NewsGator Widget Webcast with National Geographic – 4/2/08

Interested in boosting your online traffic and revenue?  We are hosting a webcast titled “Driving Web Traffic & Monetization With Widgets” on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 2:00PM ET.  Together with National Geographic, we will share widget best practices that will help you achieve greater customer interaction, higher page views, and expanded ad sponsorship opportunities.

With widgets, you can create user-driven experiences by enabling customers to interact with your brand and content from the online location of their choice including start pages and social networks.  By attending the webcast, you will:

    - Discover the differences between banner ads and widgets.

    - Learn the top 5 strategies for creating widgets that deliver positive business results.

    - See sample widgets and actual widget metric data from leading brand and media companies.

If you are interested in joining the webcast, please complete our online registration form.

A Wizard for Content Discovery

Since our consumer products went free in January, some have wondered whether NewsGator is abandoning its consumer reader. Wonder no more. We have added some new features this week, and there are more on the way, all designed to make it easier for our users to find the content they want.

All the new changes are listed on the Home, or Today page (the one you see after you sign into the reader.) One of the new features allows you to customize the Today page to your own liking – even get rid of the list of new changes.

To do that, click the Settings tab, and look under “Today Page Display Settings.” By clicking on the check boxes, you can add or delete any or all of the elements -- Recent Changes, News Headlines, Today’s Videos and the tag cloud, called System Tags -- from your Home page.

Also, give the Content Wizard a try. You reach it by clicking on Browse Feeds. Page One offers feed bundles in popular categories from Celebs to Sports. If you click to the right of Included Feeds, you’ll see a list of what feeds are being offered. Add the feed bundles by clicking Add.

Below the popular categories, we have included new feed bundles for many industries like those we offer our corporate clients. These are more focused feeds that take you deeper into those categories. Make your choices and hit Next.

Page Two gives you the chance to create a local news feed. Simply type in your zip code and NewsGator will aggregate local news for you.

Page Three lets you create search feeds by typing in words, phrases, topics, a particular url or any other term you want to track on the web. This is our Smart Feed function, but more accessible.

Click on Next and then Finish and give NewsGator a little time to reconfigure your Home page. Your changes will show up pretty quickly.

Brian Kellner, NewsGator, Vice President, Products, discusses the new changes in a podcast here.

And don't forget that you can find thousands of feeds by clicking on Find Feeds and browsing our directory by category. There are a lot of good feeds in there.

Any problems, questions or suggestions, click on our forums page and let us know.

Next: New Tagging features.

Critics. Schmitics. Who Needs 'Em?

If you ever needed confirmation about how quickly things are changing in the music industry, you need look no further than an article written by music critic Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times about the Raconteurs’ decision to release its new album, Consolers of the Lonely, to critics as well as the general public on the same day. This follows similar moves by Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead that, in essence, eliminate the critic from the initial discussion of a CD.

This has caused consternation amongst those who write about music professionally. One of the hallmarks of the rock era (at least up until now) is that critics get CDs early so their reviews can appear the day of release. Some writers fear that this will blow up in the bands’ faces and surrender a valuable source of marketing for releases.

What a load. And I say this as someone who wrote professionally about music for a quarter century. It was hard to imagine that our readers took us critics seriously even ten years ago; to imagine they do so today is almost laughable. We find out about new music now through friends, blogs, B2B networks, ripped CDs, mp3s, MySpace and Facebook. When you buy a CD at Amazon.com, an algorhythm plays critic, offering other, similar titles to the one you just added to your virtual shopping cart.

Today, with the end of the blockbuster era, where new releases would sell millions of copies during its first week of release amidst a blitz of hype from advertising and reviews, it seems that musicians are no longer dependent on that first week’s sales – and marketing hype.

I always disliked the old approach. Faced with reviewing an album in two days, you listen, hoping to find something to write about, any hook to hang a review on. Quite often, that first review doesn’t really express how you feel about an album once you have lived with it for a couple of weeks and let the songs come to you on their own terms, not a deadline.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for good criticism and considered commentary. But a review should be a beginning point for a discussion, not the end of the subject. Wouldn’t you rather read a review after you have listened to an album and formed an opinion rather than read it to find out if your favorite critic liked it or not? Powers appreciates this, too, realizing how many times she has deemed an album a reject before she really had the chance to live with it.

Andrew Sarris, a New York film reviewer who wrote many years for the Village Voice and now for the New York Observer, always asked his readers to read his reviews after you saw the picture, not before. That way, the reader gets the most out of what the reviewer is trying to say.

In the Web 2.0 world, we are all critics, and we will be better for it.

Newspaper Blogs Make Journalists More Human

I posted last week about the squawk put up by Mark Cuban because The New York Times has its reporters doing blogs. Call them anything but blogs, Cuban warns the paper, or you risk cheapening your brand.

But I often find the weblogs written by Times writers to be the best part of the paper, at least in its online version, which is now the only version I know. Today Bob Harris, for instance, in the Paper Cuts blog, which, we are informed on the page, is “about books and other forms of printed matter, written by the editors of The Book Review,” Harris writes about the seven deadly words of book reviewing: poignant, compelling, intriguing, eschew, craft, muse and lyrical.

I write occasional book reviews, so I went to my most recent to see how many of the deadly words were included. I got lucky; "unique" was the only one of the seven I used – this time.

Reporter blogs offer me, a former journalist, something beyond the day-to-day monotony of writing news. They help explain why reporters do things they way they do. A really good example is Dot Earth, a blog about climate change written by Times science reporter Andrew Revkin. He describes the difficulties that media face in covering big-picture stories like global warming.

To make his point, he discusses how reporters cover science research, and how easy it is to get it wrong. “Frogs entered the climate discourse in 2006, after a paper published in Nature and widely reported in the media (Including a story by me) concluded that global warming was a ‘key factor’ in such amphibian declines,” he writes.

Trouble is, it wasn’t true. “Now, it turns out that the mix of forces that caused these colorful residents of cloud forests to vanish from misty slopes remains contentious even though they have become an icon in discussions of extinction dangers from rapid climate change.”

Revkin leaves open a huge question mark: "What’s a journalist (or citizen) to do? The more definitive a statement, the more effort should go into testing its basis. Somehow, we need to figure out a better way to deal with complexity and uncertainty. That goes for scientists, journal publishers, and definitely journalists and readers.”

Even a cynic like Cuban should be able to see the merit in posing questions and prompting discussions like this.

Can Reporters and Journalists Be Bloggers, Too?

Leave it to Mark Cuban to start an argument over weblogs. The feisty owner of the Dallas Mavericks recently decided not to allow bloggers in the Mav’s locker room after games, and in a recent post on his Blog Maverick he chastises The New York Times for jumping on the blogging bandwagon. “Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under five minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business,” he writes.

Cuban says that, to most readers, the idea of blogging means something not vetted, edited or sourced, and therefore, questionable and perhaps unreliable. So calling reporters bloggers cheapens them. Newspaper blogging should be called “real-time reporting,” or almost anything except blogs.

It’s an interesting thought. Saul Hansell, who writes a weblog for The New York Times, not surprisingly disagreed with Cuban’s assessment. He says nomenclature isn’t that important. “First of all, blogs are part of a conversation. We link liberally to others, even our direct competitors. Readers comment. And so do sources and participants,” Hansell writes.

He makes a good point. As a longtime reader of the Times, I look forward to many of their blogs (especially the ones by Dick Cavett and Errol Morris) for their opinions, background and other stuff that doesn’t work in news stories. Reporter blogs can add elements that don’t fit in the traditional sense of news journalism, and are able to update stories quickly – in real time.

Cuban and Hansell aren’t the only ones thinking about what blogs really are. Mark Glaser, whose Mediashift weblog comments on journalism, writes that the distinction between bloggers and journalists is becoming more blurred all the time. But he doesn't see that as a bad thing, and he offers a quote from Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtopost.com, that sums things up pretty well. “I think the argument about bloggers vs. journalists has been over for years. We’ve all co-existed just fine for a while now, and the truth is, the distinction is less relevant every day. There are thousands of journalists who now blog, and there are lots of bloggers who are trained journalists.”

Free RSS Readers, the Future of the Twittersphere and the River of News

Since NewsGator made the announcement in January that its consumer products would henceforth become free, followed by news that another paid reader, NewsFire, would follow suit, there has been no lack of people in the blogosphere trying to see beneath the surface of the moves. NewsGator explained its reasons pretty clearly when we made the switch, but it doesn’t stop people from speculating.

The Graphic Man, for instance, suggests that the readers went free because of the presence (or fear) of Google Reader. I’m more partial to Austin Heller, who argues that Google didn’t have much to do with our decision, which is what we said in the first place.

Meanwhile, Steve Gillmor over at eWeek opines about how Twitter seems poised to become a part in the new world of Enterprise RSS. And RSS pioneer Dave Winer posted another argument for why newspapers should be offering their online readers his River of News concept, which seems to make perfect sense to this longtime news reader.

 

Learn More About Social Sites With This Podcast

Many of our users only know NewsGator for its many RSS feed readers, desktop and web-based, for Windows, Macintosh, Inbox and Mobile clients. But RSS has become an important tool in helping businesses and companies better leverage their workers by encouraging collaboration and building communities so everybody gets the information they need to better do their jobs.

NewsGator’s Social Sites 2.0, which works with Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007, does all those things and more. Brian Kellner, NewsGator Vice President, Products, talks about why companies are moving to social software and how it increases a company’s chance to be more competitive and productive, in a podcast.

14 More Reasons to Use FeedDemon

Hey, I like to brag about our products as much as anybody else out there. But I like it even better when our users do our bragging for us. Somebody at the techmalaya.com website – he or she isn’t named – switched feed readers to FeedDemon for Windows, and instead of reviewing the product comes up with 14 terrific reasons you should use FeedDemon as your feed reader.

I can’t argue with any of those points. And if you have Windows and you haven't tried FeedDemon, it is a free download at the NewsGator website.

Beatles Come Together on iTunes -- Or Do They?

Techcrunch is reporting that the Beatles entire catalog will soon become available for download on iTunes, which means that the Fab Four’s music will be widely available in a digital format for the first time.

But C/Net News is reporting that Michael Jackson’s company, Sony ATV Music Publishing, which owns much of the catalog and would share in the profits, is denying that the Fabs made a deal with Steve Jobs. And Reuters reports that Apple Inc., which oversees the Beatles’ business affairs, calls the stories “unsubstantiated speculation.” An Apple spokesman is quoted, "This is not news nor is it a scoop.”

So who’s right? At this point, we just don’t know. News like this outlines one of the problems with getting your information on the Web, and getting it quickly. With news sites and bloggers trying to be first to break news, there is a lot of unvetted information out there. The general rule of reporting is that you need two sources to print something (that’s the role that Mark Felt as Deep Throat played for Bernstein and Woodward during their Watergate reporting.) Today, with many bloggers and some journalists unaware of the need to substantiate all source material, information from one source has become more prevalent, and much of that content then becomes suspect and/or just plain wrong. And it moves through the Internet at lightning speed.

What’s the real story here? Will you soon be able to purchase “Strawberry Fields Forever as an MP3? We’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, be careful what you read.

Using Smart Search to Find Wild Animals and Other Creatures

Anyone who uses an RSS reader knows that it is a great, time-saving way to keep up with news and weblogs and other Internet sources. One of the things that many users don’t know about RSS readers is that they are excellent tools for researching specific topics. If you are interested in a particular subject, your RSS reader can be put to use ferreting out information from multiple sources.

Blogger B.L. Ochman interviewed Doc Searls, senior editor at Linux Journal, about how internet pioneer Searls keeps up with the enormous amount of information out there. Searls explains that he tracks keywords rather than individual blogs, news sites or feeds, because, as he puts it, “I’m more interested in subjects than sources.”

If you find yourself in the same situation, consider using NewsGator’s Smart Feed functionality to study subjects rather than individual news or weblogs. You can find it by clicking on Add Feeds from the home page and then Smart Feeds. What it allows you to do is choose a keyword or words for which to search.

If you work at a company with a name as unique as “Newsgator,” Smart Search allows you to monitor the web for news stories, bloggers (both those who brag about our products and those who complain about them) and any other place our name shows up on the Internet. If you work for Smith and Company, it won’t help as much.

One of my personal interests is how predators and other wildlife interact with humans. I started by using Smart Feed keywords like “wolves,” “grizzlies” and “coyotes.” This brought back a few stories about the animals, but since it only searches for terms and not context, I got more high-school sports results (“Grizzlies Maul Hapless Ducks, 17-3”) than information I was actually looking for. I kept trying different combinations before finally coming up with one that worked. “Nuisance wildlife” brings me a nice complement of stories about municipalities, states, the federal government and their interactions and decisions regarding predators and critters.

If you haven’t tried Smart Search and you’re studying something, make sure and give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you find.