Category: Technology

Where would I be without Google translation tools and Babblefish? Here’s a blog-style thank you coming from a 21Publish customer (Church of Northern German). Here’s a translation of this blog page in German. Here’s a translation of the church blog page in English. (original page here).

Well if there’s one other thing I can say about these technologies, it does not help me to stop perpetuating the image of being a lazy American and by failing to learn the languages of other countries.  🙁

Yesterday I mentioned adding FeedBlitz to my blog to enable people to subscribe to blog updates via email. Was motivated to do this based on a hat tip from Fred Wilson. Bill Burnham weighs in on the whole "email is king" theme and also provides a case for using services like FeedBlitz and RSSFWD. The basic finding by most people is that RSS readership is low. Bill points to a post that indicates 11% of blog readers use RSS and 2/3rds of them don’t even know what RSS is.

I completely agree with this, which is why I added FeedBlitz in the first place.

That said, people should not forget that there may be some less developed research about the behavioral profile of those that use RSS (beyond traditional demographics of age, technological sophistication, etc.). An example study is here (hat tip: Robert Scoble) which says that 87% of "influencers" use RSS. In the study I point to here, influencers are defined as journalists, analysts, and bloggers. These are people that are in some sense promiscuous about spreading ideas … presumably to other readers. I speculate that the consequence of such a finding for personal versus corporate bloggers might vary.

I need throw some change-ups over at The CIO Weblog. My projects and endeavors in the past 6 months have been outside of the backoffice operations space, and I’m lacking that first-hand practioner’s view as to what’s happening with CIOs, IT organizations, etc. I am in need of fresh material. In plain English, I’m getting stale. I’ve gotten feedback from folks that they liked my post on the NewsGator Enterprise Server and might like to see more posts like that in the future (e.g., on emerging software companies). Other things that people said that they would like to see are interviews with CIOs or other industry folks. Will try my best to seek these out, so if you are part of a software product company or consulting firm, a CIO, a manager in an IT organization, etc., feel free to pitch or contact me. Email preferred at sshu at s4management dot com.

Via the techno-mavens at del.icio.us, I’ve found an arbitrage opportunity for converting PDFs online. Those using Adobe online for PDF conversion can PayPal me $99.98 each year, save themselves $0.01/year and instead use PDF Online for free. OK – maybe you should PayPal 50% of the money to del.icio.us, and I will have figured out the del.icio.us biz model that Fred Wilson claims not to have had when he invested money in del.icio.us.

Zoli Erdos has two good posts (here and here) that aggregate pointers to and comment on some of the recent happenings in the space regarding the RSS (Really Simple Syndication protocol – feels kind of weird to do the acronym first then the longhand). Suffice it to say that Jason Calacanis has called plagiarism through RSS, "Really Simple Stealing".

For those playing at home, RSS is a mechanism for distributing information like blog posts. It is a machine-to-machine protocol that’s been around for awhile but is gaining a lot of interest as of recent. A venture capital firm recently announced raising $100 millionish for RSS investments.

I suspect there’s an inherent problem with the "really simple" aspect of RSS. If one wants to prevent full text information from being blatantly copied, then one probably has to atomize the blog posts and/or add an authenticated signature that cannot be separated. RSS will no longer be really simple then. To prevent plagiarism, units of data would have to be "really signed" (Really Signed Syndication?). RSS became more widely used in the blogging and news community because of the simplicity.

As for using the RSS protocol to increase multi-network participation of bloggers, I could see this being done, and the use will likely get richer over time. 21Publish uses RSS in its authoring interface to integrate external blogs into a blogging community at various levels.

As some of you may know, for me blogging started out primarily as an electronic newsletter. It sidewinded into a book deal opportunity, online writing opportunities, marketing consulting engagements, start-up job offers, angel investor inquiries, and my recent position at 21Publish as COO. Three of these opportunities (which I closed) are international relationships. There are a number of other opportunities baking as well, some related to blogging, others not.

If you are interested in another source of information on doing business online, the concept of a "virtual handshake" and a book by the same name, is being promoted by Harvard Business School alum and CEO of Nitron Advisors, David Teten, at a blog here.

An excerpt of the book is here. Here’s a snip of that excerpt that provides some great context about why you should consider learning more:

Most professionals meet new people and maintain relationships the same
way they did 50 years ago—with phone calls, letters, and face-to-face
meetings. However, today you can use social software to build and
leverage a much larger and more effective network. Even if you do not
use these technologies yourself, your competitors are—to gain an
advantage over you, or at a minimum to learn more about you. Whether
you choose to participate or not, social software will impact you. 84
percent of American Internet users have used the Internet to contact or
get information from an online group–more than have used the Internet
to read news, search for health information, or to buy something.