Tags: Attention, Beth Kantor, Buzz, Collaboration, Conference, Google, Live Tweeting, Noise, Nonprofit, Press Conference, Real-Time, Social Media, Social Web, Talking Points, Twitter, Ustream, Web 2.0, Youtube | Edit
Publishing / Web Design / Social Media
Buzz Web Design
Client projects and tech blog posts about Buzz
Tags: Attention, Beth Kantor, Buzz, Collaboration, Conference, Google, Live Tweeting, Noise, Nonprofit, Press Conference, Real-Time, Social Media, Social Web, Talking Points, Twitter, Ustream, Web 2.0, Youtube | Edit
RSS feeds
are the lingua franca of the modern internet, the glue that binds
together the hundreds of services that make up "Web 2.0." The term
stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and can be thought of as a
machine-code table of contents to a website. An RSS feed
for a blog will typically list the last dozen-or-so articles, with the
title, date, summary and content all laid out in special fields. Once
you have a website's RSS feed you can syndicate, or re-publish, its contents by email, RSS reader
or as a sidebar on another website. This post will show you a
ridiculously easy way to "roll your own" RSS feed without having to
worry about your website's content platform.
Categories:
Practical 2.0
,
RSS Syndication
Just about every native Web 2.0 applications comes built-in with multiple RSS feeds. But in the real world, websites are built using an almost-infinite number of content management systems and web development software programs. Sometimes a single website will use different programs for putting its contents online and sometimes a single organization spreads its functions over multiple domains.
Step 1: Make it Del.icio.us
To begin, sign up with Del.icio.us, the popular "social bookmarking" web service (similar services can be easily adapted to work). Then add a "post to Del.icio.us" button to your browser's toolbar following the instructions here. Now whenever you put new content up on your site, go that new page, click on your "post to Del.icio.us" button and fill out a good title and description. Choose a tag to use. A tag is simply a category and you can make it whatever you want but "mysites" or your business name will be the easiest to remember. Hit save and you've started an RSS feed.
How? Well, Del.icio.us turns each tag into a RSS feed. You can see it in all its machine code glory at del.icio.us/rss/username/mysites (replacing "username" with your username and "mysites" with whatever tag you chose).
Now you could just advertise that Del.icio.us RSS feed to your audience but there are a few problems doing this. One is that Del.icio.us accounts are usually personal. If your webmaster leaves, then your published RSS feed will need to change. Not a good scenario, especially since you won't even be able to tell who's still using that old feed. Before you advertise your feed you should "future proof" it by running it through Feedburner.
Cloak that Feed
Go to Feedburner.com. Right there on the homepage they invite you to type in a URL. Enter your Del.icio.us feed's address and sign up for a Feedburner account. In the field next to feed address give it some sensible name relating to your company or site, let's say "mycompany" for our example. You'll now have a new RSS feed at feeds.feedburner.com/mycompany. Now you're in business: this is the feed you advertise to the world. If you ever need to change the source RSS feed you can do that from within Feedburner and no one need know.
The default title of your Feedburner feed will still show it's Del.icio.us roots (and the webmaster's username). To clear that out, go into Feedburner's "Optimize" tab and turn on the "Title/Description Burner," filling it out with a title and description that better matches your feed's purpose. For an example of all this in action, the Del.icio.us feed that powers my tech link blog and its Feedburner "cloak" can be found here:
Get that Feed out there
Under Feedburner's "Publicize" tag there are lots of neat features to republish your feed yourself. First off is the "Chicklet chooser" which will give you that ubiquitous RSS feed icon to let visitors know you've entered the 21st Century. Their "Buzz Boost" feature lets you create a snippet of code for your homepage that will list the latest additions. "Email subscriptions" lets your audience sign up for automatic emails whenever you add something to your site.
Final Thoughts
RSS feeds are great ways of communicating exciting news to your audiences. If you're lucky, important bloggers in your audience will subscribe to your feed and spread your news to their networks. Creating a feed through a bookmarking service allows you to add any page on any site regardless of its underlying structure.
Tags: Binds, Content, Content Management System, Email, Glue, Infinite Number, Lingua Franca, Native Web, Real World, Really Simple Syndication, Ridiculously, Rss Reader, Web | Edit
A look at the new class of "Single Page Aggregators."
Categories:
Analytics
,
MartinKelley.com
,
Practical 2.0
Way back in 1997 I was one of dozens of lots of web designers trying to figure out how to bring an editorial voice to the internet. The web had taken off and there pages and links everywhere but few places where they were actually organized in a useful manner. As I've written before, in December of that year I started a weekly updated list of annotated links to articles on nonviolence, a form we'd now would recognize as a blog.
About eighteen months ago I started a "links blog" of interesting Quaker links, incorporated as a sidebar on my popular "QuakerRanter" personal blog. I eventually gave the links their own URL (QuakerQuaker.org) and invited others to join the linking. I always stumble when trying to tell people what QuakerQuaker is all about. The best definition is that its a "collaboratively edited blog aggregator" but that's a horribly tech description.
The rise of blogs is creating the necessity for these sort of theme-based aggregators. This morning I stumbled on Original Signal, a new site that organzes the best Web 2.0 blogs. A site called PopURLs does the same for "the latest web buzz." A site called SolutionWatch has written about these in Tracking the web with Single Page Aggregators. We're all on to something here. I suspect that sometime this fall some clever person will coin a new term for these sites.
Tags: Aggregators, Design, Nonviolence, Personal Blog, Quaker | Edit
"Build it and they will come" is not a very good web strategy. Instead, think "if I spent $3000 on a website but no visitors came, did I spend $3000?" There are no guarantees that anyone will ever visit a site. But there are ways to make sure they do.
Much of web marketing follows the rules of any other mode of publicity: identify an audience, build a brand, appeal to a lifestyle and keep in touch with your customers and their needs. A sucessful web campaign utilizes print mailings, manufactured buzz, genuine word of mouth and email. Finances can limit the options available but everyone can do something.
One of the most exciting aspects of the internet is that the most popular sites are usually those that have something interesting to offer visitors. The cost of entry to the web is so low that the little guys can compete with giant corporations. A good strategy involves finding a niche and building a community around it. Personality and idiosyncracy are actually competitive advantages!
It would be cruel of me to just drop off a completed website at the end of two months and wash my hands of the project. Many web designers do that, but I'm more interested in building sites that are used. I can work with you on all aspects of publicity, from design to launch and beyond to analyzing visitor patterns to learn how we can serve them better.
Making sites sticky
We don't want someone to visit your site once, click on a few links and then disappear forever. We want to give your visitors reasons to come back frequently, a quality we call "sticky" in web parlance. Is your site a useful reference site? Can we get visitors to sign up for email updates? Is there a community of users around your site?
Making sites search engine friendly
Google. We all want Google to visit our sites. One of the biggest scams out there are the companies that will register your site for only $300 or $500 or $700. The search engines get their competitive advantage by including the whole web and there's no reason you need to pay anyone to get the attention of the big search engines.
The most important way to bring Google to your site is to build it with your audience in mind. What are the keywords you want people to find you with? Your town name? Your business? Some specific quality of your work? I can build the site from the ground up to highlight those phrases. Here too, being a niche player is an advantage.
I know lots of Google tricks. One site of mine started attracting four times the visits after its programmer and I redesigned it for Google. My sites are so well indexed that if I often get visitors searching for the oddest things. We can actually tell when visitors come from search engines and we can even tell what they're searching for! Google apparently thinks I know "how to flatten used sod" and am the guy to ask if you wonder "do amish women wear bras." I can make sure your important search terms also get noticed by Google and the rest!
Search
As Seen In
Beth Kantor's nonprofit blog has an good article asking about the possibilities for real-time web interaction and asks whether it's possible for the web to let someone be in two places at the same time:
For me, the eye-opening moment of real-time collaboration came last winter when I was planning a conference with two friends. The three of us knew each other pretty well and we had all met each other one-on-one but we had never been in the same room together (this wouldn't happen until the first evening of the conference we were co-leading!). A month to go we scheduled a conference call to hash out details.
I got on Skype from my New Jersey home and called Robin on her Bay Area landline and Wess on his cellphone in Los Angeles. The mixed telephony was fun enough, but the amazing part came when we brought our computers into the conversation. Within minutes we had opened up a shared Google Doc file and started cutting and pasting agenda items. Someone made a reference to a video, found it on Youtube and sent it to the other two by Twitter. Wess had a secondary wiki going, we were bookmarking resources on Delicious and sending links by instant messenger.
This is qualitatively different from the two-places-at-once scenario that Beth Kantor was imagining because we were using real-time web tools to be more present with one another. Our attention was more focused on the work at hand.
I'm more skeptical about nonprofits engaging in the live tweeting phenomenon--fast-pace, real-time updates on Twitter and other "micro-blogging" services. These tend to be so much useless noise. How useful can we be if our attention is so divided?
Last week a nonprofit I follow used Twitter to cover a press conference. I'm sorry to say that the flood of tweets amounted to a lot of useless trivia. So what that the politician you invited actually showed up in the room? That he actually walked to the podium? That he actually started talking? That he ticked through your talking points? These are all things we knew would happen when the press conference was announced. There was no NEWs in this and no take-away that could get me more involved.
What would have been useful were links to background issues, a five-things-you-do list, and a five minute wrap-up video released within an hour of the event's end. They could have been coordinated in such a way to ramp up the real time buzz: if they had posted an Twitter update every half hour or so w/one selected highlight and a link to a live Ustream.tv link I probably would have checked it out. The difference is that I would have chosen to have my workday interrupted by all of this extra activity. In the online economy, attention is the currency and any unusual activity is a kind of mugging.
When I talk to clients, I invariably tell that "social media" is inherently social, which is to say that it's about people communicating. The excitement we bring to our everyday communication and the judgment we show in shaping the message is much more important than the Web 2.0 tool de jour.