I'm excited to unveil my latest consulting project, a fairly extensive RSS-based microsite put together with Sun Microsystems for next week's JavaOne conference. It's called BlogCentral. Turns out today is international RSS Awareness Day! This might have been a better fit for Enterprise RSS Awareness Day last week, but that's ok.

I don't often blog about particular consulting projects because most of the work I do is with pre-launch companies or for internal use only, but consulting is what I spend one to two thirds of my day doing after I finish blogging at ReadWriteWeb.

The Project

After building out a collection of RSS feeds that attendees could use to track the DEMO conference in January, I was approached by Sun about helping build a blog coverage microsite to track discussion of their giant JavaOne conference that starts next week.

This is an example of one end of the RSS spectrum, most use cases are far simpler - so don't be scared!

JavaOne is a huge conference where scores of attendees will be blogging about a wide variety of Sun products and announcements. I worked with Sun to create a page called BlogCentral (hopefully to be moved to sun.com/blogcentral by conference time!) that aggregates all the latest and the most popular blog posts about the conference and 15 particular Sun projects and products. It's like a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what's being written about at JavaOne.

How We Did It

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I was honored to be interviewed by Dave Winer today in a 20 minute podcast about the service FriendFeed and other RSS applications. Winer helped birth a wide range of technologies like RSS, podcasting and OPML (bundles of RSS feeds that you import and export from feed readers). He's a tech hero and I don't know what my life would be like without his work.

Read on for a Flash audio player and links that we discussed.
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I'll be giving a one hour presentation on using RSS for your business today at the Open Technology Business Center in Beaverton, Oregon and the organization broadcasts all its presentations in live video via UStream. Update: Notes below, above the book stuff. Will post video when avail. Presentation time is 12 noon PST. Embedded below is the player, I hope you'll consider stopping by for a visit. I'll share some thoughts on what I consider to be one of the most important technologies on the web for communication and I'd love your feedback. Live chat is enabled at this page. Though the talk is aimed primarily at businesses, if nonprofit readers here are able to ignore the parts about using RSS to grind up flowers and fairies for profit, there should be some information of interest to you as well.

Here's part 1, the action starts a little bit in and there's more advanced stuff in parts two and three. Brief notes for the whole talk are below.

Coincidentally, I'm also working on a book proposal for a publisher interested in a work concerning RSS. The original title was "RSS for Power Users" but the number 1 bit of feedback I've gotten is that the title has to change! Otherwise, feedback so far has been on balance good. Below is that proposal, just pasted in as I'm on the run, but I'd love your feedback too in comments. Thanks for stopping by!
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I've agree to participate in a launch event for the desktop video conferencing service Oovoo on Monday. If you're interested in meeting, perhaps discussing a thing or two briefly, I'd love it if you'd join me. Sign up and download of the Mac client is at MyOovooday.com. There's a charity angle and it should be fun. Why would you use a desktop app to do live video chat? Privacy and file transfer are reasons I've thought of.

Ooovoo is pretty nice, and I might end up using it in some situations - but I'm not sure. Come check it out with me if you'd like to and we'll have a chance to say hello. Limited spaces are available and I don't know how the whole plan is going to work. To be honest, the marketing here seems too involved for me but whatever. Let's get out of it what we can, and when you're talking about seeing each others' faces and hearing each others' voices - that can be a lot.

I wrote this post on ReadWriteWeb for Marshallk.com originally as it had been such a long time since I last posted here, but I showed the screencast I made for it to Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb and he asked me to post it there instead. I was happy to do so, but do want to point it out to readers here. I post a lot at RWW but I think this one will be of particular interest to readers here.

The highlights of the post are the link to this Wired article about the economy of screen scraping (great article) and this screencast about how to use Dapper that I finally recorded.

These types of tools are things I use often in my consulting work. They are really exciting and worth a close examination by anyone who reads this blog.

I had an opportunity to comment today on the question of how a company ought to respond to bloggers who have damaged their reputation. Below are my thoughts. I'd love to read yours, too.

The best thing that companies can do in response to bloggers who have done their reputation harm is to take the bloggers' complaints as seriously as is appropriate. Readers will determine the validity of blogger criticism for themselves, but if the criticism is valid then there's no hiding from it any more. It's best to be publicly responsive, on the critical blogs and on a blog of your own if you're that concerned about it. You may need to change your practices, just like you'd have to if a journalist in the traditional press criticized you in a way that you take seriously.

You may have to just agree to disagree. That's ok. It's good to presume that all parties involved are adults.

One way or the other, if you can engage and win over bloggers with honest communication then you'll become the darling of the blogosphere among your competitors and you'll be in a better place than you were before any of it ever happened. Imagine it's the dawn of cable TV and a young CNN criticizes you publicly. Are you going to say that no one consumes that media so it's not significant or are you going to try to trick CNN into believing you've changed your practices when you haven't? Probably not. You can act with the benefit of hindsight today since this isn't the first time that media has expanded dramatically to include new voices.

I just listened to the most amazing podcast about the future of the web and semantic analysis. It was an interview with BYU Phd student Yihong Ding, a researcher in what my ReadWriteWeb co-author Alex Iskold calls "the top-down semantic web." The first 15 minutes of the hour long show are about Yihong Ding's personal background, the next 15 about his research and the last 30 about his very compelling view of the future.

This interview shows just how much untapped potential remains in the world of web applications. Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there's a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights.

Download MP3 [50 mins, 23Mb]

Ding's research combines the application of a manually supplied ontology (set of terms with connections for meaning), automated analysis of the structure of a web page (what's in h2 tags? that's probably a section title) and learned meaning after repeated application of the above and correction by the user. It's fascinating and a prototype should be available in the first half of next year. I hope to get an early look at it so I can write about it on ReadWriteWeb just before public launch.

The vision of the future described in the interview is beautiful. It's one of the most clear explanations of the semantic web and what some people call web 3.0 that I've heard yet. I'm just starting to dive deep into this, so forgive any excess enthusiasm, but I'm telling you - it's good stuff.

Ding's vision of a future web not of sites and pages but of "educated agents of meaning" (smart software applications is what I'm seeing), driven by human beings to serve our needs, is a really interesting one.

His conclusion makes me think of Google Custom Search, Lijit (which I must spend some time with) and I don't know what else. It's got me on fire, though.

I found the interview through a path you might find of interest. It was highlighted in the blog of Talis, a vendor in the semantic space, in their This Weeks Semantic Web round up. It's a very rich resource, not to mention a great marketing asset for the company. I found that via the blog of semantic web rock star Danny Ayers. I was reminded of Ayers' blog and have picked it back up with a renewed interest after seeing it in a list of 60+ Semantic Web Blogs at Semantic Focus, a fascinating looking group blog where, co-incidentally interview subject Yihong Ding is a regular contributor. So we come full circle and have found a whole lot of valuable resources along the way.

I've been asking PR people lately to send me an OPML file of their clients' blog feeds. One person sent me a list of links to their clients' blogs in an email tonight, but other than that no one has been brave enough to try. This is something that everyone could benefit from knowing how to do. That big blue icon is the proposed icon for OPML, which stands for Outline Processor Markup Language (stay with me here, non technical people!).

An OPML file is an outline. In this case, it's a bundle of RSS feeds that can be moved into and out of any RSS reader as a group. No matter what RSS reader you use, it can import and export OPML files. It's real handy. If PR people, for example, would send me one OPML file of all their clients' blogs and a news search feed for each of those clients' company names - I would throw it into my reader and have a long term connection with all their news. It would build name recognition if nothing else, but I'd likely find something in there someday to write about too. There's a billion other reasons to use OPML - just ask yourself in what circumstances you can imagine sending someone else one link or file that contains a collection of dynamic sources on any topic. I know these are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night.

Here's how you do it...
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I've been an outspoken advocate of OpenID implementation for some time. It's a real joy when I go to a new website and can use an existing account I have with a trusted vendor to start personalizing my experience on the new site immediately. I'm happy to return to the site later because I know I'll remember my username and password!

The following are some thoughts and opinions on the subject that I've been wanting to share publicly. I've been sharing them with consulting clients but I want to broaden the conversation and give the real experts in this field a chance to respond. Through casual but consistent observation of the OpenID landscape, things look like a real mess. It's discouraging and I've got some ideas for how it could be made better. Hopefully we'll get some comments here from Scott Kveton, Chris Messina, Kevin Fox and others. To read some thoughts both pro and con on OpenID, check out this critical post on Lifehacker. Update: Two weeks after this post, OpenID 2.0 is ready to launch and I've written a long, very critical post on Read/WriteWeb.

Reducing friction in the account creation process is very important. OpenID support could be a great way accomplish this, but almost no one is doing it right. Most sites you see that offer OpenID support have little more than a field to enter your OpenID URL and maybe a link explaining what it is. This is almost worthless and our standards need to be raised beyond the point that this is all it takes for OpenID advocates to applaud a website.
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I had a great time this afternoon doing an hour long consulting session with some young European entrepreneurs who were considering adding a social network to a popular local niche content site they had recently acquired. I advised them not to do so, but that advice was tongue in cheek.

I suggested that instead of adding a social network to their site, they should just add rich user profile pages, site-mail (user-to-user messaging) and the ability for users to track each other's content. Add personal publishing to this list (their site already offered this) and what have you got? All the useful traits of a social network, without the Yet Another Social Network baggage.

Social networks have caught on for a reason - they offer functionality that's very useful for a lot of people in many different communities of interest. That said, everyone is wary of copy-cat, roach-motel, me-too social networks. Why not have your cake and eat it too? By framing the extension of your existing site as just that, an extension of your existing users' profile capabilities, instead of as a social network launch - you can make everyone happy and maintain your dignity.
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