Blog Sponsors

• MindTouch
• DocuTools Writing System
• Madcap Software
• Dr.Explain
• Scriptorium
• Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2
• Snagit from TechSmith

I later explored Alltop more thoroughly and discovered that Guy expanded the focus from 20+ blogs to 350+ blogs, including many more niche categories (such as technical writing) than the first version of his site.

Alltop is similar to an online magazine rack

Guy markets Alltop as a magazine rack in which you can read content from any category. For example, suppose you want to know more about children’s literature, but you’re not an expert in this field. You have little recourse outside of Google in finding good books for your kids. But going to Alltop, you can explore the top 35 blogs in the children’s literature category, and voila, you’re suddenly swimming in just the information you need. When you’re unfamiliar with the topic, Alltop does an excellent job at pointing you in the right direction.

Here’s a diagram from Guy comparing the use of Google versus Alltop.

Traditionally, people try to find information by earching aimlessly on Google

Alltop automatically congregates the nuggets of information for you

(See original diagrams.)

I asked Guy how he could compile the top blogs in a niche category without having expertise in the category. He said a technical writer selected the blogs to include. This makes sense to me, and while I don’t agree 100% with the selections, I’d say at least three quarters of them are on target. I recommended to Guy that he make a few adjustments, and he did. Now I’m in the acknowledgments section too — click the Acknowledgment link below the title.

Acknowledgments link

From a larger perspective, Alltop is another example of someone wrestling with the sea of information online, trying to tag and categorize it to make it useful. Alltop isn’t alone in this attempt. Popurls.com, digg.com, rssmeme.com, and reddit.com are other attempts at content aggregation. And of course my Writer River site is another effort to aggregate content.

Alltop excels when you’re unfamiliar with the topic. But if you’re an expert in the topic, you may find it a little limiting. Thirty five blogs is hardly enough blogs to watch, in my opinion. When I read blogs, I find interesting content by subscribing to as many tech writing blogs as possible, and then scanning down the titles. The more blogs I subscribe to, the higher my probability of finding relevant content. (See my “Selection Beats Damping” post for more details on ratios.)

I read feeds by quickly scanning the titles for titles relevant to my interests.

One last note. You may be checking Alltop to see if your blog is listed. If it is, and you didn’t get an email from Guy, consider making yourself more accessible. If you look at my contact page, I provide several ways for people to contact me. I put my email out there for all to see, as well as my Google Talk, Twitter, and cell phone information. Allowing people to easily contact me is one of my 20 usability suggestions for blogs. (Gmail does a good job at filtering out spam.)

Additional Resources on Alltop

• Will RSS Every Go Mainstream?
• Techparent Editorial: Alltop? Make it Stop already
• Alltop Version 2.0: The Art of Aggregation
  
• WorkHappy.net: Interview with Guy Kawasaki
  
• Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop: RSS Zen
  

Digg’s main focus is technology, and I always thought it would be cool to have a tech comm version of Digg with news more relevant to me. One weekend I sat down and created a Digg imitation using software called Pligg. Pligg was pretty much a Digg clone, so I thought it would work out perfectly. I called the site Writer River, referring to the idea of content that continuously flows down a river, all merged into one stream of information that bystanders can observe from a single view, perhaps picking out an object for a while and then sending it back on down the river.

The site was well-received, and it seemed to be taking off, gathering around 50 registered users within the first week. But if I was hoping for a Digg clone, I had a lot to achieve. For starters, whereas the typical number of votes on articles submitted to Digg was around 500+, the number of votes on Writer River was a bit depressing — 3 or 4, sometimes 9 if I voted several times.

The movement of unpublished articles to the front page (through an increasing number of votes) simply wasn’t happening. The site lacked the robust, thriving community of Digg, which made me realize a fundamental truth about Web 2.0 sites: it’s all about the community, not the technology.

I posted less frequently on Writer River and grew more frustrated with the number of spam posts appearing as pseudo articles (for example, posts on hand cream). I’d set Writer River as my home page, and one day while launching my browser I didn’t see the site but rather a message that said, “Your site was hacked by Silahsiz Kuvvetler, the Turkish Hacker.”

To be honest, it was a bit of a relief. I felt I need to regroup and come up with a better implementation of Writer River. By then Twitter was all the rage, and I’d heard good things about Prologue, a Twitter-like WordPress theme in which people could leave brief messages directly from the home page, without logging in to the admin panel. Since I was comfortable with WordPress, I sat down one Friday night and worked on version two of Writer River for about the next day.

In version two, I didn’t want voting. I’d rather just see articles float across the home page. In large communities, where perhaps 100 new articles are submitted a day, you need a voting mechanism to filter the content — but not with my community. The average submission was about two posts a day.

People were excited to see the site back, and while the sink/float voting features of the original version were gone, the second implementation proved a lot more functional. Rather than walking through several wizard-like submission screens, Writer River 2.0 included WordPress’s brand new “bookmarklet,” a script-based bookmark that you drag to your browser’s Links toolbar. When you read an article you like, you click the bookmarklet link, and a small window appears with the link of the article you’re reading. All you do is hit Publish, and it appears on Writer River. It literally takes 3 seconds.

It’s been several months since I launched Writer River 2.0, and so far it’s working well. The bookmarklet made me realize that with technology, what’s convenient gets used. Replace a posting process that takes 30 seconds with one a tenth of the time, and you suddenly find yourself posting a lot more frequently.

This is true of the phenomenon of blogging in general. Blogs make it easy to publish content; as a result, millions of people are blogging daily, publishing new content at historically unprecedented rates of about a million new posts per day.

The nearly infinite sea of information — one million new posts a day — makes sites like Writer River necessary. We need human aggregators, people like Robert Scoble, who’ll sift through hundreds of feeds each day, highlighting the most important content — but in the field of tech comm.

Other community-driven sites are taking off. The latest, Stack Overflow, combines a question-and-answer site with Digg functionality. Users submit questions, others respond with answers, and readers vote on the relevancy of the answers. When people vote positively for your answer, you accrue reputation points that appear below your name.

When hundreds of people engage in content-generation and exchange, impressive results can happen — namely, you find a lot of interesting, accurate content. Writer River doesn’t have nearly enough community to be on par with these sites, but it’s a step in the right direction.

You can visit Writer River at writerriver.com. After registering in the sidebar, add the POST IT link to your browser’s Link toolbar, navigate to an interesting article, and click your browser’s POST IT link.

I’ve been a long-time reader of Digg.com, but just last week it dawned on me that it would be really great if there were a Digg-like site for technical communication. So I decided to create one. It’s called WriterRiver.com and it’s pretty much a Digg clone, except that the entire focus is on articles related to technical communicators.

Check it out by clicking the image below.

How It Works

When you read something interesting online, you can submit the article’s link to WriterRiver.com through the Submit a Story tab. Everything that looks like a post on WriterRiver.com is really just a link to an article online.

When you initially submit an article/story, it appears on the Upcoming Stories tab. As other readers check out the article and vote on it — by clicking the Float link — the vote count for that article increases.

Notice how the word “Floated” appears grayed out in the lower voting button? That’s because I already floated on the article.

When enough people float an article (in this case, when an article receives 5 floats), it automatically moves to the Front Page Stories tab, which is the main page. Conversely, if you dislike the article, you can decrease its votes by clicking Sink. (Float and sink tie in with the river metaphor. On Digg.com, you digg or bury stories.)

Filtering By Popularity

More floats make the article more visible, and fewer votes (or more sinks) make the article harder to find. In the upper-right corner of the site, you can sort the articles by popularity. You can see the most popular articles (the articles with the most votes) today, this week, this month, or this year.

Tip: Set your browser’s home page to show the Upcoming Stories or some other filter. It will help you keep up with the stream of articles.

Other Implications

A few days ago I wrote a post saying I wanted to try a new path. I was mostly referring to my podcast and how tired I was getting of the interview format. The creators of Digg have a companion podcast called Diggnation, in which they discuss the most dugg/voted stories on Digg.com. The format seems to work well — stories submitted to Digg provide endless discussion for the podcast. The Slashdot Review is also a popular podcast based on the top social news sites.

I think that staying updated with the news is one of main reasons people listen to podcasts. I hope to make my Tech Writer Voices podcast more like Diggnation, Slashdot Review, and This Week in Tech. (For this, I’ll need a couple of regular co-hosts, so if you’re interested, email me.)

Pligg: The Tool Behind the Scenes

After looking at the WriterRiver.com site, you might be wondering, Tom, where did you get all the time to create this site? Well, WriterRiver.com is made using Pligg, which is a Digg clone tool. Pligg powers such sites as meaname.com (Spanish version of Digg), Kirtsy (a female-focused Digg clone), and a host of other social news sites. Pligg is easy to install and fairly robust (although it could really use a heftier user manual).

Let Others Know

Like any social news site, WriterRiver’s success depends on how many people use it. In an effort to promote WriterRiver.com, please consider writing a post about it, relaying the announcement on any listserv you’re on, or adding a link to your sidebar. It’s also the kind of site that works well as a home page for your browser (for example, you could set your home page to show the Top Stories today). The more people who submit and vote, the better the content becomes.

The Metaphor Behind “WriterRiver”

Why the name WriterRiver? Dave Winer, the guy who invented RSS, has a metaphor about a “river of news” that I’m partly using. Imagine yourself sitting beside a river watching the driftwood, sticks, fish, brush, eddies, paper cups, toy boats, etc., float by. The river naturally provides a constant stream of new content that moves along in a mesmerizing way. At any time you can reach in and grab something, bring it to the surface (“float it”) so you can inspect it for a while, and then send it back down the river.

Results I’m Hoping for

I hope that WriterRiver.com moves the tech comm. blogosophere and other online formats forward. Through WriterRiver.com we’ll showcase the most engaging articles and posts that 300+ technical writers and bloggers are actively churning out. I have a bucketful of RSS feeds that I scan through each day, and I plan to highlight the good posts in a way that makes them easily findable by others.

I also think the aggregation of the most engaging posts or articles will prove the value of the blogosphere. Certainly the articles posted on WriterRiver.com don’t need to come from blogs, but I’m betting that a good majority will. When others begin to feel the power and addiction of a well-written blog post, it will motivate more writers to start blogs and to follow them. It will also allow new writers to more quickly find reader communities, and it will enable new readers to find engaging writers.

If you have any feedback about the site, I’d love to hear it. Mostly, I’d like to see you submit article links to content you find interesting, and vote on those articles you like.

Thanks for trying this out with me.

At any point in time, you can check your mail (both work and gmail), read your feeds, check your calendar, instant message someone, navigate yourself on a map, check the weather, glance at the New York Times headlines, go to a website, set your alarm clock, listen to music or podcasts or watch video, read e-books, play BrickBreaker, calculate useless things, make phone calls, and play with the infinite number of notification settings, from one vibration to three for each of the above.

But more than a gadget, the BlackBerry 8830 has changed my life – a little bit. And it may change yours too, even if you never get one.

Necessary Admissions

First, I will admit that the urge to check a buzzing BlackBerry is irresistable. Steward Mader (no idea who he is, really — just the author of an interesting post) expresses a common observation among the BlackBerry crowd:

I was out to dinner the following Saturday night, and directly witnessed the effect of tethering people with BlackBerries. While we were out for dinner, a couple sat down at the table next to us, obviously on a second (or maybe third) date. Throught the next hour, they both proceeded to check their BlackBerries about every 5-10 minutes. … There were multiple times when one or the other would reach for their BlackBerry while in mid conversation, and just start spining the scroll wheel while the other was still talking. (“My pocket vibrates, therefore I am. Would DesCartes agree?”)

This experience is nothing new to those who have tried talking to project managers whose BlackBerries are vibrating. Forget it, just wait until they’re done glancing at the thing.

The Upside

But there’s an upside to all of this. One of the best things about using Google Reader (to read RSS feeds) is the application’s complete mobility. Not only can you access Google Reader from any computer with Internet access, you can also access your feeds from, surprise, your BlackBerry. Google Reader has a special mobile version that works extremely well.

I’m using my BlackBerry more and more to read feeds. Throughout the day there are dozens of times where I’m in a waiting mode. Waiting for the bus to arrive. Waiting to cross the street. Waiting for the elevator to ascend to my floor. Waiting in line to pay for my lunch. Waiting for a meeting to begin. Waiting for the meeting to get interesting. Waiting for the light to change. Waiting in line at the grocery market to pay for my groceries. Waiting for my wife to finish doing her hair. Waiting for commercials to end. Waiting to fall asleep at night. Waiting to fully awaken in the morning. And so on. You get the point.

During many of these waiting moments, I’m checking my feeds on my BlackBerry. It’s just so incredibly convenient to have them available in the moment I want to read them.

Your Benefit

So how does this benefit you? It does, I promise. Unlike any other feedreader, Google Reader has a link at the bottom of each post that allows you to share the post.

This is an easy link to click on a BlackBerry. So I find myself sharing about 3-4 times as many posts as I normally do.

You can subscribe to my Google Reader Shared Posts feed by viewing my public Google Reader page. It does feature an RSS feed.

Even cooler, if you add me as a friend in Google Talk, you’ll see my shared posts directly in your Google Reader, as shown in the following image.

Adding Me As Your Friend

How do you add a friend in Google Talk? Unfortunately it’s not something you can do entirely on your own. I have to accept to be added as your friend (if you send the request, I will glady accept it).

Here are Google’s instructions on adding friends:

1. Click +Add at the bottom of your Friends list.
   • If the friends you’d like to invite are listed in your Gmail contacts list, click Choose from my contacts…
   • If the friend you’re trying to add isn’t in your contacts list yet, enter their email address. If you’d like to add more than one friend at a time, just make sure to separate their email addresses with commas.
2. Click Next >> after you’ve entered all the friends you’d like to invite.
3. A dialogue box will appear to confirm that your friends were invited to Google Talk. Click Finish.

If your eyes glazed over those instructions, just download Google Talk (if you haven’t already), and click the Add button at the bottom. Then type my gmail address, tomjohnson1492@gmail.com and invite me to be your friend.

Note: If you already see friends in your Google Talk, but you’ve never added them, realize that there’s another way to add a friend: Email the same person a bunch of times and Google automatically adds him or her as your friend.

The next time you get annoyed at someone glancing at their BlackBerry, relax, it may be me sharing your post with other readers.

But Wait, There’s More

I can’t end this post without mentioning two interesting sites: rssmeme and readburner. This sharing across the entire community of Google Reader users isn’t going to waste. The shared posts are collectively aggregated and sorted. The most shared posts are grouped together, allowing you to more quickly identify good content on the net. It’s distantly similar to Digg, but the “voting” is invisibly in the background.

If the categories on these two sites could be more micro, such as a Readburner for technical communication topics, it would really be powerful.

12/09 Update: Readburner is no longer a current site.