Enterprise RSS Review

Client KnowNow's ESS is thoroughly reviewed by InfoWorld's Phil Windley.

I love the opening line: "you'd have to have been living on Pluto to have not heard of RSS by now. You probably use it to keep up with your favorite blogs. You may have even wondered how you could use it in your business."

Maybe but we have to keep remembering that we still have a long way to go to educate people about the true value from an ROI and time savings perspective.

He writes, "For a few simple feeds, blogging software probably gives you all the management capabilities you need. But if you really want to exploit RSS for work purposes, you need KnowNow ESS.

And then later:
"I found ESS to be an excellent system for managing syndicated feeds. The various pieces work together well, and the browser-based set-up and configuration make it easy to get going. The ability to capture, aggregate, and filter traditional RSS feeds as well as data from back-office systems makes ESS a must-have tool for businesses looking to exploit syndication.”

And another kudo about the value it can bring an organization: “This is a great way for a company to create RSS-based announcements and other special purpose lists.”

Also, Moonwatcher interviews both KnowNow and Attensa on corporate RSS.

Charlie Wood talks to Matthew Bookspan from Attensa and Ron Rasmussen from KnowNow about the state of the Enterprise RSS market, how customers are using their products, their views on various feed-related technologies, how their products differ from one another, and what they see coming in the year ahead.

Charlie says of KnowNow that he sees them as the Company that has pioneered the RSS enterprise space. Click here to listen to the podcast of the interview.

Tag: KnowNow
Tag: Enterprise RSS

MediaShift on RSS

Mark Glaser at MediaShift on RSS. Note his recent post with a handful of really useful links, including: Your Guide to RSS, How to Make RSS = Really Satisfying Syndication, Your Take: Which RSS news reader do you use and why and lastly the Top 5 for RSS Week.

Pirillo's New Idea

Chris Pirillo pitches the Gnomedex audience as well as VCs Jeff Clavier and Brad Feld on his new idea, which he calls TagJag.

He starts the pitch by talking about a few problems, like searching for RSS feeds on a mobile device. He wants the search to return the maximum amount of results with the least number of keystrokes on a mobile device. We see a draft page design that shows us a partial list that output feeds, whether they’re open search or a tag folksonomy. Says Chris, “if the tag is visible, we will be able to generate it.”

The idea is that you can make your own tag and then can organize it by category. “As a user of this service, you wouldn’t have to do all these searches that output RSS. You put in the word or phrase you want to search, then we parse that key word and push it through. It’s completely open, its their feed not ours, so we push the user back to the original content.”

He shows us using OPML how he can import all of his search feeds and how they could be automatically populated to Outlook. Sweet.

Chris continues, “it’s great that you’re throwing user generated content out there, but what about sharing revenue from the content you’re generating. You as a user generating content get 50%. People should get paid for traffic they’re sending out.”

He emphasizes the next sentence by looking up and directly at the audience and repeating it, “I want to structure this so that you Gnomedexers 2006 get a stake in it.” The audience claps. What that would look like at this point is unclear, but he appears to be serious about it.

Feedback from Clavier and Feld, “should your company be funded and by who? Why do you need funding? You can bootstrap small companies without funding sources. This notion that we, the VCs want to take your money is wrong. There are some businesses that don’t make sense for us, ones where we may not be able to make a lot of money.”

Clavier asks, “what is less clear to me is what you want to achieve and what your objectives are, so it lacks focus. I also want to know why you are the best person to do this. How does this compare to Wink and how will this be better than what they’re doing?”

Feld asks, “why do you need money?” He adds, “show your vision visually, whether its through a demo or where you want to go. I need something I can connect to. I think you have that. The disconnect between what you have and funding, is that its rare to dump money into a couple of people who have a vision and an idea. Try to use the least amount of resources you can to get you to where you need to go, quickly.”

Both agree and suggest to Chris that he think about this as a process and not an immediate hit, “think about funding is a process that happens through time. Just because funding doesn’t happen today, it doesn’t mean that capital can’t come in the future. Start engaging and starting the discussion early on. Take advantage of feedback from investors and the community over time. The better we can learn how you work over time, the easier it is for us to invest in the future.”

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006
Tag: Chris Pirillo
Tag: Brad Feld
Tag: Jeff Clavier
Tag: TagJag

Attention Operating System

Steve Gillmor enters Gnomedex stage left. He announces that Root.net and Gesture Bank are teaming up to announce the Attention Operating System. “We’re building on the four attention principals: it translates to: we own our data, we’re the people who create it. If you’re in it, you can contribute."

Canter asks Gillmor about money and his response is centered around affinity groups. “The driver of attention economy is affinity groups. The blogosphere is an affinity group. Within this group, there are specific interests, i.e., windsurfing, politics, etc. There’s an opportunity within those groups to do cross-selling in a way that Amazon is currently doing.”

Gillmor continues, “If I have to choose between two clouds, one that is open and efficient or a closed club that isn't, I want to go to the open club rather than the Microsoft hairball."

He then talks about the value of an alternative like Gmail, where he can pull his information out of a cloud, and not be tethered to Office. "I’m not getting this for free. Not really. People often think that the attention trust is about to coax the majors in.

Frankly, the longer they push back on this, its of huge marketing value to us. Their attitude is to lock people in. People don’t want to be locked in – they want to be free, to choose and to own their data. Our goal is to create a gesture economy with a small number of people. We don’t have to convince the big crowds to play along. We’re beyond that.”

Someone from the audience asks, “you don’t believe in linking, right?” Says Gillmor, “are you referring to my anti-linking crusade? Yes, links are dead. And, Office and Notes are dead. Links are being gamed. The page view model is being replaced. It’s going to be about the relationship between the user and the cloud. And affinity groups.

We have a lot of clout in this environment -- the blogosphere, where its based on ameritocracy, not the old concept of what the mainstream media is about. The information is looking for us now rather than us looking for information. The user controls the dialogue, not big companies.”

The audience claps. Chris Pirillo reaffirms: “The users are in charge. We always have been.”

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006
Tag: Steve Gillmor

Sex on the Stage & Online

In the same afternoon, Susan Mernit talks to us about sex and Steve Gillmor on attention. Different? The same? Combined? HA.

She writes on her blog about her talk (below), including quotes from personal bloggers related to this topic:

Figleaf: "As you know, one of my on-going themes is that the average sex blogger doesn't do anything the average non-sex/non-blogger does except admit it. One of the huge benefits of sex blogging, especially anonymous sex blogging, is that we learn from each other that we're not the only ones."

Magadalena: "I have absolutely no idea how many sexual blogs there are or what percentage of the 40.1 million sites Technorati currently tracks dedicate themselves to sexual content, but I would think it's pretty high."

Bliatz: "I wish I had the courage to turn this blog into my main outlet. I wish I had the guts to just write everything here, expose the whole picture and expose it all to everybody. I wish I didn't feel I had to hide something as natural and straight-forward as my sexuality and all the thoughts and emotions connected to that."

Evil Minx, commenting on Anastasia's Sexualitie blog (which was hacked): "It's the loss of freedom that gets me also. The sheer uninhibited joy of being able to write as the person behind my eyes is what has kept me going over the last year. "

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006
Tag: Susan Mernit

Pirillo and Ponzi

Chris Pirillo and Ponzi open Gnomedex 2006 at the opening reception in Seattle's Odyssey Maritime Discovery Center.

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006
Tag: Chris Pirillo

Gnomedex in Seattle Underway

Gnomedex Day 1 is underway on Seattle's waterfront: what a fabulous place to have an event!! I'm here wearing several hats, including 'learning new stuff,' which isn't something I always come home feeling. I'll be posting updates, notes and visuals over the next couple of days from the ground.

Check out a partial list of attendees, most of which link to their blog or a page that captures the essence of who they are. Same thing, no? RSS feed of the list here and OPML version here.

A sweet moment for me was bumping into Chris Pirillo's parents who wore the title: Staff on their badge. We mostly talked about Iowa, which brought back a wonderful memory of an ex-boyfriend's grandfather's 101th birthday many years ago.

Joe Pirillo has a great smile and note the strong family resemblance:

Tag: Gnomedex
Tag: Gnomedex 2006

Following Supernova Action

Ken Yarmosh of Corante talks about a great way to follow Supernova 2006 virtually via Emily Chang.

Says Ken of what's happening on-site:

"There’s a live audio stream of the entire conference, excellent blogging and notes on the Supernova blog, as well as the Media Center, which will provide both a blogcast by David Weinberger, videoblogging onsite with a kiosk providing by VideoEgg, and, later this evening is the Connected Innovator’s showcase."

(the latter is where client Sharpcast will be demoing and answering questions - be sure not to miss the showcase event, as it a round-up of some of the most interesting companies doing some of the most interesting things -- inside and outside the Valley).

"Second Life residents can interact and view information on Supernova, TechCrunch, Yahoo!, and the Connected Innovators on a special heads-up display."

Tag: Supernova
Tag: Supernova 2006
Tag: VideoEgg

BloggerCon Party

Not only am I missing BloggerCon this weekend, since I'll be walking on fire with Tony Robbins, but it will be the first one I've ever missed.

It was a remarkably different world in its first year, when we could nearly count the number of industry bloggers on two hands and the number of women bloggers on less than one.

Dave Winer announced a BloggerCon party in San Francisco tonight. Check out his blog and others for photos and highlights. There will be even be an IRC channel, set up by one of my favorite Brits in the Valley Kevin Marks.

Podcasting for the Masses

The Secrets of Podcasting is out: audio blogging for the masses. The book will walk you through how to:

• Download and enjoy podcasts with any MP3 player
• Create a script and set the structure and flow of your audio or video podcast
• Choose the right equipment–including the right microphone, headphones, and preamp (if its for beginners, I assume they explain what preamp is)
• Use a digital recording device instead of your PC or Mac
• Pick audio editing and recording software
• Legally play music in your podcast or vodcast
• Distribute your podcast or vodcast