Techpaulogy

Bumpin' SEO Tactics - Get Your Rank on Lock

A good portion of my job revolves around search engines, both paid and organic (with the trusty help of Anvil Media). I've often explained what "search engine optimization" or "lead generation funnels" are to my friends and family, but maybe I should have enlisted the help of Chuck, who puts it best:

See all his SEO beats over on YouTube. Yeah, there's a few...

Evaluating Buzz Monitoring Tools - Suggestions?

My team is currently in the process of evaluating buzz monitoring software to get a better grasp on Jive, its competitors, and the enterprise software industry in general. When I say "buzz monitoring," I mean a tool that tracks blogs, wikis, discussion forums, news sites, and other online communities for specific keywords, and helps aggregate and analyze that data to determine trends, supporters, product feedback, etc. I'm hoping some other folks out there may have feedback for Justin and I?

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Right now, here is an initial list of products being reviewed:

• BuzzLogic - we were also evaluating this when I was at Anvil Media
• BuzzMetrics - BrandPulse/BlogPulse (by Nielsen)
• BuzzPerception (by CustomScoop)
• Orchestra (by Cymphony)
• Radian6 - thanks to @davidalston, @RichardMcinnis, and @lebrun on Twitter
• SEER (by VML)
• TruCast (by VisibleTechnologies)
• Umbria

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The basic requirements are as follows:

Track/Monitor

• Track social media by site and by source (some bloggers post on multiple sites)
• Allow for both branded search ("Jive"), competitors, and general industry terms ("collaboration software")
  • Including advanced search operators (and, or, not) to filter noise
• Weighting/ranking of posts -- some are high impact (ZDNet) some are low impact (personal blogs)

Analyze

• Allow for trend analysis
  • Data import/export to integrate with Google Analytics, Eloqua, and SalesForce traffic & lead data
• Record tone of post (positive, neutral, negative)
• Record meme of post
• Record product discussed in post (Clearspace, Clearspace X, Openfire, etc.)
• Allow for human intervention in automated processes
  
  • Weighting
  • Tone
  • Meme

React/Participate

• Tools for getting involved in external conversations
  • Track replies to comments
• Track offline/back-channel communication (a.k.a. CRM when conversation ends up on email)
  • Depending on the CRM capabilities of the tool, we might also consider integration with SalesForce.com to manage blogger relationships

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Does anyone have experience with these products and services? Any recommendations? For example, Jason Falls has a great video over on his blog about his visit with Radian6.

Jive Won "Technology of the Year" Award from Infoworld

Jive just won Infoworld's annual Technology of the Year award, for its Clearspace X online community software. Specifically, Clearspace X was recognized as the  "Best Community Platform" in the Applications and Middleware category, alongside other winners like Oracle SOA Suite ("Best Enterprise Service Bus"). Winners were chosen by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers:

"these Technology of the Year award winners represent the best business process management system, best enterprise service bus, best database middleware, and the best SaaS collaboration and community platforms we tested in 2007."

The award is based on a review of version 1.1.1 earlier in the year, and since then there have been a number of great additions, including:

• Customizable dashboard (users can filter updates & new content they're interested in)
• Customizable interface (admins can drag-and-drop rearrange and add content modules)
• Popular and related content widgets connect blog posts, wiki documents, and discussion threads
• 1-Click sending discussion/forum/blog/wiki content via email

More commentary on the award can be found at:

• Silicon Florist
• Fast Wonder
• Jive Talks

Track Your Company and Competitors in Real-time: Persistent Search for Business Intelligence

A number of people have recently asked me how to setup real-time alerts for different things -- Jive, competitors, their own name (vanity?), etc. I've tested a number of ways to facilitate this "persistent search" functionality, whereby I am notified any time one of the many search engines out there (Google, Yahoo, Ask, Technorati, etc) finds a specific keyword. Let's use "Jive Software" as an example. Here is what I want to do:

• know any time a blog mentions the words "Jive Software"
• know any time a static website adds a page that contains "Jive Software"
• be notified ASAP so I can react

Now, to facilitate this, there are some process points:

• I want to avoid clogging my inbox, so this has to be done via RSS, not email (so Google Alerts won't fit the bill).
• I also want to over-subscribe, and build logic to filter the noise -- as opposed to only subscribe to one or two sources -- so I don't miss anything (which crosses-off the persistent search functions built into RSS readers like Attensa , where you could setup searches for both "Jive Software" and "Clearspace" and get two of every article that mentions both).

So, I turn to Yahoo Pipes. This tool is absolutely fantastic. A life-saver. And for you Perl ninjas out there, you can make it do even more than me. So here's what it does: takes in data (RSS/XML, JSON, whatever), allows you to mash it up (splice, sort, filter, rename, etc), and then spits it out in whatever fashion you want (RSS, JSON, email, text message).

Back to our "Jive Software" example. So, I want to setup a "pipe" to monitor this term (a free-standing tool that sucks in data, processes it, and spits it back out):

1. Log-in to your Yahoo account
2. Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes
3. Go to my profile http://pipes.yahoo.com/techpaulogy
4. Hover over my pipe that says "Persistent Search – Jive"
5. Click on the "Clone" link in the upper-right of the gray highlighted area that pops up
6. Click on the "My Pipes" link in the top navbar
7. You should see a new pipe in your list of Pipes that is a copy of mine.
8. Click on the title of the copied pipe to go to it's management page. You'll see the current live results for "Jive Software" searches on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Technorati , etc.
9. Click on the "Edit Source" link. Now for the magic (click the image -- it's 1600 px wide, might need to resize or download to see it best):

Here, you can see the guts of the pipe. It uses modules to fetch the source feeds, in one case re-maps some data fields to sync up with each other, combines all the sources, sorts them by date, filters out duplicates, and outputs the new feed. Voila! Play around. Now that it's been copied to your account, you can break it to your heart's content. Envision expanding this to also track searches for competitors, Jive product names, industry analysts, etc. (you'll see another pipe in my account called "Splice - Jive Feed" that combines this persistent search pipe with a shared OPML file of enterprise software blogs -- it's a work in progress).

Who else has played with this? Any Perl ninjas out there want to help me write logic (based on Regular Expressions) that can help standardize dates in all the various feeds to enable better sorting? Right now it's pretty hit or miss. Also, I'd love to explore publishing some shared "best-practice" OPML files (one for Competitor's blogs, one for Enterprise Software blogs, etc) that can be plugged in -- I was having trouble parsing the OPML file in the example "Splice" pipe.

Advanced Operators: Some of My Favorite Tools

The topic for this Advanced Operators session is a roundup of our favorite tools -- online, desktop, or otherwise (paper?). I haven't jumped in for the last few conversations, but after grabbing lunch with Justin, I realized it's been too long! So, that being said, here are some of the tools in my daily arsenal:

Blog tools

• Lijit - I am loving this new widget for my blog (look at the search box, to the right). It is ridiculously simple to setup. Basically, it is a slick interface to build a Custom Search Engine for all your web content (blog, Digg, del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, etc.), and then hook it into your blog sidebar. But it's better than Google CSE alone, as it tracks tons of stats, is readily skin-able, shows a tag cloud of popular searches... And works some magic for users who arrive at your blog via a search engine. If it detects users coming from search, it offers up other content in your network that might also be of interest (try this search, click my blog, and look above the post title -- you don't see that box if you arrive there without performing a search first).
• CLIQ - a new widget coming out of local Portland crew StepChange (with technology from Offermatica), that groups your friend's blogs together into a "CLIQ." Then it shows popular and featured content from your blog and your friends' blogs in the sidebar (based on its tracking algorithms). While it sounds really cool, it is still in private beta and getting some kinks worked out. Like what happens when you want to be part of multiple CLIQs -- I have a few friends who are already involved in another CLIQs, and can't intuitively be involved in mine too. Luckily, the support team has gotten back to me with answers to my questions, so I have been able to find work-arounds. I've been constantly searching for a Featured/Popular Post widget for TypePad, and this finally looks to be the answer! With a social flare.
• coComment - this tool keeps track of conversations you have on other blogs, and lets you know via RSS if people respond to your comments. Then, it can spit out a widget to toss on your blog sidebar, to display your conversations elsewhere.
• Last.fm - Ok, a fun on. Perhaps the best music community I've found online, it tracks everything I listen to with iTunes, Pandora, Yahoo Music Engine, Windows Media Player, and its own player (that has tons of great, free music). Then it ties together all sorts of stats, which can be used on your blog sidebar (see my photo blog -- bottom left sidebar) or on Facebook. It's also a great way to explore new music, and connect with other people who share your tastes.

Other tools

• Snag-it - This one is indispensable. It's the best screenshot tool I've found. I wrote about Snippy earlier, and have since realized that this was totally worth the cost. Not only can it capture entire web pages with auto-scroll, but it makes the print screen button about 300 times more useful -- let's you annotate and markup screenshots on the fly, before saving them as files or copying to the clipboard for use in email, Powerpoint, etc.
• RoboForm - I use this a few times an hour. It saves all my passwords and personal information, and then automatically fills forms online. I don't have to remember passwords any more, and it fills in pretty much any form the Web can throw at you (even has user-defined fields). Most importantly, it's encrypted. But it's also super portable. I sync it to my USB thumbdrive at home, and sync it to my PC at work, so it all flows seamlessly. Plus, it syncs to my Treo, so I have my passwords on the fly when I am at an Internet kiosk or a friend's house.
• DesktopSidebar - While Google, Yahoo (Konfabulator), and a number of other players have rolled out desktop widgets, I still swear by this. For people who live in a Windows world, this by far and away has the best Office/Outlook support for power users (and those of us who follow GTD practices). It puts a heads-up display of all my tasks due the next few days, appointments, scratch pads (notes), multi-snip clipboard, and pretty much anything else you'd really want on your desktop for instant use.

While this list is by no means exhaustive, there are plenty more tools I am in the midst of using, that I could write about: FeedBurner, BlogRoveR & FeedDigest (hat tip to Marshall K for these), Picnik, Wufoo, CrazyEgg, Greasemonkey... so many!

The Blog Carnival Kick-Off at Advanced Operators: Microblogging

The team over at Advanced Operators just kicked off its inaugural blog carnival post (wikipedia definition), exploring the future of microblogging. Justin posed some questions to get the wheels turning. I picked some to respond to:

• Is microblogging a fad? Does it have any value beyond entertainment?
  I don't think it's just a fad - people are really getting into it. But certainly, Twitter and crew are still trying to find their places in the world. At the moment, these tools are to some degree an extension of the IM away message, a mere broadcast of ideas or situations to passers-by. I've also seen the tools equated to the "head-knod" you give to other people as you pass them in the hall, not expecting to get a response, but just in general recognizing their presence. So, in that sense, it will mostly remain as a shout out function, which does serve a niche in online communities: what is top-of-mind. One time, I think from Steve Wrubel, there was actually an instance of breaking news getting distributed on Twitter, one step ahead of the major news outlets, but the only way that would really work is if you constantly monitored the Tweets flying around.
• Is microblogging a feature that can be absorbed by larger social networks like MySpace and Facebook? Who will dominate the microblogging sphere and why?
  I would think so -- this is how I use it. I use Twitter to power the announcement box (shout outs) on my "professional" technology blog, while I use the Facebook status RSS feed to do the same for my "personal" photo blog. I don't see Twitter itself being the tool we'll all use from here on in, but rather the functionality it inspired: ultra-portable information syndication, for tid-bits that fall below the radar of topics meaty enough to warrant a full blog post. It's more of a stream of consciousness. Where the process breaks down for me is when people post Tweets every 5 seconds about the fact that they are hungry. I use it sparingly, to make announcements not worth blogging about. I see this function being built into ANY application where users spend any amount of time, and need a quick way to give others in the community an idea of their progress or whereabouts above the noise of the regular, on-going content creation.
  
  Another interesting development where this type of data will become more useful, is when RSS filtering tools become mainstream. Take local Portland company Attensa, for example (and for full-disclosure, a client). They have developed a very powerful technology called AttentionStream, which monitors a user's RSS consumption habits, and prioritizes feeds and posts within their RSS reader based on what you pay the most attention to -- what is most important. So in this scenario, you can subscribe to a much more diverse and broad set of feeds, and after a while, let the algorithms bubble up the blog posts and microblogging snippets that are most relevant to you.

Beyond responding to the original post above, I also note that there's been a good turnout so far. I have some feedback from the comments that it generated. One piece in particular, from Adam, struck my interest:

The missing piece, which some are undoubtedly working on, is the connector between these, something to aggregate your digital life. Someone will figure it out and then there’ll be better ways to get a complete view of someone in near real-time.

Well, I have started to construct said missing piece. I am sure numerous people have hacked together something to this end in Yahoo Pipes, but I have a far simpler method. All I have done is subscribed to all my (useful) RSS feeds in Google Reader, added the "LifeFeed" tag to them, and shared the new aggregated feed with the public. Google spits out this page, which I then re-purpose as my Life Feed on my "About Paul Biggs" page. While I am no designer, you get the idea. Works like a charm, and I churn it through FeedBurner to give it a little more functionality. Voila!

Taking RSS to the Next Level - Unleashing Your Business Data

I've been a huge fan of RSS technology since its inception -- having been a rabid Bloglines user, and more recently Google Reader (I prefer its mobile interface, which I use about an hour a day on my Treo to pull down the latest news on the way to work).

But, these consumer applications are only the tip of the iceberg for the true power of RSS. It offers a much more robust platform for information distribution, where applications like e-mail fall short. It makes content ultra-portable and functional, where before it was locked in databases behind clunky websites or software UIs. It separates content from structure -- and businesses are rapidly realizing the upside to this.

How so? Well, if my personal RSS stream's goal is to get the right information to me in an organized fashion, scale that up to a business level where a corporation can "get the right information to the right people at the right time" -- that punchline came to me via Attensa, a client that is charging forward in the Enterprise RSS space. There are so many applications for RSS in a business, just to name a few:

• Team collaboration and project management feeds (bye-bye distribution lists)
• Delivering sales data and marketing collateral to empower a distributed sales team (no more digging for email attachments)
• Persistent search and timely delivery of relevant information (stop skimming that inbox full of newsletters and Google Alerts)
• And hey, let's not forget the guys over in IT -- security features to block malicious code and provide a controlled environment for information flowing through (and behind) the firewall

The team at Attensa is hard at work on two products to enable all this. First, the RSS reader for Outlook, which is really slick. It's not your average reader. To start with, a ETech they just rolled out a new version that ranks articles based on user interest and attention (dubbed "AttentionStream") by tracking reading behavior -- on an individual and aggregate level across an organization. On top of that it's integrated and optimized for Outlook, where most of us live 9-5 M-F.  It also has a toolbar for IE/Firefox to handle RSS feeds in the wild, and syncs with your del.icio.us tags. To explore it further, you can download the software for free and give it a try.

Second, on the other side of the information distribution pipeline (well, smack in the middle, actually) sits Attensa's RSS feed server. This is where businesses can truly capture the essence of Enterprise 2.0. Through a relatively easy-to-deploy appliance (on a LAMP stack -- the most recent server release also can be implemented via software appliance or hosted solution), administrators can securely distribute, manage, and track RSS/ATOM/XML feeds from internal and external blogs, wikis, and websites. Employees can then subscribe to these feeds on a selective/filtered basis and receive the information in Microsoft Outlook, in their browser, in their instant messenger, or on a mobile device. Where ever and however the information is in the most useful context.

By combining these tools (or even just the Outlook reader) you can really take RSS applications to the next level.

Streaming Music Showdown - Last.fm vs. Pandora

I've been researching online streaming music tools for a long time, and it usually comes down to Pandora versus Last.fm. Both are free online radio stations essentially, wrapped in rich feature sets. Here's the scoop on both:

• Last.fm is my favorite, as it has the greatest social media / social networking capabilities. You can listen to so much good music, tag it, rate, it, and share it with the music community. Here's my Last.fm music profile, where you can see the level of detail it's capturing and allowing users to play with. It tracks everything - plus it integrates with iTunes, Media Player, etc. It also makes super cool charts to add to your blog that are updated dynamically (see over on the right sidebar). AND, it has its own stand-alone software you can download. Pretty amazing tool. You should definitely check it out, and add yourself as my friend.
• Pandora is also great. It's more hyped in the media, but has a slightly lower list of functionality. Here's my Pandora profile so you can see what's available (more clunky than Last.fm). First off, it's only usable via a Flash-based player in your web browser -- no separate software. They did add social features last week, but with all the pop-up windows and a separate Flash player, it's kind of hard to navigate. Pandora also offers tools for your blog, thought they are less customizable than Last.fm. I applaud them for all the improvements, but until they clean up the experience, I am sticking with Last.fm.

There are also some other options worth mentioning, which are useful or new.

• Pandora.fm is a mashup of Pandora and Last.fm that I use while listening to Pandora. It lets you track your Pandora music in Last.fm. Pretty great way to get the best of both worlds (sometimes Pandora offers a better music selection and offers some new ways to discover music).
• Musicovery is the new kid on the block, but given that it's entirely in a Flash player the user e peirence and overall functionality are still lacking. But, it offers a pretty cool way to visualize your music discovery process. I guess that's where Flash comes in, as a way to very slickly visualize things for Pandora and Musicovery, but it really makes using all of the non-music features (sharing, charting, etc.) a pain.
• Yahoo Music Unlimited is different because you have to pay for it ($6 a month), but I wanted to mention it because it is my second-most used streaming music service after Last.fm. The cool thing here is that you can play ANY artist and ANY song, so you can build specific playlists or play whatever song you want, whenever. Great for DJ-ing parties... the limitations of all the internet radio players above is that you can't select specific tracks or artists due to licensing restrictions, you can only choose genres and see what you get. Other options out there include Rhapsody (more options, more expensive), Napster, and Virgin Digital. What I am really waiting for, however, is for Apple and iTunes to get into the music subscription space -- that would kill all the rest since right now none of the others sync with my iPod. Not sure what the holdup is, since iTunes has been so successful licensing everything else?

Comparing Conversation Trackers: coComment vs. Co.mments vs. Commentful

I've been meaning to keep better track of my conversations out in the wilds of the Blogosphere. There are few tools that let bloggers keep up to speed with their off-site conversations. The three most popular right now are coComment, Co.mments, and Commentful.

After a bit of testing, coComment came out on top. Here's why:

• Better blog integration. A little CSS and javascript, and there's a cool widget in my sidebar that lists all the conversations I'm having elsewhere. You can grab javascript from Co.mments, and an RSS feed from Commentful, but neither of them have built-in CSS like coComment, which lets me tailor it to my hosted blog on Typepad. Sweet.
• Better user interface. I like the on-site user interface of coComment more than the others. It collapses all the comments that aren't near your own, and let's you expand them as you see fit. Co.mments' is decent, and Commentful's is pretty sparse.

And now, I've enable coComment for all my blog posts so you can use it too (thanks to Typepad  for this being so dang easy to implement).

Connect With Paul

I've established profiles on a number of websites, both for business and for fun. If you are on these networks, please shoot me an invite:

* Del.icio.us - a social bookmarking site, where users tag websites to be saved and shared. It's more flexible than Internet Explorer Favorites or Firefox bookmarks because it's not hierarchical. You can give a website multiple tags. E.g. You could save this blog, tagged with "blog," "technology," and "business." Then, once sites are saved in del.icio.us you can syndicated them in all sorts of cool ways (link rolls, tag clouds, etc.).

* Digg - a social news site where users determine the content. Probably the most popular of its kind (others of note include Slashdot, Rojo, Reddit, Netscape, and Newsvine), users post news stories and others digg, or vote on, their favorites. Popular stories with the most diggs are pushed to the front page.

* LinkedIn - a business networking site (among others like Ryze and Spoke), it allows members to keep up with each other's skills, jobs, projects, and entrepreneurial pursuits. It's also a great source of leads for business partners and potential hires. I also use it just to keep in touch with my friends and associates.