Show n tell exposes sizeable talent

February 21 2006

So I was incredibly impressed with the number of people writing about Notes on last Thursday's first "show-n-tell" day.  It's been especially cool to read some of the blogs and web pages, because they are from new voices.

Peter von Stöckel wrote about browsing the web with LotusScript.  Kevin Pettitt wrote about form validation.  Tim Tripcony shared a design template catalog.  Vince Schuurman talked about creating PDFs from Domino.  Esther Strom solved an offline user's need to compact their mailbox's server copy.  Ian Irving built a better "save and exit" action button. Vince DiMascio published some code tips, though he's explicitly not blogging.

I know that there was some talk at Lotusphere about creating an OPML for Domino bloggers.  Not sure that would solve my issue though -- attention, bandwidth, and prioritization.  There are so many great new voices, but they get added to existing bloggers...and many of us already are struggling with how to keep up with and read all the blogs out there.

Put simply, I'm starting to struggle to figure out which bloggers to read on a regular basis.  The other struggle is how much bandwidth to give to "new" bloggers.  I applaud all the new voices that have joined the Notes/Domino-focused blogosphere.  But there's an abandon rate in all parts of the blogging world, and instinct tells me that some of these will go dark in just a few months.

How are you managing your blogreading consumption?  I don't mean from a technology perspective -- I have a perfectly useful RSS reader.  How are you deciding which blogs to read regularly and which ones get dropped from your feeds? And, last, who has the authoritative list?  I know TheSickos.com has a lot of Domino bloggers, and there are a few other sites, but I don't know how to best find everyone I should consider reading.

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [31]

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  1. 1  Sean Burgess http://www.phigsaidwhat.com/ | 2/21/2006 1:40:41 PM

    With over 100 Domino bloggers on my list, keeping up can be a full time job. I have to se aside an hour or so each day just to skim them all. Every time I see a comment from someone I don't recognize, I'll click on their website link and see what they have to offer. More often then not, they get added to my list.

    I have added my Bloglines list to my site, in case any one needs a place to start. If you don't see your blog on it, just let me know.

    Sean---

  1. 2  Ray "The Lion King" Bilyk http://www.thepridelands.com | 2/21/2006 2:19:15 PM

    Just keep up... Like Sean, I have to put aside about an hour a day to keep up with things. Sometimes I don't get that hour, but sometimes a get a bit more. It all balances out I think.

    I remember Richard Schwartz saying at Lotusphere how he was just doing specialized searches these days.... Maybe that is our future...

  1. 3  Stuart Downes http://www.sdownes.co.uk | 2/21/2006 2:29:32 PM

    I take a similar approach to Roy and Sean. However for me the title of the post is important in deciding whether to read or skip. As for finding time I think I need to read and put into practice "Get Things Done".

  1. 4  Joe Litton http://joelitton.net/ | 2/21/2006 2:42:31 PM

    Yup ...RSS is the starting point. I try to skim it each day. The title is key, so bloggers (including me) need to be more careful about the wording of that title! I skip many posts due to title that indicates something not of interest. I spend less than an hour a day skimming; I skip some titles, completely skip a site if SharpReader indicates an invalid feed or site not found, and I try to use the 'Touch it once' rule, and immediately decide whether to mark a site as 'read', or forward myself a link for followup (or go directly to the post and comment).

    As for OPML, someone had posted recently that they were 'working on' that. I'll post OPML this evening on my site of what's in my RSS list (more than what I've got listed in my blogroll). Some of the OPML that had been listed a year or two ago is still available but quite out of date. As Sean mentions, following links in comments helps to discover new sites.

    Technorati or other tagging may help us all zero in more quickly on content that is of value.

    Hmmmm....what we probably need is a site with a posted OPML feed, AND a form to allow unlisted Domino bloggers to register their site and be included in the OPML. Sounds like an OpenNTF project in the budding :)

  1. 5  Richard Collette  | 2/21/2006 2:50:44 PM

    Something like digg where a rating pushes an article up the list.

    Personally, I tend to keep the ones with personal chatter off my list and the ones that contribute to my knowledge base on the list. Some of the original blogging "how to's" prioritized blogging often over how polished the article was. Today though, with a combination of RSS and so many authors, my focus is on those with focused and useful content. I could care less if they post once a week or once a month. Frequency doesn't matter with RSS in hand. I could care less who met who at the last X conference so content is key

  1. 6  Colin Williams  | 2/21/2006 2:53:33 PM

    I maintain two lists:

    1. A high priority one for bloggers that are like my morning coffee (I can't start my day without them ;). I check this at least daily to keep up/keep informed.

    2. A low priority one for bloggers that only occasionally blog or only sometimes blog about interesting stuff. I check this as time allows. Because the frequency of posts is typically low, it is a fairly quick task to skim these say once a week to make sure I'm not missing some gem of information that might be useful.

    I'm reluctant to ever remove a blogger just because they fall silent. I figure they will turn their hosting off if they never intend to blog again. So only when their feed is inactive do I delete them.

  1. 7  Karen  | 2/21/2006 2:55:37 PM

    I've got my top five Domino bloggers on my toolbar in Firefox. I click over to them when I have time. I have a couple of other blog feeds on my Netvibes homepage, which is also linked on my toolbar. If a blogger mentions another blogger and I'm interested, I take a look. And sometimes I'll browse the blogroll. But for the most part, I haven't got time for more than five.

    How do I decide who I'm reading? (Shrug) Writers of topics that consistently interest me, which can be articles, anecdotes.. whatever. I don't think there's a formula, really. It's subjective, imo.

  1. 8  C http://www.IdoNotes.com | 2/21/2006 3:08:50 PM

    Well sice Lotusphere the group from Down Under took it upon themselves to use the OpenNTF forum database and create a blog listing site called DominoBlogs. We are hosting the database which will SOON be under { Link } as well I am repointing my URL of DominoFeeds.com to that same site.

    The database itself is up and live but the link is dead until they make a couple more changes. We might just have a listing in the making.

  1. 9  Rob McDonagh www.CaptainOblivious.com | 2/21/2006 3:16:14 PM

    Like some others have already mentioned, I differentiate between sites I check daily and those I check less often. I even have a group of 'dead' bloggers I check every couple of weeks, 'cause you never know when someone's going to jump back into the pool.

    There's also a difference between blog-reading as an exercise in knowledge gathering and blog-reading as a social phenomenon. I have made quite a few friends online through blogs, and I will read what those people have to say regularly no matter what the topic is.

    That being said, it's getting tough to keep up. I like to think I read just about as quickly as anybody bar Duffbert, but I've found that I'm more selective about adding new bloggers now because I don't want to spend all day reading blogs. Instead of adding every Domino blogger I can find, now I wait to see if they say something interesting more than once, or if they become a regular commenter on other blogs and otherwise join the community.

  1. 10  Ingo Erdmann  | 2/21/2006 3:21:02 PM

    I started with

    1. the big names

    2. people I know

    3. people whose opinion I appreciate and respect

    (these groups do overlap)

    I consider new people on my list who seem to be appreciated by bloggers I already read. Either by getting a link to relevant content or by just being mentioned. It's a community thing, right?

    I then read their most recent 10 or 20 posts and decide whether to add them. After adding them, I also consequently delete people if they don't keep my interest. Sometimes I come back to them though.

    I am using FeedDemon. It has the concept of channel groups. I barely get to read blogs in other groups than my high prio one. So I would say I limit the number of blogs to what fits my screen in a flat list (1600 resolution though).

    After Lotusphere I added some people I met there in person. It's really a whole different story to read things from someone you have met in real life.

  1. 11  Tim Latta  | 2/21/2006 3:32:57 PM

    Keeping up with the blogosphere is akin to keeping your Inbox clean....always a goal, never a reality.

    I maintain two higher level folders in my RSS reader. 'Frequent' are those that are proven to be valuable to me over time. 'Watching' are those that looked interesting at some point in time and I check in with on a less frequent basis. If they appear to be valuable enough to check regularly, they get moved to Frequent.

    Within the Frequent and Wathcing folders, there are subfolders for things like Collaboration, Technology, and other interest areas.

  1. 12  Steve Castledine http://www.dominoblog.com | 2/21/2006 3:34:28 PM

    I'm with using technorati and using a standard tag like "Lotus Notes Domino" - then new posters and old alike show in the same plce - a site dies - doesnt matter - a new site - instantly visible.

  1. 13  Christopher Byrne http://www.controlscaddy.com/ | 2/21/2006 3:39:48 PM

    Here is what bloggers (including me) need to make sure we do:

    Treat a posting as a news story and include the 5 "W's" (Who, What, When, Where and Why) in the first paragraph. It is then essential that this paragraph be included in your RSS feed. As a rule of thumb, if a headline comes across without content, I do not follow it.

  1. 14  Rob McDonagh www.CaptainOblivious.com | 2/21/2006 3:47:28 PM

    I'll amend that, Chris: it is essential that your ENTIRE post appear in your RSS feed. I am less and less inclined to waste my time loading up a browser to read the second sentence (or paragraph or...) of someone's post. If you don't have a full RSS feed, you wind up in a much less frequently read group, and I will often skip those feeds entirely. There's too much to keep up with already, as Ed noted...

  1. 15  Christopher Byrne http://www.controlscaddy.com/ | 2/21/2006 4:00:01 PM

    But here is the run. if I include the entire post, I have no control where that RSS content ends up. And this has caused me problems in the past with people hijacking and republishing the content.

    Part of the problem is distinguishing what RSS is supposed to be and what we actually use it for. It is designed to syndicate content (and in many cases abstracts of content), yet you (for example) want to use it to read the entire posting. And what do you do if you are using images as part of the posts? Use up bandwidth transferring these files?

    It does reach a point of saturation and nearly impossible to keep up with everybody...

  1. 16  Rob McDonagh www.CaptainOblivious.com | 2/21/2006 4:13:45 PM

    I don't know, Chris. You don't maintain much control over the content by keeping it out of your RSS feed if you then publish it on an open website like a blog.

    As far as using RSS for something other than what it was intended for, I'm afraid I feel no guilt. RSS is a handy distribution mechanism for content, and that is why it has been so successful. Most blogs include the full articles, notably because most of the public blog hosting services require or default to it. And as a consumer, I have a strong preference for reading an entire post in one application. It's simply enormously more convenient for me.

    So there are sites I have given up on because they make life difficult for me. In the Domino world, I rarely read Jake's Codestore site anymore because he makes me jump through hoops to see his content. I still read the summary, and if it sounds really interesting I may check it out, but 90% of the time I won't. Outside of our little world, alpha blogger Instapundit bit the dust a few months ago, from my perspective, because his partial feed is very small and even his full posts, once loaded in the browser, are usually just one liners about somebody else's blog which you are then expected to click through to.

    My point is that if we, as bloggers, want people to read our sites, we ought to make it as easy for them to do so as we can. And if we make it hard on our readers, we shouldn't be surprised if some of them don't come back.

    Oh, and yes, I cheerfully use up bandwidth to download images in feeds as a consumer, and as a producer I include images in my feed. On the other hand, I rarely post images. Bandwidth consumption by ALL of my RSS feeds is dwarfed by a few visits to ESPN.com anyway.

  1. 17  Duffbert http://www.twduff.com | 2/21/2006 6:05:00 PM

    @9: OK, that does it. Next year one of my abstract submissions for Lotusphere will be on how to generate personal publicity by having people vote on how many books you'll read in a week... :)

  1. 18  Laurette Rynne http://www.lauretterynne.com | 2/21/2006 6:44:22 PM

    @8 - The DominoBlogs.com link is now working. Initally we have set this up to be purely a self-managed, capture site for people to list their own blog and help make it easier to find new Domino-based bloggers. This way people can choose to make themselves known without having to email a whole bunch of people to get added to blogrolls (if that's even possible with the length of some current blogrolls).

    Now that we're back from our travels, Tim & I will start looking at how to make this really useful - RSS feeds to the directory listings, auto-generating OPML files (based on content, region, etc), and other ways to view the list (category, name). Other suggestions of how to make this site really useful are welcome from all. To start though, we need to get the list of names in there started so we have something to begin with. So, everyone should take a couple of minutes to head over and list themselves....

    As for me, it is difficult to keep track of so many blogs. I tend to add pretty much everyone to my bloglines list, categorised under Lotus. I can then filter so I only see new content, and then self-filter based on those who I know I enjoy reading. At the moment I have about 50 in the Lotus category, plus another 20 or so in other categories. I generally do a quick scan to see if there is anything really interesting, most often based on title, and then drift through the rest over the course of the day or at home, depending on how much free time I have (usually not much!).

    The bottom line is that you can't force people to read you, you just have to keep posting, and, more importantly, commenting on other blogs so that your name becomes familiar.

    Hopefully at least DominoBlogs.com will be a way for people to announce themselves to the blogosphere rather than waiting to be noticed.

  1. 19  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 2/21/2006 7:16:22 PM

    @18 and that, in and of itself, solves a major problem. I am sure everyone handles it differently, but the e-mails I get asking to be on the blogroll tend to be of limited efficacy. I'd rather sit back, read a while, and get familiar with the blogger and site. There have been a few exceptions, especially for IBMers, but overall I think this has served me well from not linking to dormant blogs.

    Thank you for this initiative, Laurette and Tim!

  1. 20  Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 2/21/2006 10:14:50 PM

    I created an OPML file for the list of bloggers at Lotusphere, and I also created one for my list of Domino bloggers (which is just short of 200 strong!). Links to both can be found here { Link }

    I'm modifying my bloggregator software for John Head so he can use it to set up an aggregator specifically for the Show 'n Tell posts. That should be a good tool for anyone who just wants to follow the tech tips that people post -- and in addition to providing a feed that consolidates all the Show 'n Tell posts, it will also generate OPML file for all participants (that we know about).

    As for reading and filtering... my own technique is simple: scan the headlines and authors, read a bit, leave others unread, and let the echo chamber do its thing. I figure I'm unlikely to miss out on anything truly important or interesting for too long. And every few weeks do an Edit - Unread Marks - Mark All Read. There are some authors whom I'll always read. There are others I'll only read if the headline appeals to me. Supplement that with a few searches and I get pretty wide coverage.

  1. 21  Chris Linfoot http://chris-linfoot.net | 2/22/2006 3:58:21 AM

    @14, 15, 16 - I included full posts in my feed a long time ago (had to tweak Blogsphere to do it). I do all of my reading via an RSS reader and prefer to see full posts there although this still seems to be a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.

    Generally, I agree with Ed. There is a lot of high quality blogging going on and keeping up is difficult. One suggestion may be to adopt standard tags for subject matter of general interest (like the Lotusphere2006 tag recently).

    I propose SnTT as a standard tag for Show n Tell Thursday.

    { Link }

  1. 22  Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 2/22/2006 6:56:19 AM

    Can <i>anyone</i> apply a Technorati tag to a page, or must it be the page's author who tags it? If the latter, then I could probably rig the aggregator for Show 'n Tell category feeds to do the tagging.

  1. 23  Steve Castledine http://www.dominoblog.com | 2/22/2006 8:05:50 AM

    Rich in its original form - the author tags via placings in the html or category tags in the rss.

    I guess the latter is possible by reading the rss and retagging on the other side of the fence (ie when re-displayed/listed on another site) and spoon feeding the new content to Technorati (but duplication of content submitted is probably not a good idea)

  1. 24  Kevin Pettitt www.lotusguru.com | 2/22/2006 12:58:33 PM

    Ed,

    First, thanks for the mention. Not surprisingly my traffic has jumped dramatically :-).

    @4, @12 - As for technorati et. al., the reason my post was listed there is due to Blogsphere's "Ping-o-Matic" feature (on the Blog Configuration form in version 2.1 for those using Blogsphere). You simply check from among 20 or so services, among them Blogdigger and Technorati, and the Ping-o-Matic service takes care of the rest. Joe Litton wrote this { Link } about getting posts listed on Technorati, but as Declan pointed out in a comment, such a workaround is no longer necessary. (Time for an upgrade Joe ;-)?)

    @14, 15, 16 - Full RSS Posts may come out in the next release of Blogsphere. I put that functionality into Declan's main Blogsphere development template recently by adapting code provided by Joe Litton (Joe has too many customizations to upgrade apparently :-) ). I haven't turned it on yet by adding the necessary modifications to the configuration form, but hopefully I'll be able to soon. Not sure what the release schedule is.

  1. 25  Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 2/22/2006 7:23:05 PM

    @23: If that's the case, then it seems to me that del.icio.us (or something) like it has a natural advantage over Technorati. Unless of course the various Domino-based blog templates will all soon include support for Technorati tagging -- and we can get everyone to upgrade ;-)

  1. 26  Richard Schwartz http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz | 2/22/2006 7:25:32 PM

    @24: I was under the impression that the ping-o-matic feature just alerted Technorati that there's an update, but doesn't apply any tags to the post. Am I wrong about that?

  1. 27  Kevin Pettitt www.lotusguru.com | 2/22/2006 10:50:30 PM

    @26 - Richard, all I did to get my post on Technorati AND tagged appropriately was to set the category of the post to the same value as my desired tag, and submit it. Of course, I had the Ping-o-matic settings in the blog config pointing to Technorati before that, but that was a one-time thing. In short, nothin' to it :-)

  1. 28  Steve Castledine http://www.dominoblog.com | 2/23/2006 4:45:13 AM

    Rich - the ping to Technorati gets the ball rolling - they then check your content and/or RSS feed.

    Technorati then picks up the tagging from a href elements within your content if you add rel='tag'. It also scours your rss feed for category elements.

    If you look at { Link } - you will see the tag links on each page and how they are formed.

  1. 29  Kevin Pettitt www.lotusguru.com | 2/23/2006 7:25:37 AM

    @28 - So Steve I think you're saying that if I were to categorize a blog entry about basket weaving under "Show-n-Tell Thursday", some human employee of Technorati would intervene and keep it off their site? Or by extension if a post were still technical but seemed to fit some other technorati tag(s) better, would this person recategorize the post accordingly?

    Another issue, at least with the Blogsphere template, is the (lack of) support for *multiple* categories, and/or perhaps even multiple *category types* (e.g. an "internal" category unique to that blogger, plus another field just for standard technorati tags (updated dynamically somehow), and maybe something for "region"...). Declan if you're reading this you might have more to offer in terms of Blogsphere's potential future (or present) capability to support this.

  1. 30  Declan Lynch www.qtzar.com | 2/23/2006 7:41:43 AM

    The next release of Blogsphere will have the ability to add multiple tags for Technorati, by default it will always include whatever category you have selected for the posting.

    Using the Ping-O-Matic feature when you create a new post you can inform Technorati to search your feed/url. This seems to work very well in it's current implementation and is available in the latest released version already.

    Getting back to a central opml list for bloggers I have a small app that allows bloggers to enter in details of their site ( name, author, country, rss feed etc ) and then once it's been approved it will show it in a list and make an opml available etc. The app isn't complete yet but with multiple people wanting to show such a list on their sites then a possibility is to replicate the data from site to site so everybody has the same definitive list.

  1. 31  Steve Castledine http://www.dominoblog.com | 2/23/2006 12:41:36 PM

    Kevin - I would not imagine they would have time to do that - if you tag as something - its tagged that way - no review process (as far as I am aware!) - just a robot!

    One thing I wondered was whether the html tags within the code take precedence over the category elements in the rss (or even take precedence over the content itself) - so thats something for me to research!