Newsmastering: A General Overview

• What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars? RSS News Aggregation And Re-Publishing For Beginners

  Newsmastering is a new and emerging skill that involves gathering, filtering and selecting from the chaos of information that saturates the Internet, and delivering the resulting news feed to niche-targeted audiences.




• Web Content Formats - Links Posts: How To Convert Your Link Posts Activity Into Effective Niche News Publishing

From Steve Rubel to Sepp Hasslberger, many beginning bloggers as well as a good number of experienced ones like to publish (especially on weekends) posts that are nothing else but a collection of recommended links they are offering to their readers. These digests of links have gotten over time different names: link posts, linkstream, best links of the day, news grabs and so on, with a thousand different variations.



• News Aggregation Is Online Independent Publishers Natural Next Step

  If you have mastered the blogging paradigm, have made your blog an authority and a reliable source of information, commentary or news in your selected field(/s) of interest, it is about time to "scale yourself up" - Work Less and Look More At The Bigger Picture (= See the Future).




• The Human News Aggregator: An Interview About NewsMastering With Robin Good

  Marshall Kirkpatrick, the official online interviewer at NetSquared.org, took the time to cal me up and find out more about this emerging new practice and about the tools and processes required to make it all work.




• What Is RSS: A Guide To Really Simple Syndication Benefits, Best Uses And Applications

  This is a guide explaining what RSS is and how to best use it. It is targeted at the non-technical user who has not had yet the opportunity to fully understand what RSS is all about and how to best put it to use.




• The Network Second Layer: RSS Newsmastering

  Read slowly and with maximum attention what Stephen Downes says right here:

  "What should happen, what is already happening, is that a large network of sites like Edu_RSS should emerge, forming in essence a second layer in the network. The result of this second layer is that the internet will self-organize, that information generated in a thousand or a million places will cluster, become composite, interpreted, specialized, and produce highly targeted, highly specific resource feeds at the output end."





• What Public Relations Professionals Could Do With RSS: Newsmastering, Newsradars And Personal Media Aggregators

  If you have been wondering how RSS could be of use and benefit to PR work, this good audio conversation (38' minutes) with Sally Falkow, renowned PR and branding expert, should shed some new light on these interesting issues.




• Content Aggregation And The New Curators: Podcasting Newsmasters

  Unless we start to leverage the filtering ability of talented content curators, editors and newsmasters with the efficiency and speed of new tools which allow them to find, monitor and spot key relevant content bits, we are doomed to be either drowned in this chaotic cloud of content available to us or to miss a great deal of the very best of it.




• RSS Newsfeeds Aggregation: My Business Experience

  RSS newsmastering, or the ability to aggregate, filter and compile topic-specific news digests, has opened up several interesting opportunities to create quality new services while extracting good revenue from them. The same goes for feed sponsorship and ads integration. While I am not particularly in favour of this last one, there are specific instances and formats of RSS ad integration that will yield certainly good results.




• How To Create NewsRadars: Rok Gets The Good' Steps

  With inexhaustible energy Robin has been promoting the benefits of public and private News Radars to researchers, information professionals, corporate knowledge workers and independent publishers. See the Related Articles section at the bottom of this post for references to these articles. Before Robin adopted and refined the term, the concept of News Radars was mentioned by others, notably Rok Hrastnik and the people at MyST Technology. The latter company is currently using the term BlogSite Briefings.

Newsmastering Tools and Services

1. The First RSS Newsmastering Engine For Search Professionals: MySyndicaat

   Targeted at "professionals" researchers, information librarians, competitive intelligence analysts, information scouts and specialized news editors, the new technology makes it finally rather straightforward to create topic-specific newsradars (news feeds) on just about any selected theme.




2. From RSS Reader To Direct Online Publisher: Newsmastering Away With Blogbridge

   Making use of a good RSS feed reader is essential to the daily routine of most bloggers. Feeds give you a way to quickly seek out the latest hot news for your niche audience from across the web. Wouldn't it be nice, though, to be able to read your feeds and publish your blog posts from a single application?




3. Beyond NewsMastering: Yahoo! Pipes Is The Internet RSS Remixer - Overview And Reports

   Yahoo! Pipes, is essentially a very powerful RSS feed remixer, which goes well and beyond the original newsmastering concept I described a few years ago. Potentially, Yahoo! Pipes is a highly disruptive visual programming environment that puts in the hands of many people the ability to create web mashups and web-based applications that combine data from different sources with much greater ease and effectiveness.

Robin Good Shares His Top100 News Sources For Free

Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll's foolishly imperious monarch, gay rights activists have adopted a "vote first, campaign afterward" approach to trying to win marriage rights for same-sex couples.

My colleague Gerry Smith reports that "thousands of gay-marriage advocates took to the streets of downtown Chicago on Saturday, hoping to galvanize support" for same-sex marriage. It was just one of many protests nationwide, all aimed at Proposition 8, an anti gay-marriage ballot referendum in California.

In the last 12 days or so, protesters have been picketing Mormon churches and other religious institutions that have supported Proposition 8 and launching a legal effort to have the referendum itself declared unconstitutional.

Though I'm totally behind their cause, my response to this burst of activity and determination is a puzzled, "Umm....."

The vote was Nov. 4. Traditionally, the time for demonstrations, rallies, protests, pre-emptory lawsuits and so on is before the election.

That's when moving public opinion can do you the most good.

Proposition 8 was no secret, particularly not in California. Nor was it a secret that it was doing well in the polls and that various religious institutions were putting big money into the campaign for passage.

Post-election analysis of Prop 8's narrow victory had it that gay-marriage advocates were outhustled, outspent and otherwise outcampaigned by gay-marriage opponents.

Advocates did not, for instance, make much of an effort to win support in minority communities, where homosexuality remains a greater taboo than it is non-minority communities -- even though Barack Obama's name on the presidential ballot was sure to spark a heavy turnout in those communities.

The advocates' legal claim now is that Prop. 8 represents too great a change to the California Constitution to be approved by a simple majority vote. The courts may agree, I have no idea. But the time for that argument was before the election; before asking for nullification of the result looked so much like the complaint of sore losers.

The defeat has galvanized supporters of gay marriage. Why wasn't the prospect of defeat enough?

I ran the above by Rick Garcia, public policy director of Equality Illinois:

You hit it on the head.

I was thrilled with the massive turnout throughout the country. And in Illinois we had unprecedented demonstrations in Chicago, Carbondale, Springfield, Peoria and Champaign

As much as I hate to say this I wonder where were these thousands of people before November 4?

I think a huge problem was that proponents of the proposition fought hard and dirty. Opponents were paralyzed by political correctness, by a refusal to play hardball politics (they should have spent a few weeks in training in Chicago!). They relied too much on focus groups and polling and didn't do the hard political work of getting our votes out on election day. Our sides ads were insipid at best while the proponents ran hard scary ads.

And, this community has been lulled into complacency. We won marriage in California, our neighbors tolerate us, the delightful heterosexuals in our neighborhood would never vote against us. How many friends, family and neighbors of gay people voted yes? And, we are to blame because far to many of us didn't have the necessary conversations with our neighbors, family and friends.

I haven't seen this much anger and outrage and desire to do something since the beginning of the AIDS crisis. I hope it can be harnessed for good so that we don't have another Prop 8 loss. But the question is where was this enthusiasm before the vote?

Andy Thayer, co-founder of the Gay Liberation Network. added these thoughts:

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According to SGI, the key to make this system work is their proprietary Kelvin cooling technology, which we can only imagine works by pouring buckets of liquid nitrogen over the CPUs. According to them, all this vaporware may result in a computer that can sustain 20,000 threads of execution, with a 15TB/sec memory bandwidth per rack.

High concurrency with 20,000 threads of execution 40 times more than a single rack x86 cluster system
High throughput with 15TB/sec of memory bandwidth per rack over 20 times faster than a single rack x86 cluster system
Greater balance with up to three times the memory bandwidth/OPS compared to current x86 CPUs
High performance with approximately 3.5 times the computational performance per rack
Greener with low-watt consumer CPUs and low-power memory that deliver 7 times better memory bandwidth/watt
Innovative Silicon Graphics Kelvin cooling technology, which enables denser packaging by stabilizing thermal operations in densely configured solutions
Operating environment flexibility, capable of running industry-standard Linux(R) implementations, with Microsoft(R) Windows(R) variants on some configurations

[SGI via Gadget Lab]

Does a sale of western lands mean reducing national parkland? No, first much of the land isn't parkland. Second, I propose a deal. The government should sell some of its most valuable land in the west and use some of the proceeds to buy low-price land in the Great Plains.

The western Great Plains are emptying of people. Some 322 of the 443 Plains counties have lost population since 1930 and a majority have lost population since 1990.

Now is the time for the Federal government to sell high-priced land in the West, use some of the proceeds to deal with current problems and use some of the proceeds to buy low-priced land in the Plains creating the world's largest nature park, The Buffalo Commons.

Granting that much of that western land isn't parkland, and that some of it is valuable, it's not clear to me how much of it is both valuable and not a natural park. Outside of Clark and Washoe counties, Nevada is basically worthless desert and at the moment Clark County is badly overbuilt and full of foreclosed properties, vacants, and half-built projects. Still, it'd be worth looking at something like this in greater detail and seeing if there are any plausible options in this regard. Population is growing in many of these heavily federal states and population is shrinking in the plains and it does make a lot more sense for the federal government to concentrate its land holdings in places where people don't want to live.

1. You only need to submit your Sitemaps once in Webmaster Tools. Custom Search will automatically list the Sitemaps submitted via Webmaster Tools and you can decide which Sitemap to select for On-Demand Indexing.
2. Your Sitemap needs to be for a website verified in Webmaster Tools, so that we can verify ownership of the right URLs.
3. In order for us to index these additional pages, our crawlers must be able to crawl them. You can use "Webmaster Tools > Crawl Errors > URLs restricted by robots.txt" or check your robots.txt file to ensure that you're not blocking us from crawling these pages.
4. Submitting pages for On-Demand Indexing will not make them appear any faster in the main Google index, or impact ranking on Google.com.

• Collaboration will help us do more with less. The idea is that collaboration can lead to greater efficiencies and reduce the amount of internal resources required for projects. Collaboration leads to better information which helps make better decisions in terms of how to allocate resources. Collaboration also takes advantage of prosumers and social networks where individuals can help co-innovate with companies at a lower cost than using exclusively internal resources. There's an assumption underlying this scenario that there's some surplus capacity in the economy because a) companies are cutting back on projects, but not necessarily eliminating all of the corresponding staff, and b) those employees that are cut will be available for contract work and targeted initiatives. In fact, this may even be a good time to stock up on promising young talent. The pro-collaboration folks suggest that collaboration can lead to new growth opportunities that will help companies differentiate themselves in difficult times. Extra cycle times may also be directed at innovation and R&D; there's a lot things you can do during rainy days and building a pipeline of products and services may be one of them.

• There's no time for collaboration; doing more with less means we've got to hunker down. With an economic downturn companies will not be willing to appoint resources to collaborative projects. Since the return on investment of collaborative initiatives is not always apparent, employees will also not be willing to allocate their time on activities that are not measured in performance reviews or not seen as directly contributing to the bottom line. From an employee perspective, it may make sense to hoard knowledge in tough times and be less collaborative in order to make yourself indispensable (i.e. prevent being eliminated). The hunkering down managers believe that collaboration is risky and can lead to wasted resources on dead-end projects. Moreover, they frown upon self-organizing behavior; suggesting that it will result in unfocused initiatives. It's time to run a tight ship and that means scrutinizing all discretionary pursuits, focusing on internal resources, cutting salary expenses where possible, and getting remaining salaried employees to shoulder the extra weight.

Two opinions; two very different strategies. What do you think?

Now some may say as someone from OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) did here that WEF, or its members, have been more a part of the problem than the solution. I don't know about that. At least we can say that WEF has not been equipped to act quickly enough to forestall those crisis in food and credit. So it seems that this meeting is an attempt to respond to that, to set agendas more than spot them.

Today's meeting began, of course, with a report from a cluster of councils on finance. Suzanne Nora Johnson of Carnegie issued a strong statement.

The outlook for the global economy is the worst that many of us have seen in our lives, she said. There is no country, there is no industry that will be completely immune. The current crisis is rooted in global macroeconomic imbalances. We are in this together. This, she said, was a problem of risk management. No one did a good job. There was excessive risk taking and leverage. In that, she included not only the industry and governments but media and households. It has undermined the perceived advantage of open capital markets and at the extreme has even questioned the value of capitalism today.

The groups endorsed two short-term responses: First, everyone who is engaged in this crisis has to have a seat at the table. There has to be a global, coordinated response both in crisis management and in the ongoing regulation of our markets. Second, the intense government responses to date must continue with much better communications and transparency of government objectives.

More the intermediate and long terms, the groups proposed:
* Building the capacity and capability of our regulatory authorities both in national and international forums.
* Many government improvements in the private sector need to continue.
* Greater linkages between macroeconomic policies and regulators.
* Transparency of information is not enough. There needs to be more synthesis and analysis in the aggregate. (And, no, I don't know what that means.)
* The rules of engagement of government in private sector need to be defined. There is a
* Continued investment in the private sector in the emerging markets./
* The underserved need to be engaged. Though there is a need for government intervention, she said,

Some other themes from other groups:

* Networks. We are not only more connected through the economy, environment, and security but we now have the means to connect the internet to create and innovate and make decisions. Telephony is be a bridge to greater connectedness as it links with the internet. By the end of 2010, Paul Twomey of ICANN pointed out, 5 billion people will have mobile phones and more and more they will have internet access. The global governance group called for a Marshall Plan to bridge the digital divide.

* The need for global governance (not global government, they were careful to point out). The governance group argued that world trade works because of global governance but finance is broken because it does not. They said that this will require some relinquishment of sovereignty.

* Capitalism isn't broken It would be sheer folly to allow our faith in the system to be shaken by the financial crisis, said the economic development group. That was a majority opinion, I'd say, though not unanimous, as one comment from the floor revealed.

* Mobility. The governance group said that problems cross borders without passports but we expect solutions to move with passports. The economic development group urged a global system of global migration but admitted that with unemployment soaring, it's not the time to push this; they suggested instead working it out quietly (that's not very transparent).

* Changing demographics. The economic development group said that with life expectancy extended by two decades and with a huge growth of the older demographic, retirement laws should be changed. That, too, they suggested is not best taken on while employment is rising.

* The environment and sustainability group which called for a fundamental reboot in 2009 said that the crisis in fuel, finance, and food were just canaries in the coal mine. They are early warning signs that the system is not sustainable. Of course, environment was on many tongues, but I didn't hear much new about the agenda except continued efforts to communicate urgency.

* Involving more stakeholders as also on many minds with more calls for including more people. That is a permanent challenge for WEF.

* Freedom of speech. Too little was said about that except whispers about taking on the topic in a nation that does not value and protect speech. At least someone from the entertainment group yes, frivolous entertainment said that freedom of speech is essential so people will be able to tell their stories and understand each other better. Amen. I wish that had come as a strong statement from the internet and media groups as well. Show biz shamed us.

* The group on society and values said it in their way, reminding the group of the moral imperative to develop the promise of every human being. That, of course, also touches on poverty discrimination, and education.

* The power of data and information is implicit in calls for transparency but the potential is greater than that, requiring systems to gain value from data. The health group talked about that and how data is a public good and should be in the public domain.

* Moving beyond data and information which is where too many think the value of the internet stops Don Tapscott made a good appeal for baking openness and involvement into finance (why not open-source risk management algorithms?) and government (the internet enables a national brainstorming).

* An unspoken theme I saw through the three days here was control: those who had it losing it and not knowing what to do, not understanding that according to Jarvis' First Law today, when you give up control, you win. That, to me, is the fundamental change occurring here. I am in the midst of those who control and they must learn, according to David Weinberger's Corolary, that there is an inverse relationship between control and trust.

* Crises are an opportunity for change.

Some people in the room, me among them, thought we are devoting, though understandably, too much attention to fear, risk, failure, regulation, and control. Some believe in the end, most, I hope that innovation and creation and invention are the real cures and the real means for growth and I hope we concentrate on them. WEF head Klaus Schwab does address the theme in his closing: entrepreneurship in the global public interest.

There's more, of course. Now we're getting to the point of people standing up to say we've forgotten their issue. That could go on forever.

I'll write later about my own group on the future of the internet and about impressions of Dubai.

Many of you will have read either the ELCA press release or our press release (inserted at the end of this post) sent out yesterday. In these, we announced that we are refining our focus to do what is most central to our calling as the ministry of publishing for this church.

We are called to create high quality resources for congregations and higher education. And, that is what we doing in ways that are stronger, better, more innovative and with more energy than ever before! But, in order to have this type of intentional focus on these core creative ministries of publishing, we need to stop doing some things. We will no longer be signing new contracts for consumer-oriented books. We have made the very hard decision to close nine bookstores over the next six months. We are adding to our inside sales and web development staff so that we can do a better job of reaching out to congregational leaders via phone, email, webinars, and other contemporary means of communication. In order to do this, we made the challenging decision to discontinue having field sales reps. We will no longer juggle the challenges of having 65 mini-stores at 65 synod assemblies over about a 12 week period each spring. We will add (and hope to partner with synods, congregations, ELCA seminaries and colleges, and other groups) Christian Education/Faith Formation Clinics both in person and via webinar.

We have also invested in a major overhaul of our information technology infrastructure over this past year. You will see the direct positive evidence of this with our new webstore that will be launched in December at this familiar Augsburg Fortress web address. We think that you will feel indirect positive evidence of this through improved services as this investment will assist us in being much more efficient as we serve you.

But, with this focus comes sadness. In order to have the human, time, and financial resources to invest in the exciting resources that are in development for congregations and higher education, we need to stop doing some things. And, this has meant that over the past two days, we have had to tell 55 of our colleagues across the USA and Canada that their jobs are being eliminated. It is painful for them. It is painful for those of us who have made the decisions and delivered the message. It is painful for our colleagues who will continue to work at Augsburg Fortress and who will miss good co-workers. We know that it is painful for people in seminaries, synods and the churchwide office where we have had bookstores. We know that it is painful for caring leaders throughout this church who will miss interacting with folks who will no longer visit them or host a mini-store at an event. I can assure you that we are supporting these 55 people through prayer and by providing severance and outplacement services to assist them in moving into new career opportunities.

We invite your prayers for the good people who will leave AF over the next six months. If you personally know one of the staff members who has been laid off, we encourage you to reach out to him or her with a note or a call of support. We invite your prayers for our focus on the ministry of publishing that is Augsburg Fortress. And, if you know of job opportunities in your own organizations or communities that might be a good fit for any of the smart, hard-working people who are leaving AF, we would be happy to assist you in connecting with them. You may send a note to me or to our Vice President for Human Resources, Sandy Middendorf.

In blog posts over the next few days, I'll share more of the exciting resources that you will soon see from Augsburg Fortress (print, web, video and more) that will assist people in congregations and higher education in their ministries.

In the meantime, please join me in praying for the good people who are leaving AF and the good people who are staying!

Blessings,
Beth

PRESS RELEASE NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Contact: Sheryl Burmaster
612-330-3240
Sheryl.burmaster@augsburgfortress.org

Augsburg Fortress Changes Business Model
New Strategic Plan Focuses on Innovative Resources for Congregations and Higher Education

Nov 7, MINNEAPOLIS Augsburg Fortress, the publishing ministry of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), today announced strategic plans to renew and strengthen its dual focus: creating innovative resources for the core needs of congregations and for higher education. Based on a year of intensive market research and business analysis, the strategic plan for the new direction of the company was presented to and unanimously approved by the Board of Trustees for Augsburg Fortress in its meeting held on October 24 & 25 in Minneapolis, MN.

Augsburg Fortress recognizes significant opportunities to increase the value of its relationships with congregations as well as colleges and seminaries, and is changing its core business strategies to provide the tools that today's customers need in order to grow and change.

In recent years, Augsburg Fortress has focused on providing materials to meet the emerging needs of today's congregations, taking a lead among publishers of Christian resources by developing innovative web-based and print resources for use in congregational faith formation and worship, such as Here We Stand Confirmation, Sundaysandseasons.com and Akaloo, said Beth Lewis, President & CEO of Augsburg Fortress. With the intention to fully leverage our strengths, this strategic plan centers on continuing to vigorously invest in the creation of integrated ministry resource systems employing both print and web media. We are confident that this is the best opportunity for Augsburg Fortress to excel as a Christian Publisher, and we are excited for the new direction this company is taking.

These redefined priorities presented the need for Augsburg Fortress to move away from some traditional publishing practices. The approved strategic plan includes the elimination of unsustainable portions of the business, including closing nine retail bookstores throughout the USA by May 1, 2009. However, Augsburg Fortress' long-time commitment to providing industry-leading materials for congregations and higher education will be enhanced by a greater emphasis on innovative products and superior customer service.

Marty Stevens, Secretary for the Augsburg Fortress Board of Trustees and Executive Director of Enrollment Services and Student Life and Instructor in Biblical Studies for the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg emphasizes that Augsburg Fortress has always had a fine reputation for scholarship. Now, it is strengthening its relationship with the eight ELCA seminaries through its superb Seminary Hub initiative that gives students and faculty free access to all of their unparalleled web-based content for educational use. This is a wonderful gift with an annual value of $225,000 for future congregational leaders.

To facilitate these strategic changes effectively and to realize significant efficiencies, Augsburg Fortress has invested in a comprehensive upgrade of its information technology infrastructure in the past year. Through this improved infrastructure, Augsburg Fortress will launch a more robust, integrated web shopping experience for customers in December 2008.

The new strategic direction requires that Augsburg Fortress reallocate some of its resources, including staffing realignment: the organization will eliminate positions in various locations while adding to sales, marketing, and technology staff in the Minneapolis headquarters. Over the next six months, 55 positions will be eliminated; 13 of them in Minneapolis and the remainder throughout North America.

Augsburg Fortress is undergoing important strategic changes