This idea of automated vacuuming is pretty cool - we have 3800 square feet of floor space that takes a fair amount of energy to keep clean. With our robot (named Roomba), We still have to pick up the house a bit before letting it lose, but we're free to do other things while it goes about its singular objective. Although we get all that time back, we occasionally watch in awe as the little creature attempts to optimize its path while working around and under obstacles. Ironic that we spend our free time watching the tool that created the free time. And we're not the only ones watching - I think the cat wants to ride it.

When we set out to build the MyST platform, our objective was to manufacture time through many different processes. Like Roomba, I love to watch our newest product, Net Intelligence. It uses our Google Gear scripting engine and Weblog Application Server to execute lots of queries for the purpose of building research content. MyST Google Gears execute about 5,000 queries a week on behalf of our customers, helping them with a variety of information gathering tasks ranging from competitive intelligence to tracking partner and reseller sites for product promotion compliance.

Like Roomba, we manufacture time and create operational efficiency. If you'd like to hear more about Net Intelligence, drop us a note.

Many MySmartChannels users create channels of content for RSS purposes. A channel is a container for items, information objects that can contain just about anything you want. There's no limit to the amount of data a channel (or channel item) can contain (well, 16GB per item).

Here are the steps you can follow to see if our platform might be useful for your RSS management and hosting purposes.

First, register as a member on the MyST platform - it's easy and free.

After you register and login, click on "My Channels" (upper left). You'll then find a button for creating a "New" channel (upper right). Once you finish creating a channel, add two or three channel items--just test data for now. The tool bar provides many options for channels - the first option is the "New" channel item button .

In RSS parlance, the name of an item becomes the <title/>, the Summary of an item is the <description/>, and the address of the item (a unique URL in MyST) becomes the <link/>. You can add some test description content; it's like a "body" area that may (or may not) be included in RSS feeds. Feel free to add keywords if you like, although this is not critical for using the platform for RSS use.

Once you create a few test items, use the channel view tool bar again to display an RSS 2.0 version of the channel. (see RSS button on the channel view tool bar)

At this point:

• you have a private channel for creating content items;
• the channel (and content) is secure and only available to you;
• whether viewing it in HTML or RSS, your MyST credentials are required;
• you are managing this content in a fundamental XML store that can be transformed in any way you desire.

Note the address of the RSS feed; it will look something like this (the number on the end of the address will be your own channel ID):

http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/rss/214

This address is the secure address for your channel feed that requires login credentials--yours, for now, but you can grant access to others. You can also use SSL encryption by simply changing the protocol from http:// to https://. You can also test the feed with a newsreader that supports HTTP and/or HTTPS authentication.

If you want to test your RSS channel feed as a public feed (i.e., no security credentials required), you must first grant access to the channel by a user named $Public. This can be done on the channel toolbar using the "Security" button (far right). When you grant permissions to $Public, you are granting authorization for non-credentialed users to "tunnel" into the secure MySmartChannels directly to your channel (and only this channel). The URL address for this tunneling capability is always the same address as your secure RSS feed, but augmented with /public as shown below:

http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/rss/214

Public feeds can be accessed by any news reader or Web application. If you've gotten this far, you're a genius - our platform's UI is a bit clunky because it is so secure and designed for industrial-strength RSS application development. It seems complex, but it's not - especially once you play with it a bit.

MySmartChannels RSS generation capability is extremely flexible. For example, try augmenting your own RSS address with description=full as in this example:

http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/rss/214?description=full

The above address will generate the RSS description nodes such that they contain the Summary field as an <H3/> plus the Description content (from the MySmartchannels channel item). The net result is a "full-bodied" RSS feed instead of only headlines and links. This gives you a level of agility that may be required from time-to-time, and since the MySmartChannels UI includes a rich text editor, you are free to mark up the body to achieve presentation objectives without worrying about HTML/RSS encoding issues.

As you drill deeper into the platform, you can experiment other arguments like "limit". If you have an application that calls for only the three most recent entries, for example, the sample link below achieves this:

http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/rss/214?limit=3

There's much, much more. I could go on for a long time talking about MySmartChannels and RSS, but this post is already too long (and I have not even mentioned weblogs, XML, OPML, Microsoft Office smart tags, Serence Klips, or a number of other MySmartChannesl capabilities). Drop me a note if you have questions, ideas, or comments.

Organic Search - This is a term I heard for the first time today at the CIK Roundtable on Maximising Your Website. I continue to explore ideas and reasoning behind keyword and key-phrase optimization strategies, but my conclusion is (at this moment) that good content is critical to good visibility.

This event brought out the expertise of four guest speakers and the common thread of content relevance was clear in each presentation.

• Micah Baldwin, the C-SEO of CurrentWisdom, a full-service Search Engine Marketing company, with previous roles in managing and directing marketing for companies including Kozmo.com, MyPersonal.com, and as a fundraiser for university scholarship programs.
  
• Allison Hartsoe, the founder of Internet Business Skills, a company that uses Internet technology to optimize business. Alison previously co-founded iSyndicate and has appeared on programs such as CNN Europe and CNBC Europe, and has spoken at numerous Internet conferences and shows.
  
• Clint Kaiser, the Vice President for Interactive Marketing at Wild Impact Solutions, an integrated target marketing firm specializing in online and offline marketing programs. Chris has over 7 years of experience developing and implementing email marketing programs and technical solutions and has served as a speaker at numerous email industry shows.
  
• Chris Leebelt, the Founder and CEO of E-com Media Group, an e-business/marketing firm he started in 1997. In addition to the ASP-based solutions his firm provides in which he has overseen development, Chris also leads the continuous research and implementation of E-com’s search engine and traditional marketing programs.

MySmartChannels Invitations make it easy to invite friends, colleagues, and co-workers to visit your secure channels.  As described in an earlier post, this provides a natural way to map social networks within a community of users.  Now, MySmartChannels provides a new My Invitations view that lets you easily monitor and review your invitation activity, giving you a peek into your emerging social network.

My Invitations reports on invitations in three categories:

• Received Invitations shows all invitations that you have received and accepted.
• Sent Invitations (Pending) shows the invitations sent by you which have not yet been accepted or rejected.
• Sent Invitations (Accepted) shows the invitations that you sent by you which have been accepted.

For each invitation shown, the report provides the following information:

• Target indicates the location (e.g., channel, item, etc.) to which the recipient was invited.  The target includes a link so that you can easily navigate to the target location.  This is particularly useful for received invitations, allowing you to return to the location.
• Received From or Sent To indicates the sender (for received invitations) or the recipient (for sent invitations).
• Date specifies the time and date when the invitation was accepted (or sent if it has not yet been accepted).

To view your own invitation history, simply login to MySmartChannels and click on the My Invitations link.

"Every business--high-tech, low-tech or no-tech--is faced with the merciless marketplace demand for ever-greater levels of productivity. That means constantly driving down costs and increasing efficiency." -- Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Makes sense to me... this is another way of saying that IT applications are shifting to a component services approach. When you need an RSS feed management process - there it is. When you need an ad-hoc space to capture some information, it's just a click away. However, more important to the availability of loosely-coupled IT services is the flexibility that's required after the [ad-hoc] fact.

Information workers need the agility to get their work done quickly and efficiently without being forced to think about the ramifications of selecting a particular application or information storage strategy. I call this on-demand agility - the idea that I can quickly achieve the objective at hand with a reasonable expectation that my content can be repurposed by me or another information worker.

"The horizon of the on-demand era is coming into clear view. We are evolving toward an economy in which expertise embodied in an enterprise and its people will be its real advantage and differentiator. Whatever strategic value technology may have had is shifting to the people and businesses that put it to work in support of their frame of excellence--this is the expertise that will define them to their customers, collaborators and competitors."

"Their frame of excellence" ... The term that I use to describe people with a frame of excellence is  domain experts and ideally, on-demand agility coupled with domain expertise is at the heart of knowledge management.