Over at InfoNgen, we just started producing a series of very brief tutorials for our service. Each video tutorial will focus on a single concept, and cover it in about 90 seconds. They will be built from a combination of studio material and screen captured shots.

Though these tutorials won’t be up on the InfoNgen corporate site until later next month, I wanted to give readers of this blog an early look:

The production value of these segments should improve as we optimize the workflow (especially around audio!), but I’m really pleased with the visual simplicity of the production overall.

And this isn’t the only video related news I have…

I am going to be using a format similar to this on a new video series we’ll be launching here at The Digital Edge called “re:SEARCH“. It will focus on various tools and strategies for more effective web searching, and with some luck, the first episode will be up sometime in February.

I’ll post more information on this new series once production begins next month…

PRACTICAL RSS [Show #4]: Exploring InfoNgen…

SHOW NOTES:
In this show, I demonstrate the free version of InfoNgen, a high-end feed reader/web discovery tool targeted at financial professionals and corporations. InfoNgen automatically tags and classifies every story from inbound RSS feeds or other textual sources IN REAL TIME, providing a manageable way for professionals to discover content across tens of thousands of unique sources.

Topics Include:
- the limitations of current RSS feed readers
- the advantages of a core tagging engine
- Signing up for a free InfoNgen account
- configuring content widgets on the InfoNgen Home page
- navigating the InfoNgen Feeds page for more detailed discovery

Sites Referenced:

http://www.infongen.com

Run Time: 11:33

Usage: Feel free to embed and share.

Thanks for watching, and for all the great feedback!…

To work with these feeds, most people use readers like Google Reader or portal sites Netvibes or Pageflakes. Google Reader lets people browse through the feeds they subscribe to as either individual sources or as commingled headlines. Pageflakes and Netvibes present the feeds in widget based frameworks, with each source appearing as an individual widget that can be positioned anywhere on user configurable pages.

These are all great tools except for one thing.

None of them are designed to scale up…

Each of these tools will do a good job managing less than 100 feeds, and could probably work reasonably well with twice that number. The most aggressive feed user I know, blogger Robert Scobble, manages to have over 600 feeds in his Google Reader. He ends up doing a quick scan through the 1300 headlines a day he gets to pluck out those few he thinks he should actually read. And while I know he does an incredible finding little tech nuggets to write about, I’m sure there are a lot of things he ends up missing - people just can’t effectively screen through that many sources and that many discrete pieces of information manually.

And compared to the vastness of the web, 600 sources seems like a pretty small number…

In my interview with Wallstrip, I talked a little about my company’s product, infoNgen. InfoNgen was designed specifically to handle these types of scale issues with RSS.

Our free version of InfoNgen is a new type of web based feed reader. It offers a hybrid widget/headline interface combined with a powerful semantic tagging engine in the backend to let us ‘understand’ what each individual story is about. The basic service comes with a directory of over 15,000 handpicked and organized feeds (and growing). You can turn any of them off that you don’t think are useful to you, and also add any additionals ones you’d like to have. You can also screen feeds by language - the feeds in our directory represent multiple languages and come from sources authored around the globe.

Continuously throughout the day, each individual feed is crawled, and the full text of each story in it is analyzed and classified using a broad yet detailed financial taxonomy. Because we provide these traditionally unstructured sources with rich tagging, you’re able to do a lot more with InfoNgen than just browse through feed headlines or perform basic text searches.

InfoNgen gives you the ability to read across all of your sources in aggregate using very detailed filtering. You can see what’s happening with individual companies, specific industries, or even regions. You can filter what you see further using topic based screens like ‘Management Changes’ or ‘Unusual Dividends’. You can also choose to look only at stories based on the type of source - blogs, technical publications, or local new papers for instance.

You get to focus on just the things you care about without all the noise…

I’ll be covering this version InfoNgen in more detail in the next episode of Practical RSS, so I’d encourage you to head over to www.infongen.com and check out the service in advance.

It’s completely free, and I believe you’ll find it to be a valuable tool…

QUICK COMMERCIAL NOTE: A professional version of InfoNgen with customized topics and enhanced searching and alerting features is available on a subscription basis. Contact me through email if you have any questions.

It was a great conversation focusing mostly on what we are doing at InfoNgen (The company Isaak Karaev and I founded), but also diving in to a lot of related topics in the digital space. You can watch it here:

I’ve been a big believer in Wallstrip from the day my friend Howard Lindzon described it to me, and I have tremendous respect for the whole team that makes the show work - Lindsay, Adam, Mark and crew. They are all consumate professionals and genuinely great people.

If you’re not subscribed to Wallstrip, you’re really missing out on something special.

Thank you guys - it was a lot of fun!

PRACTICAL RSS [Show #3]: Better Bidding - Auctions and RSS…

SHOW NOTES:
In this show, I demonstrate using RSS feeds to track auctions on EBay. There are some significant production changes that I made with this episode that I hope make the show more enjoyable. For the best viewing experience, open this video up in full screen mode. Let me know what you think!

Topics Include:
- generating a feed of auctions for an item on EBay
- using Firefox to add the feed to Google Reader
- using Google Reader’s “EMAIL” feature to share an auction item

Sites Referenced:

http://www.google.com/reader
http://www.ebay.com

Run Time: 6:17

Usage: Feel free to embed and share.

Thanks for watching!…

Most probably aren’t even completely comfortable with Web 1.0 technologies. Consider this clip is from a “person-on-the-street” survey - asking if people know what “RSS” stands for:

Only one person out of everyone asked got the answer right. To truly become “world wide”, the core capabilities of the web need to be understood by everyone - not just a small “technical elite”. Knowing the basics of how to search effectively, how to subscribe to and use RSS feeds, and how to manage various types of digital media are some key aspects the web today that are probably not well understood by most people.

This should be a little nudge for those of us in the blogging community. When it comes to using the Web, we need to explore ways to make many of these new capabilities accessible and understandable to average people. Critical technical issues like Web Neutrality and online voting will ultimately get decided by our elected officials. The average person needs to feel they have a stake in the outcome of these decisions and become vocal about them. Large corporate interests already are. Their votes on these issues will matter.

This is why I decided to produce “Practical RSS” - to get people connected with a web technology in a way that makes it matter to them. In some ways, education is the “civic duty” we all share as part of our citizenship on the web. We need to bring everyone into the technical fold at some level, and make it mean something to them.

It’s an area we all can make a difference in…

MPEG/MP4? WMV? Quicktime? DiVX? Apple TV?, HiRes/HD Versions?

Let me know in the comments section below, or just drop me an email at john@thedigitaledgeblog.com

Thanks…

SHOW NOTES:
In this show, I focus on using RSS to access news sources. Topics include:

- signing up for Google’s feed reader
- using Firefox to add feeds to Google’s feed reader
- subscribing to specific news feeds from sites like CNN
- creating a custom news feed using Google News

Sites Referenced:

http://www.google.com/accounts
http://www.google.com/reader
http://www.cnn.com
http://www.reuters.com
http://www.bbc.co.uk
http://www.google.com/news

Run Time: 6:44

Usage: Feel free to embed and share.

Thanks for watching!…

SHOW NOTES:
In this initial show, I give a brief overview of RSS, including:

- what RSS is and what it’s used for
- how to find feeds on websites
- the variety of available feed readers
- a practical example of subscribing to a feed

Sites Referenced:

http://www.feld.com
http://www.google.com/reader
http://www.newsgator.com
http://www.netvibes.com
http://www.bloglines.com
http://www.instantinformation.com
http://www.seekingalpha.com

Also: I discovered the image collage of various RSS logos out on the web, and am grateful to whoever it was that put that together!

Run Time: 7:08

Usage: Feel free to embed and share.

Enjoy!…

We have made a brief promo for the show:

Each episode will run about 5 minutes and feature ways to use RSS to keep up with a popular topic or interest. The premier episode should be out next month, and will cover the basics of using RSS to level set everyone on the technology. I’ll then cover a specific topic in each episode after that. It will probably start out as a monthly show, and become more frequent as the kinks in my production workflow get sorted out.

Each episode will be available both here and on Instant Information’s soon to be relaunched corporate site.
(http://www.instantinformation.com.)

I would love to get your thoughts and suggestions. Please use the comments section to let me know any RSS related topics you would like to see covered, or any incredible RSS enabled sites or tools I should be looking at.

More to come, so stay tuned..