Here is a nice debrief on using a blog in conjunction with an association meeting. Note the lessons learned about the pitfalls of sponsorship and starting the blog well before the conference actually launches.
(Via Rich Westerfield.)
Google has announced a new protocol that they are now using to better index web sites: Sitemap Protocol
he Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engine crawlers about URLs on your Web sites that are available for crawling. A Sitemap consists of a list of URLs and may also contain additional information about those URLs, such as when they were last modified, how frequently they change, etc.”
I imagine it won’t be long before most of the major CMSs out there have the ability to create one of these sitemap files. The primary benefit is to reveal pages to search engine crawlers that they would not find via their normal crawling of your site.
So, yesterday Steve Jobs announced that Apple will be switching to using Intel processors in their computers (abandoning the PPC chip). What I loved about how Steve announced it was that after showing several product demos and announcing the switch, he said that all the software he had shown were running on an Intel chip. I’m sure that built some confidence about how far along they are on the conversion. Nicely done!
I am trying out redirecting my weblog feeds through Feedburner so that I can get an idea of what my traffic is like in some more detail. This should be transparent to all current subscribers although it might make all my recent items flagged as unread. If that happens, sorry for the extra clicks it might cost you!
BTW, if you use WordPress, this feedburner plugin is great for managing the redirect to Feedburner.
Plogress.com is a site that blogifies data from the THOMAS, the online database of congressional activity. Using Plogress, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your representatives’ votes. Great tool! I have subscribed to the feeds for my Congressional delegation.
(Via Gadgetopia.)
Photo by Nikolaus Büttner.
In the past I have always described the task of coherently organizing the flood of content that ASHA produces as trying to sip from a full blast fire hose. However, as I kicked around the idea with some folks at work as I prepared for a presentation, I realized that ASHA doesn’t have a single content fire hose. ASHA, which has dozens of decentralized content producing groups, actually has the equivalent of several hundred content garden hoses. Taken individually or in small groups, they are easy to manage. However, when you have 100 garden hoses pointed at you, you get just as wet as getting hit by a fire hose.
So there you have my deep thought of the day. I mainly wanted to share the photo above that I found on Flickr. I’ll be using it in my presentation. Very apt.
Yahoo! has published their employee blogging guidelines.
After a lot of work internally, the Yahoo! Employee Blog Guidelines have been published. Yahoo! employees can find them on Backyard (our corporate Intranet) and the rest of you can get the PDF file by clicking that link.”
Jim McGee provides a link to a summary of his summary of his definition of personal knowledge management. That sounds a bit circular but you’ll see what I mean when you follow the link.
Rich Westerfield is working on developing a promotional blog for one of his trade show clients.
…I’m hoping that creating a new blog attached to a specific show and the people behind the scenes at that show will provide a differently compelling story than what Gadling is currently providing.”
I think it is an excellent marketing idea and may even improve the quality of the show itself if the organizers really lower the barrier between themselves and their potential attendees and exhibitors. The way to lower the barrier: the organizers must write authentically and frequently about the show and then listen to the feedback they get from their audience. I’ll be watching this one.
Long-time readers of this blog may remember and have participated in my little trackback experiment called KMpings. This service allowed people to send trackback pings of their KM-related posts to KMpings, which then syndicated the whole list for anyone who wanted to subscribe. It was a bit of a hit in a micro-community of KM bloggers although the activity slowly tailed off over time.
A few months ago I made some changes to the site that ultimately disabled the service and it is now completely gone with the redesign of my main web site. If you found the service useful and/or want somewhere to send your KM-related pings, I recommend using del.icio.us KM tag from now on. I subscribe to the KM tag stream from del.icio.us and find good stuff in it pretty often.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the KMpings experiment! I had no idea when I created it that it would be used as much as it was or that it would last so long.
C. David Gammel, CAE 