StartupSpot

Switching from Bloglines to NewsGator

This week I decided to switch from Bloglines, which I had been using for a few months, to NewsGator. One of the reasons I made the switch was because I have been talking to Sandy Hamilton and Greg Reinacker at NewsGator about how we might work together with a couple of our larger customers. But I also wanted gain some perspective in a way that you can’t get from reading a feature list.

I started using Bloglines because I wanted an online newsreader and they were the primary choice when I was looking. Personally I liked their interface from the beginning though when I tried to introduce Bloglines to a number of people who were not very familiar with RSS the general response I get was that the interface was a bit overwhelming.

I'd tried to switch over a couple of weeks ago but for some reason the move didn’t stick. I think once a person gets used to something the lack of any of the features your used to creates a barrier. In any case, this time the move worked.

Below are a few of the things I like in Bloglines that I would be glad to see in NewsGator. They are all pretty minor but being a creature of habit I noticed them.

• Bloglines creates a header at the top of the lists of posts so I can easily click on it and jump to the main page of blog. This is also useful for going to a blog that doesn’t have in new posts. If I click on a feed with no new posts I at least have the header I can click on to go to the site.
• Bloglines keeps the position on the page that I am reading. In NewsGator, if you have a long list of feeds, when you are done reading one you have to scroll down again to get back to the same spot when your done. This is no problem for feeds at the top of the list but it creates some annoying scrolling for feeds at the bottom of the list.
• In Bloglines the counter of new feeds updates immediately. With NewsGator the feed counter doesn’t update until you take some action that refreshes the screen.

Overall though I was very pleased with the transition, NewsGator has a very competitive offering and I’m very excited about their vision for bringing the newsreader functionality to enterprise customers. I'm sure NewsGator's Online reader will have it's own unique set of features and I'll blog about those as I get more familiar with the product.

I see a lot of synergy between NewsGator's vision for bringing RSS to the enterprise and CustomerVision's new enterprise wiki. CustomerVision will be releasing our enterprise wiki product this month and I’m anxious to see the evolution in NewsGator corporate offering.

My RSS Feed Categories

The list below represents the categories I use to classify the RSS feeds that I subscribe to.

1. Auto-generated Feeds (like wiki change alerts)
2. Community Journalism
3. Corporate Bloggers (these are folks that work for a corporation but who are not blogging as part of their job)
4. Development (software development)
5. eLearning
6. Entrepreneurs (most of these are serial entrepreneurs)
7. Interesting Individuals (these are folks who discuss a wide range of topics, I find I tend to prefer blogs on a specific topic but there are a few people who have something interesting enough to say that I will stick with their more general blog)
8. Knowledge Management
9. Microsoft (I'm surprised that I gave Microsoft its own category but they have a lot of people blogging and some of them are pretty smart)
10. News (I've gotten rid of my subscriptions to a lot of high volume news oriented sites but I've kept a few)
11. Open Source
12. Political (there is a lot of time wasting junk in this category but there are a few sites worth reading)
13. PR, Marketing and Sales (these are folks who talk about PR, marketing and sales in relation to blogs, wikis and related technologies, they are typically consultants or senior executives)
14. RSS (mostly blogs of folks from RSS related vendors)
15. Tutorial ("how-to" sites such as tips and tricks for Typepad)
16. VCs
17. Web Design
18. Web Writing
19. Wiki and Internal Blogging
20. Books

Blogs and Wikis as Corporate Solutions

Before blogs and wikis become popular among business buyers in the corporate world they will need to be positioned better as solutions. Many of the published case studies talk about how they can be used to improve group collaboration, and this is true, but it is too general.

For example, collaboration between marketing and sales could become a Sales Effectiveness solution. This is an important distinction because a busy sales organization can't be expected to buy a set of technologies like wikis and blogs and then immediately make optimal use of them. They will usually benefit from case studies and best practices and an implementation that is designed to support their specific use of the technology.

Another good example of a blog and wiki based solution is eLearning. eLearning is fairly broad area in itself but it does provide certain guidelines for how the technology should be used. For example, if a company wants to augment a formal training program with complimentary blog and wiki functionality the technology could be implemented in a way that it supports and enhances this initiative.

Corporations are still in the early stages of adopting this new technology but the early adopters have seen good results. In order for a broader group of corporate users to benefit from this technology we will need to take the next step in moving from implementing technology to implementing solutions.

Community Content Management

One of the issues I've struggled with is how to describe CustomerVision, from a product perspective. It combines content management, email messaging, and wiki style collaboration and it is used for things like sales force communications and supporting learning initiatives.

I recently ran across the term “Community Content Management” system to describe some of websites that are designed to be community driven. Many of these sites take on the characteristics of a traditional content management system but they do this with a twist. They tend to also be built to support the active participation of their customers, partners and prospects. Whether this means allowing users to submit content, such as reviews (i.e. Amazon) or to list their own products (i.e. eBay), they create a thriving business community through what is essentially a “Community Content Management” system.

This is the same basic spirit that drives CustomerVision. When we talk about what we do, we like to focus more on the solution we deliver such as sales communications and rapid eLearning but it’s helpful to have a name for our approach to content management.

What's in CustomerVision 3.0?

Wikis and related technologies have been growing rapidly in popularity among early adopters and grass roots users but to date these solutions have had little impact with non-technical users. With version 3.0 CustomerVision brings together the management and control of a corporate knowledge base with wiki collaboration technology designed for non-technical users to provide solutions for sales, training, application support and business collaboration.

New Features include:

• A One-click editing toolbar
• A streamlined editing process for authorized users
• Group editing features for private, controlled collaboration
• Ability to instantly publish content via email using a secure ID
• Enhanced commenting and discussion features
• Advanced version history and rollback features

Three Rules for Sharing Informal Knowledge

Corporations have over the years purchased or developed a variety of systems for sharing formal knowledge in the form of training programs, knowledge bases and elearning. These programs have become very sophisticated and the best of them can be highly effective. What we are starting to realize though is that formal learning only incorporates about 20% of what most people need to learn to do their job. The fact is that most learning that people do is still informal. Informal learning includes information that is gathered through email, conversations in the hall, talking at lunch, or making a phone call. It is in the area of informal learning that corporations have a huge opportunity to leverage new software and best practices to create dramatic improvements in the way their employees learn and become effective on the job.

Though the systems and practices corporations will deploy will need to be different from those used by today’s early adopters and grass roots users, I strongly believe that the consumer driven innovations around RSS, weblogs and wikis will end up having a profound impact on how corporate America shares and captures the value of informal knowledge.

For example, weblogs are driven by the concepts of:

Immediacy - New content is shared quickly and older content stays active and gets brought up to date.

Interactivity - When something gets published, readers get a chance to respond through comments, links, and various collaboration functions.

Informality - Content written in a natural, casual voice is quicker and easier to produce and because it isn't "corporate speak" it is often more trusted.

The defining characteristics of a weblog are also critical differentiating factors in CustomerVision’s approach to sharing informal knowledge, though we support much more stringent management and controls than the products used by today’s early adopters.

And these factors are much more powerful than they initially appear. When companies start to take seriously the idea that something written in an informal tone can be just as valuable as something that has been copyedited and when they start to get comfortable with the self-correcting effect that comes when knowledge workers share information they will be amazed how much more powerful their information resources will be. And the organizations with these enhanced information resources will be much more effective than their rivals who are slower to grasp these ideas.

Emerging, web-based business communications technologies

There is a lot of talk now about blogs, wikis, and RSS, and rightfully so, but these technologies are just the tip of the iceberg. For too long information has been delivered over the web in a read-only format. Today people with special skills produce "content" for a chosen audience. This one way dialog is a good start and is obviously better than requiring information to be physically printed and distributed. But things get much more interesting as the ability to share information becomes two-way and pervasive.

Enabling the exchange of information in a way that meets the requirements of the business world is a key objective of the product team at CustomerVision. We want to learn from both the grass roots technology that has sprung up recently as well the traditional knowledge management world. Combining these two approaches provides a new type of business communications solution that will enable people to share information, learn quickly, and respond to challenges with the full weight of their collective knowledge.

In the not too distant future, as the emerging, web-based business communications technologies start to become commonplace within corporations, it won't be long until we look back and wonder how we got by without them.

Social software

I love the idea of social software. I've always felt like the software industry was too focused on technology and not focused enough on the social elements of successful software. So the fact that software for linking people together and helping them communicate is now getting attention as its own space is great.

But I was also a little nervous that the first generation of social software wouldn't live up to the hype. When I think about products in this category I would include a number of products I am regularly using such as Typepad, LinkedIn, Bloglines and CustomerVision. And I am happy to report that I am amazed at how polished and effective the first generation of products in this category are. In no time I set my blog up and got started with TypePad. I just recently got started with LinkedIn and I've already made contact with friends that I had lost touch with and made professional connections with people in my field I couldn't have met any other way. And I use our own CustomerVision product on a daily basis to stay connected with the people on our team in diverse locations.

Bringing the fun back into the technology world

When I first got involved in the software industry way back in the early 1980s I remember just being in awe of the sense of possibility in the computer industry.

For the first time in a long time that feeling is back. All the activity around the "blog, wiki and RSS space" has that same feeling of enormous potential.