A Firefox add on you should have

I've been out and about watching the 20/20 cricket over the last few days at Edgbaston so my time for blog posting has been a bit limited. However last week I downloaded Firefox 3 and I've been looking for some useful extensions. Well I've found one and although it is in beta it does enhance my use of Google Reader by a company called feedly.

This has provided me with a good reading platform and allows me to save articles in Google reader but also I can pass them on to other people who follow me on Twitter and can be advised instantly of a useful web site or web article. For me the good integration with Google Reader is excellent though I did have to delete some feeds that were saved to Google Reader from some of my other sites.

A nice piece of eye candy is the ability to create a screen saver of articles and then click on this to read. It would be great to have say on an intranet where new articles appear as a screen saver and then you click on the article that you want to read. A good attention grabber.

I should say that this is available on Firefox only and is still a work in progress and no doubt will improve over time. It is the one function, that would make me switch from using google reader as my standard blog reader and saver.

RSS in three minutes

A colleague asked me today about RSS and I gave him a quick description but directed him to this link from Commoncraft (once again thanks to Lee Lefever) and if you click on the title it will open the link.

This is a great three minute guide to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) with pictures and video.

Here is the link in the title to this blog so enjoy and maybe if you are trying to explain it to your boss or a fellow colleague it might help.

One problem with RSS

When I was working with an internal communications team on the subject of RSS, we agreed that one of the ways forward was the use of blogs covering a variety of interests - say corporate bankruptcy or intellectual property or to cover a special interest group say Retail.

We recommended that we should use a to use a simple and I thought shortly to be ubiquitous Google Reader which we were going to encourage clients to download so that they could subscribe to our blog (s) and receive notification as to when we had updated the blog via RSS.

Of course this would put pressure on people to ensure that they blogged a little more regularly than once a quarter or at best once a month which can be difficult for time hassled professionals.

However the biggest stumbling block was the marketing departments insistence in
knowing who had subscribed to the site so that they could judge the value of the site. I also realised that these groups would be quite small and we were planning to deliver a very customisable service to these clients/interested observers and to provide a regular stream of information to them.

Bobcasting

If you click on the link above you can read Seth Godin's article where he introduces a word that I bet next year we are all going to repeat. He calls it 'bobcasting' Godin highlights that it gives people back control - imagine where we decide what messages we want to receive by using RSS - imagine if you are a solicitor working on a project and when a milestone is reached that a client subscribing to your Project X feed gets an update via a RSS feed rather than the ubiquitous and often lost and very infuriating e-mail.

He goes on to explain that because the Reader separates the inputs by source, he can queue up my messages from other people/sources and read them in sequence. Compare that to the noisy disaster we call an inbox.

I think that this is going to be the next step forward for knowledge management in technology terms and maybe future iterations of Sharepoint 2007 and Lotus Notes may have a RSS reader implanted or perhaps Google Reader will be licensed by Microsoft (doubtful - but a delicious thought).

RSS in 3 minutes

Just come back after attending the KM in the Legal Profession conference in London. It was helpful and I’ll be posting some observations over the next few days once I’ve reflected on it some more.

I’ve come back to read my blogs and there is a great three minute guide to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) with pictures and video. At a part of the talk a few people did not fully understand what RSS - so hopefully this might be of use to us all.

Here is the link so enjoy and maybe if you are trying to explain it to your boss it might help.

Just come back after attending the KM in the Legal Profession conference in London. It was helpful and I’ll be posting some observations over the next few days once I’ve reflected on it some more.

I’ve come back to read my blogs and there is a great three minute guide to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) with pictures and video. At a part of the talk a few people did not fully understand what RSS - so hopefully this might be of use to us all.

Here is the link in the title to this blog so enjoy and maybe if you are trying to explain it to your boss it might help.