and after he decided to use Netvibes for the dashboard, I found myself sitting down and showing him all of the cool tweaks to make it more efficient to use. He encouraged me to blog about it, so here I am! :-)

    Part of the power of Netvibes is that it is easy to use for people who are less tech savvy, yet so versatile that it can be used by real feed power users. This makes it perfect for the type of intelligence dashboards Justin has been doing. Now I’ll get on with the real purpose of this post.

    Tips for using Netvibes:

    • Tabs. Start by thinking about how you want to organize your attention. This will drive how you configure your Netvibes tabs. I organize my tabs based on content areas of interest: Tech/Web 2.0, Open Source, Community, General News, and Jive. I also have a personal tab where I keep vanity feeds, personal (non-tech) friend blogs, weather widgets, etc. This really helps focus your attention on specific topics at different times of the day.
    • Adding Feeds. You can manually add feeds using the “Add Content” button. You can import your feeds into Netvibes using various methods including OPML files. You can also share tabs with friends; for example, here are a few of my tabs: community, Tech / Web 2.0, and Open Source.
    • Configuring Feeds. You don’t need to live with the default number of items showing for a feed; this can be configured for each feed by clicking the edit button. For blogs that don’t update very often, I bump them down to 3-4 items, while some of my pipes feeds filtered through AideRSS show 15 items. Using the edit button, you can also change the title, show more details (description of each post), and configure links to open in Netvibes preview or directly on the site.
    • Columns. Use columns to further organize data within each tab by clicking the down arrow on your selected tab to set the number of columns. You can configure each tab to have 1-4 columns of data, and I have found that 3-4 columns is perfect for me.
    • Organization. This gets a little tricky depending on how you view Netvibes. Assuming you rarely use Netvibes from your smart phone (I’ll talk more about this later), you might want to put the important stuff at the top of each column or organize information into various columns based on subtopics or some other scheme. You can easily drag and drop feeds all over the page to move them between columns and even between tabs. If you have a lot of feeds, it will be easier to move them around if you collapse all of the feeds by clicking the tiny black up arrow next to the settings link in the top right corner of the page (don’t worry, you can expand all the same way when you are done).
    • Mobile organization. At a recent geek get together over the holidays, Marshall Kirkpatrick was showing me the improvements they’ve made to m.netvibes.com, the mobile interface for Netvibes. I am finding it to be a great way to catch up on feed reading during the bus ride to / from work. However, after starting to use the mobile interface, I found that I needed to do a complete overhaul of the way that I use columns. The mobile interface goes through each column in sequence by completing all of column 1 from top to bottom before starting at the top of column 2 and traversing it from top to bottom. Based on this, I reorganized my feeds into sections based on importance. For example, in my tech / web 2.0 tab, I start column 1 with my Top Blog Posts pipe that filters top posts through AideRSS followed by some of the important industry feeds with frequent content (ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, etc.), since these are usually the first things I want to read. Column 2 has blogs from industry thought leaders like Confused of Calcutta and Doc Searls, and Column 3 has blogs from tech friends, etc. As long as you keep the things that are important enough to want to read first in column 1, you should be in good shape using the mobile interface.
    • Widgets. There are thousands of really useful widgets that offer more that just feed data. These are built into Netvibes and can be found by clicking the Add Content link. You can find widgets for weather, email, IM, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, eBay, Craigslist, videos, and many more. There are also widget containers that you can use to drop a bit of code into to easily create your own custom widgets for your page.

    As you can tell, I’m a big fan of Netvibes. It has some really interesting features that make it easier for me to manage large quantities of information while focusing my attention on the most important bits of data.

    What did I miss? Feel free to leave some of your tips for using Netvibes in the comments!

    Related Fast Wonder Blog posts: