Share your clippings with ReadBurner

If you haven't already seen it, the good folks at ReadBurner have built an application to show the most frequently shared content across the web. That content could come from Google Reader or Netvibes...

...or starting today, from NewsGator clippings! If you're using clippings from NewsGator Online, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go!, or any of our other applications, you're all set. Nick Bradbury has details of how to make all of this work on his blog.

Give it a try, share with the world, and let us know what you think!

Turning Negatives Into Positives

Metallica is in the news again, this time apologizing for taking down reviews of its work by fans on its website.

Interestingly, Metallica apparently was taking down even "mostly positive reviews," which seems rather silly and, unfortunately, par for the course for this now doddering, once-admired power trio. But the fact remains that most companies and business executives, like Metallica, react unfavorably to reviews, especially ones critical of their own products or services.

We have never felt that way about critical reviews at NewsGator, and according to a post from Joshua Porter at bokardo.com, you probably shouldn't either. Negative reviews don't have to be downers.

Porter explains that many websites won't add reviews because "allowing the public to criticize products on their site would have several negative effects," including loss of sales. But, Porter adds, most negative reviews are genuine and helpful, and they create the opportunity to use them as input. He says that for many companies, "this is a tough pill to swallow, as it's not easy to admit shortcomings."

For those of us who have gotten used to eating crow (like this ex-journalist), that is hardly news. And as Porter points out, by paying heed to complaints and criticism and acting upon them, you'll likely wind up with reviews that are positive.

So the next time you read a tweet that says something like, "NewsGator's API sucks," don't panic. Read the post and act accordingly. It's the positive thing to do.

Eek. I've Got Web 2.0 Syndrome

Like anything else that explodes out of nowhere, social computing is already developing its own neuroses. Well, not really, but sometimes it seems like it is. The Online Journalism Blog came up with seven “complaints as social media addicts adapt to the demands of new technologies and fluctuating social structures.”

Some seem almost real, especially if you work at a company that is all about social media and computing. Comment Guilt is defined as regrets “that they are not commenting more on other people’s blogs,” leaving “feelings of worthlessness and frustration.” And of course there is the RSS Reader Sisyphus Complex, which describes someone who spends an entire morning reading RSS feeds, “only to find there are still 8,978 posts unread.” (Hint: Delete them all.)

But my favorites are Twitterhoeia, the “uncontrollable urge to share most mundane experiences – or, more commonly, lack of experiences – with Twitter followers. Generally involves consumption of food,” and Six Degrees of Separation Syndrome, which is “the delusion that he or she is just one friend removed from anyone else in the world and compulsively adds friends on social networks.”

The authors came up with four more, including Meme Orphanism, in a later post. Los Angeles Times writers add their own, including FriendFeed Phobia, which is pretty self-explanatory, and Obsessive Compulsive Blogging Disorder, which might be why you’re reading about this here.

It’s the End of the Web As We Know It and Other Rumors

Apple Scrapple

In the We’re Finally Glad It’s Over Department, Stephen Jobs announced Monday Apple’s plans to upgrade its popular iPhone. Beginning July 11, the new models will come in 8 and 16 GB at prices of $200 and $300 respectively, and will have GPS, along with some smaller modifications.

It finally put to end rumors that threatened to clog up the Net over the last two months as bloviated bloggers offered their withering speculation of Apple’s plan. If you needed a good argument to stop paying bloggers per post, this would have to be it.

Jittery Twitterers

You can’t help but be somewhat amused at the current downtime problems at Twitter. With Twitter down, nobody can bad-mouth it, so complainers are left with slow, cumbersome technologies like email and blogs to vent their frustrations.

The End of the Web As We Know It

And finally, a group of “Internet activists” are predicting the end of the Internet by the year 2012, to be replaced by a subscription model that will make people pay extra to use non-commercial sites. Other than a reference to an article being written in a future Time magazine, no proof is offered, but they seem genuinely concerned. Watch it while it’s still free.

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

One of the current journalism memes is that there is a great divide between print reporters and old-time newspaper people and bloggers. Often the reporters are portrayed as crotchety old farts with no enthusiasm for the new media.

Don’t tell that to Andrew Malcolm. At age 64, Malcolm has years of experience as an international correspondent at The New York Times and a feature writer at The Los Angeles Times. He has also worked the “other side,” serving as Laura Bush’s press secretary for a time. Mark Glaser has an interview with Malcolm, who is now working at the LATimes to help anchor the paper’s political blog. He is eager to dispel a few notions about journalism and blogging.

Here’s the key sentence, at least for this sometime journalist: “To me … journalism was a place where people who wanted to learn the rest of their lives went to work,” he said. That’s the reason many of us get into journalism in the first place – to learn as much as you can about as many subjects as possible. And doing a weblog is just another extension of that.

Another newspaper political blogger, Ryan Beckwith, at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., says in an interview with Talk Politics that the divide between bloggers and reporters is already lessening. He is already seeing convergence. “Over time, I think papers will learn to be more immediate, more chatty and more transparent, while bloggers will learn to be more rigorously sourced, more fair and objective.”

And to those dire warnings of inevitable newspaper extinction? “Any student of biology can tell you that the dinosaurs didn’t disappear, they evolved. Their descendants are the birds we encounter every day. They are nimble, require fewer resources and can do things that dinosaurs only dreamed about. Oh, and there are millions of them.”

Speaking of political blogs, don’t forget that the Washington Post/Newsweek Campaign Tracker widget, powered by NewsGator, is available here for anyone with a Windows Mobile Phone.

More About Collaborative Filtering

The two current buzzwords in the RSS world are “collaborative” and “filtering,” usually used together. Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb takes a closer look at how two companies, Illumio and NewsGator Online, are approaching collaborative filtering.

Perez finds a lot to like about Illumio and the way it filters feeds and content, but she picks NewsGator as the better product overall because it works on all platforms (Illumio is a Windows-only product) and because of SenseArray and AideRSS, two filtering services with which NewsGator has partnered. It’s worth reading if you’re still trying to understand how and why filtering can be useful for RSS reader users.

Phoning It In: The Presidential Campaign Comes to Your Mobile

If you have a Windows Mobile Phone and you’re following the presidential campaign closely, we have something just for you.

Along with washingtonpost.com and Newsweek magazine, we have created Campaign Tracker to build upon those two publications’ political coverage of the candidates and the election.

Newsweek and the Post are aggregating political content from their many sources using NewsGator’s Editor’s Desk and offering users up-to-the-minute news on any given candidate. There is no website involved, so users can access content without being on the Internet – you can even do it on a plane -- and each post contains the entire article so you don’t have to click through to read something.

It’s really cool, and easy to set up. So what are you waiting for? Go to this page and sign up. Like all our consumer products, it’s free.

Are You Among the Digitally Savvy?

Do you have an iPhone? A DVR? Do you listen to satellite radio? Download music online? Are you a blogger or a reader of weblogs? An online gamer? Do you pay your bills on the Internet?

If you’re involved with any (or all) of those activities, you might be considered, at least by Scarborough Research, part of the hi-tech digital market, or the Digitally Savvy. The company did a study of that market, breaking it down into 18 hi-tech behaviors – if you engaged in eight or more, you are officially Digitally Savvy.

Sarah Perez sums up the 70-page report at ReadWriteWeb.

Austin, Texas, is considered the most Digitally Savvy city, with 12 percent of the population considered DS – that’s almost 80,000 people. Not surprisingly, it found that the DS are generally early adopters of new technology and flush with the cash necessary to buy the latest gadgets. Or that marketers watch this demographic for clues to what might become popular amongst the not-so-financially-fortunate. Perez comes to a different conclusion. “In fact, it seems that the key for mainstream success is to not cater solely to the most digitally savvy of users, after all.”

Does this mean that the iPhone won’t find mass acceptance beyond the DS crowd? Stay tuned for more on that one when the new ones come to market next month.

Learn More About Inbox 3.0 for Outlook

Way back in the deep recesses of history, NewsGator sprang into being with a product that brought RSS into Microsoft's popular Outlook program. Nick Harris, who works on NewsGator's Inbox product for Outlook, talks about the new features in Inbox 3.0 and shares other secrets of the developers' trade in a podcast now available on our website. You can listen to it here.

Sorting It Out with Activity and AideRSS

When it comes to sorting my feeds, I generally am an old-school kind of guy. Since RSS brings me the newest information on websites, I tend to keep my sort order on Newest. Recently, NewsGator added two new ways to sort posts in a feed, so I decided to do a little research and find out more about how they worked.

You might have noticed the changes yourself if you’re using NewsGator Online. If you go to Sort Order at the top right of any list of posts, you’ll see that you can list them not only by Newest and Oldest, but now by Activity and AideRSS PostRank.

What’s the difference? I picked a popular, prolific feed to see how changing the sort order would work. It was easy to choose Boing Boing, “a directory of wonderful things” collected by author Cory Doctorow and a small circle of friends fascinated by the Internet. I have 89 feeds unread.

When I sort by Newest, the first post is, of course, the most recent. It’s about Wesabe, a company whose goal is help people spend money more intelligently, followed by a video of a resort in Disneyland that has sat idle, like a ruin, for several years. Third up is a post that links to author Neil Gaiman’s piece on the Harry Potter copyright lawsuit.

Sorting by Activity lists posts according to their interaction inside NewsGator. When a NewsGator user clips, emails or tags a post, it gives that post more authority and it rises in the mix. This lets me see quickly which posts are grabbing other users’ attention. (This is what we call “attention streams.”) The first Boing Boing post under Activity is one from Tuesday about people who enjoy photoshopped images of pin-ups being squished by elephant trunks. The second looks at books that changed the lives of famous scientists, followed by a post with photos of luxury hotels that were never finished and are rotting in the desert.

This offers a nice contrast to the Newest sort. With 89 posts, I know I’m not going to be interested in all of them, and this puts posts that other people find most interesting in the forefront. And if I am a publisher of a feed, Activity sort offers instant feedback on which posts are getting the most attention (and which ones aren’t) – within NewsGator. If I'm in a hurry and want to see only posts other people like, this is a good choice.

When I switch to AideRSS PostRank, I get a third way to sort my feeds. NewsGator recently partnered with AideRSS, which scores, filters and tracks the performance of any RSS feed across the Web. According to this sort option, the top posts include a story of a man detained for taking photos in an English town’s pedestrian area, a 2001 profile of former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers and one about how gun owners are happier than the rest of us.

So Activity sort judges how users within NewsGator are ranking posts, and AideRSS PageRank shows how users on the Web interact with content. The AideRSS PageRank only ranks the top 1000 feeds within the NewsGator system, so you won’t see activity on every feed.
For more information about attention streams, see this post by NewsGator’s Jeff Nolan, while Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb explains AideRSS in more detail.