Library clips

I got a follow-up email the other day from our vendor to see if I have used a new reporting package, and for some feedback. I really don’t have time now as I’m facilitating at the moment, but I will get round to metrics at some stage.

To tell you the truth, this reporting thing is going to be a whole new component to our CoPs, which means I will have to dedicate some good time to learning about it, practicing, and then putting some stuff together to inform CoP facilitators, and then to support them.

I’m so busy at the moment that I keep putting it off. I would be prepared to spend 15 minutes a day on it, but I’m one of those people who once they start, really dive into something; the momentum, continuity and freshness helps me retain and not forget where I’m up to, or how things work again.

Then I thought, blog fragments.

I asked the vendor if she could possibly use her blog to do a weekly post on reporting. Maybe what’s already available, and what’s involved. And then start getting into the new package…perhaps posting once a week to showcase a report and what questions it answers

eg. If your boss is asking for numbers, but you don’t have the time for this stuff just try this quick and easy report on distinct logins, that will buy you time for now.

eg. The boss may ask for penetration metrics eg. The difference in number between members of CoPs and all employess

eg. If your boss wants a more explicit step up, try this report that tells him how many subscribers there are across all blogs and forums

eg. The boss may want some activity metrics eg. the number of blog and forum posts

eg. What about some engagement, try this report on the number of blog/forum posts a month compared to comments/replies. What about the difference between members and contributors, or compare the number of contributors to previous months.

This would really spoon feed me, and help workaround my attitude, and attention scarcity.

There’s no way I’m going to read a paper or dive into a whole new area right now as I’m too busy, but if someone feeds me little fragments where I can learn in bits and pieces, well then I will pay some attention.

Plus I can always comment on the blog posts to get some clarification and context.

Since we are talking about metrics, here’s what Agnes Kolkiewicz emailed me back, I thought it was interesting:

“As I’m sure you know, adoption and success go hand in hand…so I usually encourage the use of metrics not just to measure ROI, but also to measure progress along the way, as then you have data to fall back on at a later date to say this is how the system improved over time. Measuring things along also helps identify “peak times” in participation so that community facilitators can try and perhaps recreate the event that caused the peak at a later date.”

“I’ll post something tomorrow and will aim at a minimum of one post a week.. your email was a good motivation!”

I replied:

“thx Agnes…you are right…kind of like measuring the heartbeat, the rhythm”

Let’s finish off with a quote by Dave Snowden on the theme of this post:

“The basic idea is simple: Small things are more adaptable than big things, and they are frequently more interesting and more able to gain our attention. People will spend more time surfing the Web and using the fragmented material of an RSS feed than reading documents. It’s easier to write a blog than a book. Fine granularity material can combine in novel and different ways more easily than formal documents.”

FeedVis - Still in private beta, with also an offer of the source code to run it on your server, FeedVis is a a tag cloud generator based on a bunch of feeds that you import via an OPML. The cloud is based on frequency and popularity. This should just be a feature of Google Reader, and probably is in Feedly (also see mini). I remember good old Feeds2.0 had a tag cluster. [via RWW]

embedit.in - embed doc and image files or URLs into your blog posts as flash boxes - doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, pdf, wpd, odt, ods, odp, png, jpg, gif, tiff, bmp, eps, ai, txt, rtf, csv, html. Limit is 20 meg. If you already have a web page with links to lots of documents, use embedit.in sitewide to convert them in one go. See their tips. I’d rather not embed it in this post, but here’s a URL to an example of embedding a URL. [via nw]

Webinmail - if all you have is an email connection, yet you want to surf the web, then email this service with the URL you want in the subject field, and they will email you back the page…you can even email a search query. [via DI]

Innercircle.cc - create an email distribution list. Also see posterous group blog/email lists

Smub.it - ever read a webpage on your phone and want to bookmark it in delicious, share it on Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed, email it, etc… I do all the time, but my phone doesn’t have bookmarklets (do phones have these). Anyway, what you can do now is prepend the URL you want to bookmark/share with “smub.it/”. It’s kind of like ShareThis, but done manually by altering the URL.

eg.
- if you came across this URL on your phone
http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- you go to the address bar, and prepend it with “smub.it/”
smub.it/http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/surf-the-web-via-email/5624/

- then it takes you to a page of icons for delicious, facebook, twitter, friendfeed, email, etc…click on one of these and your away.

Problem with my phone is I can’t choose an icon to click, darn….

Anyway, you can also manage your bookmarks at smub.it, and use a smub bookmarklet or toolbar

It’s also a URL shortener, where you can customise your URL’s
ie enter your ID and a keyword. For example the link in the example above could be
smub.it/johntropea/surfemail

[via BrightHub]

Trackle - when a visitor clicks the Tracklet button on your blog they can enter keywords and choose to get latest content delivered by email, SMS, or login to their Trackle inbox.
The RSS feed Trackle is only one of many, there’s loads of them, and you can manage all of them in Trackle. See Notify.Me and others to DIY.

Liveflows - offers related posts from your blog, similar to Outbrain and Zementa, only this one is a distributed network, and lives in the footer of your blog (it actually feels like part of the browser). See related posts from your blog, popular posts in my network, blogs I follow, blogs that follow me. I get the feeling that it’s something MyBlogLog could have done, and something Google Friend Connect (GFC) is doing. Only in GFC you only need a profile to follow people, whereas in LiveFlows you need to be a blogger (which is essential so it can show popular posts from your network). GFC can be seen more of a fans type tool …I do like that the social bar gadget has commenting and site activity, and other features like ratings. Most of these relate to the homepage, unless you embed a gadget in a post.
I wrote about the blogosphere as a distributed social network a while back. [via LG]

Google News Timeline - When you visit the site delete the saved queries. Then from the drop down menu choose blogs, and enter the name of your blog. Voila, now you have a visual date based archive of your blog. Sort by day, week, month, year and drag to sift through the archives.
Here’s a link to my blog starting from Jan 2009.
Of course you can add lots of blogs and other news sources, or even keywords…perhaps a liteweight alternative to Google Reader.
It’s all based on Google Reader, so the archives only go back to its inception in 2005. Also see 30boxes blog timeline. [via DI]

Evernote - How did I miss this one. I’ve been using Webnote for so long, but I’m now testing to switch over to Evernote.
Basically via the web, mobile web, email, SMS/MMS, blog post footer button, Twitter, download version (even for mobiles) or bookmarklet I can add a note, clip a webpage, add an attachment (audio/video/etc) into any of my Evernote notebooks. Also tag all my notes, search (even text in images, limit to title field and tag, limited to one or multiple notebooks), synch files, make public notebooks, to-do list boxes, saved searches…and heaps more. Check out their blog, and tips.

Tinychat - create an on-the-fly chat room, even embed it in your blog

It’s sometimes such a drag being an early adopter because you are ready for features years ahead of when regular users will ask for them…you just have to be patient.

But the day has come, Google Reader has turned into a simple newsmastering service.

Over two years ago I was whining (point 5 in this post) that Google Reader lacked an OPML file for each tag/folder, which it still does, but it has gone one better anyway, well kind of…

I was also whining and still will that the OPML of my subscriptions is a file and not a dynamic URL. Use case is if I import my OPML into a Google CSE, and then add/delete a feed from Google Reader, my Google CSE will not know about it, which is a pity because it means I can’t use Google Reader as a master control for people to use a public search engine across my current Google Reader subscriptions.

OK, the new feature…a while back during the American elections you may remember that Google Reader was showcasing shared item lists based on a curated selection of feeds.

Well now we can do the same with the new bundles feature. That is, grab a selection of feeds and stream the latest posts on a page.

It’s just like our Shared Items page, but now we can select the feeds, and you can make as many of these newsmastering pages as you like, basically an auto-blog based on some source feeds.

Yeah! and each has an OPML file.

Here’s my auto-blog page on mobile culture, access the OPML file of the source feeds, or subscribe to the feed.

If you click the “subscribe” button you will batch subscribe to multiple feeds right into Google Reader, and they will be auto filed in the folder/tag with the name of the bundle page.

If you decide you don’t want the bundle anymore, unfortunately Google Reader doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe all feeds in a folder, so you have to manually unsubscribe from each feed…yikes!

What about subscribing to an OPML?

Now what would truly make this awesome and catch up with what Blogbridge did, in my own words is:

“When you import an OPML file into BlogBridge can you choose it to be a static list or a dynamic list…”

“Basically a reading list means you can subscribe to the URL of an OPML file, but instead of importing all the feeds in one batch, they kind of virtually exist in your RSS reader…if a feed is added or deleted to the OPML file, then this will reflect in your RSS reader…dynamic!”

What I’m saying here, is that in addition to batch subscribing to multiple feeds one go, I would also like the option to not subscribe to the feeds at all, but instead subscribe to the OPML URL.

Just say you subscribe to the actual OPML URL of my bundle above (you virtually/remote subscribe), and then I remove a few feeds and add some new ones. Then this will reflect in your remote subscription of my OPML bundle. I hold the master, and whatever I do in it, will reflect in whoever has subscribed to it.

As I said this would be good as an option, to import a static or dynamic OPML…here’s a post I made on this over 3 years ago, Dynamic newsmastering with OPML.

I guess if this was the case, then in your “manage subscriptions” page you could have a section for OPML’s you are remotely subscribed to.

So what’s next?

It needs:

• an OPML exchange - a place to swap bundles
• a newsmaster exchange - same as above, a place to find Shared Item blogs
• a search box
• tag cloud
• curating, like mysyndicaat

This last one is especially interesting, as it’s not only a topic auto-blog, but you could have the option to remove posts before they appear in your bundle (kind of like moderating), and also adding in posts that come from other sources (kind of like what we do with our public tag/folder shared pages).

And even do this by setting up keywords to filter in and out, the latest tool is MoreOver, and the most common is Dapper and Feed Informer…and of course MySyndicaat.

You know what’s coming next, and that’s to add a group feature where members could:

• comment on items
• write their own posts

Is this sounding like a Friendfeed Room!

Related features from Google Reader:

Google Reader is your new watercooler
Meeting friends of friends

[ADDED 24/05/09: Of course now I can put a bundle OPML into Google CSE, and when I update that OPML (add/remove feeds), my Google CSE will magically be updated]

This week Twitter decided to not allow you to see tweets people you are following are having with people you are not folllowing.

Previous to this it was an option in the settings, but it turns out this option slows down the servers, and since it is only known or used by 3% of users they decided to remove it. This horrified power Twitter users, see #fixreplies.

Why?

Because eaves dropping on conversations people you follow are having with people you don’t follow is a great way to discover new people. Actually this is the most common, if not only way, that I personally discover new people…it’s recommendations without trying to be recommendations…I trust who people I follow converse with, so there’s a good chance I will want to follow them. I’m not about to go through every person I follow’s contact list and look through these lists for new people…I don’t have the time…so I get more suitable value eavesdropping on conversations…I’ve only used Mr Tweet once, it was handy, but I’d rather find new people in my flow as part of using the system.

Anyway, now Twitter promise new things, so we will see, but at the moment they have kind of come half way.:

“…any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account.”

Meaning…if someone I follow replies to someone I don’t follow using a reply button (which threads the reply to the tweet ID), then I won’t see it. But I will see it if they type the word @user in the text box (rather than using the reply button).

What they are basically saying here, is that when you click the reply button, you are explicitly having a conversation, as the tweet you are replying to becomes a link at the end of your tweet. (You will see this at the end of some tweets, where it will say “inreply to johnt”). Whereas when you type in the reply in the text box this does not link the tweets so can be taken as a shoutout or a mention, which apparently is more appropriate for you to see, rather than a conversation from which you are not in the loop.

Personally I think the option in the settings was the way to go, but since this option could no longer scale, they had to take it away, I’m sure if it did scale there would be no problem with keeping it.

NOTE: what I’m not sure of is if I click the reply button using an alternate interface like peoplebrowsr, filttr, dabr, tweetdeck will the same function apply, or does it only apply when I use the reply button on Twitter itself. My hunch is it will make no difference, as it’s a linked reply and will be treated as such.

Facebook/Friendfeed comparison

It has taken a step backwards in regards to “serendipity”, but it’s no way going to be restricted like Facebook.

I like that Facebook is restricted and private as I use it as a more personal thing, I don’t want the world to know when I’m not home, or personal family happenings. I think this is Facebook’s strength, and they should see this unique feature as something that differentiates them from Twitter and Friendfeed, some don’t think so.

Let’s face it Facebook competes more with Twitter than Friendfeed.

NOTE: Of course they (Facebook and Twitter) are in competition to be the social network you most visit, but in regards to functionality they are different.

Friendfeed is a lifestream and a social network, just like Facebook, only Facebook has all features inhouse, whereas Friendfeed consolidates all your scattered profiles that you have at different services…basically Friendfeed mostly aggregates your stuff, where Facebook does it all. And of course you are free to browse profiles on Friendfeed, where this is restricted on Facebook as they allow people to set privacy settings.

But I will say that Twitter competes more with Friendfeed than Facebook. The reason is that a lot of people use Twitterfeed to auto-tweet their blog posts, bookmarks, photo’s videos, etc…Meaning not every tweet is manually typed, some of them are auto-posts from your happenings elsewhere, which kind of turns Twitter into a lifestream service, if you want to use it that way. It’s not designed for this, as is Friendfeed, but it is done.

As I mentioned before, they are all indirectly in competition because they run on the “social network” model. There is only so many places you can spend time, and you usually will hang out in the service where your buddies are hanging out…whether this service has crap features or not doesn’t matter in the end, what matters is that you can connect with them all in one place.

For me it’s Twitter, if all my Twitter buddies hung out at Friendfeed, then I may give it a try (NOTE: I do use Friendfeed for my lifestream, but I don’t network). And I do use Facebook for family and close friends, but this is more minimal use. I use LinkedIn as well, but it’s not really a place to hang out in. Basically, if juicy stuff happens in Friendfeed, Facebook or LinkedIn, it gets posted to Twitter, ie. Twitter has become the pulse.

Symmetric

Facebook is more about friendship. I can only follow you, if you follow me back (accept my request for friendship)…it’s more about strong tie relationships.

Asymmetric

Friendfeed and Twitter are less about friendship, as I can follow someone, who doesn’t follow me back…giving it a strength of weak ties scenario. This is great for serendipity, discovery, exploration, research…

As I said each service has it’s strength in the relationship dynamic it offers, at least for me anyway.

Status Updates comparison

To finish let’s compare the experience of Facebook status updates to Twitter. I thought I would cover this as lots of people say, “this feature is on Facebook, so I have no reason to use Twitter”, but they are mistaken…

The only thing Twitter and Facebook have in common is “status updates”, which is just one feature of Facebook, whereas this is the whole concept of Twitter. Due to the differing relationship dynamic they work quite different.

FB - I can only see status updates of people I follow (in order to follow them, they have to follow me back, which means we are friends)
TW - I can visit any profile and see their updates, I can also follow them and see their updates in my homepage (they don’t have to follow me back)

FB - I can see replies from people that are also my friends to status updates on my friends profile
TW - ditto

FB - I can see replies from strangers to status updates on my friends profile
TW - This is no longer a 100% truth, see start of this post for explanation

FB - I cannot see replies my friends make on a status update on a strangers profile
TW - This is no longer a 100% truth, see start of this post for explanation

FB - replies are threaded under an update
TW - replies are at the same level as an update (any update is considered an update regardless if it has the word “reply”)
If you click the reply icon it will publish a link to the tweet you are replying to under your reply. But the tweet you are replying to will not list the tweets that has replied to it

[ADDED 19/05/09 : see Twitoaster and Twonvo for all replies to a tweet]

FB - replies alert you via notifications
TW - replies don’t have notification, they are just another tweet in the stream
But replies to you, are accessed via your reply stream

As we can see here Facebook takes a more blog and comment approach, and Twitter has a full stream approach.

Eg. in Facebook a status update is like a micro-blog post, and comments are threaded (of which you are notified). Whereas in Twitter everything is a same level item in the stream…posts start at the top of the page, and roll off the bottom.

The other thing is that in Twitter you can discover more people through posts (eg. conversations your friends are having with strangers) and visiting profiles, whereas this is restricted in Facebook.

The advantage of Facebook is that after the fact conversations are more distilled, whereas in Twitter if you were not there while it was happening, you have to piece it together, although Twitter Search does have a nifty view called “Show Conversations“, and the use of hashtag channels for tweets on a topic.