When I read about Google’s move to mainstream RSS on ReadWriteWeb, I was shocked at how obvious this was. However, there’s still one giant hurdle new users will face with RSS regardless of the terminology we use in links: The landing page.
Helping people understand RSS has been a pain point of the amazingly useful technology since it first popped up on blogs several years ago. Whether it was “Subscribe to RSS” or consistent icons, everything else fell short. “Follow this *(blog, site, topic, whatever)” gets to the point immediately and should help users know what to expect when clicking on the link.
But when a user lands on a traditional RSS page (listing of the last 10 or so links) with various calls to action to subscribe via various RSS readers, we still haven’t got there. Google has an advantage. They own one of the largest blog platforms and arguably the best RSS reader. They can seamlessly tie the two together. Publishers that don’t use Blogger don’t have that luxury.
That’s why I’d encourage Google Reader (and other RSS readers) to make it simple for publishers to mimic the functionality they’re proposing for Blogger. Imagine if all the “Digg This” links in the world simply took a user to the Digg homepage and required them to figure out how to add the story they were just on. RSS is even more complicated after the “Follow this” click simply because of the number of confusing options presented to the user.
I envision the process looking something like this:
- User clicks on “Follow this…” link
- User is presented with 2 options
- “Follow this…” using [[Publisher's preferred reader]]
- “Advanced users” follow using your existing reader
- If option 1: user creates a simple account and the feed they clicked is added to their reading list
Feel free to pick this idea apart in the comments below.
I stumbled onto Noah Brier’s Brand Tags concept today (a little late) and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The concept is simple: display a company’s logo/brand and have a viewer type in the first word or phrase that enters their mind. Marketers and researchers have been doing this forever, but never on this scale. Sure, the Internet, with it’s techie nature, skews the results a bit, but the results are fascinating.
Here are some examples:
Comcast - The cable conglomerate everyone loves to hate. The top 3 words are “cable”, “internet”, “tv”… their basic services… good so far. But it gets ugly quick with words like “evil”, “expensive”, “crap”, “sucks”, “monopoly”, “ripoff”… it gets worse…
Compare Comcast to Klondike’s top 3 words: “ice cream”, “bar”, “cold”… more simple terms about their products, but instead of “evil” their marketing slogan (”what would you do”) comes next. And most suprisinlgy, the word I entered “Yummy” comes in 5th. Think about that. Of all the words that mean tasty, “yummy” was the 5th highest word/phrase people associated with Klondike. Klondike’s marketing head needs a raise.
If you’ve never seen this site, I encourage you to look around and ponder what people would say about your brand… and then do something to help improve that.
Check out this great article at A List Apart on Developing Creative Ideas. Idea creation and development is a key part of my role and this article has some great tips on how to drive innovation out of an idea sessions (brainstorm). Getting a group of people together to be creative is never an easy task and having tools like these in your back pocket will always be useful.
Hackalytics.com is a social bookmarking tool for web analytics news, articles, jobs and more. Simply create an account to contribute links, vote and save the links you find most valuable and discuss links to share more information.
The site is based on Hacker News (which is technically based on Reddit) so I’m hoping the interface will be familiar.
This site is a work in progress and I value any feedback you may have. Feel free to leave comments below if you have any suggestions or see any bugs.
I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging and entity extraction lately (I know, exciting!). We use Inform on most of our properties and they perform very well, but new techniques and tools are all over the place. One of those tools is Open Calais by Reuters.
Open Calais is an open source API for automatically extracting keywords from text. I hadn’t had time to fiddle with it until I heard that someone had created an Open Calais Wordpress Plugin.
I immediately added both the archive and auto tagger to this site to test it out. While it came up with some odd suggestions and omitted some obvious ones (I tested a Computerworld article about MS Vista, and it didn’t recommend “Vista”), I was optimistic with this first test. Even for this post, Calais wasn’t perfect, missing the obvious “Open Calais” and “Wordpress” as key entities offering up only “API” and “Reuters” as tag suggestions. Calais is far from perfect, but a promising step in the right direction.
The Calais Wordpress plugin itself was very impressive, integrating seamlessly with Wordpress’ native tagging functionality. Basically, you can use Calais to recommend tags and then redefine them (adding/removing) as you see fit. Open Calais is officially on my watch list.
