Kicked off by Om Malik talking about SanFran being a Web 2.0 centre, Mathew Ingram wondered if Canada was missing the Web 2.0 boat ... hardly!  I think Mark Evans would agree with me that Canada is doing a lot for Web 2.0 and where?  Here in Southern B.C of course!

Tags: Web 2.0, Canada, B.C.

Powered by Qumana

As re-published on News.com, the NYT articles talks about how business travelers don't really blog, and should.  But in all the reasons why the missed the best one ... keeping the team back home (or around the country) up to date.  Now you might be thinking ... "Hey blogs are public ... we can't do that!"  Ah, but blogs don't have to be public.  In fact you can have a blog that is both public and private.

Think about it ... a secure blog, post last-minute proposal changes.  Updates on clients, new selling strategies.  And all available to you and your colleagues with a couple clicks

Tags: business blogging

Powered by Qumana

Lektora and Qumana have taken a step forward - together. Today marks a revolution in the world of RSS and blogging.

Today's release of the free RSS aggregator / reader Lektora seamlessly integrates RSS reading with blog publishing. The power of Qumana is placed right into the Lektora tool bar above each displayed feed - one click is all it takes to start a post. 

This integration bridges the worlds of RSS and blogging in a unique and seamless way.  It makes browsing and blogging easier than reading a newspaper and clipping articles

Stitch together the ways you browse and read your incoming feeds of information and how you create and edit outgoing blog posts with the elegance and ease of one click.

Lektora displays RSS feeds in an easy-to-read format. Combine that with Qumana's simple and sophisticated blog editing and publishing right in the toolbar, one click unifies the process of :

• browsing through RSS feeds,


• finding something interesting, and


• writing and publishing a new item.

This gives users a more seamless experience, not just for workflow but for aligning the thought process of browsing and reading. And it gives the user a more powerful tool to quickly post well-crafted, nice looking articles to a wide range of blog platforms, email and for saving as documents.

Lektora and Qumana joined together offers MS Word-like publishing capabilities (for one or more blogs), email posting and document creation... right at the end of your RSS feeds.

The integration also makes it easier for bloggers to make money from blogging. Start your post in Lektora, edit it in Qumana and use the built-in feature to drop in an AdGenta ad with one-click.

Your desktop client version of Qumana is always there... just drag 'n drop, double-click, and your next post is on its way. The integration of Qumana and Lektora is for PC users only... for now.

Today's release of Lektora 1.5 is compatible with Firefox 1.5.

Tags: lektora, qumana, blogging, rss, technology bridge, easy

Powered by Qumana

John Stith of WebProNews and BL Ochman talk about services to monitor the blogosphere for your company that cost ungodly amounts ... like $60,000 a year.  Monitoring the blogosphere is very important (critical IMHO to some business) for companies today.  But ... look this isn't rocket science.  I do it everyday and combinations of free tools make it pretty darn easy.

Yes, I am a techie and geek ... but I'm also busy and I don't have time to mess around.  While I respect the businesses trying to make a business from this and I'm sure they provide a value in writing up reports and giving clients easy to absorb info ... I think there is a lot you can do yourself.

How?  Well I'm going to talk about this at the upcoming RSS conference in depth and give a workshop on this as well at the end of the conference proper ... but here's a top line toolkit:

Search engines:

• Feedster
• PubSub
• Technorati
• IceRocket
• Gada.be

RSS reader:

• Lektora (we have almost fixed the Firefox 1.5 compatibility issue ... I have a Windows version available if you'd like to test it)
• Bloglines

That's all you need to get going.  Essentially, what you are doing is searching for a term or website, saving the search in a way the RSS reader can check and you're done.  Now ... fitting this into your business is not too hard.  Using existing staff resources can make it very time efficient.  Couple this with an internal blog and Qumana (Qumana and Lektora will soon be fully integrated allowing you to go from RSS reader to blog post or e-mail with a couple clicks) and you're a couple steps away from a self-contained and dynamic competitive intelligence system.

Sound easy?  Yeah it actually is.  What often is hard is companies making it part of people's jobs to do this and having them realize that this is just as important following commentaries in the press.

Powered by Qumana

Hat tip to Steve for this link to the Technorati blog about the spiffed up charts.  I've put a couple charts below to show you the easy blogging of them ... there is a simple "Blog this chart" below the chart that lets you copy and paste the code for it.  Unfortunately the code doesn't allow you to show anything more than the default 30 days on your blog ... if you click the links you can expand and contract to search to as little as 7 days to as many as 360.

Examples:

Posts that contain Qumana per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Posts that contain "tris Hussey" per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Now the big question ... so what? Yeah exactly.  I can't see too many day-to-day uses for this.  You could illustrate the explosion of an issue on the scene.  I guess you could ad it to your side bar as a kind of on the fly ego-feed.  Not to diss Technorati, this is interesting, and being a data wonk I had to play with it.  Implications?  We're getting more and more interested in looking at blog information.  While many might use it to track a celeb ... companies should be using this to track their brand.  Visuals are always good and this chart makes for good visuals.

Tags: Technorati

Powered by Qumana

Technorati is celebrating its first Tagiversary:

It was one year ago that we introduced Tags to Technorati, and what a year it's been! We're now tracking 4.6 million tags on over 75 million posts. Over half of all new posts are now tagged (using categories or rel links), which means they're easier to find and enjoy.

Tags have become an integral part of how blogging occurs. Of how people find information and how they disseminate it. The tag space is ever evolving, and yet has come far in a single year span for Technorati. It's amazing to think of tags as being a relatively 'new' concept.

Of course, what is a celebration of tags without improvements? Well, Technorati made a few nice upgrades. The tags homepage has a "hot tags" section:

Also new: language filtering, tag trend charts, and toggle features to customize your page.

The improvements show a number of things. The increased ability to follow topics by tags alone, and the ability to guage tag/search popularity. We can search Qumana and see the trends on our tag, which is an important metric that we can now use.

Happy Tagiversary to Technorati, and all the best for a productive new year in this very interesting space!

Tags: tagiversary, technorati, tags, tagging, tag space

Powered by Qumana

One major point to developing a successful blog strategy is to keep it simple. A simply blog strategy is easy to understand and follow. It lays out what you can and cannot say, and encourages you to share your voice.

One great example of such a policy is for Opera, a web browser company:

1. Share your thoughts
2. Be active
3. We're not your mama
4. Don't give away the farm
5. Check your sources
6. Our friends are your friends

"Remember to use common sense. If you need help in a situation, don't hesitate to ask your manager. Your blog is meant to be an open window, but remember there are legal obligations."

It's all about enjoying the opportunity to speak about the company, not about mistrusting employees. That kind of trust speaks very clearly, and positively, about the company.

Here at Qumana we have our own blog policy. It's not a written one, but it's understood what can and cannot be said, on our own blogs and here on the Qumana blog. If we're building to a launch, we have team discussions about what we say and when. We're careful to be coordinated in our efforts to respond to comments. And we try to bring our insight and perspective into what we do. It's created a positive and dynamic blog that we feel is open, honest, and interesting to read.

Via Jeremy @ Blog Marketing ; Tags: blog, blogging, blog policy, opera, qumana

Powered by Qumana

I don't think I'm looking forward to anything more in the near future than this event.  Why?  Because I'm going home to Boston to speak with amazing folks like Buzz Bruggerman, Robert Scoble, Bill Flitter, David Geller, and Rick Klau about RSS.  Yawn?  Hardly.  RSS might be the stealth technology of the Internet, but it is the most important (IMHO) and almost most crucial we have now.  I'm going to be on a panel about RSS, talking about using RSS for competitive intel (one of my fav subjects), and leading a hands on workshop after the conference proper (PDF version of the agenda I just got in my e-mail).

It's not too late to sign up and come.  Hey and if you're lucky you might even to get to meet my mom (I think my mom is just as cool as Chris').

See you in Beantown!

Powered by Qumana

Qumana loves the Mac. And to prove it, this week we launched a private beta release of a new Cross-Platform Qumana to a couple of dozen testers, many of whom are Mac users. In addition, we've built in many new features our customers have been asking for.

You asked us for:

• a Mac version
• ability to see and edit HTML
• local storage for draft posts
• properties management

You asked for it. Qumana listened. And responded.

We won't give away all the new features just yet, but we're excited to have a great new product to share with everyone. For a sneak preview, hear what some of our testers have to say:

• Neville Hobson - "it looks promising."
• Andy Boyd - "Easy posting to my WordPress blog... Having a split pane between WYSIWYG and source code is great" (check out the screenshots)

Qumana has built a *new* product. It will look and feel much like our current Qumana, but have improvements in many areas we have collectively identified. Improvements, new features, and new ways to blog easier, faster, and more profitably.

What does cross platform mean? It means that the same Qumana will work on both PC and Mac. Different download files, but the same look, feel and functionality will be built and sustained in one Qumana version.

When does it come out? Well, we're still in a private pre-beta testing stage. Still some bugs to fix and features to add. We have some great people helping us to test out the new version, making sure it's robust and the interface comes out smooth. We won't give you an exact date, but it won't be long now.

Can I help test? Sure, if you want to be a part of this private beta stage, send us an email to info AT qumana DOT com specifying if you are PC or Mac, your blog platforms and some info on why you want to help test Qumana.

Thanks to everyone for all the continued support and feedback. Qumana wouldn't be where it is today without you! And keep your eye on this space. More to come.

Tags: qumana, beta, cross platform, mac, offline editor, blog editor

Powered by Qumana

Humans define things.  We create words, meanings, descriptions.  It's in our nature.  So in the last year or so people realized that with the emergence of blogs, wikis, RSS, AJAX, etc. something on the Internet was different.  People weren't starting whole online businesses to sell you something you could get at the corner store.  Sites like Flickr, GMail, Bloglines ... these are services that make people go wow what did I do before this!

Well, what do you call this new Net?  In the spirit of software the consensus figured we had a major upgrade and called it Web 2.0.

Jeneane Sessum and Halley Suitt are discussing this as a hype or not term.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for these two Blogging Divas ... but being the blogosphere you gotta take sides and on this issue I'm with Jeneane (sorry Halley).

We have to call it something else.  There has been a sea change.  The applications are different, the ethos is different.  This isn't the 1990's ... granted, there are people (as always) over hyping this.  And some people are going to come up with some harebrained schemes.  Still I'm liking Web 2.0.  I'm not telling people at every turn ... oh you need to have a blog to make money ... no.  I think we're all smarter than that.  Yep I'm getting a lot of people into blogging ... but as a medium for self expression not as a bandwagon to make loads of cash.

Web 2.0 something for the hypewriter? Eh, no ... not yet.

Tags: Web 2.0

Powered by Qumana

Michael gets the coolest tips. He got an idea about 1000tags.com and did a quick review on Techcrunch.  So here's the skinny.  Tagging is cool, right?  Search engines love them.   People like use them.  Now you can buy them.  Yeah, buy them.  1000tags.com is going to sell 1000 tags and link them to the site of your choice.  Cool deal.  How much?

How much does it cost?
The price goes like this (in US$):

* For shared tags, the price is $5 per character, but with a minimum of $25 even if your tag is less than 5 characters, which is ok since most tags will use at least 5 characters. Also, since the maximum tag size is 20 characters, the maximum price for a shared tag is $100

* Exclusive tags cost $250 upfront just for making them “exclusive”. Then, the price goes up depending on the number of characters and font size. It can get expensive if you use up lots of characters and a very large font size. Remember, exclusive tags are expensive not because we’re greedy but because we’d rather people book shared tags.

I guess this is a tag cloud that really does have a silver lining, heck maybe even gold.

Tags: 1000tags.com, Techcrunch, milliondollarhomepage, tags, tag clouds

Powered by Qumana

The BlogBusinessSummit blog has this great headline today:

BrandWeek Says Blogs are a Bad Marketing Idea. We Say BrandWeek is a Bad Marketing Idea

Ouch.  Harsh?  Actually no.  Read the whole report here (PDF).  The short paragraph is more than condescending and dismissive, it just plain misses the point.  Blogs aren't as much as a "marketing tool" as an information tool.  Blogs are important for marketers because the information can travel so fast.  Bad product reviews and good ones can take off like lightening.  So we're not saying all products need a blog or that all marketers need to blog, we're saying you can use blogs to your advantage, even passively, but you have to be aware and tuned in ... or else.
Just like they said on BBS:

The blogosphere is mistaken if they think businesses owe them something. But on the other side of the coin, businesses - particularly those that rely heavily on buzz marketing and word of mouth - ignore the blogosphere at their extreme peril. BrandWeek may not remain relevant to the conversation if it doesn’t figure that out.

Also seen on BloggersBlog

Tags: blogs, blog marketing, buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing

Powered by Qumana

Next month is NorthernVoice and Qumana is proud to be one of the sponsors of this great conference.

We'll be there at MooseCamp talking about Qumana, Lektora, blogging, and RSS.  Should be a blast.

See you there!

Tags: NorthernVoice

Powered by Qumana

Before the holidays Jon wrote about a post of Seth Godin's on his blog.  The holiday season got in the way of me writing about it then so getting back on track here (oy the unread feeds to plow through ...) ...

Reading Seth's post I was drawn to the last part ...

Magazines run ads.
Books don't.

What are blogs?

I see any given blog as a moving target ... moving and morphing as the author wishes.  In the last 24 hours I've written some short posts, long posts, and a recipe (you gotta try it ... it's really good).  So what is my blog?  A blog.