Micro Persuasion

Making Gmail Your Gateway to the Web

Photo Credit: Adapted from Gateway Arch by docdevore

For the past five years my browser home page has been set to either Google.com or iGoogle. (I briefly flirted with the New York Times as my default but have integrated their feeds everywhere else.) This week I switched it to Gmail. With all of the features they have been adding lately, particularly through their Labs, Gmail is unquestionably my virtual Swiss Army Knife. It is not only my communications hub. It is my knowledge base and to some degree my feed reader. Some say it is becoming an enterprise dashboard - it is. It is my gateway to the web. (Note they added themes today!)

In this post I outline some recent ways I have tweaked my Gmail Personal Nerve Center by connecting Gmail with other web services. (Other posts on Gmail are here.)

Search the Web from Gmail

Gmail's search capabilities are top-notch. It's a big reason why I store tons of articles, factoids and even documents there. However, it's easy to miss the little button that says "Search the Web." These days I begin most of my web queries from Gmail. I even get a head start using their advanced keywords. (For example I type in new york weather when I want to know what the temperature is.) This will become even more useful once Gmail adds its SMS features later this month. Once that's back up you should be able to use it with Google SMS and get back search results via IM.

Update and Track Your Social Networks via IM

I am slowly in the process of trying to shift more of my communications out of email towards social software and IM. (More on this topic soon.) Still, I want an easily accessible record of all of these streams. So I am using Gmail much of the time to post to these services and also receive updates.

If you set up Ping.fm you can update all the major social networks via Gmail Chat. I post to Twitter via Ping.fm. I receive back replies by subscribing to a Twitter search feed for @steverubel via IM via notify.me. In addition, I receive Facebook alerts also by running my feed through notify.me. You can find your Facebook feed here. (You can also IM Friendfeed and Yammer directly and receive updates back from them too, which I do.)

Subscribe to High Priority Feeds and Alerts

I love Google Reader but I also like to be able to subscribe to some of my feeds via Gmail so that they are archived in a single place online and offline (via IMAP). However, I want to make this easily managed. So, I put all of my high priority feeds in Google Reader into a folder, make this folder public and then subscribe to the feed in Newsgator Online. Newsgator offers POP delivery so I have Gmail automatically fetch this account, scoop up the feeds, filter/archive them and tag them with the label "Feeds."

Track the Day's News with Gmail Clips

I am a news junkie and like to stay in the know. Gmail makes this a snap with Gmail Web Clips. I have pretty much standardized on the New York Times as my source of choice. In addition, I like to be able to track Techmeme too as well as all the news on the Presidential transition. So I have added a bunch of feeds to Clips including one from the awesome Times Topics site that stream into Gmail via a nice handy little news ticker.

Use Gmail as a Writing Tool

Sometimes writing can be intimidating, but it doesn't need to be. I like to start my writing in Gmail and then move it into other services where I can do more. For example, I wrote this blog post in Gmail and then sent it directly to TypePad. I also start documents here and then email them into Google Docs for additional tweaking (eg word counts, etc.). Finally I have a huge swipe file of articles and ideas stored in Gmail for inspiration and reference (for more on this concept see this great post from Write to Done). LifeClever offers some more thoughts here on using email for writing. See my other Gmail posts for how to use the service for storing ideas.

Build Links in Gmail to All Your Other Services

Finally, last but not least, when I do need to access other services they are all a click away in Gmail. I have added the Google Calendar and Google Docs gadgets to my sidebar. I store my To Do List in Google Docs so it's usually the top item in the gadget. In addition, I store my bookmarks in Gmail by exporting them to HTML and sending the page to myself using Ubiquity, which I pull up using Gmail Quick Links. Also, the links at the top of the page put me a click away to secure https versions of some of Google's other big services.

I keep adding to my system as Google rolls out features, but to me Gmail is my gateway to the web and the one web site I could never be without. Gmail turns five in the spring and I amazed how they continue to make it even more awesome once you start to really tweak it to your needs.

Tabbloid Turns Feeds into a Personal Magazine

I actually found this one through an Adwords link in my Gmail and it's a gem.

Tabbloid is a "hatchling" project from Hewlett-Packard that turns your favorite feeds into a personal magazine (HP's personal systems group is an Edelman client). All you need to do is point it at one or more feeds and set up a delivery time and you will get a nicely formatted PDF by email. You can also generate a PDF on the fly from one or more feeds.

Below is what a sample magazine issue looks like. I simply pointed Tabbloid at my favorite feeds from Google Reader and generated this PDF.

Google Reader Adds Attention Statistics

Google Reader added some additional per feed statistics that help you measure where your attention goes. If you click on details for each feed Google tells you the number of subscribers, posts per week and the update time. These were there before. However, they now also offer a chart that shows you how many items you read per feed. (via Hutch Carpenter on Friendfeed)

I've Seen the Future of News, It's the Newsfeed

In the last week or so I talked about three trends: 1) social media is speeding up, 2) that the attention crash (and not just the financial crash) is being felt by more of us and 3) that the newsfeed - more so than RSS - is the future of syndicated content.

This last emerging trend is important and it's connected to the other two. Newsfeeds can solve the attention crash. Further, they are built for speed.

My post on Forrester's RSS study generated quite a bit of commentary. I believe in the data. RSS has peaked. Yes, there are lots of people who use iGoogle who don't need to know what RSS is and start pages are growing. However, I believe that social network newsfeeds will become more a more prominent delivery channel over time.

Newsfeeds elegantly combine peers and pros, algorithms and networks. They know no bounaries. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb agrees. This is why social networks will become the primary theater for PR in five years time.

Here's a great example of where this is going. If you haven't seen it, BreakingNewsOn is a great resource on Twitter. It's always the first to break big stories. It was useful on Twitter, but now it's even better because they're on Friendfeed and I can see what other people think through likes and comments.

As I write this, minutes ago a campus shooting has unfolded at Western Kentucky University. Note how the commentary is aggregating around the post and in the screen grab below. That's the future of news. It's real-time, collaborative and in this case it's in my Friendfeed stream.

What's interesting here is that the freshest story isn't always at the top. In fact, it's often the one that generated the most recent activity from the community (comments/likes in this case). That's an entirely different model than one that any news site uses. They organize around importance. Blogs, on the other hand, go in reverse chronological order. This is different.

The newsfeed metaphor synergizes commentary, activity, relevance and timleiness and that's why it's the beginning of a new era in news.

RSS Adoption at 11% and it May Be Peaking, Forrester Says

Forrester Research today published a new report on the state of RSS. In short, while there are bright spots, it does not paint the picture of a technology that's going mainstream anytime soon.

On a positive note, the resarch entitled What's Holding RSS Back?, says that nearly half of marketers have moved to add feeds to their web sites. Further, RSS adoption among consumers is at 11% up from just 2% of users three years ago. RSS feeds usage is more dominant among men.

Here's the kicker, though. That might be all she wrote for RSS' growth track.

According to the research, of the 89% of those who don't use feeds only 17% say they're interested in using them. In fact Forrester spends much of the report helping marketers better explain the benefits of RSS to their customers. "Unless marketers make a move to hook them — and try to convert their apathetic counterparts — RSS will never be more than a niche technology," the analysts (who include Jeremiah Owyang) wrote.

Lord knows, as someone who spends three hours a day in Google Reader, I am a giant evangelist for RSS. But I am also a realist. Feeds are way way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve. So I think RSS has peaked.

Still, while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehichles that bring content you care about to you. In each case, you're total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you.

RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.

Build a Real-Time News Ticker with Friendfeed

I have written before about how to use Friendfeed's powerful imaginary friends feature as an aggregator. Now that they have real-time updating and lists, you can actually combine these to build a handy desktop news ticker.

First, create a bunch of imaginary friends for the different news sources you want to follow. Assign each to a relevant Twitter profile. For example, I have three imaginary friends: The New York Times (Twitter), Techmeme Firehose (on Twitter) and Breaking News (on Twitter).

Next, add these to a special Friendfeed list. I rolled them up in a list called News.

Now click on the real-time link on this list page, open the mini window and bingo. You can also bookmark it so that it runs in your Firefox sidebar. Here's the result.

Three Ways to Rock the New iGoogle

Google earlier this week rolled out a significant upgrade to iGoogle, its popular personalized home page/widget webtop. The "Canvas View" update has been praised but it's also been equally panned by lots of people. Lifehacker is running a poll that has 55% of readers giving it a Bronx Cheer while 45% like it.

I have mixed feelings about it. The left side tab does take up a lot of real estate on my screen, which isn't that wide. (I have a MacBook Air running 1280x800). Also the Gmail application is very buggy. Links don't work and the ability to use rich text formatting is now gone. Users are irate. These seem easily remedied.

It's also worth noting that Google has yet to activate the Open Social community features - which are stil in the developer sandbox. Once they do, iGoogle will by default become one of the biggest social networks in the world. Keep an eye out for that.

What iGoogle does have going for it though are full-screen widgets (which they still for some reason call gadgets). A lot of these are powered by and integrated with Google Reader. Here are three ways I am using it so far and I have noticed using PageAddict that my time spent with the site is rising significantly. This is something that will make page views extinct.

Subscribe to the Best of Friendfeed and Reshare Items with Your Followers

I love Friendfeed but it's a bit too hard for me to follow it the way I really would like to. So I subscribe to my personal "best" of day feed on my IGoogle page. What's great is that under the Canvas View feeds like these have the same features that Google Reader has. So, if I hit share at the bottom, I can easily re-syndicate these items back into Friendfeed. I wish I could add notes the way I can in Google Reader. Hopefully they will add that feature.

Use iGoogle as a Google Notebook Scratch Pad

During the day I need to take lots of notes. I am in the process of moving most of my computing to the cloud. The only desktop apps I still use are Office 2008, primarily PowerPoint and Entourage  (Microsoft MacBU is an Edelman client). Everything else is in the cloud, including all my notes. All of my these get funneled into GMail eventually, but they often start in Google Notebook.

By adding the Google Notebook widget to iGoogle and maximizing it full screen, I have found it to be an awesome scratch pad for meeting notes. I can tag entries, export them later to Google Docs an then email these into GMail. Further, If I need to reference my Google Reader or Gmail, it's right there on the same page. In fact, I used it to start writing this blog post.

Add Google Suggest with iSuggest

I am addicted to Google Suggest. It's amazing way to discover searches that are relevant to yours. Google recenty added it to the main Google interface, but for some reason they forgot iGoogle. Add the iSuggest widget to iGoogle and minimize it and you'll enjoy the same functionality while waiting for Google engineering teams to become a bit more synchronized.

Next I am going to start exploring the Netvibes Universe for widgets that incorporate additional functionality, like adding Facebook to iGoogle.

The End of the RSS Full Text Free Ride

If had to pick a single technology that changed my life the most this decade it would be RSS. Phones and computers evolve, surely. However feeds, which I started reading in 2003, were a total game changer. Today I read almost 600 of them. In fact I view my entire reading list as a competitive weapon that allows me to help my company and our clients stay head of the curve.

There are two kinds of RSS feeds - full text and summary feeds. This is a topic that's often debated. Many bloggers syndicate the full text of their posts. In some cases, they monetize them by running ads in the feed. Other bloggers are happy to give away their content sans ads to build thought leadership.

Almost every large media outlet, on the other hand, only offers partial text feeds - also with ads. The reason is they want to monetize your eyeballs twice. They get you with one ad impression in the feed itself and then go for even more if/when you click through to read stories.

In the midst of a massive global downturn I suspect that many advertising-supported bloggers will follow in the footsteps of the larger media outlets and pull their full-text feeds. While none of the big tech blogs has done so just yet, the signs are there that they're perhaps feeling pressure.

Take a look at these screen captures from two great blogs in my Google Reader stream. The first one, from CyberNet News, features a giant banner ad at the top of the feed. For a long time ads in feeds, generally speaking, were really small and unobtrusive - no more. The image on the the bottom, from Googling Google, is a sponsored post that appears in the feed.

If online advertising should continue to shrink, RSS ads - which have not been exactly been a big winner - will get cut. And this will lead more ad-supported bloggers to start going the way of partial text feeds. Some, however, will recognize that remaining with full text feeds has its advantages. Further, they might be fearful of alienating their readers as other emerging voices happily offer the same news via a full text format.

I would also keep an eye on corporate bloggers. They almost always syndicate full text and have little to gain from traffic. Full text can build their brands. If corporations continue to become digital curators - which is happening - then they may use full text feeds to compete for attention.

Page Rank is the Ultimate Measure of Online Influence

Friends, Romans, countrymen, followers, page views, in-bound links, share of voice, unique visitors and subscribers. These are just some of the more common ways serious content creators (and those who hope to reach them) measure online influence. However there are big flaws in all of these metrics.

Followers and/or RSS subscribers are nice to count. But given the Attention Crash, it's a good bet that many of these people aren't as engaged with your content as you might hope. For example, I follow several hundred people on Friendfeed but I only see a fraction of their stuff because I don't have time to actively read or even scan.

Unique visitors and page views - which I said was dying back in 2006 and is dead as far as I am concerned - are also largely empty numbers. Lots of people visit my blog. However, many of them arrive via Google, the web's version of Ellis Island. And then they're gone.

After thinking about this a lot I have reached the conclusion that Google Page Rank is the ultimate way to measure online influence. It's far from perfect. However, several other metric candidates I addressed in February 2007 haven't panned out. There are three reasons why Google Page Rank rules.

1) Page Rank is something you earn by producing high quality content that people link to - or what John Bell describes as socially connected

2) It enables you to influence people on the Internet's biggest stage - Google - and just as people are searching for the topics you are knowledgeable about. This means it amplifies your influence because the press start at search engines when researching stories

3) Finally, Page Rank is channel agnostic and takes the entire online ecosystem into account. It judges you based on links from all kinds of sources, not just people who live in the same fish tank. In other words, it goes beyond people who hang out on Twitter who love people who Tweet or bloggers who link to other bloggers, etc. It eschews the echo chamber

PageRank takes time to earn. There are no shortcuts. Google is democratic and rewards professionals and amateurs equally if they do their job well. Create high quality content that earns links from other quality sources and, over time, your Google Page Rank grows as does your influence and responsibility.

(Yes, I did say responsibility. My blog has a Page Rank of 7. If I were to actively blog about Edelman's clients, it could alter Google results and thus their reputation. That wouldn't be ethical now would it?)

Many bloggers monitor their Google Page Rank. The AdAge Power 150 and the Healthcare 100 lists allow you to sort bloggers this way. But Page Rank influence is not limited to blogs.

Did you know that individual identities on social networks like Friendfeed and Twitter have Page Ranks that are independent of the main site itself? Its; true. Someone new on Twitter has a Page Rank of zero. While those who have been on the site longer have a higher rank. The same goes for Friendfeed where I have a Page Rank of 4 but Robert Scoble has a 6.

It would be interesting to take lists like the Twitterholic 100 or the FFHolic 100, both of which rank influencers based on followers, and run them through a Page Rank checker. While followers and Page Rank are probably linked I wonder if some interesting anomalies might pop up in the process. (If you want to check the Page Rank for any site you can use this bookmarket. However, note that results can vary based on the tool you use to check.)

Until someone comes up with a better metric, Page Rank to me is the ultimate measure of online influence. Do you agree?

Recession Proof Your Job with Web Based Tools

The economy is the story of the year. And although Congress is poised to pass a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry, we're not out of the woods. Many feel that a deep global recession is imminent. This means there will be layoffs - perhaps lots of them. To protect your job, you need to ensure that you are personally accountable and adding value every day.

Social software and web applications, if applied correctly, are sharp arrows in your quiver. They can also become massive distractions. Here are three techniques using web tools that can help you become more personally accountable in your career.

Track Your Browser Time with PageAddict

Time and attention are finite resources that must be harnessed properly if you want to succeed. Nevertheless, this is not simple in the connected age. Given that many of us work in Internet-related fields, it's easy (and some would argue quite valuable) to spend the entire day in your email inbox or on Friendfeed or Twitter. Problem is, you may not accomplish a thing.

Like my friends Paul Stamatiou and Kevin C. Tofel I spend the vast majority of my computing time "in the cloud." This means my browser, Firefox, is used more than any other application. But recently I have started using PageAddict, a free Firefox extension, to collect data on my Internet usage and I have found it invaluable.

PageAddict monitors the sites you visit and logs your time. You can then tag them into categories. All the data is stored locally on your computer. A similar tool that people love is called RescueTime. However, given that I spend a ton of time in my browser I have found PageAddict more than adequate for my needs.

Above is a screenshot from PageAddict that shows where my time was spent over the last two weeks. Email includes my corporate web-mail and GMail. Soc Nets includes Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter. While docs covers Google Docs, which I use to write, and Google Spreadsheets, which I use for GTD, goals, projects and ideas.

As you can see almost all of my time online is work related. Still I can see that I need to shrink my social network usage a little bit and increase my time with documents, web applications while also keeping RSS contained. I also need to go through the undefined section to see if there are big groups of sites that can be tagged.

Wrangle RSS

Many of us are RSS addicts. ReadWriteWeb recently did a great job showing how blog reading can help you grow in your career. This has certainly has been true for me and it's why I read 568 feeds, tag much of what I unearth there, file it in Gmail and share it liberally.

Still, as great as RSS is, it can eat your time. I have worked over the last couple of years to a) shift most of my reading to the early mornings or evenings when I have time to really ponder the content and b) use RSS as a knowledge management hub for information that others can use, including you, my colleagues and clients.

Google Reader Trends gives you the data you need to track this over time. You can see how many items you have read, what day/time you consume feeds as well as how many items you have shared. It also shows you the feeds you read the most, even via a mobile device - this is something even RescueTime or PageAddict can't track. Analyze the data and make sure it's aligned with your goals. Below is a screenshot from my reader.

Track All Your Time via a Web Calendar or Online Spreadsheet

In my field we all track our time. In some cases this is how we know what to bill clients for our time. In others, it's to ensure that we aren't over-servicing accounts. However, if you don't have to track your time I highly recommend it since it's a great way to ensure that you are focused and delivering value.

I have been using Google Calendar to track my time. I set up a calendar just for this purpose and use it to log when I start/completed a task. Then I transfer this data to our enterprise-wide time tracking tool. What I like about using GCal is that I can search my time or go back to a specific date to see what I did when. I also use bookmarklets to speed up the logging of my time.

As a next step I may move this to Google Spreadsheets or Zoho since I can generate charts to see where my time is being spent. I also want to think about how to synchronize my logs with PageAddict.

Bonus Tip: Create a Motivation Wall with Picasa or Flickr

This tip isn't really about measurement, but it's a little web app hack that I use to motivate myself. Using Picasa Web Albums I set up a private album called "The Motivation Wall." On the wall I collect images of people - some living, some dead - who achieved greatness. I try to hit this site every so often because I know it will inspire me to do the same.

In the screenshot above you will find some of my heroes - Michael Jordan taking the final shot to seal victory in the 1998 NBA Finals, Michael Phelps winning his seventh gold by a hundredth of a second and Ben Franklin (a tinkerer like me) discovering electricity.

Additional links of note...

23 Personal Tools to Learn More About Yourself

Bytes of Life : For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track

Make Magic with Metadata in Gmail

Personal knowledge management is becoming one of the most critical skills that information workers like journalists, marketers and PR pros need to succeed today. Specifically, I am talking about the efficient collecting, processing and weeding of massive amounts of data. In this post I want to offer tips on how to take full advantage of tagging information in Gmail. (I have covered Gmail previously in this context in three separate installments.)

Gmail is not just an email client, but a rich, searchable database. Think of it as a data mining system. The more data that you allow to flow into Gmail, the more you'll get out of it - if it's organized.  Even better all of this information is available across any device and even offline using IMAP. As much as I like Evernote, it's lack of offline notes on the iPhone made it a deal killer for me. Plus I already live in Gmail so it was easy to stick wit it.

GMail has labels, which are essentially tags, but they're unwieldy. You need to constantly manage them if you store a lot of info. It's a pain. I prefer to tag on the fly. And using GMail's unlimited plus addressing and filtering capabilities, you can. Here's how.

First, set up a filter in GMail so that all mail from the prefix of your email address to that prefix is auto-archived and marked as read. In my case this means mail from steverubel to steverubel. This will ensure that the emails do not show up in your inbox.

Next, as I find information I want to collect, I email it to myself using Ubiquity, a new extension for Firefox (Google Toolbar offers a similar email capability). However, instead of emailing it to just my regular email address I add a tag to the prefix by tacking a word on to the address with a plus symbol. To add multiple tags I send the message to multiple plus addresses all at once.

For example, Nielsen just published some interesting data about health and social networking. I know I might need this later so I select the article and invoke my email command in Ubiquity and send the message to both steverubel+health@gmail.com and steverubel+socialnetworking@gmail.com. The article never hits my inbox. It gets autoarchived where I can get it later.

Now if I want to find everything I have tagged under health and social networking, all I need to do is search for to:+health or to:+socialnetworking and bingo, the article turns up.

Finally, you need to make your tags easily accessible. Searching for these keywords every time is a pain. The solution is to use GMail Quick Links. For tags I access regularly I pull up the search in GMail and either bookmark them in my browser or add them as a Quick Link in GMail. (Note you need to enable Gmail Labs first in the settings.)

That's all there is to it. Next up I plan to couple this technique with Google Alerts and Newsgator's POP3 capabilities, which comes free with Newsgator Online, and GMail fetching to add have news and RSS flow into GMail that matches certain conditions I set up in advance and have them autotagged.

It's Time for the News Aggregators to Come Clean

Correction appended about Yahoo's operations 9/12/08

A news story from 2002 about United Airlines filing for bankruptcy tripped up investors yesterday when it re-appeared on Google News, Barry Schwartz reports. The Google News team follows with their own explanation. However, the entire issue raises the lack of transparency that permeates the major news aggregation sites. It's time for them all to come clean.

According to Reuters consumers are increasingly turning to news aggregation sites for their info fix because of the growth of the mobile web and an appetite for broad perspectives. These sites, which include Google News, Yahoo News, Topix and Daylife, differ from RSS readers. Feed readers also roll up news but they put the user in complete control of the sources they consume.

News aggregation sites operate without editors. So, they're prone to the occasional glitches like the one that occurred yesterday. The problems are deeper, however. Most of these sites also roll up blog content and they don't tell you that. Yahoo just recently quietly started to link to blogs. Google is doing the same.

The problem is that these sites don't delineate blogs from news sources. On the one hand, that's terrific news. I have long said that there's no such thing as social media - it's all just media. However, on the flip side, as we all know the quality can range here and that presents a challenge for the reader in determining who to trust. Transparency can help.

Although this specific incident with United Airlines did not involve blogs, it underscores the lack of transparency that permeates these sites. They are doing everyone a disservice by not providing detailed information on how they crawl, who they chose to crawl and why they roll up some sites and ignore others. Give us information to help us make choices on who to trust.

--

Correction:: Yahoo has a team of 24+ editors based largely in Santa Monica, CA as well as some in satellite offices in New York City, Chicago, and Sunnyvale, CA. So technically, they aren't a news aggregator in this context. Further, they do clearly delineate news from blogs when linking to them.

Lifestream Links

Over the last few months I have been blogging a lot less than I really would like to. I have so much I want to say here and often so little time to write thoughtful essays. There are weeks I get on blogging kick. Last week was one. Then there are times where it's nearly impossible to bang out quality posts with meetings, travel and client work.

That said, I am very active online every day and especially generous in sharing links on Twitter and Friendfeed - even when all I am toting is my iPhone. So if you're not subscribed to my lifestream feed, you might want switch to since that's where I am putting all the good stuff. Here's a sample from tonight ...

• Quarkbase is an interesting site that aims to tell you "everything about a web site." So far most of the data they offer is available elsewhere. However the presentation is amazing
• Twitter Grader offers rich data on Twitter users by handle and ranks them. Fun for egos everywhere
• ABC News' 20/20 this week looks at what people search for - porn and celebrities
• Facebook gets closer to Friendfeed with the addition of a "live feed" that auto-refreshes all of your friends' items. I feel that Friendfeed is essentially becoming Facebook for geeks (of which I am one)
• Steve Broback is putting all of the free blog search engines through their paces
• Accuweather is now on Twitter

New York Times Flags Print Edition Stories

The New York Times recently made a small, but important change to stories they post on their web site. If the story made it into print, at the bottom they include a tiny footnote that says where it ran and when. For example, the footer on this piece on video games notes: "A version of this article appeared in print on August 10, 2008, on page AR1 of the New York edition."

This kind of context is helpful not only for readers, but PR pros as well. The major monitoring services like Factiva tell you where a story ran, but Google News does not. Now it's easier to tell.

Most publications don't offer feeds for their print edition content. I wish they would. It provides context. The Economist is one of the few that does. However, at least for the Times, you can now you easily use Google News to build a feed for stories that they ran in print. Simply search for the phrase appeared in print. Then you can subscribe to the the RSS feed Google generates.

If you want, you can even get more specific - creating a feed for all stories that ran in print that are on a particular subject. For example, here's a search for stories about the Olympics that ran in the print edition of the Times. You can subscribe to the feed here.

How Newspapers Can Turn Problems Into Profit

A few weeks ago I wrote about the perfect storm facing print media. Robert Scoble started a similar thread on Friendfeed over the weekend. This week in my AdAge column I look at the same trends, but this time through the lens of potential solutions to the problems.

Newspaper publishers are facing a perfect storm thanks to three megatrends: rising inflation, America's growing green conscience and disruptive technology. To succeed in this era of great change, they need to think about how to make lemonade out of these perceived lemons. Unfortunately, so far, they haven't. Here's my advice.

RISING INFLATION: As gas prices rise sharply, so do distribution costs. To compensate, many newspapers have announced they are significantly increasing their hard-copy newsstand prices. However, that's a 20th-century reaction to what is a complex, 21st-century problem.

What they should be doing instead is using this as an opportunity to put a hard date on when they will abandon print altogether, close down plants and migrate completely to a digital paradigm. They need to have faith that their brands and quality editorial product will encourage readers who haven't already migrated to do so.

GREEN CONSCIOUSNESS: Americans are increasingly becoming very aware of their environmental impact and what they can do to mitigate it. Millions are taking the simple step of cutting print subscriptions in favor of (slowly) going completely digital. Is this a threat to newspapers? Of course, but it's also an opportunity.

Advertising -- particularly outdoor and print -- also creates tremendous waste. Newspapers can take the lead in going green and in the process create new avenues for advertisers to play up their related social-responsibility programs online. It's a win all around.

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY: Last but not least we have the growing popularity of speedy 3G-enabled smartphones and devices such as Amazon's Kindle e-book reader. Newspapers have invested heavily here, creating smartphone apps and pushing content for Kindles. But they don't go far enough.

Newspapers have made it hard for readers to get what they want without jumping through hoops. For example, they syndicate story summaries in their RSS feeds (even to paid subscribers). This forces readers to visit the website for the full content, and when they do, they have to trip over interruptive ads and interstitials.

Make it easy for loyalists to get what they want, when they want it, and they will remain just that -- loyal.

MarketingAge Profile

Marketing Age magazine, which is published in Ireland, ran a profile of me in their July/August issue where I talk about my role within Edelman Digital, how I use RSS to keep in the know and trends in social networking - including Friendfeed. The article is not online. However, If you're interested, they have graciously given me permission to share it here. The full PDF is here or you can simply click through each of the images below, which are up on Flickr.

iGoogle to Get Ads This Summer, Is Google Reader Next?

Google developer Dan Holevoet published the roadmap for the forthcoming changes to the iGoogle personalized home page. You can check out the presentation here.

The site, which anecdotally I can tell you is getting very popular, will get a new canvas view (below) starting in June and social features over the summer. However, what's most notable is that iGoogle is getting ads. They have not shown yet what this will look like visually. However, there is more info posted in an official FAQ.

According to the Google deck and FAQ, ads will appear embedded in the widgets themselves and only in the new canvas view - offering developers a way to monetize. In addition, Google will solicit feedback from users as they go. However, I wonder if this is going to add to the clutter of the site. Further, I would be interested if the developers use Open Social features to make the ads as social as the widgets promise to become.

Meanwhile in related news, Google Reader is closing in on Bloglines, according to new data from Hitwise. The site is currently free of ads but with Google's purchase of Feedburner I wonder if a Gmail-like model is in the works for this site too - particularly as its use increases. Ideally this would encourage feed owners to join Feedburner's ad networks and share in the monetization in and Adsense like model.

Friendfeed's Business Model Will Look Like Google's

I love Friendfeed. However, I am far more enthusiastic about the platform's robust RSS and search capabilities than its current value proposition as a universal social aggregator. I find it generates too much noise at times, but when you tap its search/RSS tools you have a killer app.

As I recently noted Friendfeed's imaginary friend feature is incredibly powerful. In addition, so are its advanced search capabilities. Combine them and this is where things get interesting.

Here's an example. I haven't tried this yet. But my gut is that you can actually use Friendfeed to create a Google Coop-like scoped search tool just for Twitter.

Simply take the Twitter public timeline feed and add it as an imaginary friend. Now you can scan the full text of every tweet - even if Summize should go belly up one day. In addition, you can generate RSS feeds against this new imaginary friend for any term you want to track. The public timeline too much for you? No problem. Just take your personalized Twitter friendstream feed and now you can data mine just your peeps.

This is just the beginning. Friendfeed benefits immensely from the network effect. The more individuals that aggregate their social streams with the service, the more it can be data mined and thus monetized - and its power grows.

So, for argument's sake, let's say in a year that even 50% of people who actively publish online aggregate their streams with Friendfeed. Suddenly you have a competitor that in utility could eclipse most of the vertical social search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search and Summize. Friendfeed doesn't index the full text of blog feeds yet but I suspect one day they will give publishers the ability to opt-in.

Now, what if Friendfeed were to wrap Google Adsense contextual ads around keyword searches just as it becomes the de-facto source for searching the social web. Think that's big? I do. And that fact that Friendfeed's founders come from Google probably bodes well for such a model. Stay tuned.

Become an Expert with the Power of Deliberate Practice

Photo credit: "A-Rod taking a practice cut" by Dog Company

Recently, I was interviewed by Kellie Kass from Simply Communicate for an in-depth business profile called "How Did I Get Here." In the article, I share something I don't think I have ever talked about before: how I apply deliberate practice in my never-ending quest for insights into digital media, marketing and online culture. I decided to write about it now because I became more aware of my habits and because I believe it can help anyone become more successful.

Deliberate practice - at least as a concept - is relatively new to me. However, little did I know it's something I have been at for years. Perhaps the same is true for you. Regardless of your passion, it's something that - when applied - is surefire road to success.

The basic idea isn't rocket science. Basically, anyone with just even a little bit of natural talent in a given domain can master it in about 10 years by methodically practicing the essence of their craft two hours daily (including weekends) and measuring their progress from one day to the next.

The concept was developed by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University. It's becoming popular in sports and business. It's a big reason why Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez and Warren Buffet continually get better. They practice on building their strengths every day in a meticulous way. (The links on their names cite relevant stories. The best piece I have read on the subject is this one from Fortune.)

In my case, I've actually been applying deliberate practice in my work for at least five years now, perhaps longer. I have been an online junkie going back 20 years. However, I only started deliberately practicing my study of the web and online culture in 2003. It just didn't dawn on me until 2008.

Every day for five years I have spent at least two hours a day, seven days a week (usually early mornings and evenings) trolling through 500+ RSS feeds on business, marketing, culture and technology. I then parse these observations into insights that I share here but also through other venues you don't see - like content for clients and our staff. Here's my trend graph from Google Reader.

In the last few months I have become a lot better at focusing my attention and measuring my progress. For example, I often look back at my posts from the last four years to see where I was right or wrong so I can get better at what I do. Two emerging influentials who I believe take this approach are Louis Gray and Chris Brogan. I reference them both in my interview with Kellie.

The takeaway here for you is this: if you want to be an expert at something (anything really), you can! It just takes time. Here's the formula: a) follow your passion, b) practice the essence of your craft in a meticulous, measurable way for two hours daily (for years), c) learn from data and adjust as you need to.

Google Reader Adds Universal Sharing

Google Reader has added a new feature called "Note in Reader" that lets you share any item from the Web, not just RSS feed content.

To share something, all you need to is is drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks to get started.

Like Google Reader Shared Items, these new posts get rolled up onto a single page, which anyone can subscribe to. In addition, you can add notes, but it's not clear if these are searchable.

The new feature is similar to what Facebook, Friendfeed and others offer and moves Google Reader one step closer to being a social net for shared content.

UPDATE: The official word from the Google Reader team.