Amy\’s Grab Bag, Oct. 2, 2004

Another collection of items that have caught my interest lately.

TOP OF THE LIST: CM Professionals: This is a brand-new organization for people involved in all aspects of the content management industry. I just joined because it sounds really cool and several top-notch colleagues of mine are already members. I’ll report later on how I like the group.

Here’s how CM Pros defines itself: “…The premier community of practice for people involved with managing content for electronic and other media. CM Professionals collects, develops, organizes and provides access to knowledge about content management through online resources, email interaction and face-to-face summits. By identifying, refining, publicizing and advocating for respected content management practices and models, CM Professionals educates and fosters interaction among content management professionals, enterprise leadership, product vendors and university educators.” They’re having an event in Boston Nov. 30.

Read the rest of this week’s list…

MyRSS no longer free: Previously in CONTENTIOUS I’ve recommended a service called MyRSS, which allowed users to create scraped webfeeds for third-party sites. Apparently there have been a lot of changes. MyRSS is about to relaunch as something called Market Sentinel. Old feeds created via MyRSS no longer work. Here’s an excerpt from the message now on that site: “Thank you very much for your interest and support during the early days of myrss.com. We have successfully completed the market research stage and established that there is a real business need for our service. We are now ready for full commercial operations and are re-launching the company as Market Sentinel. This means that we will be discontinuing the free myRSS service. …As Market Sentinel, our aim is to provide a service that notifies the user instantly of content updates to any web on the Internet, by email, via a newsreader, a webpage, or in any way the user requires. As with myRSS we plan to make the service as simple to use as possible – just enter the url and we create the feed.” It’ll be interesting to see how this kind of commercial business handles copyright issues. Lots of people aren’t thrilled when others scrape unauthorized feeds of their content. Expect some copyright hassles here.
Online word of mouth neglected by newspapers, Editors Weblog, Sept. 9, 2004. Never underestimate the power of coversations among individuals and groups. Despite our mass-marketing-saturated culture, word of mouth remains a powerful influence. This blog posting, and the Buzzmetrics study it describes, offers an interesting glimpse into how the internet allows quantification, measurement, and comparisons of “buzz” – at least in terms of conversations held in public via online discussion forums.
Software programs called RSS readers creating a blog jam, Seattle Times, Sept. 20, by Kim Peterson: I’ve seen several articles like this discussing the dark side of webfeeds. In a nutshell, some folks are concerned that if webfeed usage becomes very popular, the polling behavior of feed readers could end up overburdening servers and causing an internet logjam. I’ve heard arguments for and against this. The issue is real, but there may be ways to address this problem.
WizBang Standalone Trackback Pinger: I haven’t tried this yet, but it looks pretty cool. This free online service bills itself as: “…a way to send a trackback pings to any blog that accepts Trackbacks. You do not need to have a Trackback system on your blog to send pings.” Handy if your blogging software either doesn’t handle trackbacks automatically or does so unreliably. (What’s a trackback?)
HaloScan: This free online service “…provides an easy to use commenting and trackback system for weblogs and websites, allowing visitors to leave instant feedback. By copying and pasting just two lines of code into your site, you will enable your visitors to easily leave their feedback, opinion or a comment on the subject at hand.” I haven’t tried it, but again it sounds like it might be useful for some folks. (Thanks to Debra Broughton for this link.)
Pluck and Moreover join forces: On Sept. 21, the popular feed reader Pluck (a free plug-in to the Internet Explorer web browser) announced that it will be joining forces with Moreover Technologies (a popular news aggregator service) to add “personalized news services” to Pluck. These will include aggregated news feeds from Moreover, a custom webfeed builder, news search, and “persistent search” (akin to the custom keyword-search-based feeds offered by Feedster and Blogdigger). Sounds interesting – although nothing could ever make me want to return to the security and performance nightmare that is Explorer.
Science Library Blogs: Two Examples, Sept. 8 from Blogs, RSS, etc.: I’m always amazed at how innovative and creative librarians are online. Yet another great usage of weblogs. Next time someone tells you weblogs include nothing but opinionated, irrelevant driven, show them these.
Google Ad Policies to Be Publicly Expanded, ClickZ, Sept. 29, by Danny Sullivan. I know many people who have advertised via Google’s popular AdWords propgram. Virtually all of these people have complained about how there seem to be a lot of hidden rules that govern acceptable content for those ads. They’re right. Google hasn’t been 100% transparent about how it manages that program and makes editorial decisions about ads. Apparently, Google is about to expand its editorial guidelines document for AdWords, which hopefully will clarify some of its heretofore unwritten rules.
What’s a content management system (CMS)? In CONTENTIOUS and elsewhere this term is readily tossed about. However, a lot of people in the content business (especially those haven’t had much direct experience with creating online media) have never used a content management system and may not even know what it is. For those of you who are at the beginning of this learning curve, the folks at Audience Dialogue have written an excellent brief backgrounder that includes the bare minimum you should know about what CMSs are and how/why they’re used. Dwight Shih also published another good basic CMS backgrounder.
Top 10 free and cheap content management systems, May 29, MediaSavvy. That’s right, content management doesn’t have to be terribly elaborate or costly. The comments to this article list other candidates.
Am I a maven? Or a connector? Well, Sabine Kirstein seems to think so – thanks for the compliment! In her Sept. 27 posting to Odd-Lot Thoughts she wrote, “I think as blogs become more common, the value of the connectors and mavens will increase. People won’t be able to explore as much, so what folks like Robert Scoble, or Amy Gahran, or Michael Feldstein say and who they link to, will be come more and more important.” I honestly wasn’t familiar with that kind of usage of the terms maven and connector, so I borrowed from my public library the book Kirstein referenced, The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s quite intriguing. I appreciate the recommendation. Yeah, now that I know what Sabine’s talking about I think I might be a bit of both a maven and connector. But mainly I’m just insatiably curious and hopelessly talkative.