Attensa Connect

Where Does the Time Go?

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:55:40 -0800

Admittedly, Attensa Connect has been dormant for over 4 months. Alot can change, and has. Four months can be an eternity, and looking around the industry, there is much more known today than there was last November. Initiatives such as Lotus Connections show Web feeds gaining a foothold in the enterprise space in a meaningful way.

No longer is RSS the provenance of corporate evangelism as more and more companies yield to the realities of the bottom line, understanding better how to get the right information to the right people at the right time. Of course, none of this is new. We've been documenting the corporate uptake since we began publishing, but it's interesting to notice how the interest has really turned to details.

It seems fitting to pick up where we left off, and look to Scott Niesen's recently published a series of articles on feed reading best practices. It's a good compliment to existing feed publishing best practices. Both are comprehensive studies of how to get the most out of RSS at the individual level, and great primers for anyone looking for a place to start tuning information delivery.

Feed Publishing Best Practices

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 22:08:33 -0800

Niall Kennedy has posted a wonderfully concise set of best practices for publishers who would like to use web feeds to syndicate content and data. He includes some non-obvious tips like maintaining accounts on the major online feed readers (Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, etc.) and using them to subscribe to your newly launched feed to ensure it is picked up by blog search engines. Worth a visit. Read it and tag it.

Attention On the Item

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:08:55 -0800

google_reader
Originally uploaded by brooksjor.

Robert Scoble, now with his own Scoble Show, has a recent video interview with two of the engineers at Google responsible for Google Reader. It's worth a look.

I played with Google Reader, which I haven't before, while I listened (and half watched) the video. They've done a really nice job (and that's what I really think, because I can't say the same about Google Calendar) of putting the feeds in front of you so that they flow and you can keep them organized.

But what's really interesting about it is that you can share items from different feeds with other people. How does that work? Well, if you've subscribed to three different feeds in Google Reader - think of three of your favorite feeds in the reader you use now - then as you're scolling thorough the items (posts) of one of them, you can click a little icon at the bottom of the item that says, "Share."

Clicking "Share" puts the item into what is essentially a new "Share" feed that is viewable, like your original three feeds, in Google Reader, but they also give you a URL for a separate HTML page, an Atom feed that you can subscribe to, or javascript for a widget you can add to a blog or whatever that lists these shared items. Very cool.

What's cool about it is that it means you can dissect feeds at the level of item and say, Hey, I think this specific piece of information is important, and I want to share it with somebody else. I doubt it was terrifically hard to do, but it's exactly what you need to be able to do as a user - work with items - and I don't think I've seen it anywhere else, and, as I said, they got the interface right.

I'd say Google Reader is now a great example of how a person who consumes a lot of information through the use of feeds can be aided in paying attention to the right things. And, not surprisingly, the topic of attention is touched upon in the interview.

Information Best Served Right Away

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:27:15 -0800

We're getting to know a little more about a startup company in the Bay Area called Real Time Matrix. They have an interesting model. As I understand it, you define an information stream or "channel" using both keyword includes and excludes, that are organized in a hierarchy, and, as data flows through their backend, it looks closely at the stream in order to sort and filter what is relevant to you. This is then delivered via RSS.

Although their presentation and marketing is pretty nascent, the technology, which is really about feeds, attention, and activities, that is, the information you get, your ability to process it based on how good it is, and, finally, how you act on it, appears to have some legs. We're using this same basic framework of feeds, attention, and activities right now to design a mashup between our feed server and Lotus Notes because it covers your three essential bases: I (attention), We (activities), It (feeds).

Conceptually, Real Time Matrix, is similar to Findory, which analyzes your clickstream and presents relevant information. But the Findory is about consumer news, while Real Time Matrix is obviously interested in business data and intelligence. It will be interesting to see if their algorithms are industry strength, too.

Think Mashups

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 21:14:25 -0800

Tune out the presentation a little bit and just think about what's going on here in this mashup by IBM. They're pulling data from several places, some of it riding RSS, and essentially having chunks (or maybe, flows) of data talk to other chunks.

We should probably start giving ourselves a little freedom to think about what kind of data we want to bring together, what we want it to do more than how to make it work, because the open Web, as this mashup shows, invites it.

Active Listener: Putting Podcasts To Work : Production and Post-Production

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 14:04:15 -0800

Production and Post-Production Issues

All that noise -- how do you filter it out? You can invest hundreds of thousands in a sound proof studio or you can do your recordings at your office. As you may imagine, most everyone does their shows in their office. Here's a shot from the Tartan podcast studio. Essentially, we are looking at a desk. Really, that's about all you need.

But really, most podcasters are working with what they have. Idea is to think about what you are doing. Ambient noise is ok for interviews at a conference. Doing an interview with a sales executive for an interview? Make sure you are in a quiet place. Check out the environment before you get started.

CC Chapman, who recently joined Crayon, a new marketing agency, talks about environmental concerns in this second part of the interview we did with him. CC says:

* Background music during your show can help a lot. But don't make it too loud. The music may be just right for the show. But if it's too loud and the music plays on a 15 second loop, then it's just distracting. You can tell when the music is starting the new loop.

How Feedia gets ready for a podcast
We go through the Feedia set up for podcasting:

Two Audio-Technica microphones
Inspire 1394

The Inspire 1394 connects through a firewire cable to Johnny's laptop. Mixer software is on the laptop. The microphones run through the Inspire mixer on separate channels.

We always do a back up with the M-Audio Microcontroller. Our two microphones are connected via USB port. The M-Audio is a two-channel microrecorder with a built in CompactFlash drive. We use a 4 gigabyte card to store recordings. Recordings are saved as .wav files and saved on the computer as mp3 files. Six gig cards are available. M-Audio is small and light. It has a lithium-ion battery that can be recharged by connecting the USB cable from the M-Audio device to the laptop.

Widgets for Business Intelligence

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 11:21:13 -0800

Widgets. I'm not particularly fond of this term to describe the chunks of code that are being embedded in web pages and blogs. This code brings content from somewhere else on the Web to where you are - for yourself, as a "starter page" if you will, or as part of the content you're publishing for other people. The word "widget" isn't descriptive, it seems to me, because it suggests "gadget," which is a device with practical use but often thought of as a novelty.

natigeo
Originally uploaded by brooksjor.

But there's so much more that could be done with these things, which in fact are micro, modular Web services. Today they're mostly used for weather, news, and images like the one from National Geographic pictured here that's available on Apple's website and meant specifically for its computers. But what gets me excited about them is business intelligence. That is, they could be used to gather the information, text, images, and video, needed by people in a company to start understanding what's significant and what isn't.

Widgets are made out of XML, so are RSS feeds. Which is why Steve Rubel writes in a recent post that widgets are "glorified RSS". Yes, exactly, they're RSS feeds, plus.

What I'm picturing here (and I wish I had a good example of widgets in the enterprise, but I don't, although I'm sure one or two exist) is a Netvibes type of interface, very modular and fluid, that any employee could quickly customize with widgets (or whatever the next-gen name is for these things) to track intelligence and research from multiple sources. Some of the widgets could come off the public Web, but others could be hooked up to services like OneSource and LexisNexis.

Even better, though, is that within this interface could also be next-gen widgets acting as windows into Lotus Notes (Hannover) or Salesforce.com or Tableau Software - whatever platform the company uses to contextualize and apply analytics to ongoing projects or problems. Or, there might be a widget acting as a window into an internal blogging platform or wiki through which people could drop "quick posts," starting the analytical process through dialog via comments and relevant posts.

So, pull, filter, push. Maybe it's just the lightweight business intelligence we've been waiting for.

Category, Granular, Niche

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:48:35 -0800

Bill Flitter, who is the founder of Pheedo, an RSS marketing solutions company, left a comment on this blog the other day. So, I dove into his feed to see what he's paying attention to.

Recently, he's been at the direct marketing association's (DMA) annual event where, apparently, RSS is a topic that's alive and well. Bill links to an article by Heidi Cohen of Clickz that's a summary of a panel that she was on with Bill and Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines.

There's some good stuff there, and if you're interested in what RSS has to offer marketers, you should check it out.

What I get out of it is, feeds would really be most effective if thought about and delivered at an individual level. Let's look at the points she makes (or summarizes) about types of content feeds:

There are "category-level" feeds, she says, (e.g., digital cameras) for people early in the buying cycle. Second, there are "granular-level" feeds (e.g., data on a specific camera) for people further along in the buying process. Finally, there is "niche content" related to the offering to keep people engaged with your brand.

Hmm. Doesn't it suggest that to go from level one, "category," to level two, "granular," to level three, "niche" that you have to have a way to individualize the feed. I mean how do you do this well without going at it one feed at a time. It's all about personalization: one RSS stream per person with just the right content.

Because if you can generate a unique URL for the feed and figure out a way to find out what the person at the other end of that feed stream needs - what she gets excited about - you're really cooking. And in my opinion, it's not so much about delivering content, it's about asking for feedback from that person. Then, the content should mirror, whenever it can, the feedback.

I think we're still at the stage, mostly, of generating a unique URL and delivering generalized, if somewhat tailored, content. There's no mechanism, though, for really finding out what our subscribers want. But what if . . .

Clipboarding At Eventful

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 19:48:07 -0800

If you want to try out Live Clipboard, which I posted about the other day, go to Eventful and do a search on whatever.

On the page for the event you choose in Eventful, you'll see an orange scissors icon in the sidebar on your right: "LiveClipboard." Click that icon, then right click and choose copy. Nothing happens. No, not until you go to your blog's window for posting (or whatever text window you want) and do a right click and select paste.

And out pops:

The Divine ComedyWednesday, November 8, 2006, at Savoy, Cork, Ireland

Or at least that's how it looks in it's viewable form. The actual code looks more like, well, code.

You just used Live Clipboard to take event data from one Web app, and in the form of a microformat, I might add, and copied it to your Web app (blog post or whatever you chose). The usefulness of this is now other computers can read this calendar entry that you pasted because it's not just text, it is a microformat, specifically the hcalendar format. So you can get synched up in a myriad of ways when computers parse your post and seen that you have the hcalendar format and what it says.

The point? The point is (a) it couldn't be easier to do (b) sharing information between apps is what it's all about and (c) when these micro chunks of information can fully utilize RSS to communicate back and forth, one less thing holds us back from collaborating with other people.

But anyway, try it out by going to Eventful. That's the easiest way to get a feel for its significance.

One On One

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:07:30 -0800

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.

- Aristotle

Blogger Daniel Eran wrote a wonderfully succinct history of RSS in 2005, which I found on the wikipedia page on RSS.

Here's what I took from it:

The basic idea of RSS is to distill the core content of a site and deliver it as raw data, devoid of presentation, in a structured file. While every website looks, behaves and is organized differently, they can all publish an identically formatted XML file that contains a description of the site's content, with embedded information on the publisher, when it was posted, and links to find the content on the site.

What I observe in this beginning is that RSS provided a method to move websites, at least the core content, instantly across the Web. I think based on the popularity of RSS in this early stage of adoption that one can now say it made the Web more of what people naturally expect it to be: fluid and much more workable than websites can be, certainly than the were in the mid-1990s. So, good start.

But what about how it's developing?

I think it's still early to tell, but I think the most interesting characteristic that I see developing is the ability for RSS to go beyond connecting data to a single person (e.g., NYTimes politics section to my feed reader) to connecting organizations to a single person, and, best, just one person to another person. What I mean is that a feed tends toward an ownership of one on the recipient side, even more than email, although at first that's counter-intuitive because in the case of email you actually have an email address that you know is linked to an actual human being, because it's a hand-raising, choice-making, intention-setting activity to choose your feed and the items within it.

With email there is just the one, too, but it is the passive one rather than the active one. With a feed there's no two ways about it - it's your feed and you choose what's in it.

And I would say that same tendency - toward the one - is active on the publishing side of the feed, too. Why? Because isn't the best way to get and keep someone's attention to speak to them directly in a way that specifically engages or inspires? Nothing has been invented yet that can do that better than me talking to you, if the context is right and so are delivery and timing.

So we're going to continue to see all kinds of personalization in feeds, from contextual ads within the feed to custom and thematic feeds to functionality (e.g., "Subscribe") within the feed. But the flowering of feeds will occur when they're used to facilitate a back and forth discussion between two people.

The Power of Choice

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:35:21 -0800

Who would have thought that a venture capitalist would be so entertaining to read . . . entertaining, insightful (and understandable), and maybe a bit prophetic? Well, Fred Wilson is all of these things.

Attention VC?
Originally uploaded by dmc500hats.

I read feeds from around the Web religiously and though others are close seconds and thirds, Fred's feed is the one I get the most out of. He and his partner, Brad Burnham, at Union Square Ventures are focused on "lighweight web services built on top of commodity/open source infrastructure," which others of us might call Web 2.0.

Let's see, today he has 12,514 subscribers to his feed (visible in his left sidebar toward the bottom), and that's only a portion of his overall readership, although a nice portion.

Fred has made the point in a previous post, if I remember correctly, that your feed audience - the people that subscribe to that little RSS icon on your website by placing it in their feed reader - is not the same as the people coming to your website. This is a different crowd that consumes the Web in their own way. One way of expressing this difference is that instead of surfing here and there they sail in particular directions, to specific destinations. In terms of information that means they want to know about certain things and to go a little deeper into them. That's why the use a feed reader to get their information - because it aggregates it in one place and they can watch it evolve over time.

So, the point is, if you're trying to connect with people who have positive attention spans, your feed audience is generally that audience.

Now, Fred gives us a data point on this attentive audience that is really quite enlightening. Here's what he says in a recent post:

Less than half of all my impressions last month happened on my site. I delivered about 300,000 ad impressions in September. Over 60% of them were in my feed. That's right, sixty percent.

Isn't that interesting? It really is quite interesting. Because it strongly suggests that people who choose to subscribe to a feed are at least as proactive and probably more so than the people who visit your Web page. I have a feeling that two years from now that's going to seem like common knowledge. But right now, Fred's data point feels like a breakthrough in demonstrating that there might be a better, more effective way to share information than through Web (and blog) pages.

It's quite logical actually. I don't think it's too far fetched to say that feeds are an evolution in how information and knowledge on the Web are consumed not simply another way they are consumed: i.e., a Web page is how you find information but a Web feed is how you choose information. Naturally, you are going to trust the ads (and other forms of marketing) more in something you have chosen.

What Is RSS Really Good For?

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:45:40 -0800

Jeff Nolan, known for his blogging at SAP who is now at Teqlo (a startup that allows business users to create their own apps), wrote on his blog that if he were doing an RSS company, he would use it to leverage cross-functional apps by using RSS as a "semantic data integration tool."

He doesn't give a lot of detail but, in my mind, "leveraging cross-functional apps" with a "semantic data integration tool" is quite similar to what Ray Ozzie has demonstrated with Live Clipboard. There is semantic data (i.e., data that contains meaning like microformats) within distinct apps at one or multiple points, all strung together with RSS feeds.

This could be a very light weight, quick and effective way for apps to talk to each other ("always on and two way"). I think it's interesting to note that in a stream-of-consciousness post, Jeff offered this as his bet on RSS.

Active Listener: Putting Podcasts To Work, Planning and Pre-Production

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 20:51:58 -0800

Active Listener: Putting Podcasts To Work, Show 2

In this show, we discuss the pre-production and planning issue with starting a podcast.

Introduction

We start with mention of Jake Ludington, who does a lot of podcasting and has written about the basics of getting a show started. Discussion centers on hosting, blog platforms and RSS.

Hosting: Space and bandwidth issues. John Hartman talks about the nightmare that can happen if your show gets very popular and you are charged for exceeding your bandwidth limit
Resources: Todd Cochrane, author of Podcasting, the DIY Guide, does an excellent job of explaining what to look for in a hosting provider.

Interview with Chris MacDonald

Chris MacDonald started podcasting in 2004 with the launch of indiefeed, which features tracks from indie musicians. Today, indiefeed has 750,000 downloads per month. He is currently vice president of business development at Libsyn, a podcast hosting company that recently launched Libsyn Pro, a service designed for corporate applications.

We talked with Chris about the issues to consider when hosting your podcast. Here are some of the interview highlights:

Hosting has to be easy. It should be simple to get your show online. Anything that is less than easy should be questioned
Hosting provider should make it easy for you to distribute to the right people
Look for a provider with an advanced statistics platform who has the ability, for instance, to track RSS susbcribers, unique downloads and partial downloads. A note: If your host does not provide this data, you can use Feedburner. They will host your feeds and provide measurement data
Knowing from the onset what the costs will be if the show scales
Case study: Chris talks about Libsyn's experiences with National Geographic and why companies will be sucesful if they choose a platform complimentary to their IT structure

Dreamforce06

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 08:15:00 -0800

Yesterday Dreamforce kicked-off. Dreamforce is Salesforce.com's annual conference. If you're reading this blog, you most likely know that Salesforce.com is delivering customer relationship management software to companies over the Web. And that they've done such a good job of it since they launched in 1999, that it's unquestionable at this point that they're playing the disruptor's role in the market.

Dreamforce06
Originally uploaded by gokubi.

But that's not all. Salesforce.com also looked into its own future and saw that the very nature of software development would be changing. The essence of this was that a small number of companies would offer application platforms upon which developers would offer their apps to a wide audience - a business market place, if you will, much like EBay does for consumers. The benefit to developers is that they could shed a lot of the marketing and sales efforts, and use those resources to create better software.

Because Salesforce.com had 20,000 customers for its Web-based CRM system to point toward such a platform, they felt it could be their "second killer app." And they launched it in January of this year as the AppExchange.

The reason this morning's keynote by Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO, might prove to be more than routine is because, word is, he will be announcing that the AppExchange is now capable of not only hosting applications, but that the business logic can be programmed directly into it. This would be pretty extradordinary because it would mean that Salesforce.com could compete directly with companies like Oracle. And Benioff has publicly said that's exactly what he plans to do.

We've put an RSS app on the AppExchange, which you can see in the sidebar to your left (or here's a link to it: http://tinyurl.com/jnyg4), so that Salesforce.com users can pull data to their desktop or a mobile device. This is a perfect example of how useful RSS can be in a business context. But, we're also very interested in the AppExchange because we think that RSS is going to play a much larger role in the next-generation Web, specifically the business Web, as explored in the Live Clipboard post below. The AppExchange, and software platforms like it, is definitely part of that future.

Simple Bridges

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:45:47 -0800

If you're interested in hearing about Live Clipboard, the subject of the post below, from the horse's mouth, then you can listen to this IT Conversations podcast with Ray Ozzie. It was recorded at last year's ETech conference where Live Clipboard was introduced.