Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Your 2011 Primer.” This week’s links take a look at some tips and trends to help get strategically prepared for 2011.

#5: Maybe next year…

Let’s get started with a quick pep talk from Seth Godin. “It’s not too late, it’s just later than it was.”

Link: Seth’s Blog

#4: 10 Trends That Are Shaping Global Media Consumption

In reading this article, I am reminded of Clay Shirky’s theorem of technology’s impact on society: “These tools don’t get socially interesting until they become technologically boring.”

Link: RIA Journal

#3: 10 Business Models That Rocked 2010

What struck me in reading this article was how many of these models had been attempted before. It’s probably equally worthwhile to examine how these implementations succeeded when predecessors failed.

Link: TechCrunch

#2: Blogging Forefather Seeks to Re-Invent Blogging, Again

Dave Winer, inventor of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), is very concerned about silos. So he’s doing something about. “The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure… You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place.”

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?

At this time last year, Google seemed unstoppable: so much so, that many of the news stories and blog posts were questioning whether or not they were too powerful and even advocating a Google-free existence. Just a year later, many experts are questioning whether or not they are in real trouble.

Link: TechCrunch

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We all know intuitively that it has never been easier or cheaper to do “x” than it is today.  In fact, statements like that are boring and pedestrian to the point that you may already be considering moving on to the next article. What if I told you it’s possible to build a web site today for $0 in one weekend that would likely have cost over $100,000 and taken several months just three years ago?

After launching the web site Truemors, entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki posted a presentation titled “How I Built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail Social Media Site for $12,107.09.”  And he did so in 7.5 weeks. Closer to home, I received a RFP to build a web site for a local association on a Friday afternoon last year.  By Sunday morning I had the entire site built with nearly double the functionality that was included in the RFP.  These two anecdotes illustrate that it has never been easier or cheaper to build web sites, communicate, collaborate, reach out, or network.  In fact, almost all of the tools I’ll discuss in this article are FREE.

Domain Registration

The first step in leveraging these tools for your organization is not free, but it is very inexpensive.  In order to gain full leverage from many of these tools, it’s important that you own and control your own domain name.  Domain registrars can be found online and include services like GoDaddy, Register.com, and Network Solutions.  Depending upon the domain level type (i.e. com, net, org) the annual registration cost ranges between $10 and $15 per year.

Web Hosting

Next, you need to select a hosting service and it may or may not be through the same company that is your domain registrar.  Selecting a hosting provider should be done on the basis of a) the operating system you intend to use (i.e. Windows or Linux), b) any applications or frameworks you’ll be installing (e.g. WordPress, Drupal, DotNetNuke), and c) promotions that various companies may be running from time to time.  In most cases, you should not have to pay more than $4 to $8 dollars per month for shared hosting.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Free, open source web content management systems have obliterated most of the barriers to entry that have existed from the early days of the web until very recently.  I typically use the analogy of an “instant web site – just add water” to describe them.  In fact, many hosts offer one-click installations of these frameworks as part of their service offering.  Most CMSs share the following benefits:

• Ability to manage content without web or programming skills – no more relying on web masters to make changes.
• They are FREE.
• They are powerful, flexible, and scalable.

They also share most if not all of the following characteristics:

• Template (or skin) driven layout and design
• Group-based security and membership support
• Easily modified content
• Web standards upgrades
• Third party extensions

The most popular open source CMS systems are DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.  A comparison of these systems is beyond the scope of this article, but my take is that WordPress is the easiest to install and use, while the other three are more powerful and flexible with a longer learning curve.   Of the four, DotNetNuke is the only Windows-based CMS; the others are all LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP).

Google Apps

Google has a free service called Google Apps that provides a whole laundry list of FREE, powerful services including email, shared documents, shared calendar, shared contacts, web analytics, and more.  It’s quite easy to create an account and configure these services for your organization and they deliver powerful collaborative features.

Newsletters

Many organizations still send email newsletters to their customers or members using standard email.  This is dangerous for several reasons.  First, many of these home-made newsletters violate the Federal CAN-SPAM Act.  Second, if enough of these emails are sent you could be violating your Internet Service Provider’s terms of service.  In addition to these dangers, they also have several shortcomings compared to dedicated e-newsletter services like Vertical Response or Constant Contact, like the lack of advanced reporting and analytics or attractive HTML-format emails.  Plans start at $10 per month, but Vertical Response if FREE for non-profits.

Networking and Outreach

A full discussion of Social Networking is also outside of the scope of this article, but it bears mentioning.  Facebook recently introduced the “Fan Page” feature that is becoming more and more powerful as a tool for organizational outreach.  LinkedIn is a more professionally focused networking web site whose “Groups” feature is an effective means for connecting together groups of like-minded professionals.  There are many others that have their own virtues and vices associated with them, but they all have one thing in common; they are FREE.

How to Keep Up

The world is changing and although this article can get you started, the landscape is changing quickly an you will need tools to keep up on the latest trends.  Here are a few suggestions:

1.       Stay up to date by finding relevant blogs and reading them regularly, using an RSS reading tool to subscribe to news and blog feeds, and use social networking sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.

2.       Ask questions about current and emerging technologies.  Again, social networking sites are great for this particular approach.

3.       Spy on other organizations similar to yours.  What technologies are they using?  How are they leveraging social media?

4.       Network with others in your space.

5.       But DO NOT simply accept the status quo and keep following the same old plan.  Technology is always changing, so keep an ear to the ground and be a “heretic.”

Whatever you do, don't do this...

We’re Talking Techno-DIY

Leveraging these technologies is similar to a “do it yourself” project at home; you don’t need to be a plumber to replace a faucet, but you may not want to install a new sink yourself.  The trick is to find your comfort zone and ask for help when you’re outside of it.  The take-away from this article is that you should, at the very least, be aware of the vast array of low and NO cost technologies available to solve problems today and you should vigorously challenge the assumption that “more expensive is better.”

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What is RSS?

Well, it stands for “Really Simple Syndication” but given the fact that there is still not widespread adoption and so few people understand it, one could take exception to that moniker. In any case, let’s try to use a newspaper analogy to explain this. Think about reading your local newspaper. For many people, there are certain sections that are of more interest than others. And maybe some sections that are of no interest. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could call up the newspaper and tell them, “I’m only interested in the Local, Business, and Sports sections, so would you please only include those in my newspaper? Also, I’d like the newspaper delivered to me at home, the office, and in my car – depending upon where I am at the time.”

So, that’s it in a nutshell; it allows you to subscribe to “feeds” that contain news and information from sources that are of interest. And depending on your technology platforms, you can read them from anywhere, anytime. You can scan over headlines, deciding which (if any) sound interesting, choose whether or not to read the entire article, and even make notes, mark them as a favorite, or share them with your friends and associates.

For this particular article, I’m going to stay away from the more technical how-to stuff and try to concentrate on the “what” and “why”. I’ve spoken with many colleagues in the past couple of weeks who are either new to the concept or don’t really understand how it can be leveraged by them to help them meet their personal and/or professional goals.

Here’s a snapshot of my Google Reader. It’s only showing publications I haven’t yet marked as “read” (click on the image to see full size).

So you can see that I’ve set up my reader to “tag” feeds with certain keywords (e.g. “FFL”, “LinkedIn”, “News”, “Sports”, etc…) I can browse through the publications based on these categories and when something seems worth reading more, I’ll either click on the article to read it immediately or “star” it so that I can read it later. Because I’m using Google Reader, I can also do all of this on my BlackBerry as well using Google’s Mobile Reader Application.

Why Do I Care?

• Let the information come to you. For me personally, this is the most compelling benefit of RSS. I don’t have to worry about missing out on information that might be important to me by failing to read a particular issue of a newspaper or seeing a press release on a company’s web site.

• It takes all kinds. There are many different types of RSS feeds available for subscription that make it possible to stay informed of many different topics. You can subscribe to news articles, blog posts, forum discussions, Craigslist postings, press releases, etc…

• It’s OK to look. Any RSS reader will display a headline and several summary lines describing the publication, allowing you to quickly and easily scan through for items of interest.

• Save, tag, share, and/or comment. RSS readers generally provide capabilities to perform tasks to organize, document, and share your subscriptions. If you see an interesting article but don’t have time you can save it to read for later. You can assign “tags” that categorize articles and even share them with others in your social and/or professional circle.

If you want to start utilizing RSS, the first decision to make is selecting a RSS Reader. Read this Lifehacker article to get some recommendations. You can also see how many different ways there are to make use of your RSS feeds.

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