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Micro Persuasion

Steve Rubel explores how the digital citizen is transforming marketing, media and public relations.


Build an Annotated IM Feed Reader with FriendfeedToday

Using Friendfeed as an RSS Reader

In my day dreams at least, one of these days I am going to write a O'Reilly book called Friendfeed Hacks. As they keep adding features, I keep finding new uses for the service beyond the obvious.

I have explained in the past on how to maximize the imaginary friend feature and how to turn it into a real time ticker. Now here's a quick tutorial on how to turn Friendfeed into a cool instant messaging-based feed reader. This uses a new feature they turned on late last year.

First set up one or more imaginary friends that either include RSS feeds and/or Twitter streams. You can find a nice list of media sources available on Twitter here.

Next, roll these imaginary friends into a list.

Then, log into you

links for 2009-01-08Yesterday
Three Reasons the Internet is Eroding Apple's MojoJanuary 7
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"Rotten to the Core" by Pupski on Flickr.

I have been an Apple fan and a Mac user much of my adult life. I bought my first Mac in 1992 and have owned half a dozen since. I wrote for Mac magazines in the mid-1990s. I waited on line for many hours twice for the iPhone and I am writing this post on a MacBook Air that I bought sight unseen last year after the Jobsnote.

However, after yesterday's disappointing keynote, I am convinced the Internet is slowly eroding Apple's PR mojo. They are still having a good run, but the times are changing. Here are three reasons why Apple may not make the turn like it did before. There's a lot of lessons here for PR professionals.

1) Bloggers and Citizen Journalists

In the old days, Apple could keep a tight lip on the ship. Steve Jobs has built a no-leak culture since he arrived back

Co.mments Tracking Service Shutting DownJanuary 6

Co.mments, a service that enables you to track your comments on blogs across the web, is shutting down on January 11. The founder Asaf Arkin put up a blog post last night notifying users.

Co.mments.com is Shutting Down

I have been hungering for strong comment search and utilities for a long time. I was a fan of co.mments because it allowed me to create a comment feed on my blog. This is something that TypePad doesn't offer built in, except on individual posts. (Note - if you subscribe to the comment feed, it will be gone next week.) Backtype is a promising service, but I find it doesn't catch all comments. But it does a fair job.

Overall, I think Friendfeed has the opportunity to soar here. I envision that they will start to integrate more tightly with blog services like Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress, as well as Twitter, Facebook

links for 2009-01-06January 6