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Increasing Your Blog Readership Using FeedBurner and Email Signatures

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Internet | 18 Comments

I agree with Robert Cringely, FeedBurner is going places.

I called FeedBurner today to ask about some solutions to support corporate blogging and spoke with Jake Parrillo from the Business Development Team.  We drifted to talking about blogs in general and about ways to generate traffic to a blog.  He told me about a free FeedBurner service called Headline Animator, which according to FeedBurner allows you to:

Create and customize an animated banner that cycles through your feed’s five most recent items. It’s an easy way to promote your content anywhere you can place a snippet of HTML.

The result will look similar to this:

 

 

Jake told me that he uses the Headline Animator to spread the word about his blog by including the banner in his email signature.  Outstanding!  He says it’s really helped to increase readership.

Email signatures are just one idea; you can of course place the banner anywhere.

Setting it up is really easy.  (See the Headline Animator Overview and FAQ for more details):

1. Set up a FeedBurner account
2. Burn your RSS feed
3. Click on the Publicize tab
4. Click Headline Animator
5. Configure the theme (controls the size and colors of the banner; there’s an “Email Signature” theme) and the Title
6. Click Activate
7. Copy the resulting snippet of HTML and paste it anywhere you like.

I just configured a Headline Animator banner for my blog’s RSS feed and included it in my Yahoo email account’s signature.

Thanks Jake!!

p.s.  Too bad there haven’t been too many tech IPOs lately, I’d love to get in on this one.

Windows Home Server Will Achieve Limited Adoption

Posted on February 20, 2007
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Internet | 5 Comments

I don’t believe that Microsoft’s recently announced Windows Home Server (WHS) product will achieve wide adoption among the product’s target audience. Announced by Bill Gates at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January,

Windows Home Server will help families with multiple PCs connect their home computers, digital devices and printers, in order to easily store, protect and share their treasured photos, music, videos and documents. By automatically backing up home PCs, centralizing a family’s digital “stuff” and allowing access to it away from home, Windows Home Server will help simplify and enhance family life.

I expect the product to see great uptake among technology enthusiasts but I don’t think it will be pervasive with the typical Internet family. Reasons include:

• People don’t think of themselves as running support operations. (Credit for this bullet comes from colleague and friend The Derf.) When it comes to people’s computers, they just want them to work and they expect their data to be safe. Unlike things like printers and scanners (and even WiFi) which provide direct and obvious utility, WHS is a pure infrastructure device and therefore won’t be recognized as essential.
• For PC and consumer electronics products to be widely adopted I believe they must either fill an obvious gap (I don’t think the gap is obvious here since most people don’t think about things like backup) or they must significantly improve the user experience. For example, WiFi allows you to sit out on the deck and browse the Internet. Photo printers give you the instant gratification of passing around just-taken digital photos. So what about appliances that backup PCs? Wait, doesn’t that just happen automatically*?

Paul Thurrott covers the product and states Microsoft’s objectives towards ease of use in his preview of WHS at the SuperSite for Windows. It’s an interesting opposing view.

* Microsoft seems to recognize how important (and generally missing) consumer PC backups are.  (Backup is a primary function of WHS). As such, I’d like to see Microsoft implement an Internet-based backup offering as part of Windows Live OneCare which could be integrated with Windows Vista and XP. I think Vista should present users with an in-your-face prompt to back up their data to OneCare following new PC setup.  Including this functionality in Vista could spread the protection of PC backup to the 90 million+ units of Vista that IDC estimates will ship in 2007.  Note:  If you are interested in Internet-based backup for your Windows machine today, check out Mozy and Carbonite, which are very good and inexpensive.  The Webware blog has a post on some other services as well.

IE Unfriendly

Posted on February 19, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 4 Comments

My blog doesn’t render properly in Internet Explorer 7. I’m using the Vertigo theme by Brian Gardner. His Vertigo demo page renders perfectly in IE 7 so I may have introduced a problem when I was customizing the page templates. According to Google Analytics, 64.52% of you aren’t seeing the problem. :) (It’s actually 71% since 18% of the IE users are running IE 6.)

My Reading List

Posted on February 2, 2007
Filed Under Books, Personal | 1 Comment

I’ve added a Reading List section to my blog, representing a partial list of the books I’ve read. Specific mentions include:

• Confessions of a Street Addict  - Jim Cramer is great whether you have an interest in the market or not. This book describes how he got to where he is. I get a kick out of Mad Money.
• The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time  - A fascinating look at the history of Google. An easy read.
• Jack: Straight from the Gut- Jack Welch is a business legend. A very interesting account of Jack and GE.
• Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity- Long title, but outstanding book. It’s a bunch of essays written by Joel Spolsky about the business and technology of software. Possibly the best insight into the world of software and programming that I’ve read.
• Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions- A great true story about 6 MIT students who made a killing in Vegas Blackjack using a system they developed.
• How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle - How the World’s Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers- A fun read about the interview process for software developers historically used at Microsoft.

I added the Reading List link to the blog header line:

 

I’ll be adding to the list over time, so be sure to check back.

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Defining the Undefinable

Posted on February 1, 2007
Filed Under Corporate IT | 6 Comments

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 are two concepts that have gotten an incredible amount of press in the past year, both in IT industry media and corporate IT.  Part fact, part hype, part buzz, part reality, part theme, part meme, part concept and part tangible, these two terms share one important attribute:

They are very difficult to define.

If you ask 10 different people to define SOA or Web 2.0, you will get 10 different answers.  For the most part, all of the answers will be right, and all will be wrong.

For corporate IT shops (and Marketing and Advertising and other departments who might touch the Web 2.0 concept), I posit that you shouldn’t spend time ‘figuring out’ the definitions of these terms.  That approach won’t scale – different groups within the organization will end up with very different (and often orthogonal) interpretations. 

Rather, I suggest that organizations educate themselves as much as possible on these concepts and then:

Define what they mean to your organization.

These definitions should be developed internally (IT is the best candidate to spearhead) and then evangelized horizontally, across the organization.  In the case of SOA, this is important because it is an overarching concept, with integration and sharing at the very heart of the idea (at least in my definition)  :).  It’s very difficult to build an effective SOA without the organization having a unified view.  In the case of Web 2.0, its possible touchpoints extend across IT, marketing, product development and other business areas, making a common definition important as well. 

Once these terms are defined, the business can build their Web 2.0 strategies and IT can design their SOAs.  By marching in lockstep with your cross-departmental peers, your organization can best take advantage of these powerful yet vague terms.