Two social media types

My brief and unscientific survey of all things pertaining to functioning social media sites excluded subscription AOL, music sites, photo sites, and video sites. Otherwise, they are all listed here on my Syndication Feed Lab page.

It's just a list. Don't bother making sense of it all. It is an incomplete list.

My first focus of interest was how these sites inter-operate and connect though feeds, APIs, and widgets, in actual practice. I'm almost positive I've learned something over the last few weeks, but it is a busy marketplace and things keep shifting as I watch. You'd think these folks would take a vacation now and then.

This more technical interest of mine was in service of the Internet Marketing gods, and I discovered two types of social media sites.

1. Social media sites that are inhabited, and
2. Social media sites that are uninhabited.

It is a fairly obvious distinction once one browses for groups, friends, followers, fans, or co-conspirators. The opportunity to make new friends is there, or it is not. Most of these sites provide the opportunity to invite my existing friends to the site, and even strongly encourage it. The philosophy seems to be, "If I can't spam my friends, who can I spam?"

But, what's the point of that? I already know my friends and have established reliable means of communicating with them, and I'm not talking about Facebook. Not that I would ever spam my friends beyond their level of tolerance anyway.

Syndication + social media = opportunity. It is the opportunity to smooze, make new friends, and distribute content to a wider audience. The smoozing and making friends part is critical to the success of the operation.

On the other hand IROTWS (I Read On The Web Somewhere) an offer to "Build a network of trusted friends for you!"

How the heck does that work? "Trusted friends by proxy" does not seem to compute.

Enabling Google Gmail Web Clips

I don't have much of an opinion about Google's Gmail Web Clips, so don't consider this to be a recommendation. I am very curious about what Google is up to in general, and Web Clips drew my attention because it revolves around syndicated feeds, and I have just started to look into it. So far it looks heavily slanted toward the display of paid advertising, but I still need to mess with it some more before trashing it.

Enabling Web Clips is easy and reversible. There is a Web Clips tab on the Gmail Settings screen.  It  is also possible to add an RSS feed to the list, but that part hasn't been so easy yet.

And the winner is . . . Koornk

It was three weeks ago today that I began my syndication experiment with this blog, or to spam the universe through an unconscionable misuse of RSS feeds, as some might say. The main purpose of the test was to see through experience how RSS feed syndication worked in practice, using only free online services. A second purpose was to find and reach new audiences that might be interested in my writing. Third in order of discussion was the possibility of self-created back-links to this blog to increase traffic and boost PageRank.

An important issue was the question of indexing the various blogs, quasi-blogs, and micro blogs by Google. The points of interest were: (1) If, (2) When, and (3) What effect?

Today I found out the answer in a small way. My Koornk blog  was the first of my testbeds to have a feed back-link indexed by Google, as shown in this screenshot. The Google search result for Koornk linked to the individual post, and not to the main blog page.  Due to the quirkiness of the system I cobbled together, the back-link is not to this microenterprise blog, it is to an intermediary transmission stage of mine located on Status.net.  Don't ask why.  It's complicated.

Microblogging standards

In the ancient and arcane world of Usenet, cross-posting was considered by many to be a great sin, and it was usually discouraged.  It was discouraged because it was annoying.  Reading a cross-post was like reading a message from somebody who wasn't really there. Cross-posters generally weren't available for conversation. Cross-posters were not interested in conversation, they were interested in shoveling their message far and wide. Some were so unkind as to call out cross-posters as being "spammers."

The idea of microblogging standards involve the character length limit for microblog posts, and essentially, the ability of various services and platforms to cross-post. These days, cross-posting with blogs is not only encouraged, it is practically a fad.  I have pursued blog syndication myself with some gusto.

A few of the main players in the world of microblogging interoperability standards are found at: ostatus.org, and microblog. See Wikipedia also.

This type of interoperability, or cross-posting as I call it, is something that people donate large sums of money to further. In 2009 the Knight Foundation gave money to design a system that allows anyone, anywhere to easily create a Drupal online news site whose content can be published on Facebook in order to reach an extended social network. - from drupal.org

Cheapo feed syndication blues

Playing with feed syndication services that meet my specifications has its challenges. My criteria are simple. These requirements for feed syndication service are:

1. They must be totally free.
2. They must be easy to understand and use.
3. They must work at least some of the time.

In point of fact, it's a lot like playing with Leggos where each piece is made by a different factory to slightly different specification. Sometimes the quality control is not six-sigma.

So it goes in cheapo land.

Syndication Notebook entry - Superfeedr.com

Superfeedr.com has been in existence for about a year or so, going by the date of its domain name registration, and I just found out about it today.  At first glance, Superfeedr looks like an answer to my prayer, but it is a bit more technical than most of the services I've looked at recently.  It will take me some time to get with the program, I'm sure, due to the level of technical detail that seems to be involved.  I'm not the swiftest learner on the block, either.

PubSubHubbub stands for PUBlisher-SUBscriber HUB, or PubSubHub. The 'Hubbub' is cute, though.

Part of the specification documentation is hosted on Google Code - here. The reference hub is located on the Google Apps Engine.

This will take me some time to figure out. Best of all, it involves a whole new thing, XMPP, of which I know nothing except XMPP is commonly called 'Jabber."

XMPP.org software libraries

Syndication: Blog RSS to Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us, or delicious.com as Yahoo! calls it, is a social bookmarking site, and the Microenterprise blog RSS feed is now channeled to Bebo like this:

Blogger —> Feedburner —> Twitterfeed —> Status.net —> Ping.fm —> Delicious.com

As you can see, the form of the entry is unacceptable. "Tom Fox (tomwfox)'s status on Sunday" is much less than useful.  It is counter-useful.  Plus, Delicious.com inserts rel="nofollow" in to the anchor tags.

This one is for the dustbin.  Plonk.

Delicious.com's FAQ include the following:

How can I promote my website or advertise on Delicious?

Bookmarking websites in order to promote or advertise them is considered spamming, and that's against our Terms of Service. If you'd like to advertise on Delicious, you can use Yahoo! Search Marketing to be in Sponsored Search results within Delicious.

For what it's worth, the Delicious TOS does not actually say that.

RSS to Ping.fm jury rigged

I'm thinking since Ping.fm was spawned in the micro-blogging Twitter World, and feeds from big-blogs introduce complexity and a level of pesky details previously not encountered by Ping.fm.  Parsing a single XML file type, the Twitter type, is not a big deal, but building a general purpose XML parser capable of dealing with a wide variety of RSS types is a big deal.  Yet, it can be done.  It has already been done by others, and I'm confident Ping.fm will get it right soon.  If not, they should quit.

Anyway, I've re-wired my experimental RSS distribution circuit to avoid any big-blog RSS inputs directly connected to Ping.fm.

This Blogger blog -> Feedburner -> Twitterfeed -> Status.net -> Ping.fm.

In this distribution scheme, Twitterfeed does the parsing of the big-blog RSS and shoves it to Stastus.net which generated the RSS feed that is input now (today - right now) into Ping.fm.

This is not an ideal arrangement, but it might work.  This is the eleventh time I've re-drawn or revised my Blog syndication distribution map. If you look at it tomorrow, it will have probably been changed again.

This post will be my first test of the new channel.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

How well does Ping.fm parse Wordpress blog feeds?

How well does Ping.fm parse Wordpress blog feeds?  It depends on how you look at it, and how long you look at it.  With a statistically insignificant number of samples . . . a grand total of two . . . I'll give the optimistic view of Ping.fm's performance, and give it the benefit of the doubt by saying it got exactly half right. The other half, not so good.

Background:

"The WordPress->Feedburner->Ping.fm did not work any better than the Blogger->Feedburner->Ping.fm did. Maybe the problem is with Feedburner. I just switched to the native WordPress feed of this blog to Ping.fm, just to see what happens next." 

- The Learning Curve - RSS to Ping.fm - Again

The first and most encouraging sample was Ping.fm-feed version of this Wordpress post: Another Ping.fm test

Ping.fm correctly came up with this as its shortened link: http://ping.fm/8m1Jo

The second less than inspiring example is Ping.fm's rendition of #smartmarket test

For this one, Ping.fm came up with a shortened link, http://ping.fm/6D8ie, that incorrectly re-directed to the blog post's comment feed:

feed://tomwfox.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/smartmarket-test/feed/

Ping.fm has a serious problem parsing Feedburner blog feeds and Wordpress blog feeds.  Is it fair of me to think that Ping.fm may have problems with blog feeds in general?

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Snooping Yahoo - RSS syndication feeds and more

Both Yahoo! Pulse and Yahoo! Meme easily allow the importation of external RSS feeds, and display the content, such as a blog post, in a Twitter-like truncated feed, with a shortened link. It is usually displayed as the blog post title, with the shortened link back to the original, and possibly a bit more.

One unexpected find was the fact that Yahoo! Meme posts are automatically sent to Yahoo! Pulse.  So, the same RSS feed sent to both results in duplicate postings, or near duplicate postings, on Yahoo! Pulse.  One comes from the direct RSS feed to Yahoo! Pulse and the other comes from the same feed echoing off of Yahoo! Meme.  Therefore, I eliminate the feed to Yahoo! Pulse, and no harm done.  It gets there anyway.

My personalized Yahoo! Pulse page is not accessible to the general public, and I have no idea if or how it may be visible to another Yahoo! member, or friend, or distant cousin.  In other words, Yahoo! Pulse seems fairly useless to me.

Yahoo! Meme, on the other hand, is nice by providing a unique URL for my page there, which I named Ephemerality (http://meme.yahoo.com/ephemerality/) .

This is the same name I used on Tumblr.com.

Another unrelated discovery was my Yahoo! blog with the unique URL:

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_WNBEBRWQHDKYV2ILHJOCNYKDH4/blog

It's nice to have a unique URL for my totally free Yahoo! blog space, but that URL is ridiculous.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Syndication - RSS to Twitter, et al. flummox

Automated syndication of RSS feeds to social media platforms is in a state of transition and growth.  Add in the fact that several social media sites are in the midst of transitioning user authentication protocols. These things are a little glitchy, at the moment. As a guy doing things on the cheap (meaning free), I can't really complain all that much.  Except possibly about the fact that I'm interested in testing the actual marketing usefulness of these free services in the social media world, and not so much interested in testing if they work right and issuing ticked-off public bug reports..  Nevertheless, that's the way it is. A lot of it just doesn't work right for now.

First — As of this first week of August, 2010, Ping.com allows one RSS feed to directly connect as an input for its services.  Ping.com is new to this.  The other more commonly accepted method for connecting a RSS feed to Ping.com is through Twitterfeed.com.  Twitterfeed.com is the original Twitterizing service.  Ping.com has been a social media distribution service. I opted for the new untested option and used a Feedburner RSS feed for this Mircoenterprise blog in Ping.com.

Second — Twitterizing services shorten links due to the 140 character limit on Twitter. When Ping.com shortens the link to the original Microenterprise blog, it has a difficult time locating the correct link to shorten in the Blogger - Feedburner RSS feed.  Ping.com only gets it right about half the time, and this is annoying.

Third — So, when I get the bright idea to switch the circuit, and use Twitterfeed.com as an input to Ping.com, like everyone else does, and not have a direct connection between Ping.com and Feedburner, it doesn't work. I don't know why it doesn't work, but every time I try, the setup fails.

Note: As of August 6, 2010 afternoon, this notice appears on the Twitterfeed.com signup page for Ping.com:

"Please note that Ping.fm have temporarily suspended the use of twitterfeed with their service. Until they re-instate this functionality, we are unfortunately unable to post to Ping.fm."

Fourth — Then I say to hell with Ping.com, and I start moving all the social media connections already established there and take them over to HelloTxt.com.  HelloTxt.com is working perfectly, as far as I can tell, but now the problem is that HelloTxt.com does not support all of the social media platforms I connected with on Ping.com.  One of them is Yahoo! Meme, which is odd.

Note: As of August 6, 2010 afternoon, the few social media services that I switched from Ping.com to HelloTxt.com are not working . . . yet. Sometimes these things take time.

Therefore, I moved what I could and left the rest on Ping.com.  Ping will get it working soon enough, I hope.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Social media: RSS feed to Koornk.com

Koornk.com displayed the Microenterprise blog RSS feed through Ping.fm without any fuss, as shown in the screenshot of Tom Fox on Koornk. Of the four active links showing, two of them actually work and connect to the appropriate Mircoenterprise blog page. The other two active links go elsewhere, as of now.

The link problem is not with Koornk.com, it is with Ping.com.

The first link shown below, as shortened by Ping.com is: http://ping.fm/rF8DL

Currently, that Ping-shortened link re-directs to:

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/2537874321591363343/posts/default/3400403793792964686?v=2

. . . . which is not correct.  It ought to re-direct to this URL:

http://micro-enterprise.blogspot.com/2010/08/rss-syndication-glitch-no-1.html

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Social media: RSS feed to Tagged.com

Tagged.com is a social media site similar to, but much less popular than, Myspace.  Tagged.com appears to be, and has been described as, targeting a 'youth market.'  It is all about games, music, and flirting.

I connected to Tagged.com through Ping.com (see: Distribution channel map), without first checking to see if it was a good audience for an internet marketing blog.  I don't think it is, now that I take a close look at Tagged.com, and the focus of interest there,  However, Tagged.com does pick up and display the twitterized blog post.  The display on Tagged.com includes the Bit.ly shortened link to the original Microenterprise blog post, but it it not an active link.

Tagged.com also provides for a custom URL for my profile page, making it accessible to search engines - at least in theory.  All other of the pages are accessed through generic URLs and session cookies, which is bound to fuddle search bots. Tom Fox's Tagged.com profile page.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Blog post syndication distribution channels and map

The native Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed for this Blogger blog, microenterprise, is re-directed to Google Feedburner, and anyone can subscribe to the feed in a number of different ways including the free email distribution that Feedburner provides.  More than that, by using the many social media, automated ping services, and micro-blog platforms freely available today, I have recently constructed an entire distribution channel that pushes my posts down a networked distribution channel.

This is just a beginning that I cooked up yesterday afternoon, and there is a lot of room for expansion.  More importantly, there is the question about the effects, if any, that the distribution network has on traffic and rankings.

I created a visual representation of the RSS distribution channel here, on Scribed.com.

August 3, 2010 Update

1. I removed my test blog on Presently.com from my distribution channel. Presently.com is in the business of creating and selling enterprise in-house micro-blogging software.  The free hosted micro-blog that Presently.com offers is intended, it seems to me, as a live demo of the software, rather than as a working tool or community in the public internet environment.  I looks like fine software, but it wasn't designed or intended for my purpose.

2. Since I will be originating posts on Tumblr.com, to keep it alive, I decided those new posts will be distributed to Twitter and Facebook.  Why not?

3. Moved Facebook off of my Twitter feed and onto a Ping.fm feed for the Microenterprise blog posts.  The way it was before resulted in double posting of Tumblr posts on Facebook.  Not good.

The RSS distribution channel map has been revised, expanded, moved, and re-published, here.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter