A week ago I started a series of post about a certain sort of blogging “etiquette”; a wish list that bloggers would be able to follow to enhance the experience of their readers. I talked of the importance of posts’ titles; today I’ll talk about the content we put in our feeds.

When we blog we have normally two mediums of publication. The first one is what appears on the web site of the blog with all his features. The other is the Atom or RSS feed that our subscribed readers download every morning. What is really interesting with RSS feeds is that you can, at one place, aggregate many source of information. You can scan the content of your feed and read what catch your attention. Another interesting thing that you can do, depending of the RSS reader you are using, is to search in your old feed posts as if you were searching for stuff on Google. Everybody knows the fact but where is the problem?

The problem is that some blogger put entire posts on their website and only excerpt of these posts in their feeds. My question is: Why? This is probably to increase the traffic on their website; it’s the only thing I can think of. The problem is that this practice cut the readers with a vital source of information. What is interesting with feed is to have a local copy of posts to have the ability to search in them. Without the full post, this feature is useless. More and more bloggers are doing this. More and more frustrated I become and less and less I subscribe to such feeds. What’s beautiful is the decentralization of the information in the system; not his centralization in a focal point.

Think about it as a reader and as a publisher. As a blogger, think what are your goals: is this to get the greater number of hits on your website or to be read and commented? If it’s to be read then your preoccupation would be to publish your entire posts in your feed.

Technoratie: [blog] [feed] [rss] [content]

This morning I was commenting on 2 different posts on Scobleizer. The first one was Making sure the right story gets out about corporate blogging at Microsoft, a correction to an article appear on Economist.com. The second is Microsoft is rotting, Malone says. I was subscribed to Robert’s feed since some months. I read some of his posts but I never commented on them before. I never really understand how he got his popularity. I thought that I knew it after I read the Economist’s article on Robert; but I was wrong. I fully understood the root of his success when I read the correction to the article. I say that I fully understand? I’m possibly wrong but I’m probably on the good path. Why is he so popular? The answer to this question can be somewhat simple: because he his authentic in his writing. He has an undeniable talent in writing and public relations and these talents help him pass his message, his ideas and his thoughts. He has the capacity to say things as they are, a sort of modesty, and give credit to others. When we read him, we know we’ll not be bullshitted.

Some ideas had surfaced when I read/post comments on these articles. The first one is the power of small ideas, and normal person; how they emerge; how they are promoted and why they changed the world. You just have to think about blogs, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Silicon Valley and Einstein. They are all examples of small ideas or normal folks that changed the world. Why? How? This is the more interesting part of the story because nobody knows the answer to this question. Personally I think that all of these ideas/persons have a focal point: the ability to communicate their ideas; the ability to make these ideas understandable to their community. They are probably the result of their creator’s writing and communication genius. Without these traits, they would not have changed the world.

The second interesting idea that emerges from the discussion was the capacity of enterprises to cope with the changing market. The next big change in today’s market will come from the East. Enterprises will need to change the way they work and the way they communicate if they don’t want to disappear. Microsoft is doing it. Some person didn’t seem to see it or understand it but it’s the case. I personally thing that they are now where HP was some decades ago when they were at war with Digital. They won it because they cope with the market’s changes. They started to communicate with smaller Silicon Valley companies. Like Microsoft or not, we are here now partly by the ingenuity of people working for it.

I suggest you to read the posts and comments to fully understand what I wrote there 😉

Technoratie: [scobleizer] [scoble] [writing] [communication]

Yesterday I talked about how del.icio.us was inventive and genial. I talked on how and why I use it. But I had a problem: it was to publish the content of it on my blog. Radio Userland didn’t permit such a thing; the system is not made to refresh content if the Radio software isn’t running. So I had a problem. I searched and tested many solutions but no one was what I needed. I needed a simple, ease and reliable way to post a RSS feed onto my blog with a layout that fit in it.

I finally found what I needed. Feed2JS is a project of the Maricopa Community Colleges. What’s Feed2JS? This is a way to publish a RSS feed on your blog using JavaScript. How it work? You need to generate your feed’s code on their website. After you have to cut and paste the generated code on your webpage and it’s done. After, at each hour, their servers will scan your feed and refresh it with his new content. It’s free, it takes 2 minutes to implement and it’s without ads. You can’t really find a better service.

You also can create your own style for the feed’s box. It use CSS and you can find style examples there. The only thing you have to do is to generate the CSS code and put it at the top of the page where the feed will be displayed.

If you have access to your own server that run a PHP Interpreter then you can download the source code of Feed2JS, modify it, and run it on you server.

It’s really a good publishing tool for you blog and it’s the best I found around. Try it, you have nothing to lose.

Good publishing.

Technoratie: [rss] [feed] [publish] [blog] [feed2js]