Susanna Kallur’s Olympic dreams came to a painful end as she face planted in an epic fail during the women’s 100m hurdles. Poor dear :(

Moment of contact with hurdle. Susanna looks like she’s doocing.

Read more and see more pics at:

• Swedish woman hurdler Susanna Kallur fell on the first hurdle of the women’s 100m hurdles.
• More pics of Susanna Kallur’s fall
• Slideshow of pics

Susanna Kallur is supposed to look like this:

I started Metafluence originally as the business to take over for Portland Internet Co. This was supposed to be my company blog. Before that business had the chance to move, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse from Nemo Design. So, I decided to keep the domain and just turn it into a blog about web design and online marketing. My gig at Nemo Design transitioned into another opportunity with Jive Software, where I continued to blog on Metafluence.com.

During that time, I had a number of revelations. Most importantly, I had reached a new understanding about why I’m blogging and what I want to do with my career. I decided to leave the Metafluence brand behind and move forward with my own name, Justin Kistner.

My goal was to move my blogging activities to JustinKistner.com at the same time that I started on at Voce, which was 90 days ago. Instead, I got stuck. Originally I got stuck because I wanted to roll out a new design. Then I got stuck because I wanted to move my content from Metafluence over to JustinKistner.com. Then, I just got burned out.

I was burnt out because I was spending my working days helping people with their blogs, which lead to the classic problem of the cobbler’s kids having no shoes. I was also fairly busy planning a wedding, maintaining side projects like Beer & Blog, serving on the Board of Legion of Tech, and ramping up in my new job, which includes blogging on their blog.

Well, I feel like I’m through the woods now. I still have to move all of my content over to JustinKistner.com and finish the design. And I will be working on that this weekend. In the mean time, I’ve decided to lose my perfection paralysis and just start blogging on JustinKistner.com.

I’ve been gently teased about my current online identity crises, but the truth is that it’s hard to migrate over to a new identity name space when you have a ton of equity built up on an existing name, like Metafluence. Please bear with me as I make this transition, but don’t stop teasing me. I think it’s funny and true. ;)

I have about 15 draft posts started on JustinKistner.com, and tonight I shall release one of them as a full-fledged blog post. I’m looking forward to blogging on my own site again and responding to your comments!

I have the good fortune of being able to stay in Portland for the time being. Voce likes that I am outside of the Valley’s echo chamber and that I’m part of the tech scene here, which gives them more connections in this area.

I’ll be starting my job there on April 7th. As I said earlier, I’m going to be relaunching my blog under the domain http://www.justinkistner.com/, which will be ready before I start on the 7th. I will be giving everything I’ve got to make sure the work we do at Voce will be groundbreaking and worth following. Stay tuned! ;)

Engagement is about communication between a business and influential consumers, media, and analysts to publish real-time, unique responses. Engagement is part PR, part socializing, part tech, part design, part writing, and all awesome. Here are a few links on the subject:

• Microsoft Announces New Reporting Standard for Digital Campaign Performance: Engagement Mapping
• TruCast - Engagement management software

I’ve seen a few things about Fedora recently in my dashboard and I finally decided to take a look at what the stories have all been about. I read TechCrunch’s take on the logo war Red Hat is bringing on the DataPortability WorkGroup. My first thought was how similar the Fedora logo is to Dosh Dosh’s logo and the Quark logo. Then, I remembered reading a post about how similar the Quark logo was to a range of others, which also looks like the Fedora logo. Take a look:

The two logos from Red Hat’s Fedora and the DataPortability WorkGroup:

Here’s the dosh dosh logo:

Here’s the Quark logo:

Here’s a bevy of similar logos:

(This image is from Under Consideration)

So, here’s the deal Red Hat. Your logo is no where in the vicinity of unique! You certainly can not claim the infinity symbol is yours to trademark. You are supposed to be a participant in the open source community, and this kind of action doesn’t bode well there. No one is confused about the two brands, particularly since one doesn’t have a commercial product or offers services!

My advice, stop this bullying while people still respect you.

Sincerely,

Justin Kistner

** Update

It appears that the DataPortability WorkGroup wants to freshen their logo anyway, so if you want to help them they have started a logo competition.

Even though the DataPortability WorkGroup has chosen the high road, I still think it’s important for people to know that Red Hat was in the wrong here. Their logo shares more in common with logos that were created before Fedora’s than it does with the one from the DataPortability WorkGroup. I want to advance that message because I don’t think the DataPortability WorkGroup deserves to look like hacks when Red Hat is far guiltier of copying other logos.

I use the Twitter reply sniffer output in Netvibes as a module that sits on top of my Tweet stream. It pulls out directed messages for higher priority consumption.

A while back I asked a question through Twitter. Paul pointed out that what if there were people that were following me, saw my question, and replied; but I wasn’t following them. Then I wouldn’t see the reply. My solution at the time was to add everyone that was following me, which ended up making my incoming Twitter stream noisy. Then, I found a Twitter reply sniffer on Yahoo! Pipes and thought I found my solution. After looking at the source for how the sniffer worked, I realized that the pipe was only searching through the stream of people you were following, so while it was helpful for catching missed direct messages, it still required the replyee to be part of the list of folks I was following, which still left me with a noisy Twitter subscription feed.

Then, I found TerraMinds. They offer the most timely search engine for Twitter on the web. So, I put together a Pipe that notifies you of messages directed at you on Twitter, even if you are not following the sender. You can enter your Twitter username and subscribe to the output in a feed reader or a widget dashboard.

If you’re not familiar with Yahoo! Pipes’ interface, here’s a quick image showing you where to enter your Twitter username and where you can subscribe to the output via SMS, email, and/or RSS. **IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure you enter your Twitter username *AND* click the “Run Pipe” button *BEFORE* using the subscription options.

Enjoy!

Earlier today, Sam shared his executive dashboard that keeps him on top of our market’s information flow. I thought I would share some of the more technical details about integrating Netvibes, Pipes, AideRSS, and Dapper to create his dashboard.

Defining our objectives

We started this project with me interviewing Sam about the feeds in his reader. I also asked him about his behaviors online and existing relationships. I then pooled my notes [pic of my notes below] and began sketching up organizational concepts. Once Sam and I felt pretty good about the data we wanted and how to organize it, I began working on the dashboard. I found it easiest to do my work in this order:

1. Create Dapper feeds
2. Aggregate and manipulate feeds with Pipes
3. Run outputs through AideRSS
4. Import feeds and configure modules in Netvibes

Netvibes brings it all together

I have to say that I haven’t done a comparative analysis between PageFlakes, NetVibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo, and the other players in the dashboard space. I noticed that 50% of the subscribers to Jive Talks used NetVibes, so I went with it [see image at right]. Netvibes offered a great selection of pre-built modules, and they have a large community of 3rd party modules, which has some really cool shit in there. Netvibes offers some great drag and drop functionality, as well as cool Javascript editing, like clicking on a tab’s name coverts it into a text field with save and cancel buttons, which really speeds up development. Plus, once I’ve got Sam dialed in, it’s easy for me to share the entire thing with the other Jive execs, which saves me a ton of time. If you want some more help with using Netvibes, just search Google for “intro to Netvibes“. If you want to know more about how to use Netvibes, check out Dawn’s intro to Netvibes (it also talks about Pipes and other services).

Powering modules with Pipes

This is a big part of the secret sauce behind Sam’s dashboard. He was already using a feed reader to aggregate a slew of sites, but as his list grew well past a hundred feeds. The big list of feeds was becoming unwieldy. Using Pipes, I created a variety of higher quality feeds from his list. One thing I did was aggregated similar sources into a single feed, such as all of the 2.0 sites (like Read/WriteWeb, Techcrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, Web Worker Daily, and more). I then took that super 2.0 feed and ran it through AideRSS. So, Sam has a column with the 2.0 news and it’s topped with an AideRSS module that tells him what is most popular in that river of news, which helps him join important conversations via commenting and writing trackback posts.

In addition to aggregating feeds, we use Pipes to manipulate feeds. So, for example, we filter an aggregated list of feeds to sift for any posts that have trigger keywords, such as our names, competition names, bursty keyphrases, etc. We also use Pipes to do things like add the initials of the author to a story’s title, which helps Sam know who is writing what story in a river of news. If you want to learn more about leveraging Pipes, I have a five part series that offers a brief introduction to Yahoo! Pipes.

Leveraging popularity to drive focus

One of the common criteria that we used to steer Sam’s focus was popularity. AideRSS offers a really cool service that lets you analyze the items in a feed. It ranks the items based on a few factors such as number of Diggs, number of times it was saved in delicious, number of comments on the post, and more. While I love this service, there are three big problems with it.

1. It doesn’t resort items based on the rankings. Hellooooo! It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that resorting the items based on the ranking is really useful. In fact, I think the ranking is useless without resorting the items. But, worry not. Dawn has made a sweet Pipe that resorts a feed based on the AideRSS ranking. She also did a write up on it on her blog.
2. It doesn’t like Pipes. I have been able to use a Pipes output as an AideRSS input, but most of the time it chokes. I’ve tried things like truncating the Pipes output to a reasonable number of items, like 20, but that doesn’t help. Not sure what the problem is, but it royally sucks. My only advice is to keep trying to submit your Pipes, however, you may have to wait a full 24 hours before trying again, otherwise AideRSS gives you an error message about too many attempts from your IP address.
3. AideRSS has some caching problems. For example, when I was first setting up Sam’s blog, I messed up his feed and it was pointing to my blog’s feed. I corrected almost immediatly, which was over a month ago. But, AideRSS still pulls my blog’s feed if you enter Sam’s address. Stupid and frustrating.

Making feeds where none previously existed

Some of the data we needed to monitor didn’t come as RSS feeds. No bother, Marshall introduced us to Dapper, which is a screen scraper data extraction tool. I won’t go into a ton of techy detail here because Dapper isn’t very complicated. It does one thing and it does it well. Plus, Alex Iskold already did a great job detailing how Dapper works.

Less is more

While I have ideas that involve aggregating and filtering Dapper created feeds in Pipes, sending them out to AideRSS, then resorting them in Pipes based on the AideRSS ranking, and delivering them in a Sprout widget embedded in a Netvibes dashboard; it turns out that is a bad idea. Most of these services are in beta, which means they are unstable—I mean that both in terms of service and financially. Programming best practices recommends eliminating as many points of failure as possible. So, sometimes I’ll sacrifice a small advantage in favor of eliminating a service in the data pipeline. I ruled out using Sprouts as a whole because I found that I was basically displaying feeds with them anyway (with some extra buttons I could live without). Sprout makes much better sense as a syndication tool for promoting content, at least at this stage, but that is a subject for a deeper analysis of Sprout, which I’m releasing later this week. :)

One big annoyance from integrating multiple feed services is lag. Timely delivery of data is a crucial part of a dashboard’s success. The more systems you route your data through, the more impedance your pipeline has, which means data gets to you slower. I’m in the midst of charting how often each systems updates their feed and what factors influence caching.

Join the Portland Data Plumbers Google Group

Mashing up so many different services, most of which are in beta, around a loosely standardized language is a difficult and dynamic task. In order to stay on top of everything, a few of us have been informally getting together on a kinda monthly basis to problem solve together. If you are interested in participating with us, I started a Google Group called the Portland Data Plumbers. Check it out and join up if it piques your interest. We’re looking for people that can contribute, not just lurk.

I’m super interested in hearing other peoples’ experiences with feed service integration including quality feed sources, cool Pipes, integration tips, and dashboard use cases. I’m also down for helping people out, so if you have a question, drop me a comment. Helping people takes my mind places it wouldn’t go otherwise. :)