Feeds and Traffic

A part of the adoption of RSS/Feeds inside EY involved discussions about what effect this would have on peoples browsing habits and what are the possible knock on effects. Would a desktop reader create, for example, capacity issues on our firewall or internal web servers?

The end result is that it's almost impossible to predict. However, the question came up again recently and, as we now have several feeds, I did a quick check. The xml file of the main feed on our Intranet site was 7k. The home page was 341k.

The most basic computation based on 7k returned every time the reader refreshes the feed on an hourly schedule shows that about 5 days worth of feed updates is equivalent to one visit to the home page.

The feed is only updated two or three times a day. When the xml file hasn't changed the web server returns a 304 (Not Modified) http status code - a tiny fraction of the 7k. Therefore the real value equates to 19 days or 26 if you add weekends in for free.

It's got to look like feeds will reduce traffic.

The counter argument to this is that people will be more aware of updates and therefore it will drive up visits to sites. This may be true, but I have no way to measure it. If it is then, assuming the content is work related, this can only be a Good Thing. It is, after all, one of the fundamental benefits of the technology.

It's a wired world

As I look over the different technology elements involved in the creation of my combined feed I can't help but be amazed.

There are three sources: My blog (the simple Atom feed), NewsGator clippings (stuff I tag in my reader, FeedDemon, in RSS) and Del.icio.us (stuff I tag with tfkfeed in delicious, also in RSS)

These three feeds are merged, de-duplicated and sorted by publish date by a Yahoo Pipe and spat out as a single RSS stream.

This RSS stream flows through FeedBurner, which truncates the posts, and creates a combined-format feed that is more broadly compatible than standard RSS or Atom.

We've been pretty successful in Ernst & Young at utilising feeds. We've got many internal sources producing feeds, not just blogs. Some of our knowledge repositories and portals will display content in a mini-reader. All desktops have a feed reader (other than the rather incapable embedded ones).

I'm working now to raise awareness of what comes after this, and although it will take some time before we see anything like the picture I've painted above, I'm looking forward to challenge.

Copyright conscience

For obvious reasons I don't subscribe to the feed on my own blog, but did so the other day just to check that the feed-reader-clippings-yahoo-pipes thing is working. It is, but there's no distinction between content that is my own and that from other sites, although the links are clearly to the source. Nevertheless, I feel this potentially misrepresents other peoples content as my own have set the combined feed to summarise. This final step is done by FeedBurner, which I've been using all along in order to track subscription.

I realise this may reduce the value of the feed, but I don't feel comfortable doing otherwise.

Delicious Yahoo Pipes

So now I added del.icio.us into my Yahoo Pipe. I haven't used del.icio.us for a Long Time now, despite having the toolbars, I just don't think to tag things there. Well, in an effort to see if it's just habit on my part or really No Longer Useful I've joined it into my feed pipe.

Now if I tag something in del.icio.us with the tag tfkfeed it will flow through the same Yahoo Pipe that is currently joining my Google Reader (now no longer used) and my four FeedDemon clip folders. The nice thing about del.icio.us is that I can add a description that becomes the body of the RSS feed, so it's like a mini post that only goes into the feed.

Whilst in pipes I created a new pipe that joins my posts feed and this combined clip/del.icio.us feed into one. So now through one feed it's possible to track everything all my tech related streams.

All of this is making me want to try out Flock. Never done that.

Neighbourhoods

This looks interesting, but can we spell it right?

Andrew McAfee

Awareness Networks builds, hosts, and deploys integrated E2.0 suites for an impressive roster of customers ... When they described how neighborhoods work within Awareness, I think I said "Great idea!" out loud.

Each Awareness installation is called a ‘community,’ and each community can contain multiple neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are simply ways to categorize the content that gets contributed over time, and are defined in advance by the people who commissioned the site. Since these people are usually the bosses of the company (or are at least acting on their behalf) neighborhoods tend to reflect the formal organizational structure or goals of the company, or some combination of the two.

Linking back

Moving to FeedDemon as my feed reader has introduced an annoying side effect. The corporate browser is IE, so although I have FF installed on my machine it is not the default browser. I use ScribeFire for quick blog posts like this one and I haven't found a suitable equivalent in IE (not that I've searched very hard given that I do most of my browsing in FF). Whilst using Google Reader I was reading posts in FF too, so quick blogs were a simple matter. Now FeedDemon has taken my blog reading back into the world of IE and broken the link to quick and easy posting.

This extra copy URL-switch to FF-paste routine was certainly becoming a barrier to me making some posts. However, I found the entry below on the Channel9 forum that shows how to create a right-click menu entry for 'Open in FF'. Now I can easily bounce links from FeedDemon (and from IE) into FF from where I can use ScribeFire to post.

Barrier lowered, posting continues.

IE add-on: Open In Default Browser

In Firefox an extension exists - IE View - to open a link target in IE. I asked if a similar extension could be created for IE - Sven pointed out that it could. This IE add-on will allow you to click on a link in IE, and open its target in your default browser. Sven's version allows you to open the target in Firefox.

Has anyone a recommendation for posting direct from IE?

Blog beginnings

I first came across Ricardo on Linked-In, where he had answered a question. He caught my attention because he works for PWC, a competitor to Ernst & Young (where I work). So I pinged Ricardo and we've been tracking each other's blogs. It was interesting reading Ricardo's post on the origins of his blog as it matches so closely to my own.

I started a blog internally about two years ago and recently decided to 'go public' for similar reasons to those given by Ricardo. However, I still actively maintain my internal blog and probably post equally frequently to both.

This motivated me to write a post about identities that has been stewing since I Roo Reynolds made a remark at the Online Information Exhibition I attended in December 07. Roo said that he has only one identity and it keeps him honest. Personally, I have lots of identities and I don't have any desire to mix them.

This blog is my professional identity, although I might post a bit of personal stuff in here. I do more personal stuff internally, partially out of fear of identity theft. I have several social networking persona's, the two main ones being Linked-In (professional) and Facebook (social). FB is the closest I get to publishing anything about my life on the web. If FB gave me the ability to have circles of friends I might do this more.

I have considered (but with four children never spared the time) setting up a private blog with logins in order to share my life with my closest family and friends who are scattered across the globe.

As bit of an aside: on identity theft the stories don't get much funnier that this.

What do other's think? Do you keep your worlds apart or throw everything into one bucket?

UPDATE: Someone sent me this link. It's an interesting read, but I think it's overdone. Sure there are people who exhibit extreme behaviours between different identities, most of us just reflect who we are in an appropriate way. In this post, however, I was thinking more about who I want to hear me. I'll tell my wife my deepest secrets, I won't blog them here. I'll tell my friends I'm looking for a new job, I won't post it here or on my internal blog, or on FB. I'll discuss some technical interest here, but internally will post about how EY could respond or use it.

Right now I have to have a separate application for each group and no tool yet enables me to break down my contacts into smaller groups and direct, at the level of a message, communications to these small groups. I'm guessing the future is not far off when I'll be able to do this in something like FB.

FeedDemon - 14 days

I've been using FeedDemon for two weeks now. Here are my thoughts:

• + I have two machines so the way sync'ing just happens is great.
• + Gives me access to both internal and external feeds in one place. When I was using Google Reader I started ignoring Bandit and missed internal updates for extended periods.
  
• + Reports to help me manage dead feeds. Probably comparable, although quite different, to Google Reader.
  
• + Clip folders have given a bit more structure and context to posts that are of interest. I never really used the tagging in Google Reader.
• - The toolbar for each feed (to flag, share, mark read etc) is at the top of the feed, so I keep scrolling up and down.
• +- I initially missed the auto-mark-read-as-I-scroll feature of Google Reader, but now I'm not so sure. I quite like being in control of when feeds are marked read.
• - I would to have the option for links to open in new tabs by default, instead I have to remember to click on the little icon next to the feed title. I guess once in the habit I won't mind this so much.
  
• + Prefetch seems an excellent feature, although I haven't needed to use it yet.
  
• - The keyboard shortcuts seems a bit odd. Ctrl-Shft-A to mark a feed as read, Ctrl-R to mark the whole folder of feeds as read. On the plus side you can configure all the keyboard shortcuts.
• - FeedStation doesn't auto clean up on a per feed basis. Some podcasts are daily, some weekly or less frequent. I use Juice and will continue to do so.

So the big question. Google Reader or FeedDemon? Nyah, it's an easy one. FeedDemon, and for this one reasons (or is it really two) above all else:

• Combined internal/external with the sync'ing between machines (at least for the external feeds)

Carrots and what

So what is the perfect accompaniment to a carrot? If this happens, what else will sell out? I say hummus.

Facebook users plot global carrot rampage

More than 60,000 people from an online group have pledged to swarm supermarkets and buy out their supply of carrots in one day in a bizarre mission labeled "impossible" by vegetable growers.

Laying traps

Terry Doerscher posts a very interesting and eloquent entry on balancing the need for directive control and to give freedom to flourish in the work of Knowledge Workers. Quite rightly he concludes with no prescriptive answer, as there isn't one. I'm no expert on this matter and haven't the time to read even the two books Terry mentions let alone the library of thought that no doubt exists around this topic. Coming at this from a technical view we need to widen roads and lay traps.

People will use the tool that enables them to do what they need to do in the most efficient way. Efficiency means that not having to ask anyone for permission or assistance to get this done. People will sacrifice their contribution to the Greater Good if necessary. In other words, the tools we provide need to be obvious to use and unhindered by bureaucracy. (This reminds me of Andrew McAfee's post on The 9X Email Problem; if you need to make people change from what they are doing now the hill is so much steeper.)

Then there are the traps; not preventative measures but ones that capture what people are doing without requiring them to do anything different. This is the emergent attribute of technology that is at the heart of Enterprise 2.0 software. If we can harness every day activities and link them into the collective organisation in a way that contributes to the Greater Good then we gain something for nothing.

I'll conclude then to say that emergence will be a key technology contribution to the solution.

Planview - Blogs - Enterprise Navigator: Dancing on the Edge of a Razor Blade

Drawing upon the works mentioned and your basic daily observation, we know that knowledge workers, in particular, professionals, tend to be a highly independent sort and very cat-like. When you get right down to it, we like to do what we want and do it the way we want to, not necessarily how someone else wants us to. In fact, we are generally loath to take direction. Nor are we inclined to clue anyone else in on what it is that we are doing or our methods or progress, if we can avoid it. We want to establish our own list of tasks, set our own priorities for them, and figure out how to pull it all off without any help or oversight.

Not so native after all

From an article in this weeks Information World Review, "The idea that the Google generation is the most web-literate is a myth." This from research commissioned by the British Library and JISC.

I have become increasingly sceptical about the hype created over Generation Y, and pointed to it in my Online Information 2007 reportback. I do not doubt that there are differences between the generations. I do not claim that there is nothing to consider. However, the new generation will bring as many challenges as it will address issues.

It may be that GenY'ers adapt to and adopt more easily new technology. It may be that they are more able to work in an environment that pulls attention in several different directions at once - they may be better jugglers. However, they will need to learn how to plan, to analyse and draw their own conclusion, and they will need to learn how to fail.

To tie, as some do, Enterprise 2.0 technology to this generation is nonsensical. For me it cheapens the value argument for Enterprise 2.0. The fact than GenY'ers will be more comfortable working with these tools does not mean they will add that much more value. However, it does suggest that they will participate, which many of my generation and beyond are not prone to do.

The natural conclusion is that Enterprise 2.0 is only valuable if it has the participation of the older generations; otherwise these will be spaces that perpetuate the faults of GenY'ers rather than integrates and matures them.

Lotusphere to go

If, like me, you didn't get to Lotusphere but have an interest in the software stack you might be able to catch one of these. I'm going to make an effort to get to the London one, although there's no details on it at the time of posting.

IBM Lotusphere Comes to You 2008

Lotusphere Comes to You is a premier event series featuring new and timely presentations designed to bring anyone who couldn't get to Orlando the critical messages and the excitement they missed.

Eclipsed Amazon+Audible

I have blogged a couple of times about ebooks. This is a technology that recently caught my imagination - sparked by the release of the Kindle. On Thursday I spotted that Amazon has bought Audible - probably the best known and perhaps largest seller of audible books (I have no facts to back that up) - but the news of MS and Yahoo has eclipsed this news. I do know that Audible make heavy use of DRM to protect their content, although I think their purchase model makes things little better than the Amazon experience, where an audible book costs about the same as a paper copy but comes with a more restrictive licence.

I'm waiting for the confluence of the right device (I like the look of the iRiver one) and library, that sells books at the right price and with a fair licence. I don't mind DRM, but get the price down to reflect the restrictions, and don't impose it on authors/publishers that don't want their work restricted in this way.

Will this Amazon+Audible tie-up create this magical world. I'm not seeing the writing on the wall just yet.