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Hearst Believes There’s Money to Be Made from Website Printouts

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:07:55 +0000

Hearst is showing the Skiff e-reader at CES this week, but the company also just announced a deal with Format Dynamics that focuses on a very different aspect of the online content business: printing hard copies of websites. Printing from most websites tends to result in wasting lots of paper on printing empty pages. Often, the layout of the site also doesn’t look quite right on the printed page. Format Dynamics’ works with publishers to create printed pages that are professionally formatted – and in the process, the company also adds advertising to those pages. Sponsor Hearst is rolling out Format Dynamics CleanPrint technology on GoodHousekeeping.com now and plans a larger roll-out on its other sites like Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Redbook, Popular Mechanics and Seventeen later this year. Some of the larger websites that already use Format Dynamic’s technology include the Denver Post, Politico , CNN Money , Slate and the Wall Street Journal . Format Dynamics takes a publisher’s HTML code and reformats it into a multi-column layout. The service then adds advertising to these printouts based on criteria set by both the advertiser and the publisher. Advertisers are charged per printed ad. Catering to Big Publishers for Now – Self-Serve Services Coming in the Future For the time being, Format Dynamics is only working with larger publishers, but the company’s CEO Ethan Holien told us that a self-serve product for small publishers is also on the company’s roadmap. Question: Do People Still Print? We couldn’t help but wonder how many people actually still print anything from a website. According to Holien, this number is higher than most people expect. He couldn’t disclose the exact data – though the company does offer detailed statistics to its customers. The only statistic we were able to get was that for a typical news site, about 0.5% of all visitors print out news reports. According to Holien, for other types of content, this number can often be much higher and given the content on GoodHousekeeping.com, Hearst will likely see higher printout rates than 0.5%. Discuss

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Hearst Believes There’s Money to Be Made from Website Printouts

Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:55:00 +0000

Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction. No one expects you to leave your house during the day. You’re allowed to spend the majority of your life in front of a glowing screen, and flipping out over WiFi issues is par for the course. And you’re never far from the Web, since your mobile is always in hand when you have to leave your laptop behind for some incomprehensible reason. But even with such a license in hand, I have to make a case for periodically disconnecting. What do you think? Sponsor More and more, I am trying to set aside unplugged hours and even days for Internet-free, mobile-free, “Luddite time.” Time for asking a stranger for directions, time for talking to the people you’re with rather than the people you “follow,” time for interacting with the world around you in ways that don’t include clicking, scrolling or downloading. Time that’s increasingly being destroyed by smart phones, “super” phones and what ever “super duper” devices are in the pipeline. Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can’t be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web – the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts – to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you’re making more connections between online entities and content, but you’re losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world. I’m not saying that the Internet makes you stupid. I am saying that, if left to run wild across the vast territories of the Web, your mind can turn into a laboratory hamster, frantically pulling levers and running in wheels while his environment remains essentially static and his motivations essentially artificial. Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you’re not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you’ve ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren’t you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so? And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble’s FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn’t trend on Twitter and hit Digg’s front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters. Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I’ve spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we’ve all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices. I personally want to spend many hours in 2010 offline and off my mobile. I want to do things like watch an old movie, go for a walk, have a dinner date or read an honest-to-god newspaper without checking in on Foursquare or posting an “overheard” on Twitter. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m aging. Many of my contemporaries say their sole offline time is sleeping. I’ve certainly lived that way, too, and I spend many days now online for 14-18 hours. But I don’t want every day to be like that. What about you, dear readers? Do you currently plan for and enforce offline hours for yourself, your significant other or your family? If so, how and when do you take your breaks? Or are you a tireless defender of the Internet junkie lifestyle? Most importantly, what do you see as the explicit benefits or detriments of being online around the clock – or of taking periodic furloughs? Let us know your opinions and best practices in the comments. Discuss

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Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

Live Blog: Google’s Android Press Gathering

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:55:15 +0000

Google is holding a press event to showcase the new Nexus One and possibly some other mobile innovations today. We already know quite a few details about the phone itself, but hopefully Google will also have a few surprises up its sleeve. The press conference should get under way at 10am PST and we will live blog the event here. Sponsor We will post updates as they happen. Keep reloading this page to see the latest news. 10:00am As usual, the event is running a bit late. 10:06am Getting started. VP of Product Development takes the stage to talk about the Open Handset Alliance. “We will unveil the next generation of the evolution of Android today.” 13 new members will join the OHC – including: NEC, China Telecom and Freescale. Recapping the history of Android hardware (G1, myTouch, Droid) 10:10pm “A year ago we had 1 device, now we have 20 devices on 59 carriers.” Google wants to prevent fragmentation – talking about compatibility test suite. “Android today is about getting more users onto the mobile web.” Android users search the web over 30x more on Android than on feature phones. From the beginning, Android was always about being developer friendly. Talking about being able to multi-task (a subtle swipe at the iPhone?) The Next Step in the Android Evolution 10:15am “We are only in the early stages of the evolution of Android. Volume and variety of Android devices has exceeded Google’s expectations. “But we want to do more. Wants to work closer with hardware partners to showcase the software. Announcing the Nexus One “Where Web Meets Phone” 10:18am Google calls this a new category of phones: “super-phones.” On stage now: Peter Chou, CEO of HTC. Talking up the Nexus One: “The Nexus One is one of the best designs from HTC.” Outstanding display, fast processor. “It pushes the limits of what is possible on a mobile phone today.” Chou leaves the stage after posing with the phone… 10:22am In depth look at Nexus One Erik Tseng takes the stage to demo the phone. Hardware : 3.7 inch AMOLED display – WVGA. “Deep contrast and brilliant colours.” 1 GHz processor – fast processor = less slowdowns. Trackball works as notifications tool. Will pulse when you get new messages. 130 grams – 11.5mm thick Sensors : light sensor, proximity sensor. 5 megapixel camera New for Android: active noise cancellation – using two microphones. 10:29am Google will offer custom engraving (just like the iPhone…) “With this hardware, we think we have half of the story. It’s the combination of hardware and software that makes this such a great phone.” No surprise: Nexus One will come with Android 2.1 10:31am New features in 2.1: Customization More homescreen panels – more widgets Example: weather widget: knows where you are from GPS Google expects to see more widgets from 3rd-party developers Showing live wallpapers. 10:35 3D capabilities of the Nexus One and Android 2.1 App launcher: new twist – 3D scroll-wheel – icons sit on a 3D wheel instead of a flat page New photo gallery – written with CoolIris Everything scrolls smoothly – quite impressive. Looks just like CoolIris on the desktop. Features background sync with Picasa Web Albums 10:39am Voice Commands In 2.0: Voice queries (“directions to nearest Ikea”) In 2.1: Every text field is now voice-enabled Voice recognition learns every time you speak a query 10:42am Sneak peek at Google Earth for Android Also voice-enabled. Clearly making good use of the fast processor. Everything scrolls very smoothly. Buying the Phone: Google Hosted Web Store 10:45am How to buy the phone? Google will sell the phone in its own web store Keeping it simple: buy phone without service ($529) – or with service from partners (T-Mobile $179) For now, T-Mobile only. But: “Expect to add more carriers and hardware in the future.” Verizon Wireless and Vodofone will join the program. Web Store 10:49am Demoing the store. Purchasing all done in the store – no need to go to the physical store 10:54am Recap First phone of a series of phone – more operators, devices and countries coming in the future Showing demo video right now Q&A 11:00am Question : Why only such a small amount of space for app storage? Answer : soon, you will be able to store apps on SD cards Question : Will it ship today? Answer : Yes. Question : Is this an iPhone killer? Answer : Choice is a good thing. Question : Whose inventory will the phone come from? What will you do to make the App Store more well-known? Answer : Unlocked phone comes from Google. Regarding the Android Market: Marketing for Nexus One and new Web Store will be essentially online. Focused on making the store better. Question : Why was it necessary for Google to design the phone? Why not just have an HTC phone that runs Android? Answer : Google didn’t design the phone – HTC did. Google is just the retailer and worked mostly on the software. Question : What would convinces somebody to buy a $530 phone? Answer : That’s choice at work. “This is the early stages of a longer journey.” Question : Google isn’t known for being a retailer. Answer : “We shouldn’t focus on retailing.” Google wants to offer a complete solution and give consumers choice. Retail part is very important but just another channel – not a channel that will replace other channels. Question : What’s the revenue opportunity for Google? Answer : These super-phones are great for accessing the Internet and that’s where out business is. Hardware sales are not the big deal – just wants to get more people on the mobile web. “If you want the best possible Google experience you come to the store and get the device.” Question : Will it support tethering? Answer : In future versions. Not a strategic issue but just something Google needs to implement. Question : Is the physical keyboard dead? Will Google start to sell more products online? Answer (from HTC): We offer lots of different phones and people can choose what best fits for them. This design is focused on the form-factor and screen. HTC offers other devices for “keyboard-lovers”. From Google: The new voice input works very well and Google will soon offer other devices as well. Question : Will other counties support multi-touch on the Nexus One? Answer : It’s a software thing. “We’ll consider it.” Question : When will Google Voice launch publicly? What about the other phones that are coming soon? Will something awesomer come next month? Answer : Other manufacturers will add more devices. “If you need a great phone today – the Nexus is a great phone.” (Nothing about Google Voice in the answer). Question : Google wants to do revolutionary stuff? What’s revolutionary about this phone? Why does Google get behind this phone if it’s pretty average? What not revolutionize the pricing structure with an ad-supported phone? Answer : This is a baby step. Let’s get the store going and then we can see what comes up in the future. Question : Will people be able to check out the phone in retail store? Answer : We want this to remain pure and simple. Marketing this online-only and selling online-only. Question : What’s the difference between a super-phone and a regular smartphone? Answer : The big differentiator is the openness of the app store. This is as powerful as your laptop was a year ago. Question : Question for Motorola: Will the Nexus One cannibalize sales of the Droid? Answer : We try to deliver the best products we can. Will upgrade software on the Droid. Question : Why does Google feel the need to change the way phones are bought? What’s broken about the current system? Answer : We are trying to optimize efficiencies. Just like web store revolutionized the way you buy a camera, Google wants to do the same thing for phones. After there are enough phones out there, you can experience it through using somebody else’s. Marketing just increases prices. Sidenote about partners : We would love to sell for Verizon and Vodafone right now – just have to integrate the IT. Question : What can users expect in terms of software upgrades? Users never really know what phone will get the upgrade Answer : HTC wants to upgrade all of its phones (nothing specific). Google argues that some phones simply don’t have the hardware capabilities for the upgrade. The intention is to make sure everybody gets some kind of future-proof hardware that can get upgrades for a certain amount of time. From Motorola : Intention to upgrade the device to the best software that the hardware can run. Not every device supports the 3D capabilities of Android 2.1, for example. Backward compatibility slows down innovation. Questions : Will Verizon get unlocked phones? Answer : Unlocked phones are a problem with CDMA phones. Will only be sold with Verizon plan. Question : Will you port Google Voice to the iPhone or will you suppress this to give Android an advantage? Answer : Google Voice team isn’t opposed to having its app run on other platforms. Question : Didn’t Google say it won’t do a phone? Answer : We don’t do hardware. 11:43am: And that wraps up today’s live blog. Thanks for reading! Discuss

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Live Blog: Google’s Android Press Gathering

Seesmic Looks Beyond Twitter – Acquires Ping.fm

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Seesmic has acquired Ping.fm , a status update service that allows users to update posts on over 50 social networks through SMS, mobile apps, IM services and 3rd party apps that support the service. Seesmic plans to integrate Ping.fm into all of its applications in the near future. In addition, Seesmic’s users will be able to send updates to their favorite social networks through Ping.fm’s email, SMS and IM gateways. Ping.fm’s founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough will join Seesmic as full-time employees and continue to work on Ping.fm. Sponsor Neither Seesmic nor Ping.fm disclosed the terms of the acquisition. It’s worth noting, however, that both Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman invested in Ping.fm in December 2008. Update : Joi Ito just confirmed that this acquisition now makes him an investor in Seesmic. Seesmic’s founder Loic Le Meur notes that he hopes that this acquisition will allow the company to speed up “its vision of becoming your default application to stay in touch with your friends and constantly managing your online social presence.” Through Ping.fm, Seesmic’s users will soon be able to easily update their status on a wide variety of social networks like Ning, Yahoo Meme, Yammer and Status.net. Seesmic already offered built-in support for Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace. According to Le Meur, Ping.fm currently has over 500,000 registered users, though the number of active users is likely far smaller. In total, Ping.fm posts about 200,000 updates per day. Seesmic’s own Twhirl has offered support for Ping.fm since early 2009. Seesmic Wants to be a Lot More Than Just a Twitter Client Given Seesmic’s vision, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company is interested in broadening its scope beyond Twitter. The acquisition of Ping.fm gives Seesmic all the necessary infrastructure like SMS and IM gateways to execute this vision. Ping.fm offers it’s own URL shortener and gives users access to detailed statistics about how these links were used. One of the most interesting aspects of the company’s recently announced native Windows client , for example, is that it includes support for a plugin architecture . This will allow developers to integrate support for virtually any social network into Seesmic. In the near future, Seesmic plans to expand this feature to all of its clients. Discuss

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Seesmic Looks Beyond Twitter – Acquires Ping.fm

Who Uses Social Networks and What Are They Like? (Part 1)

cgseo — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:00:00 +0000

A study released earlier this year by Anderson Analytics looked into the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook , MySpace , Twitter , and LinkedIn with a goal of providing marketers with information about users’ interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today. Some of the study’s findings echo things we’ve already heard. For example, Facebook users tend to be old, white, and rich. MySpace users are young…and fleeing. Other info is new: Twitterers are more likely to have a part-time job, LinkedIn users like to exercise and own more gadgets. Sponsor Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! The Anderson study sampled over 11,000 GreenfieldOnline panelists (an online survey community) over an 11 month period to understand social networking services’ (SNS) reach and overlap among the U.S. Online Population. In May, the company surveyed an additional 5,000 panelists of which over 1,250 participated in an in-depth attitude and usage survey. They then grouped the participants into two categories: those who use social networks and those who don’t. To be considered a social network user, the participant had to use one of the sites in question in the past 30 days. Of course, not everyone is devoted to one social network alone. The study found that there is some overlap between sites, as shown in the chart below. Social Networkers, in General Out of the 110 million Americans (or 60% of the online population) who use social networks, the average social networking user logs on to these sites quite a bit. They go to social networking sites 5 days per week and check in 4 times a day for a total of an hour per day. Nine percent of that group stay logged in all day long and are “constantly checking what’s new.” Interacting with Brands When it comes to brands online, the study found that: 52% of social networkers had friended or become a fan of at least one brand, 17% felt positive when seeing a brand on a social network, 19% felt negative when seeing a brand on a social network, 64% were neutral or didn’t care about brands on social networks, 20% would like to see more communication from brands online, 35% would not like to see more communication, 45% were neutral or didn’t care. Social Networking Myths Shot Down A couple of interesting things that came out of the study included the debunking of some social networking myths. Social networkers are not as interested in friending strangers or creating “fake” friends to boost their ego. Out of the group, 45% connect only to family and friends and another 18% will connect only to people they’ve met in person. In other words, two-thirds are connecting to people they actually know. Only 10% of those surveyed said they will friend anyone. Also interesting is that only 15% of social networkers say they log on at work, thus debunking another myth about how prevalent social network use is at the workplace. Non-Social Networkers The study revealed the reasons why some online users aren’t into social networks. Surprisingly, it’s not because they hate technology – they spent just as much time on the web as the networkers do. Instead, they don’t use social media because either they don’t have the time, they don’t think it’s secure, or they think it’s stupid. Yet even out of the time-starved group, 22% report they’ll start using social media in 3 months and 27% said they’ll start using it in a year. Continue to Part 2 for details on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Discuss

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Who Uses Social Networks and What Are They Like? (Part 1)

Imprisoned, Attacked & Dead Bloggers Increases Worldwide in 2009

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:30:01 +0000

According to a report released today [ PDF ] by Reporters Sans Fronti

Britain’s Conservative Party Offers £1 Million Prize for New Crowdsourcing Platform

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:05:45 +0000

Britain’s Conservative Party plans to offer a £1 million taxpayer-funded prize for a website that can “harness the wisdom” of voters. The price will be given to the team that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies.” According to the Guardian , some of the ideas for this site include services that help to identify wasteful government spending or rate the quality of schools and hospitals. It is worth noting, though, that the Conservatives will only give this price away if they win the 2010 elections. Sponsor Clearly, this move is meant to generate some excitement for the Tories in the upcoming elections, especially given that they haven’t been in power since Tony Blair took office in 1997. A Great Idea or a Waste of Taxpayer Money? Looking beyond the politics of this proposal, this idea clearly has something going for it. According to Jeremy Hunt, the U.K.’s shadow culture secretary, “there are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by government.” One could argue, however, as the Liberal Democrat’s spokeswoman Jenny Willott does , that there are already lots of ways for people to collaborate and communicate online and that this is simply a waste of taxpayer money. Willott argues that sites like Facebook already allow voters to communicate with each other and the government. In the U.S., crowdsourced projects like this have generally been funded by non-profits. ProPublica, for example, recently launched a project that allows citizens to track how the stimulus money is being spent. Image Credit: Flickr user ohadweb Discuss

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Britain’s Conservative Party Offers £1 Million Prize for New Crowdsourcing Platform

How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Let’s say you’re a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you’re a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you’ve got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest. Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the “Google and wander” method? We think there is. Below you’ll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry. Sponsor Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Works With Just About Anything We’ll use the field of Education as our example, because there is a lot of activity there and we presume we’ve got more educators as readers here than butchers or candlestick makers. These methods can be applied to discovering the hottest people and topics in social media in any field, though. If you doubt that these kinds of steps could help in your line of work – check out this post , where we found the best work-related RSS feeds for Fire Inspectors and Physical Therapists, just to prove that we could. In the following 13 steps, we’ll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post. No end of variations are possible, of course, on this method – but we expect a lot of readers will find this useful. People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to “join the conversation” – because they aren’t sure where to find the conversation. Here’s how we find and track the most popular conversations in niche fields. Popularity isn’t a perfect judge of quality by any means, but it’s a good place to start from. Is this post a cheat sheet? Maybe, but we think of it as a way for you to make your cheat sheet on whatever sector you follow. Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field There are many different ways to identify the top blogs in a given field, systematically, but some methods work better than others depending on the niche you’re looking at. We compared six of our favorite methods in this post . Here, we found that visiting http://delicious.com/tag/blog+teaching gave us good results. By default the URLs are listed in reverse chronological order – the most recent items that anyone has bookmarked and have ever been called both “blog” and “teaching” will appear first. In the image above you can see that we’re running two Greasemonkey scripts called Autopagerize and Sort By Popularity . Greasemonkey is really easy to use, see our post How to Learn to Use Greasemonkey in 5 Minutes. . These scripts let us open multiple pages of bookmarks all at once and then sort them in order of popularity. So we did that, then scanned down the top several pages of most popular items tagged both “blog” and “teaching.” We tried words other words like “education” as well. Each time we found a good site, we copied the link to it and went to step two. Add The Feeds to a Reader We like to use Netvibes to build collections of feeds because it’s easy. Click on “add items” then “add feed” and paste in the link to the top blog you found. Netvibes will auto-discover the RSS feed for the site, often multiple variations but it shouldn’t matter which one you choose. We pick “RSS 2.0″ just because it’s the most standard. Add it to your page and then go back to Delicious to find more sources. We repeated the discovery step until we found about 10 good blogs to subscribe to. Then we visited those blogs and looked at their “blogrolls” or sidebar links to their favorite blogs. We found a number of good sources to include in our list that we had never heard of before. One was a good looking blog about education and technology that was written in Spanish, so we grabbed its feed and ran it through Mloovi.com to have it automatically translated into English, then put that translated feed into Netvibes. Once you’ve got a good collection of top blogs in that Netvibes “tab” it’s time to get it out of there. You can read the blogs in Netvibes, but there’s more that we’re going to do with these blogs. When you’re in the “add feed” screen, you’ll see an “OPML Export” link. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is the format that reading lists are imported and exported from feed readers in. It’s really simple. Export it to your dekstop and then move onto the next step below. We’re now going to edit an OPML file – but don’t be scared! It’s easy, we promise. Anyone can do it. Pull Out Your New Tab’s Feeds This step assumes you’ve using Netvibes, or some other start page, for other things in addition to this project. If that’s not the case, skip to the next step. We use Netvibes for a number of different things, so when we put together a new collection of feeds in it and want to export them, we have to deal with the fact that our whole collection of feeds in all our tabs gets exported. Simply search for the title of your tab in the file, then delete everything outside of that section! Everything except the very beginning and end of the file, that is. You can see what it should look like below, in the next step. The Top of the OPML File. Don’t delete the document type declaration of the body tags. Rename the title of the file and resave your document. Now don’t you feel smart? That was really easy though! Now to Find the Hottest Posts from Those Top Blogs Now that you’ve got an OPML file of the most popular blogs in your field, you can take that file over to Postrank.com and import it. You’ll need to create an account, and the service doesn’t allow you to manage multiple OPML files, so you may need to create a new account for every time you do something like this. I just create a new account with a GMail alias. Did you know that as while other apps, like Postrank, think that emailmarshall@gmail.com, emailmarshall+1@gmail.com and emailmarshall+2@gmail.com are all different emails – Gmail considers them the same thing? It’s true, that’s an alias and all emails sent to any of those will end up in the same inbox. So I create a new account for each OPML file (silly, but that’s how you’ve got to do some of these things) and then import my new OPML file. Rank the Blog Posts With Robots! Once you import that OPML file from your desktop, you’ll probably notice that Postrank has seen some of the feeds and not seen others. You should probably come back in an hour once they’ve processed the remaining feeds. What are they doing? They are checking every item in every feed to see how many comments it has, how many inbound links, how man times it’s been bookmarked in Delicious or Digg, how many times people Tweeted about it, etc. It’s then ranking each item in each feed on a scale of 1 to 10, relative only to the other items in that same feed. What does this mean? It means you can have Postrank show you only the most popular posts in each of these top blogs, as determined by the blogs’ own communities of readers. That’s valuable information! It’s a very fast way to get up to speed on the latest hot topics in your field and by subscribing to the feeds filtered for popular items, you can pay peripheral attention to this field but know that you’ll never miss a really big story. Thanks Postrank! If you’re interested in the Greatest Hits of Top Education Bloggers, here’s the OPML file we built with the feeds we’ve found so far: Top Education Blogs – Greatest Hits . Just right click and save that link, then upload it to your feed reader. Banish Content Overload By selecting all the feeds in your collection, then setting their filter to “great” – you’ll be shown just the hottest posts from each blog. Selecting “best” will show you almost nothing at all, though. Once you’ve set the filter to Great, export this filtered version of your OPML file and move on to the next step! Pretty Up Your Collection We would recommend opening this new OPML file in your text editor and renaming it something more useful. Check Out the Hotness By clicking on any of the feeds you imported into Postrank, you can check out the hottest posts in that blog’s recent history. Hello time saver! Some of you might be temped to call it a day at this point, and we have captured a lot of good intelligence with relatively little work – but don’t stop now, there’s more we can do! You’ll want to take these next steps, too. Import Into a Feed Reader Go back to your Netvibes or other reader’s “add a feed” page and you’ll see the option to import an OPML file. Import your new Postrank.com filtered OPML file and you’ll be subscribed to just the hottest posts from the best blogs in your field of interest. Oh but there’s still more we can do! Make a List of the Links You Found There’s a number of different ways you can do this, you could have made a separate list of your links before you subscribed to their feeds, but I didn’t in this example. Instead I went into Netvibes, clicked on the title of each blog and copied its home page URL over to a list in a text editor. Why do you want this list of links? Check out the next step. Make a Reference Search Engine! Google Custom Search Engine is really easy to use and is an incredibly powerful tool. Just paste the list of all your top sources in your field into the box on the page, save it, then bookmark the URL of the resulting search engine. Now any time you want to look real smart on a topic in education, you can just search for keywords in your Top Education Blogs Custom Search Engine. We have a lot of different Custom Search Engines that we use here at ReadWriteWeb. Want to see what the results look like? Here’s the Custom Search Engine we’ve got so far for Top Education Blogs .

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How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic

8 Things Every Geek Needs to Do Before 2010

cgseo — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 05:14:30 +0000

It’s one thing to have resolutions for the new year. I, for example, plan to lose weight, learn Python and design the perfect handbag. But since nothing satisfies like the quick achievement of a short-term goal, here are eight things every good nerd needs to to before the ball drops later this week. These tasks comprise a quick to-do list that will leave you feeling competent and prepared for the decade that approaches. Also, you can play the condescension chip and start chiding friends who haven’t checked off these items yet. Sponsor 1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships. Facebook’s maelstrom-causing privacy changes have given quite a few of us a head-scratching good time trying to figure out just how much of our private lives are to be made public. Before the new year begins, take a look at your settings on sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LiveJournal and any other places you might be sharing personal content to make sure what you display is consistent with the public image you want to project. As more recruiters and employers hit the web in search of info on individuals, it’s becoming ever more important to monitor and control our own identities. If you look back to the origin dates of some of your accounts, you might be surprised at what you thought was appropriate to share online in 2005. Also, while considering what’s private and public, take time to evaluate what a “friend,” “contact” or “follower” means to you and what types of information you share with different groups. 2. Change your passwords. Safety first, friends. Social web security threats in 2009 were sweeping and surprised more than a few users with spam DMs, hacked accounts and malware of all kinds. Check out the password management tools recommended by a recently high-profile hacker (scroll to the last few paragraphs); for free or cheap, they’ll help you generate strong, random passwords and manage them from your computer. 3. Own your name. I’ve conducted many a web search on many a professional geek this year, and I’ve been disappointed by how few of us have staked a meaningful claim to our online identities. If you haven’t already, buy a URL – preferably one that relates to the name you use professionally – and make friends with Google. If you don’t show up in the first results when you search for your name, get a crash course in SEO and ask friends to link to you. It’s good for your social life and your career if you seize the opportunity to tell the searching world about yourself rather than relegating that responsibility to LinkedIn, Facebook or some weirdo with the same name as you. 4. Prune your feeds. When going through your RSS feeds, do you find yourself impatiently scrolling more than you’re intently skimming? Is your list of unread items becoming unmanagable? The end of the year is a perfect time to get rid of the content you’re not reading and group the stuff you are. Take some time this week to organize, delete and add feeds, thereby optimizing your feed-reading experience. Try tools such as NetNewsWire’s “dinosaurs” and “least attenion” features that weed out unread or dormant feeds, and consider implementing tools such as Lazyfeed or Guzzle.it that can bring relevant results from fresh sources. And make sure the feeds you own are easy for others to find, too. 5. Find a better mobile. If you don’t have a smartphone already, chances are you’ll desperately need one next year. And if you already have one, think long and hard about whether you’re happy with your service, network and interface. While you might not be able to run out and buy your dream device before 2010 rolls around, visit a few retailers, read some reviews and have your eye on a good mobile to purchase next year. Mobile tech keeps on booming, and you’ll want to ensure a frustration-free year as new apps and OSes roll out. 6. Update copyright notices on your website. Here’s a simple, obvious and necessary reminder. Does your website currently claim a copyright year of 2007? While it doesn’t put you on the foul side of the law, it does look a bit silly as we head into a new decade. The Next Web has a good bit of dynamic code for site owners. 7. Revisit your blog. That poor, neglected old beast might be long overdue for a design facelift, a blogroll refresh or even just a few new posts. While you’re at it, why not set automatic reminders to periodically bug you about posting in the new year? On a more mission-critical note, you’ll also want to make sure you’re using the most updated version of your CMS; not doing so can can lead to problems from broken plugins to getting hacked . And while you’re at it, the year’s end might also be a good time to consider switching up your CMS service altogether. 8. Back up your data. Hacks and hardware failures happen. Before 2010, make sure as much of your data as possible is protected. From calendars and contacts to blog posts and work projects, more and more of us are relying on networks of servers and startups to keep us running. So, now might be a good time to download and back up files of LinkedIn contacts and WordPress posts – anything that’s valuable to you and portable. Think of it this way: You – or at least parts of you – live in the Internet. If the Internet caught on fire, what would you grab to carry with you out of the blaze? We hope this list helps you all get a few housekeeping items squared away in time for a great New Year’s Eve filled with peace of mind and a smug sense of superiority over your fellow nerds. If you can think of any must-do year-end tasks, please let us know in the comments! Discuss

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8 Things Every Geek Needs to Do Before 2010

10 Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed

cgseo — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Ten years ago, Napster revolutionized commercial music by – we’re all grownups, let’s call a spade a spade – democratizing piracy. Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And 10 years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica !), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they’ve tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans. Sponsor Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Napster CEO Says Consumers Needed Free Music, Control On the Napster blog CEO, Chris Gorog, wrote yesterday , “The original Napster hadn’t thought through how to protect artists’ rights… Napster was about putting the control into consumers’ hands so they could find virtually any song they could think of.” That kind of thinking makes me twitch. I love users. I am a user. And yes, I’ve illegally downloaded my fair share of tunes over the years. (Sorry, Journey, but the road trip karaoke sessions would’ve been meaningless without “Don’t Stop Believing”.) However, consumers neither need nor deserve control over content they did not create. Illegal downloads have been said by many to stimulate sales; the Radiohead album Kid A is often cited as a case in point. But when users are downloading media as a substitute for actually purchasing it, the paradigm hurts musicians far more than it helps. I would venture to speculate that in P2P ecosystems, users get the glory and commercial musicians get the hard knocks. Users have dozens of ways – P2P, YouTube, a bajillion file-sharing sites – to share music that profit the musicians themselves little or not at all. But where are the online tool kits for the thousands of working musicians – often independent of record labels’ heavy duty promotional machines – who live and die by their ability to promote and sell their songs? Napster introduced a single-edged paradigm: free content for users at musicians’ and labels’ expense. What has the Internet done for musicians and labels lately? Napster Worked Actively Against Musicians, and No One Worked (Well) With Them Napster spent the first part of this decade showing complete disregard for the promotional and sales needs and wants of musicians. Can you imagine what the musical online landscape would look like if they had seen the copyright wars as an opportunity rather than a legal problem? What would have happened if they had invested that time and money in creating a workable solution for getting users to pay for content? If they’d worked with bands to create and market non-audio, extracurricular content for fans? If they’d been creative instead of passive-aggressively litigious ? Here’s what happened to musicians working online since 1999: MySpace. MySpace, a tragic tale of clunky interfaces, slow fan-finding, spammy marketing tools, confusing events organization, bad media players and no revenue. While consumers were rejoicing in the newfound glut of free tracks, working musicians (as distinguished from lolling-about-in-the-Playboy-Mansion-grotto musicians), especially the independent ones, had to struggle with the most time-consuming, noisy promotional channel possible. And when a challenger sprung up (Facebook, duh) to take that channel’s place, the musicians were homeless because the challenger included no music-related tools. What’s the Future Look Like from the Napster P.O.V.? Currently, our musician friends are struggling to craft cohesive online marketing and sales strategies from a patchwork of odds and ends. And Napster? Gorog examines the current landscape of a la carte online music stores (such as iTunes) and streaming media sites (such as Pandora), concluding, “No service has cracked the nut and figured out how to create a profitable business model.” What’s his company’s solution? “With Napster’s new offering introduced on May 18, we believe we bring the best of both worlds together. Five bucks each month gets you 5 MP3s” plus streaming audio. Let us introduce a long, thoughtful pause in honor of Napster’s $5-for-5 subscription plan, which is as unoriginal as it is a bad deal. It’s a mashup of two models that Gorgog just stated didn’t work, and when compared to Emusic ‘s and other sites’ subscription plans (about $12 a month gets you about 30 MP3s) and Last.fm/Imeem/Pandora’s free streaming offerings, it seems very financially stupid – especially considering that Napster introduced the now commonly held expectation that all this media should be free. Gorog states he sees a future of subscription plans for unlimited, on-demand music. But again, this is a probably not a paradigm that will profit bands . It used to be that record labels were in charge of screwing musicians over (click the link for a classic article by producer Steve Albini). Now, that task has passed to the fans themselves, with special thanks to the developers who focus on illegal file-sharing over usable platforms for musicians and consumers alike. In the coming days, we’d like to address the concerns of and online tools for working/commercial musicians. We’re aware of a few good ones, but we encourage you brilliant RWW commenter-types to leave your thoughts – and pointers to musician-friendly startups – below. We’ve got a cabal of techie-musician-hybrid dudes just waiting to beta test them. Discuss

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10 Years After Napster, Musicians Are Still Getting Screwed