Bottom Feeder
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2005-06-29

What's a blog?

Most web pages are static. They rarely change. Once you've visited it once there's few reasons to come back. Blogs make it easier to update your webpages on a regular basis to keep people coming back.

James started to notice blogs about 3 years ago. The purpose of blogs is to get noticed. Companies are trying to put a human face on their company - eg: Microsoft.

A blog is an ad-hoc editorial page. Writing editorials has been around for a very long time. Now with the internet they get a much larger readership with blogs.

Now the cost has been reduced to almost zero, now it's a time investment to write interesting stuff that people want to read.

It's easy enough to find something you're passionate about. But that doesn't guarantee that anyone will read you. The tricky part is finding readers for your blog.

When James started June 2002 he had very light readership. At this point he had about 12 readers. Then James got an email saying "I like reading your blog, but I'd like you to add an RSS feed". James's response was "I'd like to, but first you have to tell me what it is."

It turns out syndication is very important: RSS, ATOM, XML, etc. These specs are all very vague and badly written, but syndication allowers readers to subscribe to your blog.

Without RSS syndication, if you want to read somebodies blog you have to check their website every day. With a News Aggregator subscribed to an RSS feed, you never have to visit their site again, their new content will be sent to you. Content comes at you instead of you going to the content.

The thought leaders are using News Aggregators. James reads around 288 sites a day. He couldn't possibly do this in a browser. Some people read 1400 websites. Without an aggregator you wouldn't be able to even approach that.

RSS is an XML format. It has a channel and items in a channel - title, link, description. The format is a rich, extensible way to convey a headline service.

[Q: The screenshot on the screen, what software is that? A: That's BottomFeeder, it's written in VisualWorks]

James added an RSS feed and immediately his readership went up. It went from 12 readers to 30-40. But he still didn't understand what it was good for. This was before he even had an Aggregator.

All of this lead to Bottom Feeder and the Cincom Smalltalk blogs. With it you can track people that you find interesting (examples from the Cincom Smalltalk user blogs). But you can also track product/person mentions using RSS enabled search engines.

If you wanted to know who is talking about Cincom.. you could go to google and do the search, then yahoo and do the search, then MSN and do the search.. etc. Or, you can set up search feeds for Cincom on those sites and the mentions will come to you instead of you finding those mentions.

James tracks mentions of BottomFeeder. Sometimes this is bad, because of the name.. but on the other hand, because the name starts with a B, he's usually near the top of a list of Aggregators.

With the blogosphere. You can either define your own message, or someone else will define your message for you. This may be a bad thing.

You can find positive or negative mentions for your own products with the search feeds. If they're positive mentions, then that's good you can email them to see if they would like to write a success story. If it's negative, you can find out what the problem is and fix it.

Blogs get good search results. If you search for Cincom's CEO, "Tom Nies" - the second mention on google was James's blog. A search for "Cincom", the first hit is the Cincom Smalltalk homepage, the real Cincom homepage was nowhere to be seen. "Bottom Feeder" - top of the list.

In total, James has 28 search feeds. He tracks their products, BottomFeeder, Smalltalk, the competition, person amazon interests, etc.

People will talk about your product(s) or service (or worse, they won't!): Do you want to know what they're saying?

Again: Either you get your message out there or somebody else will put a message out there for you.

James then started showing how the tree works.. two pane or three pane mode. There's also a newspaper mode. The different views can be set on individual blogs. Some people write a lot - so Jim puts them on newspaper mode.

The rendering of content is done by Software WithStyle. There's a talk by Michael Lucas-Smith (me!) on WithStyle after the break.

Bottom Feeder will update every hour by default. It spawns a thread for each blog. That's 288 threads. On a platform, this can be painful - such as Windows. In Smalltalk, it's really easy and you can do it on any platform.

James shows us he can change the look and feel - the CSS - of all the different blogs he reads. The different styles sit in a directory - they're not hard coded in to the application.

Bottom Feeder supports HTTP Authentication for private feeds too. BF leverages a lot of the power that is in VisualWorks Smalltalk.

It's also integrated on the server side. There is a client blog posting tool to post blogs to any kind of blog server using multiple blog posting API's. The editor is WYSIWYG to make it easy to bold and italicise content. This editing was done using Software WithStyle.

Bottom Feeder supports an aweful lot of neat things. It's very feature rich.

Bottom Feeder will figure out if there's an RSS feed for a website if you tell it to add the website. As a user, you don't have to look specifically for the RSS feed link, just the website that has the XML or RSS icons on it.

This is an opt-in audience. If you don't enjoy what you're reading. You simply unsubscribe. Blogs also contain comments which you can write to from Bottom Feeder.

This stuff is used extensively in the Cincom Smalltalk Group. Feeds for their bug reports, feeds for the blogs, feeds for their wiki's, feeds for their version control system (There's support for doing this in CVS too), etc. Cincom's Public Store has an RSS feed too.

This is important for marketing too. Blogs will give you a way to have multiple faceted messages to get out of your company, not just the distilled marketing messages.

Publicize your product: Tech features, what problem it solves, who should want it. Microsoft, Sun, IBM - all in. We do a lot for Cincom Smalltalk - there are 20+ bloggers for CST at: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs