Library clips

1. Avoid broadcast emails that don’t concern you (instead you can subscribe to the blog - RSS or email, choosing what is sent to you…push vs. pull)

2. Using blog posts instead of emails allows these communications to be stored in a central repository, instead of lost in silos.

3. Each post has a permalink, and you can use comments to discuss (otherwise people may email reply to select people, leaving others to miss out on the discussion).

4. Browse by author, date, month, category, tag…it’s a database I suppose…also full-text search.
Categories/tags provide some sort of context when browsing, and post title is similar to an email subject line.
(I’m yet to see fielded search on a blog, ie. search in the title, author, category, tag, date, etc…)

5. Besides publishing, organising, subscription, notifying, and storing searchable communications in the one go, the blog can also act as a portal by displaying stuff on the sidebar.

6. A new staff member can easily catch the gist of what’s going on by reading the blog, and checking out the links on the sidebar.
People outside the business unit can get a glimpse into the going ons of another business unit…even subscribe
(you may be interested in changing jobs within the same firm, by viewing and/or subscribing to a business unit blog you can get an idea of what’s going on).
Everyone can author the blog, anyone can view the blog.

7. Re-syndicate the contents of the blog to different sections of the intranet, or wherever…people can read your contents; at your blog, in an RSS Reader, in an email client, RSS to IM, RSS to SMS, desktop ticker, menu or browser or system tray reader, desktop widget, or at a website that re-syndicates the contents…also as a an intranet search result.

8. Since it is a simple publishing platform, it may encourage the sharing of tacit knowledge.

9. Since this information is centralised for people to view, it may avoid re-inventing the wheel, or a related business unit may borrow concepts from another business unit, leading to innovations.

10. The idea of stuctured blogging and datablogging enable you to aggregate data from fields in blog posts, even generate tables, graphs, statistics, etc…

Attention : Long or short blog posts

Earlier I posted on how del.icio.us recently split up the contents type of the inbox…the inbox is now for tag subscriptions, and the “your network” is for user subscriptions…makes sense.

Well now, if you go to “your network“, you will see a section on the sidebar called “your fans“.

These are people who have you in their network (you can set your network to private, so no-one can see which users you subscribe to).

I was pleased to see that I have over 20 fans…these people must like my link stream…glad to be of service.
I’m doing it for myself anyway, what not let others peer over my shoulder and capitalise on the rewards of my efforts.

If my fans like my stuff, there’s a good chance I’ll like their stuff, so off I go clicking on these users to see what they’ve got.

Now that I’m directly driven to view the accounts of my fans, I want to view other user accounts…hmmm, I’d love to search by a user field.

At the moment the search doesn’t specify fields (I think it searches in the title, tag, and comments field combined).

Check out Simpy and RawSugar for fielded searching, even combining them.

Feedback

I’d like to make bundle headings for my “your network section”, and also for the “your fans” section, not only that but I’d like these bundle headings to be clickable just like in the “inbox” section.

If you click on a bundle heading from the “inbox” (your tag subscriptions), you will just see a portion of the content from your whole inbox.
I’d even like to click on one subscription within a bundle from my inbox, and see the contents from just that subscription, at the moment if you do this it will just launch to that tag page, if you want to choose another tag from your inbox you have to use the back button to get back to your inbox.

Now how about our “tag bundles” headings (the user home page) being clickable hyperlinks, I’d love to see only bookmarks from tags within a tag bundle…RawSugar has this feature.

To go one step further, I’d like to do a search query within one of my inbox bundles or across my whole inbox, and for it to generate a feed that I can subscribe to in my inbox…Simpy has this feature.

Export Internet Explorer favourites to an OPML file…simple as that.

NOTE: this is a download, and it exports a file not a URL.

Feedpass is the lastest and the best RSS landing page so far.

The Feedburner landing page offers a few RSS Readers, and start pages to choose from…compare this to the myriad of choices at Feedpass (at the moment they offer 56 RSS Readers).

The choices are: RSS readers, email, start pages, browsers, or manually…you can also save individual posts in your favourite bookmark service.

Everyway of subscribing has an explanation…very informative…and you can even earn money if people click on the ads on the landing page
…anymore features on this landing page and it would lose focus.

See more.

[ADDED: I forgot to mention they provide code for buttons, auto-discovery, and you can claim your feed…not sure how to do this…I think this will display other features like statistics]