Doug Cornelius .com

On February 17, 2009, Securities Docket is sponsoring a webcast that will look at the numerous ways that securities and compliance counsel and professionals can now use web 2.0 to promote, market, and network themselves, their practices and their firms as never before.

Please join Bruce Carton, Editor of Securities Docket, and me for a webcast that will discuss the best new tools and strategies available to securities and compliance counsel and professionals, including:

• RSS;
• Social Media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook;
• Blogs;
• and much more.

To attend this webcast scheduled for February 17, at 2 pm Eastern, please sign up on the Securities Docket website.

The Enterprise RSS Day of Action is April 24.

I consider RSS to be the glue that holds together Web 2.0 and especially Enterprise 2.0. Blogs and wikis are great tools. But they are even more powerful when they are pushing content out through RSS feeds. It is much more efficient to have relevant content pushed to you, rather than you having to seek it out.

I previously posted on knowledge as an artifact and a flow. RSS is the flow. Enterprise RSS is the flow for the enterprise.

Of the 2.0 technologies, RSS is the least recognized. Most people recognize blogs, wikis and social networking sites. Tagging like del.icio.us tends to fall down on the list. But most studies I have read put RSS way down at the bottom for recognition and use. Enterprise RSS falls even father down the list.

Enterprise RSS is the key tool that would turn a collection of blogs and wikis into communication tools. To much internal communication happens by email. As a result, your email inbox becomes an information warehouse. That email does no good to the person who starts at the firm the next day. The knowledge is lost to that person.

Lots of internal communication could be better handled by using a blog, wiki or similar tool to host the information. As new information is added, the subscribers get the notification of the change and the content. The big plus is that the content is on a platform that should be easily indexed and retrievable by a search engine.

To really make this work well, you need to force subscriptions on people. That is the keystone to Enterprise RSS.

To learn more about Enterprise RSS:

• Listen to this great podcast with James Dellow of Chieftech and Matt Moore of Engineers without Fears: podcast – james dellow – enterprise rss action day
• Enterprise Day of Action Wiki
• Attensa an Enterprise RSS vendor
• NewsGator an Enterprise RSS vendor

I am recombining the feeds from several sites into one more comprehensive stream. Anyone who is interested can see a large swath of what I am writing about, what I am doing and what I am thinking about.

Now translate this to a use inside the enterprise. It is possible to pull disparate communication and authorship from a particular person and display that information in one place inside the enterprise. You can combine someone’s internal blog, external blog, internal postings, internal tagging, external tagging and other sources and create a dynamic profile of that person. If you then store that “story” as it grows, you are creating a searchable repository of experience, expertise and interest for that person.

Currently, my friendfeed and lifestream are both pulling together information I add from:

• KM Space
• Real Estate Space
• Twitter for dougcornelius
• Shared Items from Doug’s Google Reader
• Del.icio.us bookmarks for Doug Cornelius

Of course, like any good “2.0″ tool, my friendfeed and lifestream each have a separate RSS feed that you can subscribe to or easily publish.

Right behind wikis in the toolbox for law firm knowledge management 2.0 is the use of RSS feeds. Without RSS, a wiki is a much less powerful tool.

RSS is simply a notification of a change or new content on website. The notification can be sent by email. Even better is through feedreader. Google Reader, Bloglines, Attensa, and Newsgator are examples. (Most of you reading this are getting it through a feedreader. There are few getting it by email and some keep coming back to the page to read the content.)

RSS disaggregates the content from its source. You do not need to go back to the website to find the change or discover the new content. The content is pushed to the subscribers of the RSS feed for the website. Wikis publish the changes to a wiki page or the addition of another wiki page to the subscribers of the wiki. Blogs push out new blog post with RSS.

The power of RSS is to showing the flow of information rather than just seeing static content. RSS turns a webpage from a repository of information into a broadcaster of information.

The most popular RSS Feedreader in October of 2007 was Google Reader in October of 2007. It had the most feeds being added to it during that month. It had 37.4% of all feeds added to a feed reader, according to AddThis.com.

Google keeps its crown for another month, continuing to grow its share. This growth looks to be due mostly to losses by Bloglines and NewsGator. Based on the year to date trend, Google continues to grow its market share.

In my feed from SharePointPedia, I came across a post from Bill Gates on how he uses Office 2007 and SharePoint. Yes, it is a pretty fluffy post about how wonderful Office 2007 is to use.

Mr. Gates points out the ability to use SharePoint as an expertise locater. He also talks about creating internal websites, collaboration and discussions in SharePoint, but never uses the terms “blog” or “wiki” or “RSS.” I find it interesting that he is playing up the social networking features of SharePoint.

In a related note, Mr. Gates talks about using email and outlook as his primary communications tool. Again, he leaves out blogs, wikis and RSS.

I recently switched from using Bloglines as my feedreader to using Google Reader. I liked the ability to publish shared items on Facebook. As the number of my feeds has exploded past 150, it has gotten harder to manage the feeds. I found this especially true when I was on “vacation” at my in-laws in Missouri two weeks ago. After a few days off-line, I had several hundred unread items.

Jack Vinson got me thinking about organizing feeds by priority instead of content. I really liked being able to view my feeds by subject, but also wanted to make sure I saw very important items very quickly.

I very pleased to find that Google Reader allows you to organize your feed BOTH ways. Feeds can be in multiple organizational folders.

As you can see from this screenshot of my feed list, I have given my feeds a ranking of 1, 2, 3, or 4. Each feed is placed into one of these ranking folders and one of the subject matter folders.

I used numbers because the folder list is alphabetical. My first attempt was using “high” and “low” but they got buried in the folder list.

I can focus on the “1″ feeds when I am busy, dismiss the “4″ feeds when I fell overwhelmed by the number of unread items and focus on a particular subject when I am in the mood.

Its great when software allows you to have it both ways.

I noticed this morning that Facebook now has an RSS feed for your friend’s status. I am not sure if that has been there for a while or whether it is a new feature. (I found it by clicking on the “see all” link on the Status Update section of the opening page.)

It is great to see the Facebook communication platform opening up for use in other applications.

One of the questions I always have with a blog is whether anyone is reading it.

As I posted earlier [Why Blog? My Reasons] I use this blog as a personal knowledge management tool. I put links to articles that I want to refer to later, along with my reaction to the article. I post to gather my thoughts on a subject. I find this blog to be a great technology tool to help me gather, organize and search my information and my thoughts.

Shortly after I started the blog, I noticed that people were reading it. Then curiosity got the better of me and I started tracking site visits. As a devoted fan of RSS, I realized that tracking site visits did not capture those who were reading posts through a feedreader.

Several weeks ago Google purchased the FeedBurner. The first sign of the companies integrating came out: FeedBurner Integration for Blogspot Blogs. Since this blog is based on Blogger, I made the switch to see if I could could get a better sense of the number of subscribers. The changed resulted in a tenfold increase of the number of subscribers.

I did not realize there was so many of you. Thanks for reading.

Forrester Research and NewsGator are putting on a webinar: Increasing SharePoint Value with RSS: “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is getting lots of buzz because it’s a one-stop portal, collaboration, content management, search and business process environment. To get the most of SharePoint team sites, you need to make the experience as rich as possible for employees and ensure that content is accessible when they are away from the portal. “

Using the RSS feeds and an enterprise based RSS reader can turn SharePoint from a repository of information into a much more powerful communications tool. SharePoint produces RSS feeds for its blogs and wikis (no surprise). It also has RSS feeds for searches, changes to lists and many other objects in the SharePoint platform.