I'd Rather Be Writing » relevance

Paper.li as an Alternative to Google Reader [Screencast]

Tom Johnson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 14:40:20 +0000

To find good content online, I find that I’m going less and less to Google Reader and more to sources like Paper.li, an automated content curation tool that filters out some of the content noise. The problem with Google Reader is lack of content curation. You get a ton of noise, regardless of how fine-tuned your list of feeds are. With tools such as paper.li, which rank the most shared links on Twitter (based on a user’s followers, a hashtag, or a list), you can filter out the first layer of noise and more quickly find relevant content.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwXeWqaFP9A

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Are You Irrelevant? Engaging, Provocative Video

Tom Johnson — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:18:22 +0000

I saw this video on the Content Wrangler Community. The original source is on youtube. Talk about engaging. I completely agree with the person here. In a day when I’m arguing for the merits of moving the Intercom online, this video couldn’t be any more apropo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUvd46_-iKE

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Blogging, Podcasting, and Screencasting: Eight Characteristics to Attract Devoted Followers [Part I]

Tom Johnson — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:44:45 +0000

Download MP3
Length: 50 min.

This podcast is a recording of the Blogging, Podcasting, and Screencasting presentation that I gave to the TransAlpine conference in Vienna in June 2009. In the presentation, I explore what well-known bloggers, podcasters, and screencasters do to inspire readers to become devoted followers rather than just casual subscribers.

Devoted followers stay updated with each new post, podcast, or screencast, eagerly awaiting the next new one. They’re intimately familiar with your content and either comment regularly or regularly return to your site. In contrast, casual subscribers may check out the site from time to time (if they even remember the title), but they feel no loyalty to the blogger/podcaster/screencaster. Months could pass without an update and they wouldn’t notice.

Rather than explore blogs, podcasts, and screencasts as separate media with their own unique characteristics, I group them together and explore eight common characteristics that make blogs/podcasts/screencasts successful: relevance, story, appropriate revealing, voice, readability, visibility, interaction, and regularity.

If you want to follow the PowerPoint, view it here. It’s not sync’ed with the audio, so you just have to guess where I am (but the PowerPoint is mostly visual anyway, since that’s my PowerPoint style). Also, because of the length (90 minutes overall), I divided the podcast into two parts. This is part 1.