Iterasi Blog

Killer New Features For PositivePress

2009-10-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

This week we’ve made some significant additions to PositivePress. These additions are direct results of input from our customers. All these features are available today. If you are a PositivePress customer or someone evaluating it under our 30-day free test drive period, these features will just magically appear.

First, we have made some significant changes to the overall navigation. We reworded some of the top navigation elements to be more logical. But I assure you everything is still there as well as some new features that we believe you will really like. Without further ado, the new features are:

Topics: We built PositivePress using best in breed Open Web technologies (read: RSS feeds). This works for some customers who like the ability to monitor specific media sources. But the number of people who feel comfortable working at this level is admittedly a subset of the general populace. Some people told us they just want to enter a term and not get into the details of where the data comes from. So we built Topics.

A Topic can be a product, a company, a person, a place…whatever you want to monitor. Sometimes you may want to monitor a set of products. Other times you may want to monitor a product as well as the products that compete with it. Under the covers, we do the work to scour the web for information on a Topic. With this in mind, we’ve also changed the way we charge for PositivePress. We now charge by the Topic and Feed – so that you can choose the right combination for you.

Overview Dashboard: Users told us they would like one spot to get an overview of what they are monitoring. The Overview Dashboard is just that place. Under the Overview tab you will see both a place to get a quick, at-a-glance look at what you are monitoring in PositivePress as well as a workspace to compare various types of web traffic. If you want to understand what makes up the coverage for a certain point on a graph, just click on it and you will be redirected to the Web pages in the Archive that make up that point in time. (Slick, huh?). The Overview Dashboard has 3 sections, as described below:

Workspace: The workspace is where you can track and compare Web traffic by Topic and Date Range as well as by Tag and Folder. The workspace defaults to showing overall traffic across all Topics by channel – Blogs, News, or Twitter – and allow you to change the parameters to compare just about anything interactively.

All Topics Overview: This view gives you a quick at-a-glance look at the relative coverage of each of your topics. This is especially valuable when comparing a product or company against its competition.

Individual Topics: Each topic displays a line and pie chart showing the mix of coverage – Blogs, News and Twitter. This is useful for tracking coverage in greater detail. And any time you see something of interest and want to look deeper, just click on the point on the line graph to be directed to the articles that make up that point in time.

Automatic Reports: Based on user feedback, we created a way to email reports automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. These Automated Reports contain graphs to give you an overview of your coverage. To use Automated Reports you simply give the Report a title, determine frequency (daily, weekly or monthly), decide which Topics to include, address the report, and select OK. PositivePress will send the reports out as instructed. As well, a copy of each report sent will be kept under Reports-> History for referral at a later time.

View Slideshow: This feature exists under the Archive Tab and is optimized for review of the details of a set of pages. Each page is shown in full size – as opposed to the thumbnail view in the Archive view – and across the top are controls optimized for tagging and adding notes to a Web page. View Slideshow is very useful when you want to examine a set of articles over a period of time, commenting on some, tagging others, and perhaps deleting some that were captured by error.

This sums up the major features of or new release. We hope you find these new features useful. Either way, we appreciate it if you let us know what you think.

Check out PositivePress media intelligence.

Tracking our launch using PositivePress

2009-08-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of eating one’s own dog food, we thought it a good idea to show you how to use PositivePress to capture, archive and report on the launch of… (drum roll please) … PositivePress! (I bet you saw this coming).

The video below walks you thru the process of setting up PositivePress to capture and archive media coverage, how the review and report process works and finally, the resulting report. Enjoy.

Click here to see the report.

Introducing PositivePress

2009-08-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

Today we are announcing the launch of PositivePress™, Iterasi’s premium service designed for business professionals who depend upon knowing what is being said about their products, company and marketplace. With PositivePress we have made it easy to track stories, build a private searchable archive of Web coverage, and generate reports to colleagues, clients and executives. We’ve also extended our archiving technology in some new ways. For example, for Twitter we not only archive the entire message (or Tweet) but we also crawl the links within each Tweet and archive those pages as well, thereby providing the most complete archiving of Twitter available.
We have also made significant changes to the Iterasi free site – now called Iterasi Personal™ – that add some features folks have been asking for and streamlines server performance.

Introducing PositivePress™

With PositivePress we’ve added the ability to easily capture the Web, archive it forever, and report on what you’ve captured. And we’ve done it in a way that allows users to leverage the best-in-breed technologies to deliver results in a powerful and cost-effective way. PositivePress builds on top of Iterasi archiving technologies to provide what other solutions can’t; the guarantee that the article is there when a client, colleague or executive wants to see it and the ability to build a searchable database of Web-based coverage.

Capturing the Web

We really didn’t have to look too far to find the best method to monitor and capture interesting stories on the Web. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is both simple and ubiquitous. It is simple in that it exists on virtually every news source, blog, search engine and social media source. Most browsers identify RSS feeds automatically. RSS has emerged as the de-facto technology used throughout the Internet to pass information. Think of RSS as the silk that makes the Internet into a Web. From simple tools like browser-based readers to complex programming tools like Yahoo Pipes, RSS is the answer to subscribing to information flow in the Open Web. Click here to see Wikipedia’s definition of RSS.

PositivePress leverages RSS to allow you to capture the Web from whatever source you like. We have a widget that contains a number of pre-loaded RSS feeds from popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, bing, ask.com), news sites (BBC, Fox, and Yahoo News) and blogs/social media/blogs (Twitter, Bloglines, Technorati, DIGG). We also include a small bookmarklet that allows you to grab a feed of any page that has an RSS link. As well, we offer advanced Add Feed to use once you get the hang of how RSS works.

If you don't already, you'll really appreciate the power of RSS. Nothing else, be it proprietary or custom, comes anywhere close to the ease and power of using RSS to monitor your Web presence.

PositivePress Reports

Once you collected the stories of interest you need a way to share them with those you work with. Sharing can have many meanings. In a PR or media related firm, you want to share coverage with your clients. Within a company, you may want to share stories with peers or executives. Whatever the reason, reporting on digital coverage is the key to showing how a company, product or individual faired in the rapidly changing world of digital media.

We learned a lot in researching PositivePress. In the public relations (PR) world there are lots of powerful tools available. Many of these tools are very expensive and limited in their report capabilities to a single, large and complex report meant to be published monthly. People we spoke to wanted a lightweight method to deliver digital coverage to their clients. Some wanted to deliver reports on a weekly basis, others whenever the news hit. All of them said it was important to be able to make a report quickly and that it must look good. It was important that they were able to convey information quickly. Since a report would flow through the clients’ organization, branding and an easy way to contact the author were mentioned as important as well. Finally, it helps to know if the report has been opened, at what time and by how many people.

From this input we created a simple and powerful report generator. In the picture below you see a sample report from a make-believe firm called Acme Media Tracking. In the top center is the Summary where the Acme account manager summarizes the week’s coverage. In the upper right-hand corner is the firms’ logo and below the logo is a link titled Email Report Author. These features provide a simple way for readers to know where the report came and get back to the reports’ author.

Finally, the bottom of the report contains Thumbnails and Notes of individual stories. Each Thumbnail refers to an individual story in the PositivePress archive. So stories are never lost and you or your clients can refer back to them without having to worry about losing coverage from days, weeks or months ago.

With PositivePress you can generate simple and powerful reports with the assurance that coverage will not go away.

Iterasi Personal™

We’ve made some significant changes in our free offering which we now call iterasi personal. The first thing you will notice is that My Pages has changed significantly. By popular request we have added the ability to perform operations on large numbers of pages. Now you add a Tag to a group of pages, or a common Note, or Delete in Bulk, or make pages Public or Private. This feature should make operations within your My Pages account much easier.

We have taken away the Search column on the left side and replaced it with a Search box at the top. That was the source of some of the performance latencies our site was experiencing. As accounts got bigger the search required to display the contents of that panel became excessive (and less useful). Also, most of what was on the home page for searching the public archive has been moved to a top Nav element called Public Pages.

We have also removed ‘Import Bookmarks’ as an option. This feature costs us a lot in terms of bandwidth and performance and was getting limited use. It may reappear but, frankly put, it requires too much horsepower to be given away for free. So if it reappears it will most likely be as part of a monthly-subscription product.

Finally, on the free site you will be getting pitched to try out our premium products. We hope you will give them a try – PositivePress is the first and we have more in the pipeline. Click here to learn more about a free 30 day trial of PositivePress.

Conclusion

We are excited about these changes! With PositivePress we feel we’ve opened the door to a world of possibilities for customers to use the full power of the Open Web, build a permanent, searchable library of coverage, and quickly deliver powerful reports.

For our Iterasi Personal users, we think you will find the improvements meet some of the requests you have made of us over the last year. Hopefully many of you will find tremendous value in archiving whole streams of information with PositivePress!

pete

RSS is the best tool for the job

2009-07-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

Currently at Iterasi we are in beta with a brand new product. I have dropped hints about this for months now via posts here and ramblings on twitter. One element of this not-yet-released-so-I’m-not-gonna-describe-it-yet product is its integral use of RSS. The problem: I have had a lot of angst in counting on a technology that many non-tech savvy users see as pretty raw stuff.

Please do not take me wrong; I am a huge fan of RSS. However when I utter those three letters to the tech-challenged potential customer I often get a glazed response. I then proceed to show that, in fact, it’s called Real Simple Syndication for a reason; it really is simple. Still glazed. As previewing a new product with potential customers is critical – and one can't ignore the feedback – this has bothered me for some time.

Maybe I am doing something wrong. Thoughts race through my mind. Maybe I should build some ‘wrapper’ in our product to ‘hide’ the complexities of those three letters? As the sleepless hours drag on, I envision some fancy UI that allows someone to just drop in a term or phrase and magically get the answer. With this magic, my customers won’t have to learn the mysteries of the scary RSS hobgoblin.

I was lamenting this situation with a trusted friend (whose identity shall remain secret) over IM:

Petegrillo: funny thing... I was feeling like we should have more 'front end handholding'

Petegrillo: but in fact, the entire web runs on RSS

Mystery_friend: i think so

Petegrillo: so we would in effect limit our users abilities by obfuscating the power of all these RSS capabilities

Mystery_friend: i like that

Petegrillo: hey a good quote huh?

Mystery_friend: it is

(Sounds like the answers one would get from a therapist, huh?)

There is it. The elusive moment of clarity. I could spend tons of engineering energy to hide the power that RSS provides across the Open Web. Or I could let the Open Web work for me. RSS exists on most all news site/blogs, browsers, search engines, and on twitter as well. For more sophistcated applications Yahoo Pipes provides an extremely powerful tool set built around RSS. (One noteworthy exception to RSS acceptance is Facebook. They seem to dabble in RSS and then run away from it).

So now I get it. I am at peace. I will not try to hide the power of the Open Web. I will have to deal with some initial resistance with the belief that my customers will learn the power of RSS and find greater value in our product by working with the best tools available.

It’s a gamble. But I think it’s the right move for our customers.

pete

Change coming

2009-06-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

Change is constant. Right now is certainly a time of change for businesses of all shapes and sizes. And we are no different.

Changes have been hyper-accelerated by the current economic situation. In the months since the most recent bubble burst – as measured by the famous Sequoia Capital R.I.P. slidedeck of October ’08 - most startups have either closed shop completely or gotten real serious about turning themselves into sustainable businesses. The events we all read daily about have had an effect on customers as well. Customers now are expecting to pay for services they value and questioning either the sustainability or the value of free software. Feedback from users has been pretty direct on these points.

At Iterasi we will be acting accordingly. We have been giving away way too much for free. Many users have told me this. We have experimented with various business models with some successes. Shortly we will move to a model where we will charge for premium services. As has been rumored for some time (by me mostly) we will be offering for-fee products built on top of our core archiving technologies. The first of these products will be available a little later this summer. These products will be provided as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model billed on a monthly basis. Without leaking too much, let’s just say that if you are in the business of tracking Web-based media, you might like what we will be offering.

We will, however, continue to offer free Iterasi accounts for the foreseeable future. You can expect that there will be some limits on what we provide for free, and a way to increase the features available to you for a reasonable fee.

There are some things we won’t do. We will not do away with your ability to archive pages for free. Nor will we hold the pages you have archived in the past at bay by requiring you to pay to access the pages you already have archived. We may reduce the number of pages that you can archive for free. Likely we will also reduce some of features available for free use. The details are being decided as I write this.

These changes are good for Iterasi as well as our customers. We want to be around to provide our services to as many people and businesses as we can. It’s what we do.

Importing Furl pages into iterasi

2009-03-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month it was announced that Furl, an early innovator in the world of social bookmarking, had been purchased by Diigo. The announcements we read said that the Furl service would be rolling into Diigo in a future release.

Since that announcement we have had quite a few Furl users ask us if they could import their Furl pages into iterasi. The answer is ‘Yes, sort of’. Let me explain. At this time we have an import tool that would let you import your bookmarks and their associated metadata and use iterasi to make fresh archives of those Webpages. To be clear, we do not (yet) offer the ability to import the pages as they were captured by Furl users days, months or years ago.

We have talked about the effort to import Furl pages and it would not be hard for us to develop. Currently our plate is pretty full so the decision to add this capability will be based on how many people ask for it. So let us know if this is something you would like. If we get enough requests and decide to add this feature I’ll make an announcement here at a later date.

In the meantime, if you want to import the Furl URLs into iterasi and get a fresh archive of the webpage, then do the following:

EXPORT your Furl items as bookmarks:

1) Login to your Furl account

2) Go to 'Tools->Export My Archive'

3) Click on the 'Browser Bookmark' link to select the export format used by IE and Firefox.

4) Save the file locally somewhere that you can remember

5) If you want to import your Furl 'Categories' as iterasi 'Tags', then you will need to modify the export file to change the label "CATEGORIES" to "TAGS" and replace the semicolons used to separate the tags with commas. The easiest way to do this is to open up the file in notepad, and do a global replace for CATEGORIES and semicolons. Choose 'Edit->Replace' and replace 'CATEGORIES' with 'TAGS'. Repeat the previous step replacing semicolons with commas. (NOTE: Use ‘Replace All’ to replace all occurrences in the document at once, saving you from having to go through the file one bookmark at a time)

IMPORT your Furl bookmarks into iterasi

1) Login to iterasi

2) Go to 'Tools' and click on the 'Import' button

3) In the import form, click on the 'Browse' button and locate your saved exported Furl file.

4) If you want to add extra tags to your Furl item – perhaps you want to tag all of these with the Tag ‘ImportedFromFurl’ you can do that by adding to the Tags box.

5) If you want your Furl items to be private, check the Private checkbox.

6) Click on the 'OK' button when you are ready to import

7) Our servers will browse to each of your imported Furl URL's and archive a fresh copy of that URL's webpage and save it in your account. You can see the progress of this in your 'Pending Archives"

Again, let us know if the full webpage import from Furl into iterasi is something important to you. We will count the votes and if there is enough interests we'll post here at a later date.

A Natural Fit

2009-03-03T12:59:00.000-08:00

Today we launched a very cool integration with AboutUs.org. AboutUs is another Portland, Oregon-based Internet company. If you don’t know about AboutUs, here is how they describe themselves:

AboutUs is a wiki for and about businesses, organizations, blogs, forums, and really anything or anyone that has a website.

Think of us as your guide to websites (that you can also help build).

So what does a Web archive have to offer a Website wiki? We think a lot. This relationship will provide every AboutUs user access to the iterasi archive of Web pages for each AboutUs website they visit.

Here’s how it works. Each AboutUs Website now contains a link ‘Iterasi Archive’ in the section titled ‘Website Information’ immediately under the thumbnail. This link may have a number next to it representing the number of pages for this domain that exist in the iterasi archive. Clicking on the link will bring the user to the Web archive where they can dig further into the iterasi archive of Web pages for that domain. If we haven’t seen this domain in our archive we will queue up a job to go archive that site. We will do the same if the newest archived page is older than 30 days. That way we will keep the archive fresh and current with more use by AboutUs users.

So why is this cool? Well for a whole bunch of reasons. It gives the AboutUs user a very cool new feature (obviously…right!). AboutUs users can now search through the iterasi archive to research the evolution of the Website, search for information of historical significance, whatever. For iterasi, it should be a source of traffic to our site where we can hopefully turn them into happy users as well.

But there’s more to the story…

Some people…

So how did this deal come together? How did two Portland, Oregon-based companies ever determine they could do something to benefit each other? Did we bump into each other at one of the 10,000 coffee shops in Portland? Did we follow each other on Twitter and become lifelong brothers before we ever met face-to-face? (Don’t laugh… this has been happening a lot lately… ).

No. Oddly enough, this relationship was initiated by Erik Benson of Voyager Capital. Yes, that’s right. A venture capitalist put us together. Erik and the Voyager team recently made an investment in AboutUs. But the history here goes way back. I have known Voyager since the late 90’s and have interacted with Erik and partners Bill McAleer and Enrique Godreau many times since. They have always been professional and downright decent to work with. Even when they declined to invest in my firm in the 90s (WeSync.com) they took the time to explain where I should improve my plan. Note that this was in the Bubble 1.0 days when no response was considered the best-practices method for a VC firm to signal a startups to just ’get lost’. So years later when I was working with a promising young company that needed venture financing, I stood on the table and shouted“Hey, talk to Voyager, they are really smart and really decent people as well”.

Recently I ran into Erik. I suspected he had something to do with putting iterasi and AboutUs together. The talk went something like this:

Pete: ‘Erik, are you behind this?’.

Erik: ‘Yes. It makes sense to me’.

Pete: ‘You know, if people find out you do nice things, it could be the beginning of the end for you as a VC’.

Erik: ‘Yes, it could appear that I am losing my edge’.

We both had a good laugh and went our separate ways.

So here I go again

I know, I know. I should be blogging about how great this relationship is for both companies and for all of our users. There will be more on this - you can count on it. I promise to bang our drum louder as this relationship unfolds.

But I just had to point out what anyone who has been in business very long can tell you: People make it happen. Nice things you do for people result in nice things happening back. Karma is real. I want everyone to know how the business world should work, can work and, for me, did work this time.

iterasiLite, updated browser support and Web-based Import Bookmarks

2009-02-25T12:44:00.000-08:00

Today we are releasing a new product - iterasiLite for Firefox – as well as updates for our clients to the latest browser releases, and a Web-based Import Bookmarks tool.

iterasiLite

Today we are launching a new product for Firefox users we are calling iterasiLite. This product is based on the bookmarklet links but now wraps them in nice icons that automatically install in your toolbar via AMO’s familiar .xpi file. iterasiLite includes two toolbar buttons – one to A)rchive a Webpage and another to V)iew your personal archive. As is typical in any add-on in Firefox, the buttons can easily be changed, moved or removed to conserve toolbar space. Please download the new iterasiLite at http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10879

Help us get iterasiLite out of the sandbox and approved for public release by writing a review on iterasiLite’s AMO listing.

IE8, FF3.1 beta 2 Browser Support

We updated iterasi to the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. For Firefox we support all versions from 2.0 up through the latest version 3.1 beta 2. For Internet Explorer we support versions 7.0 and now 8.0 (IE8). You can download these new clients from our downloads page at http://www.iterasi.net/Download.aspx

In addition, the latest Firefox extension is also available for download on Mozilla’s Addon site (AMO) http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8039. Help us get our Firefox extension out of the sandbox and approved for public release by writing a review of our product on our AMO listing.

Web-based Import Bookmarks

We originally built our Import Bookmarks service as an application that ran on top of our client-side Scheduler. This worked fine but had some problems, the biggest being that it was client-side and therefore used a fair portion of a users processing and horsepower to get the job done. So we listened to our users’ feedback and built a server-side archiving engine that we now use to import your bookmarks. It is easier on users and us to just import the bookmarks to the Web and capture the pages on our iron. Live and learn.

That’s all for now. More fun things on the horizon. Can’t wait to write the couple of posts!

Will digital history simply disappear?

2009-01-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

We started iterasi with the idea that individuals should be able to save Web pages they find interesting. We saw this as fundamental to one’s use of the Web. Everyone spends a lot of time searching the web for answers and use bookmarks to save what they found. However, bookmarks often point to pages that are no longer be there. So we thought we’d fit a pretty generic need by supplying something more than just bookmarks.

From inception we thought of personal and business uses for iterasi. But there has always been, in the back of our minds, a case to be made for a greater purpose. Some of our users save receipts, some articles, others save programming tips. All of this is good. Some are using iterasi to capture historical events. In a posting here in November I referred to the work of one user who captured the front pages of digital news magazines heralding the Election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 98 news sites from around the world. This is a great set of Web pages and now, thanks to the creator, a record for the entire world to see.

An article titled titled 'Websites must be saved for history',

published this past Sunday in the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk ), describes the problem where history, in effect, disappears when a Website changes. The author cites two examples; 1) the recent changes in whitehouse.gov, which remove references to the Bush Whitehouse, and 2) the removal of more than 150 sites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney shortly after the games ended.

This article makes the point that despite the huge technical advantages of the digital age, we stand to actually lose some accounts of history. Certainly any method used to record history is subject to loss. Paper rots. Statues erode. Wood decays. All of our digital capabilities offer potentially huge advantages over these more physical solutions.

The problem is that digital content has a habit of disappearing. For a variety of reasons, publishers remove, replace or deprecate their content. Sometimes websites simply go away. Whatever you call it, history is now recorded in the form of a Web page may at some point may be destroyed or stored where no one can see it. We are left with the situation where there is no guarantee that history recorded in digital form will be available in a consistent fashion for future generations.

Not that this is news to anyone. The Internet Archive (www.archive.org ), founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, uses hundreds of servers and petabytes of storage to capture and record the Web. From their Website:

Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.

Archive.org is a great service that has proven its value to Internet users over the years. They capture Web pages at a varying frequency as determined by their own algorithms. As such, they are very well equipped to capture the Web and therefore help stem to loss of historical Web pages.

At iterasi we have taken a different approach. We do not know where all the great nuggets of information are on the Internet. But we think you do. So we allow you to build your own archive. We hope you archive pages you find valuable and, if appropriate, share them publically so that others may benefit from what you found. They may contain historic events or they may contain your favorite recipes. Whatever you archive, I bet others may will find value in what you archive.

Referring back to the article in the Guardian, the iterasi archive has 29 pages on Whitehouse.gov from the Bush administration and zero pages of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. On the former, hey that’s 29 pages that perhaps don’t exist anywhere else on the Web. I can’t feel too bad about not having web pages from the 2000 Olympics as we started iterasi in 2007.

So if you use iterasi, realize that you are also a librarian and a historian. So go forth and save the Web! Someone in the future may benefit from your efforts.

Difficult Decisions

2008-12-04T10:52:00.000-08:00

Startups are inherently risky propositions for everyone involved. I know this by now but it doesn’t make some things any easier.

As November wore on it became apparent that the economy was not going to snap back in any meaningful way in the near term. Faced with this reality, today at iterasi we took the painful step of reducing our staff. Our reasoning parallels what is being echoed across the industry. We need to conserve our cash, even at the cost of adding features and growing our customer base.

To our users, rest assured that iterasi is on sound financial footing. We raised a funding round that in normal economic conditions would be gone in 2009 as we would be spending to grow. The reductions we made today assure that we can continue on our path – albeit at a slower pace – without having to raise funds in 2009. Hopefully by later in 2009 things will have started to move in the right direction and we will be in a good position to grow with the economy.

To our teammates who are leaving, you will be missed. We were a small team of star performers that made great products in a great company. We are a smaller team now and better off for having had you on our side. I am sure the Portland community will gobble you up quickly. Talent like you guys is hard to find.

pete

Personal Rights versus Public Decency: what’s an archive to do?

2008-11-26T16:38:00.000-08:00

I can’t get over the number of things that come up that I did not anticipate. Background: At iterasi we build a Web archive, which is a place to capture, save and, optionally, search for and share Web pages. So unlike a bookmark that when clicked returns the current view of the Web page, at iterasi we save the page in the exact form it was when you saw it. But you probably knew that.

So now the unforeseen issue du jour. One of the goals of our work here is to let people archive whatever they find interesting. We do not pretend to be the judges of what is interesting to users and I seriously doubt they care what we think in this regard. So the right of choice is paramount to our belief system, as it appears to most enlightened humans and to the Internet in general.

Sometimes it gets dicey. In particular is material that may be offensive in nature - such as porn.Here is the rub: on our homepage we show ‘What the iterasi community is archiving…’ followed by a set of thumbnails showing the most recent pages saved by users. This is a nice visualization of what we do and pretty popular. Since we launched our search site we have gotten a few folks saying ‘nice site but do you think it’s a good idea to show porn on your homepage?’

Oh great. Ruined my post-launch afterglow buzz completely. Now another problem: Unfortunately our Search capability is very powerful. So users searching our public site start to trip across material they find offensive.

So we have to do something to protect users from seeing offensive material while protecting the rights of those who wish to archive material for their personal use. Luckily, by chance we happen to have the plumbing in place. All we have to do to hide material from ever appearing on our homepage or in the results of a search is to mark offensive material as Private. This should be easy, as there is a fair amount of public domain lists around to help us filter out offensive materials. We go to one of the large porn/blacklist aggregators and downloaded their list of bad sites. So the task at hand sounds simple enough. Just build a query in the database to check new pages against blacklist pages and mark those that appear as Private.

Here’s where things go to hell. The lists we have seem to include any site that ever had anything approaching bad material. That includes YouTube, blip.tv, popular game sites, any photo or art website, etc. I looked up one URL I didn’t recognize and it got me to a National Geographic video on an African Water Frog.

By now I want to scream. I start out not wanting to censor anything and then have to admit I have to. Now I’ve become a censor, someone Urban Dictionary describes as ‘…a moron who decides what is appropriate to list or not.’ At this point we hand edit the list and try to use some intelligence in determining what sites are porn and what sites may occasionally show things like naked frogs.

So for you iterasi users who mysteriously find some of your pages marked as ‘Private’ and you can’t figure out why… it’s our fault. If you feel they were unjustly set to Private and want them Public again please let us know. We’ll get better at this over time but right now this is what we have to do.

Portland Has No Stars

2008-11-24T14:47:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking lately about the phenomenal Ignite Portland event held a few weeks back at the beautiful Bagdad Theatre in SE Portland. It generated good local coverage (most comical was local TV station KGW calling it a ‘hipster event’) and for a while even dominated Twitter traffic (#ip4). But here I sit, two weeks later, still smiling as I think of all the friends I saw there and the Twitter friends I met in person for the first time.

It makes me think… What is going on in Portland, anyway? We are no stranger to high tech. Tektronix started here in the 40s and Intel moved here in force in the late 70s. But something pretty powerful is happening in Portland right now. I struggle with explaining it to friends who are not in the tech industry. We’re different than the Valley and different than Seattle. As I contemplate why this is, it occurs to me…

We have no stars here in Portland.

High tech is an industry ripe with fame and fortune. The individuals who achieve success gain a degree of notoriety and become Stars. Yes more Stars in our Star-struck culture. Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the last 20 years, you can probably name a dozen high tech Stars without pausing to breath. But Portland lacks these ‘names’. I can’t recall seeing a list of ‘the top 10 most blah, blah, blah in Portland high tech‘ published anywhere.

Totally distraught, I ask myself, ‘How can we thrive without Stars?’ What are we going to do without these brilliant individuals with their uncanny ability to know what will happen next? Who will pull our backward high tech scene together? Who will be there to lead us through this morass, if not a Star? Oh the hopelessness!

Just wait a minute. I was at Ignite Portland. The mix of intellectual horsepower and wit inside that old theatre was awesome and second to none. But how can that be? We are little old Portland and we have no Stars…

Maybe that’s it. Maybe Stars and Starchasing is not such a good thing. Maybe we make up for our lack of Star power by our collective energy, enthusiasm and intelligence. Maybe it’s our Oregon culture, our ‘Keep Portland Weird’ mindset. Could it be our respect for the ideas and rights of others that makes us such a force? Does the way we question everything… EVERYTHING… make us such a formidable movement?

That’s it. The Portland high tech community has come together in a big way. You can feel just feel it in the air. We don’t have Stars because we don’t want Stars. We don’t need Stars. We want people to contribute what they can, where they can, and help the overall movement grow. We steer each other unselfishly believing in our own value system that ‘your success is my success’. We are small. But we’re doing great things.

It’s our sense of community. We are the Portland High Tech Community. We don’t have any use for Stars.

Introducing a Simpler Client and a Searchable Public Site

2008-11-18T22:57:00.000-08:00

Today we released a couple of significant new features; a new lightweight iterasi client and a new searchable Website. The new client is a lightweight bookmarklet version of the full iterasi product that’s been out for a while. Our searchable Website allows anyone to search among the hundreds of thousands of public pages housed in the iterasi archive.

Below are details of each of these features. But before I lose you to the details, let me take a moment to discuss the ‘why’s’ behind these features. Our goal at iterasi is simple: to be a place where users can memorialize what they experienced on the Web and either keep it privately or provide it publically for the benefit of others. At this time almost 80% of the archive is public. With this release of our Website all these pages are fully indexed – all keywords in each page, Tags, URLs, Notes – so that everything in the page is searchable. The bookmarklet adds a simple-to-use tool that allows anyone to memorialize pages of significance to them – be it a favorite recipe, blogpost, research report, or maybe even the results of a historic Presidential race.

So use iterasi to capture history. And perhaps give it a try when you want to see what others find interesting.

The Bookmarklet

The new iterasi bookmarklet provides a lightweight version of the full iterasi product. There are both advantages and shortcomings when compared to the iterasi toolbar solution.

Bookmarklet advantages: the Bookmarklet is basically a link that you can save as a favorite and add to your Links bar if you'd like. To archive the page you see in your browser, just click on the link. With the Bookmarklet there is no browser plug-in and no installation process. When you save a webpage using the Bookmarklet, the capture is performed in our datacenter in the cloud instead of on your computer. So you don’t install anything and no longer have to wait for the capture to complete in your browser. Being a link that runs a small Javascript script, it can run on any modern browser.

Bookmarklet shortcomings: the Bookmarklet simply queues up the archiving process to run later on our hardware. The Toolbar installs in your browser and has the ability to capture exactly what you see in your browser when you press the Notarize button. In many cases that will not make any difference which tool you use - a recipe, article or blogpost will most likely archive just as you see it. Pages that use dynamic content or are accessed behind a login/password are best archived using the full iterasi Toolbar.

Public Search

With this release we now offer anyone – iterasi account holder or anyone coming to our site - the ability to search among the public pages archived by iterasi users. (Note that pages marked Private are NOT AVAILABLE in the Public Search Site). Remember that pages in the iterasi archive are selected by a real people and not by spiders or bots. The collection of archived pages covers all corners of the Web – sports, politics, programming tips, recipes, analyst reports, tutorials, jokes, etc, etc. Whatever a user wants to save.

Some choose to save history. In the blog ‘Teaching Online Journalism’, Mindy McAdams writes how she had a student spend election night archiving 98 different news sites from around the world using iterasi. From the New York Post to the Hindustan Times. From Gazeta Wyborcza to The Australian. From the Dallas Morning News to Le Monde. To see all 98 pages click on: US Presidental Election from the eyes of 98 news sites from around the world

It’s a very impressive collection. And now the digital versions are a permanent part of the world’s history.

So take a look at what the iterasi community is archiving. Try our search and you may find something of interest. Or archive pages that you find interesting. Otherwise, they just might disappear.

What I Want To Learn At WordCamp Portland

2008-09-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

I am going to first give a big thanks to Aaron and Betsy for putting in all the big effort for WordCamp Portland this coming weekend. They are hard working, doing it for the love kind of folks. It's people like them that make Portland such a wonderful place to be a blogger, vlogger, photographer or magic bus loving, media cooker. Bus loving media cooker?

Here's what I hope to get out of the event.

1. iterasi is switching to Wordpress. What type of ecosystem should we develop? Pete is interested in creating more threaded discussions. I look forward to exploring views about the different mixes, combinations and methods for creating a community profile of the people and our work here at iterasi.

2. How should we be treating distributed comments such as optional comment postings to friendfeed? Should we have the ability for people to post video comments? What about integrations for showing related posts?

3. What WP themes should we consider for the type of ecosystem we seek to create?

Please look for me if you are going to WordCamp Portland. I am the guy wearing the orange hat. I look forward to seeing you there!

iterasi now imports bookmarks from the iPhone and ma.gnolia

2008-09-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

iterasi now imports bookmarks from the iPhone, Safari on the Mac and ma.gnolia, the popular social bookmarking service.

Here’s how it works on the iPhone. Apple designed the iPhone to sync it’s bookmarks to the local browser – Safari on Macs and IE7 on Windows PCs - using iTunes as the synchronization ‘hub’.

On the Mac, iTunes syncs bookmarks with the Safari and on Windows PCs iTunes syncs bookmarks with IE7.

In this release we added support to Mac platforms to import bookmarks from Safari. So using Import Bookmarks on the iPhone involves two steps:

1. Use iTunes to synchronize bookmarks between the iPhone and the Mac (or PC).

2. Use iterasi to import the bookmarks from the browser. With this capability we are now able to Import Bookmarks from the iPhone on either Macs or PCs.

Our integration with ma.gnolia is very similar to how we incorporated support for delicious.

A user enters their ma.gnolia username and password into the iterasi Import Bookmark wizard.

iterasi will import all your bookmarks from your ma.gnolia account and offer you the ability to archive each bookmark once, once a day, week, or month, or not at all.

It’s pretty straight forward, simple and powerful.

iterasi Moves to the Heart of Downtown Portland

2008-09-22T23:57:00.000-07:00

We moved downtown to the heart of Portland, Oregon!
We are located at 715 SW Morrison St, Suite 800, which is pretty much ground zero in downtown Portland. We occupy the 8th floor of the Pioneer Arts building.

This is a great building with opening windows on all sides so light and airflow is assured. We look up and down Broadway – effectively Main Street in Portland – and oversee the goings on at Nordstrom and Pioneer Square. We moved from 2,200 sq ft to about 4,100 sq ft so we have lots of room to spread out. We are all pretty excited to be here and invite you to come by and visit us! If you are far from Portland, we took some photos to give you a glimpse of our new digs. :-)

We moved here for two primary reasons: better proximity for many of our employees’ commutes to work and to get closer to Portland's exciting and thriving high-tech community.

It’s exciting to see what is going on in Portland right now – new companies forming, others moving into the area and new deals getting funded. It has been some time since I felt this level of energy in the high-tech community in Portland. What’s also great is that there are new faces emerging with fresh new ideas. Events such as Lunch 2.0, Beer-and-blog our upcoming first-time-ever CyborgCamp held in conjunction with sister-city Vancouver BC, live local broadcasts in the form of Strange Love Live and all the other wacky things going on make Portland an a great place for the 24 hour-a-day high-tech junkie!

As a retread from the wonder days of Web 1.0, I’m here to tell you that this time it is different. There’s something in the air this time around. It’s called community. It’s real and it’s catching on. I don’t think things will ever be the same. I like it. It’s right.

Pete

A Quick Fix

2008-09-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

We released a new iterasi extension on Sept. 5 that lets you import bookmarks from delicious. Since then, we have received feedback from some people using our Firefox extension, that their tags were not properly separated during the import process. This resulted in some of the imported pages containing one long tag string instead of several separate tags. We sincerely apologize for this error.

Yesterday, we released a new Firefox extension that fixes this issue for any future imports from delicious. If you imported your delicious bookmarks prior to yesterday’s release and you have this issue, we can help you correct the tag problem with a fix on our end. The fix will convert all tags with spaces to comma separated tags on those pages that were saved by the scheduler.

If you are interested in having us apply this fix to your tags, please email us at support@iterasi.com and include your username.

TechCrunch 50 To The Sounds of Tahiti

2008-09-16T19:53:00.001-07:00

Back from TechCrunch 50. At the San Francisco Airport I recorded a group of women from Tahiti singing while they waited for their plane. They were the happiest people I have ever seen waiting for a plane. I wanted to find a way for people to hear the music so I decided to set it to the photos I took at the conference. Thanks to the TechCruch team for bringing together a group of start up entrepreneurs,venture capitalists and a whole bunch of familiar faces. :-)

Allen Stern, Import Bookmarks and Tahiti Folk Songs

2008-09-11T23:43:00.000-07:00

I met Allen Stern of CenterNetworks at TechCrunch 50 on Wednesday. Allen covered DEMO in addition to TechCrunch 50. He interviewed Pete at the DemoPit. It's short, basic and to the point about the import bookmark feature we added to iterasi earlier this week.

Discovered Allen's post with Pete just before boarding the craft back to Portland. I did not want to leave. A group of Tahitian women kept putting smiles on the waiting passengers with their playful folk music. They just laughed and sang. Perfect way to head home from a fantastic few days at TechCrunch 50.

Getting late. Good to be home. Here are some more photos from TechCrunch 50.

The Hall of No WiFi and Other Pictures From TechCrunch 50

2008-09-08T17:20:00.000-07:00

Before I get started, a message came yesterday afternoon from TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde. We will get a table on Wednesday in the DemoPit. That's in addition to yesterday's time on the floor demonstrating iterasi and our wildly popular import bookmarks feature we announced yesterday. Our painful day of WiFi starvation is not going unnoticed. TechCrunch is making good on yesterday's nonexistent connectivity. They are giving iterasi another day to really be able to demonstrate what we do. Thank you, TechCrunch. :-)

I often wonder what the conference halls look like at the events I watch from afar in Portland. And so I decided to take a few shots from TechCrunch 50 to give a glimpse of the happenings and this space we are calling home for the next few days.

First, welcome to the "Hall of no WiFi," as I called the DemoPit yesterday. I talked to a few of the startups there this morning and the connectivity is far, far better.

Londa left the booth to watch Ashton Kutcher yesterday present "Blah, Blah, Blah." She had her chance yesterday to have Ashton on a platter. That's Ashton up there with Sarah Lacy, a celebrity in her own right and, I must say, a traveler on the Gnomedex magic bus.

The San Francisco Design Center Concourse reminds me a bit of a barn or grange hall. It's long and narrow but provides room enough for 1,700 people. It's a pretty basic set up but it works just fine for the event.

The DemoPit runs parallel to the open space where people gather for lunch. On the far side of the hall from the DemoPit, Microsoft set up a start up center where I found a group playing with the touch table yesterday. It looked like a group hack of sorts.

In the main hall, you can see the size of the conference. By 8:15 this morning, the room started to fill. An hour or so later, tables filled up all the way to the back of the room.

Jason Calacanis said people gave the "National Idol" format a thumbs up. It works. Presenters give their startup pitch. Judges sit behind the presenters. Mark Cuban, Don Dodge, Kevin Rose and Roelof Botha ripped a few pretty good. As I tweeted, I would not want to present a highly abstract concept to this group.

Back in the DemoPit, you see more startups than you will be hard pressed to find in one place. A total of more than 135 startups are in the DemoPit, including Zivity, a startup that "promotes beauty." You should have seen the number of mobiles hooked up at the Zivity table to get their photos. :-)

Anouncing import bookmarks for Firefox, Internet Explorer and delicious

2008-09-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

Users have been asking to import their existing bookmarks into iterasi since our earliest releases. Well today we are releasing this capability on all platforms we support. Seriously, this feature was requested almost as much as a Mac version. So for me, a personal victory; a bunch less ‘trust me, its coming’ emails I have to write.

This feature imports bookmarks from Firefox, Internet Explorer, del.icio.us and/or from any app that exports to the standard bookmark export format. So you tell it where your bookmarks are, we import them and make permanent copies of the pages the bookmarks point to. No more lost articles. No more link rot. No more Error 404s. But we don’t just import them. Import Bookmarks is built on top of the iterasi Scheduler – released last month – so one-by-one you can choose to archive each bookmark once, every day, week or month, or not a all.

We chose the browser-based bookmarks and del.icio.us (now just ‘delicious’) because they seemed like the obvious first choices. Our plans going forward are to work with other bookmarking services and Web applications to easily automate the permanent capture of Web pages. We see this as a key part of our value proposition; we want to be your personal Web archive, we don’t want to make you change what you do. So we’ll work with the applications that you use every day to make it easy and automatic for you to save what’s important to you.

The Scheduler was released last month. I hope you have had a chance to try it. This handy tool allows you to have iterasi archive pages on regularly scheduled basis (daily, weekly or monthly, you pick the day of the week/month, you pick the time, etc). Like a personal version of archive.org’s WayBackMachine, the iterasi Scheduler can be used to capture your favorite web pages. How can this be used? The Scheduler is useful for daily sites that you don’t want to miss and that change a lot such as retail, news, recipe sites and bloggers/journalists. It is also useful for sites that you want to track over time, like a politician’s site, where you may want to track the number of supporters or their ‘evolving’ messages, or a competitor’s site, where you might want to track announcements, specials and changes in their messaging. The uses for the Scheduler are limited by your imagination.

One warning on import bookmarks: If you have lots of bookmarks, it is best to schedule it to run when you are away from your computer. Think about it; we are feeding dozens and dozens of bookmarks down to the browser who is one-at-a-time loading, notarizing, and shipping each up to your account. In other words, we are torturing the poor browser. As you might expect, the browser can lock up under this kind of load. We find this situation to be unavoidable.

So we decided two things. First, we advise you to import bookmarks when you are away from your computer – say, in the evening. Second, should we be importing a lot of bookmarks and have the browser lock up on us, we would kill and reload it. This way we can run through your entire set of bookmarks and get them archived in (hopefully) a single evening. So the bottom line here is that if you leave something in your browser when you are importing a lot of bookmarks, you may come in the next day and find your browser is closed. We are sorry if this causes any inconvenience but we really have no way around it.

The Import Bookmarks and the Scheduler offer individuals the ability to monitor and archive the Web in ways they’ve never been able to before. Give ‘em a try and let me know what you think at feedback@iterasi.com

pete

We Miss Gnomdex...

2008-09-03T21:59:00.000-07:00

Londa and I coordinated today in our human circuitry shirts from Gnomedex :-) Hey, hey that's Pete Grillo!

We miss Gnomedex and all our magic bus buddies but hope to see some of our friends at TechCrunch 50 next week. Ping us if you'll be there.

The iterasi Magic bus rides tomorrow for all who wish to join us.

More hijinks. We promise. :-)

iterasi Magic Bus Rides at Inverge

2008-09-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I had a Podcast Hotel event in Seattle. I had done a Podcast Hotel event before in Portland. But at the one in Seattle, something really clicked. Geeks came to talk podcasting. Artists came to learn and perform. The geeks interviewed the artists. The artists just loved that the geeks admired them and their work. The geeks and artists talked about artist rights, music and tecchnology. They partied. Good, good times.

I guess that is one of the most satisfying results of the Gnomedex field trip on the iterasi magic bus. Geeks took a bit of time to make a side trip to see some local art. We connected artists and their work with a group of super appreciative geeks.

It's a big reason why I am so excited to get the iterasi magic bus back on out and welcome some people from the inverge conference on a little trip Thursday evening to see some works by local artists over in a part of town they might normally not visit. I'm talking inner SE Portland, one of the most exciting, emerging artist communities in the Pacific Northwest.

If you are unfamiliar, the magic bus is owned by Nat Taylor who drove us to Gnomedex, joined us at the conference and skillfully parallel parked the long, yellow biodiesel baby underneath the viaduct just off Alaska Way. The brother can drive. We connected through Jay Stewart, someone who I first met at Gnomedex two years ago. He's part of the Gonzo gang. Those merry pranksters I've come to know from up and down the Pacific Northwest Coast from Portland on up to Vancouver, BC and beyond. Nat converted the bus, a 1978 International Harvester, added two couches, some bean bag chairs and a bed in the back. It has a rocking stereo and bus seats up front if you prefer the full, traditional school bus experience.

Now, inverge is a conference that is starting to gain some traction. And, it's well deserved. It's at the Gerding Theater, the old Armory building in Portland's Pearl District. Steve Gehlen is the organizer who put inverge together. You can hear an interview with Steve on Hazelnut Tech Talk, Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo's podcast.

The line up is strong. I'm particularly excited to hear Amber Case talk. She's our local cyborg anthropologist. She's super intelligent. She joined us for the Gnomedex road trip. Locals Scott Kveton and Raven Zachary are also on the bill. Scott is chair of the OpenID Foundation and VP of Open Platorms at Vidoop. Raven is talking about 20 things you'd never do with a mobile phone. He is founder of iPhoneDevCam. Also speaking are people like Joshua Green of MIT and David Card of Jupiter Research.

After a day of intellectual noshing, Renny Gleeson and the Weiden and Kennedy crew will host a little party at their office in Portland. It's one of the coolest office spaces around.

We'll roll the bus up to WK at 6:30 for boarding. Everyone is welcome. We'll take a ride over to the Bamboo Grove, where we'll see their current graffiti art exhibit. Perhaps we'll look for other graffiti art in SE. It's a draw to that part of town as local artists frequennt the area, spraying it with their art. We'll hang out and then roll over to Green Dragon for food and drink, courtesy of iterasi.

We'll then board back on the bus and head back to the Pearl for First Thursday and later for some music courtesy of MusicFest NW? Nat just sent an email and said we may have to check out Steel Pole Bath at the Doug Fir. They go on at 1 am. Could be that kind of night on the magic bus.

Local artists, geeks, media honchos, great music and craft beers - that sounds like a worthy combo. Perhaps we'll fit in that late night music over at the Doug Fir. Sure sounds like fun to me.

See you on the magic bus!

Making Mashups With Ubiquity and iterasi

2008-09-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

What a cool combo iterasi and Ubiquity make for creating simple mashups.

Ubiquity is a new add-on from Mozilla Labs that gives the ability to write on web sites, translate pages and a whole number of uses. It is in its experimental form but already shows a lot of promise. Watch the video on the blog. It gives an excellent overview of what Ubiquity offers.

I used Ubiquity and iterasi to create an invitation for the next magic bus ride on Thursday evening after the inverge reception at Weiden & Kennedy. I used Ubiquity to write on the web site for the graffiti exhibit we are going to see. I used iterasi to archive and share the invitation.

Now I see what Josh Bancroft meant when on Twitter he compared compared Ubiquity to Silverlite. And why Robert Scoble said Ubiquity means he will not have to switch to IE8.

Troy Malone uses iterasi with Ubiquity. He initially sparked my interest in using the two technologies to create new ways for making your own notes on web pages. It's a bit like commenting but on the page itself, not in a box where comments usually appear. This is the first release so it still has some way to go. But Ubiquity holds promise in its use for adding notes to a page, much as you would write, for instance, on the margins of a flier.

I made a few more of these simple mashups to show how the two applications can be used.

I wrote notes on my Friendfeed lifestream

I captured and added notes to a Twitter lifestream from Roseburg,Or. where I spent the weekend with Judy and her parents.

I added a comment to the latest news from from Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web about Google Chrome, the new Google browser.

I commented on a photo by Kris Krug taken on the iterasi magic bus trip during Gnomedex.

Step By Step Instructions

Here are step by step instructions for adding notes, highlighting and making copy bold or in italics on a web page with iterasi and Ubiquity.

I created a short video to demonstrate: mashups with iterasi and ubiquity

To get started, download and install the Ubiquity application.

Once installed, give it a try. Do the "control+space" command on the PC or "option+space" on the Mac. You will see a small window pop up in the left corner of your browser. Try doing a search.

Now go to a web page that you want to mash up. Scroll over the text. Use the command "control +space or option + space, depending on if you are using a PC or Mac.

Now type "highlight" in the Ubiquity pop up window. Press enter and the text on the web page will be highlighted in yellow.

Type edit and then enter. You will then have cursor control over the web page. You will see how the images are framed. Click around the images and you will see where you can add text.

Scroll over the text and highlight or write "bold or "italic" in the Ubiquity window. Press enter.

If you click refresh the highlighting will go away. if you email the page, the highlighting will not appear. This is when iterasi comes into play.

If you do not have iterasi, you may download it from our web site.

After the pages is saved, it will made public unless you click private when notarizing. You will see the page with your annotations in your personal account. You may then email it, use the Short URL to post the link or embed on your web site or blog.

I am sure there are many more mashups to do with Ubiquity and iterasi. Translating pages, more map integration and a whole host of uses are yet to be explored.

Have fun!

Five Reasons Why We Added The Short URL Feature to iterasi

2008-08-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

It is the little things about an application that are are often most valuable. Those features are often not immediately noticeable. iterasi's Short URL is one of those lesser known features that you end up using for all sorts of purposes.

We added the Short URL to the "embed" area in your personal account archive. When in your personal archive, click on embed and you will see the Short URL for the page that you want to cite. The Short URL replaces the long web address that appears in your address bar.

For example, I saved a blog post by the talented Liz Strauss, titled: "Social Networking: 10 Reasons Why Twitter Folks Unfriend You"

Here's the link from my personal archive in iterasi that I could use:

https://www.iterasi.net/Viewer.aspx?RootAssetID=37743

And the Short URL found when clicking on "embed":

http://sqrl.it/?xsb2c

Make sense?

Now, on to the five reasons why we added the Short URL feature to iterasi:

* People requested the feature. For example, Benson of the Res Ipsa blog said it would be useful for attorneys when citing electronic sources.

...I mentioned the availability of short permanent URLs to access the notarized pages would be a feature I thought users would really appreciate so they can more easily use Iterasi for citations in professional publications. I am happy to report that the most recent version of Iterasi offers this new feature. This is a company that is listening to what users want and responding quickly. Keep an eye on this add-on for additional features in the future.

* Short URL works far better with microblogging service like Twitter that limits users to 140 characters or less

* Bloggers can easily use Short URL when linking to a page they want people to always have access to no matter how much time has passed

* Short URL is easy to use when texting a link over your mobile phone

* The link will not break in email. Web addresses will sometimes break because they do not wrap. That is not a concern with Short URL