Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Take a look at Rojo. This reader essentially bring aggregation to blog aggregation… And here’s a terrific review of the product. Still not enough to get me off NetNewswire but you might like it…

Thanks to Tom for the pointer…

NYTimes.com’s RSS feeds generated 5.9 million pageviews on the site in March, which represents a 342% increase year over year and a 39% increase from February’s 4.3 million pageviews. The sections that were most popular among RSS feeds included: Washington and Business. The feeds have been available since February 2002 (www.nytimes.com/rss).

A post worth reading… of course blogs won’t replace news releases. Much like blogs won’t replace magazines. I’ve written about this so many times that I won’t rant on again about it here. Other than to say…

The press release performs a key technical communications function. It’s the official, final, absolute communication from a company. And that moves markets and influences decisions like no other. It’ll be here for a long time. Ok, it’s getting commoditized like everything else – prices are coming down, richness and distribution are going up, folks are getting much more targetted… but they are here to stay… I promise.

Too often people think of this little paper mechanisim when thinking of a release. For the most part they are digital and have as much utility as a blog. Many are RSS enabled – just like a blog. (I get all my Sun releases via RSS). And as Shel rightly points out, they’re written for the press. At least some of them are.

And as Shel says:

None of which suggests that company executives shouldn’t blog. Opening a channel of communcation between an organization’s leadership and key external audiences is one of the best business uses of blogs. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for press releases any more than the introduction of e-mail eliminated the need for telephones and faxes.

Can an employer intervene? From the NY Times this morning::

As the practice of blogging has spread, employees like Mr. Kennedy are coming to the realization that corporations, which spend millions of dollars protecting their brands, are under no particular obligation to tolerate threats, real or perceived, from the activities of people who become identified with those brands, even if it is on their personal Web sites.

They are also learning that the law offers no special protections for blogging – certainly no more than for any other off-duty activity.

The notion that you should blog anonymously to avoid getting fired though – as suggested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation – is, well, ludicrous. First, anonymity is pretty much impossible on the web. If what you are going to blog is that bad it’s likely all you would be doing is staying the inevitable. Blogging on your work or employer in a public forum needs to be done in the context of their policies, practices and culture. A better rule might have been, use your head – and where you’re not confident of that, blog on something other than you boss. You have no protection either way. Get over it.

Blogging on matters of work, while still working where you work, will always be a bit of a grey area. No policy will fix that without killing the spirit in which blogging is undertaken. Nial’s story is a positive one. One based on open dialog. The employer acted responsibly. The employee acted responsibly – and with sensitivity. Where there is no dialog folks get fired and employers good names get tarnished.

One of my keynote attendees suggested that once a week I do a blink on a social networking technology. I’m not sure how long I will keep this up but in the spirit of giving anything a try… take a look at ZoomInfo. A pretty quick way to search on people. It’s kind of accurate and very interesting.

::  ZoomInfo is a unique summarization search engine that finds, understands and extracts the latest online information about people and companies and instantly delivers it to you in concise and useful summaries.

And then there is BlogBridge… I’m testing this RSS reader. Not sure if I see enough to abandon my investment in NetNewswire. It’s nice to have an alternative on the Mac though. And, it includes a server-based service (free!) that enables you to synchronize your subscriptions between different computers.