A few interesting things this week …
Recent Links on Ma.gnolia
Writing for WebWorkerDaily and The Holidays
Many of you already noticed that I have started blogging on GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily site. Thank you so much for all of the congratulations, well wishes, comments, and more. The plan is to post an article or two a week on a freelance basis. I even got a head start before I left, so I have a couple more posts in the WebWorkerDaily publish queue that should go out sometime next week.
My first post was about making productive use of my holiday time, and I am happy to say that I am off to a good start. I’m posting this from the Chicago airport (where my flight has been delayed), but at least I managed to edit and encode 2 more 2 minute Yahoo Pipes demos during my last flight, but you will have to wait to see them until I post the next one on December 29th.
I’ll also be mostly off the grid until December 27th. I’ll be in rural Ohio hanging out with family and playing scrabble, but my internet connection will be pretty spotty during the trip. They have dial up access (no DSL or cable on the farm), and even my EVDO access is painfully slow. In other words, you could be kind to my inbox and wait to email me until after the 27th *hint, hint*.
Have a great holiday season!
My Favorite Technology Blogs and Podcasts
People often ask about my favorite technology blogs and podcasts, and I was inspired by the recent ReadWriteWeb post on a similar topic to do a post with a few of my favorites. These are in no particular order.
10 Favorite Tech Blogs:
- ReadWriteWeb
- WebWorkerDaily
- FreelanceSwitch
- Silicon Florist
- TinyScreenfuls
- Web Strategy
- Connie Bensen
- Online Community Report
- FeverBee
- Apophenia
10 Favorite Tech Podcasts:
- TWiT
- net@night
- FLOSS Weekly
- Buzz Out Loud
- WSJ Tech News Briefing
- IFW Daily
- CNET News Daily
- Strange Love Live
- BBC Digital Planet
- PRI The World
Wow, it was hard to pick my favorites. Limiting to technology helped, since I could leave all of the NPR podcasts (love Science Friday), NYT, etc. The blogs were really hard, since I could choose from the 250 feeds in my reader.
What are your favorites?
Community Manager / Social Media Jobs are Still Hot
ReadWriteWeb’s Jobwire site has been keeping up with who is being hired, while many other sites are focused on layoffs and the downturn. It’s exciting to see them publish their numbers showing that people are still hiring community managers and social media specialists.
I’ve been seeing a similar trend anecdotaly, and so far at least, I’m still getting clients who want me to consult with them to help build online communities, new blogs, or improve their social media presence.
They have some other data available in their full post, which you should take the time to read. It’s just nice to see a little good news about people getting jobs now and then.
Using The Debugger: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo
The debugger serves a couple of functions in Yahoo Pipes. The first one is pretty obvious – debugging. It allows you to see exactly what is happening in each component of your Yahoo Pipe to help with the debugging process when something isn’t working quite right.
The debugger also serves a less obvious purpose. You can use it to learn more about the elements of the rss feeds that you are using as input. For most blogs, the rss feeds are fairly standard, but other services store all kinds of useful information in their rss feeds in addition to standard elements like link, title, and date. The debugger can help you find this additional information in the feed.
More Details
- The Demo Pipe. A copy of the Yahoo Pipes Debugger Demo Pipe. Click “View Source” to see the modules.
- Fetch Feed Module. Contains 1 feed from Shizzow, which contains a wealth of location information within the feed.
- Filter Module. Filters posts with a certain keyword out of the feed to demonstrate the debugger.
- Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.
- The demo also spends time using the debugger to explore various elements of the feed.
I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training courses.
Previous videos in the series:
Recent Links on Ma.gnolia
Online Community Building Manifesto
If you don’t already read Rich Millington’s blog, FeverBee, you should. He recently published an Online Community Building Manifesto (PDF link). He says:
There aren’t any answers in this manifesto. Instead it’s something better, it’s a call to change how we approach online communities.
It’s a short manifesto, and I encourage you to read it. What resonated the most with me was the focus on the social aspects of online communities. In my experience with community building, both within companies and with clients, companies find the software / technology to be the easy part. Installing a piece of software and getting it up and running is something companies do every day. Where they get tripped up is in the people portion of the online community equation: psychology, sociology, motivation, and other more social concerns.
Take a look at the manifesto, and send your comments to Rich. He’d love to have your feedback.
Trust and Corporate Blogging
I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking on this blog and in other places about what to do and what not to do with a corporate blog. Here’s a short summary:
- Don’t regurgitate press releases. Do focus on content relevant to your industry
- It’s not all about you. It is a conversation.
- Don’t focus on marketing messages. Have a personal tone.
- Make sure the blog doesn’t get stale. A content roadmap can help you stay on track.
This morning I read Josh Bernoff’s Forrester Report, Time To Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas, which focused on whether or not people trust corporate blogs. I was not surprised by the finding that only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs trust them. I don’t usually trust press releases, which tend to tell one side of the story (the company’s side) always in the best possible light and sometimes with so much spin you can’t find the meat of the announcement. Too many corporate blogs seem like a series of press releases, and I don’t trust those blogs. However, there are also many excellent corporate blogs written by people that I do trust.
I tend to agree with Richard MacManus on ReadWriteWeb:
To the larger point of whether corporate blogs are trustworthy, it depends on so many things that it’s difficult to make a sweeping judgement. For example, I trust some Microsoft blogs more than others – depending on the person blogging and perhaps even the department they work for. It depends on the style of blogging, the content that’s published, the way the blog is promoted, and so on. (Quoted from ReadWriteWeb)
Based on the recommendations in the report, I suspect that Josh agrees with us:
Like any other marketing channel, blogging can work. But it’s not about you; it’s about your customer. Our rule of thumb is that if the person reading the blog says, “Sure I don’t trust corporate blogs, but I don’t think of your blog that way,” then you’re on the right track. (Quoted from Time To Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas)
Josh includes a few tips for improving the trust on your blog (his article has a few more tips and a paragraph with more explanation on each one):
- Blog about the customer’s problem.
- Blog to your hordes of fans.
- Blog about issues at the core of a community.
- For B2B companies, get your employees in on the act.
(Quoted from Time To Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas)
The real message here is that trust has to be earned. Trust has to be earned for each new corporate blog and each individual blogger. Jeremiah Owyang put together an informal checklist to help you evaluate your current company blog. A great corporate blog can be a trusted source of information, but it takes real work and diligence to get to that point.
How’s your corporate blog performing?
User Input: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo
This video shows how to request a user input and use the keyword from the user as the filter in a Yahoo Pipe. If you haven’t already watched the 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Introductory Demo, I strongly suggest that you watch it. The user input demo starts with the simple pipe created in the introductory demo and changes the filters from keywords hardcoded in the introductory pipe to the keyword from the user input.
Podcast Feed and iTunes
More Details
- The Demo Pipe. A copy of the User Input Demo Pipe click “View Source” to see the modules.
- Fetch Feed Module. Contains 2 feeds: ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM.
- Text Input Module. Leave Name and Position as the defaults. Prompt: “enter a keyword” or other instructions for the user. Default and Debug: “apple” in this example. You can generally use the same term for default and debug, but make sure that you use a word commonly found in your feeds that will generate enough volume for testing and will generate default results for your users to view.
- Filter Module. Filter by the keyword entered in the user input module by connecting the text input to the filter module as seen in the demo.
- Sort Module. Sort by date in descending order to make sure things are sorted in a logical manner.
- Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.
I’ve created many Yahoo Pipes, and most of them have been published on my Yahoo Pipes and RSS Hacks page where you can also learn more about my Yahoo Pipes Training courses.
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