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What’s Hot on PlanetLotus.org is broken

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The other thing that prompted me to write about why I like feed readers better than only using PlanetLotus.org was a post over on Andrew Pollack’s blog. Gaming Planet Lotus is Juvenile and Destructively Arrogant. Give it a read and chime in on the comments as I think it’s a pretty good discussion. The gist of the story is that someone had figured a way to post a PL link that caused a post to get over 4000 hits, which obviously skews things. And I agree, that sort of thing is indeed gaming the system.

The problem I have when I look at the (non-gamed) numbers on PL is that I don’t find the click numbers truly to be a good indication of what’s hot in the overall community. My reasoning is this: These numbers are only representative of a couple hundred users viewing PL. The most votes I can see on the story numbers for the past little while has been about 250 clicks. And it’s only people that use PL. Now if every single person in the Lotus community was using PL and only PL, then the numbers would mean something definitive to me. But that’s not the case. We’ve been talking about trying to break out of the echo chamber, but I believe this shrinks it a bit. You see, I read all these blogs via RSS in my feed reader. I bet there are a lot of others that do that too. I’m a member of the community, I read the story, but I never really voted to up that vote count.

The other thing that really kind of annoys me is that people are doing a really good job of writing enticing post titles that may or may not really reflect on the content of the post. More than once I’ve clicked on something (on PL or my feed reader) and found the content to be lacking. In my feed reader, that’s fine, but on PL I just increased the hit count on the story and made it more popular. I can’t take that ‘vote’ back at all. So incendiary headlines will always be more ‘hot’ than something that is plain jane.

Then there’s the prospect of promotion. We’re all bloggers and we want people to read our posts. So, we use what’s available to use to promote those posts. We’ll post tweets, or on facebook, or plurk or any of the various social networks. For example I might tweet about this post and put a link to it. So, someone following me on Twitter might click on it and read it when it’s available. I go to links from other people on Twitter all the time. Now, it’s been said that posting the PL link code elsewhere is gaming the system. So I can promote my story, but I can’t use a link that will make it more hot on PL. If I want the PL numbers to go up, I just need to point a person to PL and hope they click the link. Or I can give them a direct link to my site that bypasses PL, thus not increasing my numbers of how many people read the story. If I use the PL link, they get to the story AND the link number goes up on PL. Apparently some people think this is bad, although I guess to ME, I’m not sure why? My followers are almost all in the Notes community, and if they are reading the story, my story would be more hot, wouldn’t it? I don’t have any sort of answer, and I’m not trying to damn PL here. It’s just that those numbers are not useful to me, and I don’t feel that they are really a good indicator of what content is hot or good. Because of that, I dunno if the voting numbers are actually helpful to the community as a whole or not. PlanetLotus.org is easily one of the best community tools we’ve ever seen, but I’m not sure how to fix the read counts unfortunately. Anyone have any good ideas, or is it fine as it is and I’m just a nutbag? .

Feed Readers & PlanetLotus.org

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I’d been meaning to post this for a little while, but a couple things today made me decide to finally do this. Now, let me clarify things first. I LOVE PlanetLotus.org. I think it’s a wonderful contribution to our community and I think it’s an incredible way to get people into viewing the Lotus blogging community. In fact, I have an upcoming IntranetJournal article where the first thing I share with the reader is PlanetLotus.org. So realize this, I think it’s cool. There is NO hating going on.

That said, I will take a feed reader over planetlotus.org only any day.

I’ve seen a couple people recently say they’ve stopped using RSS readers and only use PlanetLotus.org now. That scares me, and leads me to believe a lot of people are missing some great content. So here’s a few reasons I think a FeedReader is much better than PlanetLotus.org on it’s own.

  • Unread marks – An RSS reader will have unread marks associated with all the posts. It’s easy to see what you have and have not looked at.
  • Speed – An RSS Reader pulls down the text of post and stores it locally. So, when you go to read it, it’s immediate. On planetlotus.org you have to click the link and actually GO to the website in question. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s slow, sometimes the site is down.
  • Offline ability – Since the posts are downloaded, you can read them offline. So sync your feed reader, then take it on the train, under a tree, anywhere you might not have access.
  • Archival ability – I can mark a post as flagged to keep it for later. That way I can keep all the best posts available.
  • Grouping – You can group blogs together in folders based on anything you wish. If I wanted all admin blogs in one folder and all dev blogs in another, or all Quickr blogs in another. I can do that and easily separate content I want.
  • Keyword searching – If I don’t want to group, I can set up my feed reader to flag everything with a particular keyword. I can have it show me everything with Quickr in it if that’s what I’m currently interested in.
  • Synching amongst locations – I use NetNewWire on Mac, FeedDemon on Windows and sync it all through the NewsGator online service. Unread marks and archives and everything travel between my various pieces of software. So no matter where I read stuff, everything syncs up.
  • I’m in control – I don’t have to see blogs I don’t care to read in the midst of my headlines. With PL, I get em all, whether I want to or not.

Those are just a couple technical reasons I like using feed readers better. Another one is this, and I believe this is the biggest thing:

If you don’t read planetlotus.org every hour or so, you will miss stories.

It’s true, because of the amount of posts, things scroll by fast on PL. If you aren’t refreshing PL all the time, you run the risk of missing good stories. Also, I believe most users won’t scroll past that one screen. Right now I see about 20 stories on my screen, and normally if I go to PL, I look at those stories and MAYBE I’ll scroll past that to the bottom of the page. But I’ve never clicked NEXT PAGE.

And what if you make a post that isn’t while half the world is awake? Will people around the world completely miss your post? It’s a possibility, and that kind of sucks. With an RSS reader, you can walk away for a week and come back and still have access to all the content that happened while you were away. You can do that with planetlotus.org, but it’s a lot of clicking. And it’s clicking that I think people just won’t do.

For me planetlotus.org is the gateway drug. It’s the way to get people interested in Lotus blogs. And for casual readers, it’s the perfect end solution. But for someone who really wants to follow the community more closely, I think adding feeds to your RSS reader will ultimately be a better solution for you. Right now, I use PL to search for blogs I don’t already subscribe to. When I find ones I like, I add them to my feed reader.

So for me, I almost never visit PlanetLotus.org even though I find it highly valuable. And since I never click on a headline on PL, I never contribute to what is hot or not. Sometimes the numbers on what are hot kind of baffle me, and that’s one of the other things we can talk about. Maybe in the next post.

So my answer is, promote the hell out of PlanetLotus.org and once you get people hooked on the blogs, get them into using a feed reader. They’ll thank you.

Utilizing RSS in your Lotus Intranet

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My latest article for Intranet Journal is entitled Using RSS in your Lotus Intranet. It’s basically a primer on what RSS is and can do for your company. It also shows how to use the Feed Reader in the Notes 8 client to subscribe to feeds.

We bloggers tend to take things like RSS for granted without realizing that a vast majority of end users have no clue what RSS is or how it can benefit your organization. Now that Domino, Quickr and Connections can all serve up RSS feeds, and Notes 8 can read them natively, I think we really need to let people know how valuable RSS can be.

If your users or organization aren’t yet using RSS, I hope you can use this article to help give them the nudge they need!

FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are now free!!!

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Wow. Newsgator has now made all of their consumer RSS Readers free. Nick Bradbury gives you the scoop here. They also have a FAQ concerning any questions you might have.

Looks like they will be collecting anonymous usage data, but you’ll be able to turn that off and work in a standalone mode if you want to.

I love NetNewsWire on the Mac and was a huge proponent of FeedDemon on Windows before I switched over to the Mac platform. I think they are simply the best two RSS readers on the market. And the nice thing is, they have an online service that you can hit via a browser to get your feeds and it synchronizes everywhere. So, if I open NetNewsWIre at work and read stuff, then read some stuff on my Blackberry, then read some stuff on my iPhone, then go home and work on a windows machine with FeedDemon, the feeds and unread/read statuses sync between them all.

I’ve been using this for awhile and can wholeheartedly recommend it. This is certainly a kick in the teeth to google reader in my opinion.

For all you folks that didn’t want to pay for a good client before, you can now grab one (or many) for free. I highly recommend that you do!!!