Blogs | Social Signal

Would you be a more effective agent for social, economic or political change if you could see the progress we're all making as a movement?

Just how much should you fear the Social Signal vendetta of the week™? Not that much, it turns out: no sooner had I written my tirade against LinkedIn Answers than I spent the evening answering them. The key to my change-of-heart? The discovery of a groundbreaking technology known as cutting and pasting. Sure, I'd rather have pulled my LinkedIn Answer with the miracle of RSS, but this is a decent plan B.

So you really, really, really want people to contribute to your new, grassroots, user-driven site? If you want to invite my content in, you'd better let me get it out.

That means offering per-user RSS feeds for all user-contributed content. (If you're new to RSS, check out our rsstocracy.com site for an intro.) If I'm adding content to your site, I need an easy way to suck the content back out for republishing on my site. (In fact, my AlexandraSamuel.com site now consists pretty much exclusively of the content I'm posting on other sites, including this one, and then re-aggregating back onto my own site.)

A useful cautionary tale in this regard is LinkedIn. LinkedIn Answers rely on users to contribute questions AND answers to create a great (and very useful) repository of advice and referrals on just about every business topic imaginable. We often encourage folks to participate actively in LinkedIn as a way of raising their professional profile. But I'm rethinking the wisdom of that advice now that I see there's no outbound RSS feed for my own LinkedIn answers. If I'm going to make LinkedIn the go-to place for my contributions of professional intelligence, I expect to be able to republish the answers I'm writing on my own blog.

And LinkedIn should make it easy for me to do so, for three reasons:

1. By making it easy for bloggers to republish their LinkedIn answers on their own blogs, LinkedIn encourages bloggers to contribute more actively, which will help them build up high quality content.
2. By making it easy for people to subscribe to answers that come from their favorite experts, LinkedIn increases the returns to becoming a top LinkedIn expert, which again encourages high quality contributions.
3. By making it easy for people to republish their answers -- possibly as teasers that link back to the full answer on LinkedIn -- LinkedIn could get a ton of topic-specific inbound links, which would bring in lots of visitors directly from blogs AND boost LinkedIn's Google juice on topical Google searches.

If you're creating a user-driven site of your own, keep LinkedIn's example in mind. Seize the opportunity LinkedIn is missing by making it easy for your users to get content out -- recognizing that's the best way to bring content in.

Here's a little something we're trying out on the Noise to Signal cartoon: a postcard feature.

Head to any (recent) Noise to Signal cartoon, and look for the links at the bottom. You'll find a "Send this as a postcard!" link. Click it, and you're off to the races.

Take it for a spin - I'd love to know if it's working for you!

How can online collaboration tools like Basecamp support effective project management? That's one of the questions that came up at the values-based project management session I attended at Web of Change, led by Rob Purdie of Important Projects.

This year's Web of Change conference included a session with Rob Purdie of Import

How do you create a site that keeps people on your pages? By creating a site that's easy to leave.

Traditional web design often focused on keeping people on a site by reducing the number of exit points: with few or no external links, the logic goes, people will stay longer.

It doesn't work that way. The Internet is designed for hyperlinks, lateral exploration, serendipitous discovery. When you cut off exit routes, you're cutting off your site's circulation, and you're creating a stagnant site.

Okay...

One of the most powerful things about the social web is how it harnesses two human impulses to each other: the drive to connect to other people, and the drive to express ourselves.

The result is an explosion of content from people who would, a few years ago, have had few outlets of expression. Suddenly you can post your own photos, share videos, offer opinions, publish poetry and do much more.