Here is a recap of my first experience using RocketPost - a new full featured blog posting tool.

The Setup Wizard asks you to name the blog as you set it up. Why
doesn't it just retrieve the name when you give it the blog host
address and account info?

After asking you for the name of the blog, then it asks whether
you have a blog on the Internet. BlogHarbor is a choice but Blogware is
not. So for Blogware users who are not BlogHarbor customers, it is
confusing when it asks for a BlogHarbor user name and password which is
actually the Blogware user name and password.

It retrieved the entire list of all my Blogware blogs but then
only allowed me to choose one from the list to set up. I have a ton of Blogware blogs
that I maintain and just want to be able to set up all of them at once.

I chose my
internal company blog (the first one in the list) even though I had
entered Mohr Blog (my personal blog) at the first prompt, just to see
what would happen.

It asked me if I wanted to retrieve old posts so I told it to retrieve my last five posts. No posts were retrieved.

I tried the “Set up blogs” option from the Tools menu and
changed the name of the blog in RocketPost to match the name of the blog on Blogware. Still
not able to retrieve posts.

I set up my internal company blog. Still not able to retrieve posts for that either.

RocketPost has a far more robust editor than any other blogging client I have used.

1. It counts words as you type.
2. It allows you to attach a date and timme to your post so you can
   post to the past or the future. With BlogJet I have to post as a draft
   and then go into the Blogware interface to adjust the date before
   publishing.
3. It has a strikeout formatting button - useful for corrections
4. It allows you to insert Web Service tags such as Google or Google Images

5. blogblog

   Glen Mohr

   The
   photo editor seems great but we'll see what it looks like when it
   posts. I set the picture here with as left justified and gave it
   margins of 10. For some reason the word “blog” was added on either side
   of the picture. Then I edited the picture and set the margins to zero.
   The words “blogblog” then moved to the top of the picture. Not sure
   where they came from. But just being able to edit a photo on the fly is
   fantastic.

6. Another nice feature is the “continue reading break” except I'm not
   sure where the text goes that you type after the break. I would expect
   it to put everything above the break into the excerpt field and the
   full post into the body field.

Editor is very easy to use. I added a drop cap to this paragraph.

Here is a left pull quote that I did with one paste and click:Just being able to edit a photo on the fly is fantastic

I'm not sure how the spell check works becuase I wasn't able to get it to find any of my misspellings.

I'm going to try a file attachment as well becuase I've always had
trouble getting attachments and photos to come through to Blogware when
posting with BlogJet. glenmohr.JPG (4 Kb)
Ok

, that's a problem. When I insert a file attachment and then hit
return to go to the next line and continue typing, for some reason the
first couple characters of what I type following the file attachment
are added to the link to the file attachment - see “Ok” above.

I'm going to try the file attachment again: glenmohr.JPG (4 KB)

This time I hit two line breaks after the attachment link and that seemed to work.

Now I'll post.

As you can see, neither the photo nor the attached file came through.

Everything below the “continue reading” break did not make it onto the blog. I'm not sure where it went so I took out the break.

I just went back into the RocketPost editor, to add this.You can
easily tell if a post in the editor has been published becuase the
permalink shows up.

The feature that immediately caught my attention with RocketPost is
the abilty to post to multiple blogs at the same time. I haven't seen
this in any other blogging client and would be very useful. I tried to post this article to my internal company
blog and my personal blog at the same time but could not find any menu
choice to do that.

When I checked the RocketPost window that displays all my blogs, I
discovered that the old posts, only three instead of the five I had
requested, had been retrieved. Perhaps it just took a while. No option
there either to post to multiple blogs simultaneously.

The online help told me to add the URL for my blog to the images
settings to ensure that pictures get uploaded. When I went to do this,
I discovered it was already set correctly, so no help there.

I also can't find an option to switch blogs while I am editing a
post. I frequently start writing a post and realize I'm set to publish
to the wrong blog. With BlogJet I can just go to “manage blogs” and
change blogs without haveing to start over.

I called up an old post copied the text, started a new post for a different blog and pasted in the contents. Then I modified it and tried to post. RocketPost did not like this. It would not post and kept giving me an “internal error” message. Also it started using about 96% of my CPU's capacity until I shut it down.

So, RocketPost has a lot of nice features but is not yet working right for Blogware.

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This wonderful cartoon by Hugh Macleod is also available as a t-shirt (currently sold out).

To see more of Macleod's work, see gapingvoid.

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ATA Cycle is a full-service bike shop, with a first class selection of
bikes, parts, and accessories from kid's bikes to top-of-the-line racing
frames and everything in between.

Their website, atabike.com,
provided customers with a typical brochure of ATA's services and
products, with a simple banner and contact information at the top of
each page.

There were some attempts to further engage cycling enthusiasts through the Racing-Scene and Cycling News
sections; however it was obvious that these resources were being
underutilized. (The last team listed on the Racing-Scene page was from
2003).

Hussam, ATA's owner, knew that his growing, passionate, and
loyal clientele needed a website where they could find out more than
the basic information about the store, location, hours, etc. but felt
overwhelmed by the amount of work required. So, The Otter Group was
brought in to design strategies for a weblog/website to support this
locally and globally dispersed cycling community.

We began the design process by asking questions:

- What are your goals for the blog?

- What elements of the existing website are needed on the blog?

- Which sections of the blog will be updated daily? weekly? monthly? yearly?

- How do you want customers to find you on the web? what keywords, search terms, etc. do you want associated with your business?

Then, we developed a plan for the new ATA blog, which morphed itself into a hybrid blog/site, ATAbikeblog.com:

blog

website

Features:

- Header banner with contact and location information, logo, site navigation, RSS feed

- Left column with Best of Boston logos, weblog categories, “Recent Articles” from weblog, Login

- Right column with Search tool, customizable RSS radar headlines from selected news feeds

- auto-generated photo gallery: “What's New In Our Store”

- Footer with contact information

- Dynamic center column with display for webpages, article posts, images, etc.

New features:

- Weblog with these features

- Search tool

- Subscribe via RSS feed or email

- RSS news components

- Auto-generated “What's New In Our Store” photo gallery

- easily updated web pages and article posts (no need to install HTML editing software)

Benefits to moving to blog format:

- Create new and edit existing content: web pages, article posts, photo albums

- Content is tagged, indexed, and searchable by all search engines

- Built-in full-text search tool

- Each article post has its own unique URL

- Both article posts and web pages fully support HTML

- Article posts can be easily organized into categories, assign keywords, dis/allow comments, trackbacks

- Readers can subscribe to content via RSS

- Easy to upload and manage folders of photos and files

- Moblogging feature allows administrators the option to post to blog via email

- Easily secure categories or components for internal use

By combining content on the old website with new content on the
blog, ATA's new blog/site now functions in both capacities without
sacrificing the “look and feel” of a website. Content is organized
simply and is now easily updated and edited using Pingware's
best-in-class web-based software. Both blog and website are managed in
one place.

Thinking about a blog for your business? Contact us and we'll work with you to create a web presence that meets your goals.

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At the Otter Group we feel we have just dipped our toes into the
pool of possibilities in
podcasting for learning. Since March, we’ve been producing the
Negotiating Tip of the Week Podcast with Dr. Josh Weiss, Associate
Director of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard’s Program on
Negotiation, as a way to reach both a general audience and to help
extend learning for participants in an elearning course we offer for a
local client.

“Podcasting for Learning” captures the beginning of our journey using podcasts as a new medium for learning.

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From the International Association of Online Communities:

Our research has shown that on travel distribution Web sites (hotels, airlines, destinations, rental cars etc) the most visited pages or content is always related to special offers.  However, from an end user or travel consumer perspective, manually checking every Web site looking for new deals becomes extremely time consuming.  Email special offer and newsletter subscriptions is an extremely good solution to reach these customers for a travel marketer, however, the growing challenges with email marketing are well documented at this point.  Enter RSS.

 

Subscribing to an RSS feed where you are notified of new special offers or events for a destination, hotel or airline of your selection seems like a perfect solution.  RSS lends itself perfectly to distributing this content in a simple well formatted manner…and on the end users terms!  An example of this being applied can be seen at SmarterTravel.com . 

 

One of E-site Marketing’s first applications of the technology was for a spa resort Web site we developed.  We RSS “enabled” the online store where in addition to room reservations, they sell signature products, spa treatments and gift certificates. 

 

Of particular note, and an attest to BL’s comment on Tuesday about the impact of RSS on Search Engine rankings, after only 1 week the store was ranking number 1 out of 256,000 results for a spa related keyword search.   This type of result would typically take months to achieve, but because of the high priority being given to RSS content the search engines immediately listed and ranked the Web site.   After 3 months the Web site was ranking number one for the highly competitive keyword “spa resorts” out of 11,000,000!

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On BuzzMachine there's an interesting discussion going on about “customer service in reverse”

In the continuing Dell discussion, Steve Rubel answers Steve Baker’s question about how companies should deal with lots of bloggers raising lots of customer service issues:

Steve,
over time I think you’re going to see blog search and Web search tools
integrated into CRM systems. This will give customer service the tools
they need to manage individual issues that bubble on blogs. However,
you are right. PR professionals will increasingly need to not only
serve as an organization’s mouthpiece (one of them at least), but also
its eyes and ears. The best PR pros have done this for years. Blogging
just makes it easier to keep our finger on the public pulse.
This is
how we operate at CooperKatz. We monitor the blogosphere for all of our
clients. If we spot a customer issue, we route it to the right party to
manage. Occasionally, we also reach out ourselves to begin the
dialogue.

Interesting… so imagine if rather
than having to go to companies for service — and waiting on hold and
waiting and waiting… — the companies came to us! What a concept.

Think
of that world-in-reverse: You post a need online, tagged with a
microformat (more on that later), and people find you and bid to solve
your problem or sell you their product, selling you with price and also
with testaments of trust.

That’s not the world in
reverse. That’s the world as it should be: The sellers come to the
customers, not the other way around. The customers becomes the
marketplace. I like that.

Now just
replace customer service issue with learning need. Wouldn’t
it be great if the explanations and solutions and training you needed
came to you when you asked for them?

Just-in-time learning or on-demand learning
is supposed to make this possible but these systems that place
information at the learner’s fingertips have one major drawback. The
people populating the systems with information and
training materials need to know in advance what the learner is
going to need.

Learning and communications departments
have the mandate to provide information to employees as quickly
and efficiently as possible but their processes are inherently
reactive. It takes time to recognize that a learning need exists and
then to recruit the appropriate subject matter expert to develop the
solution and then to deploy the “learning object” or “training module.”
There is a place for this kind of process of course, especially when it
comes to compliance issues. But there are many learning needs that
would be better served by a system that immediately taps into the
knowledge of the entire enterprise and aggregates solutions.

Such
a system, what we call an “emergent learning network” enables anyone
who might be able to help to respond. This is the way it frequently
works in the blogosphere. You publish a question on your blog (or as a
comment on someone else’s) and if it’s interesting enough and turns up
in the aggregator of someone who has an incentive to provide the
information you need or direct you to someone who can, then they will
respond.

Having just finished reading Freakonomics I am thinking about incentives. On places like Experts Exchange the
incentive is monetary but in most of the blogosphere the incentive is
in recognition (which of course can translate into money indirectly)
and this is the way it needs to be in the enterprise.

To be successful an emergent learning network needs—

• to integrate with, complement and extend the sources of information already available
• to integrate
  seamlessly with users’ existing work processes, ideally allowing users
  to adapt the input and output interfaces to suit their own needs
• to incorporate design and management of the network that encourages participation
• what else?

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This
review compares RSS Submit and RSS Feed Submit:

In terms of
generating traffic, what good is an RSS feed if no one can find it,
right? Part
of promoting your feeds and using them to generate traffic is of
course
submitting the feeds to appropriate search engines and directories,
quite a tedious process if you’re doing it by hand, given the
large
number of directories and engines out there.

While the guys
behind RSS Submit have been doing a great job
updating their software, they now have a new competitor, RSS Feed
Submit. Yeah, difficult to differentiate between the two,
given their almost identical names.

Anyway,
both solutions are actually quite simillar, with only small
differences
between them…

a] Both tools are desktop
software

b]
RSS Submit will submit your feeds to 78 engines and
directories, while RSS Feed Submit covers 75. Not much difference
here,
although it seems that RSS Submit might be doing a better job at
keeping their tool updated (I've been using them since April and
already received many updates that made the software easier to use and
added new engines and directories).

c]
Certain search engines and directories require more
information than can be provided through a fully automatical
submission
process. RSS Submit tackles this problem by first asking you to
fill-in
a longer form and then automatically taking you to each of the manual
submission sites, where it already pre-fills the forms and only asks
you to confirm manually. RSS Feed Submit makes this even easier, first
requesting that same information, but then doing all the work
automatically. The only question in my mind is the quality of
submissions and how they compare to eachother.

d]
Ease of use is a strong factor, and RSS Submit takes the
game here by allowing you to submit multiple feeds at the same time,
save them in the management interface and track how many times you
submitted each of them. RSS Feed Submit allows you to do one at a
time.

e]
As far as expanding the basic functionality of the tool,
RSS Feed Submit is the clear winner, as it allows you to add new
search
engines and directories by yourself, even easily tackling those that
would otherwise require a manual submission. A great user interface
for
adding new sites.

f] The final differentiating factor is
the price, with RSS
Submit starting at $44.95 for the Personal Edition, and RSS Feed
Submit
selling for $29.95.

And they both
provide a free trial version…

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A great review of Drupal, SilkBlogs, Manila, Typepad, 21Publish WordPress. by Robin Good.



“Group
and multi-user blogs can be extremely effective instruments of team
aggregation and project management within the enterprise and large
organization, leveraging distributed teams untied from one unique
physical location.”

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From ASTD Learning Circuits

Workers Spending Too Long Searching, Says LearningGuide Survey

Forty
seven percent of workers are spending more than four hours per week
searching for information, according to a recent survey carried out by
LearningGuide, a U.K.-based workplace performance support company.

The
survey asked visitors to the LearningGuide website how much time
workers in their organization spent searching for information per week.
The results showed that people are spending a large amount of their
working time, 32 percent spending four to five hours per week and 15
percent spending over five hours, searching for information.

According
to LearningGuide's Alfred Remmits: “Workers are getting bogged down
with change and information overload, particularly as a result of new
and updated applications, and management is failing to sort it out. Our
survey supports other research studies into working patterns that have
shown workers often spending between half and one working-day per week
finding out how to do things correctly and looking for information.
It's an increasing trend.”

“More
training and bigger helpdesks is unlikely to be the answer. Simply
pouring more of the scarce training budget into how management has
traditionally sorted out knowledge issues, using more courses and
e-learning, is unlikely solve this,” added Remmits. “Workers
are less willing to spend time on training courses when queries about
working procedures or applications emerge. Quicker, immediate answers
are needed. Helpdesks are often overloaded with queries from users who
are increasingly learning 'informally', turning to co-workers for
answers, searching the network and of course clicking on Google.”

Remmits
believes that the informal learning, taking place in the workplace,
needs greater control and involvement from the traditional training
department, so that workers follow their company's procedures
correctly.

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