In the spirit of Georgeʼs request for feedback from the employees I tossed together most of the things that buzz around my head as things we could do to take advantage of the fact we online media not print media.

These are all technology related ideas and suggestions that apply both to efficiency issues internally and to B2B and consumers.

Syndication

Syndication on the web has formalized around RSS feeds. Aggregators like Google News use this, and users use this via RSS client software or aggregators like Google Reader. RSS clients exist for almost every platform from the PC to the iPhone.

Optimally every page on the site that lists content should be available as an RSS feed including search results. For instance, I should be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for the “Europe” regional portal page, or the Terrorism Weekly, or the search results of the term “Putin”.

Aggregation

The flip side of pervasive syndication via RSS on the Web is the ability for users to specify feeds from other sites they would like to look at in what place or for sites like ours to pull content or links to content via RSS that is in context to our content. For instance, titles to recent NYTIMES articles on Europe on our Europe regional portal page.

Links and References

Weʼve been very good internally at taking advantage of our existing content and linking to previous articles in context within a new article. What we donʼt do so much is link to outside sources of information within our articles or provide links to relevent information as a footnote to articles.

I presume that outside and open sources were used to flesh out or validate the numbers and other references within our analysis, but we donʼt provide these links to our users, ignoring a major power the Web has over printed media.

Commentary

Weʼve gone back and forth over allowing user feedback that that is visible to other users and allowing a means for users to discuss or content within the context of the article.

Mostly this failed because we didnʼt like some of the things our users persisted on saying and we didnʼt have the time to moderate it. Interaction between readers and easy feedback transparent to other users is another significant ability Web based media has over print.

Gaming companies and computer manufacturers like Dell deal with virulent and often antagonistic user communities while allowing these mediums of interaction and feedback by maintaining one or more employees dedicated to “Community Management”.

We should consider bringing back a comment system and doing the same.

LinkBacks

We should implement linkback functionality to help us track when other sites link to our articles.

A Linkback is a method for Web authors to obtain notifications when other authors link to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. The three methods (Refback, Trackback, and Pingback) differ in how they accomplish this task.

Any of the four terms -- Linkback, Trackback, Pingback, or (rarely) Refback -- might also refer colloquially to items within a section upon the linked page that display the received notifications, usually along with a reciprocal link; Trackback is used most often for this purpose. Also, the word Trackback is often used colloquially to mean any kind of Linkback.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback

Social Bookmarking with Voting: Yahoo Buzz, Digg, Slashdot, etc.

Digg and Buzz provide a means for users to submit a story and vote for it negatively or positively. Other users of Digg or Buzz can then vote for it too. This provides a sort of mob moderated method of aggregating news and other information from diverse sources on these sites.

Story and article sources like blogs can provide a quick and easy means for their readers to submit a particular story to Digg or Buzz with a positive vote so that Digg and Buzz readers have the opportunity to view the story or article.

This sort of mob moderated system was first created on sites like slashdot.org as a means to to give users the ability to self-rate content. Slashdot could create so much traffic to the site the an article originated from that the term “slashdotted” was coined to mean the site was brought down by an over-abundance of users. Digg and Buzz both provide a means to siginificantly increase new user traffic by making our content visible on a third party site that appeals to users who want their contented vetted by someone else before they bother. http://buzz.yahoo.com/ http://digg.com/

Personalization

We should allow users to customize both their stratfor home page and there email to a higher degree.

Users should be able to create a “My Stratfor” home page that shows only content they are interested in by keyword, region, or any other defining attribute. Optimally they should be able to aggregate RSS feeds from other sites too in form of teasers or titles.

Emailed products should include the customization that already exists plus something like Googleʼs Alert mail system that allows a user to immediate get an email notification of content that matches specific keywords. non-pc access

Stratfor content should be available in a useable form on popular non-pc devices like the iPhone, Kindle, and other mobile devices.

In some cases this allows for a custom application, in others it is a matter of designing a version of the site that works well for mobile browsers.

Workflow and 100% web based process

Weʼve gotten rid of Filemaker and the other parts of the horrid process we used on the old site to get content published. Thatʼs wonderful, but we still fail to take advantage of what we have. Most of the workflow is still uncontrolled and relies mostly on employee action via email. As pieces move from writer to editor to copy editor and onward email notification by the previous person in line causes the flow to continue.

Most content development doesnʼt touch the website content management system until well into the editorial process, instead occurring in Microsoft Word.

Optimally, the content should reside within the websiteʼs content management system once the first draft leaves the writer. Editorial changes should be made within the content managment system so that changes can be tracked and problems caused by differences between formatting capabilities of Word and the website can be avoided.

Workflow should be accomplished by the website automatically by notifying via email those necessary that a piece is ready for next step in the process.

Access Granularity

On the customer side we have only to levels of user unpaid and paid. I believe there is still a customer that isnʼt an old rich white man that want to read our content. These potential customers simply cannot afford $350 dollars a year. Weʼve attempted to address this before with categorical failure, but provided some other level of access at the $50 and under price point is still a means to nail the under 30 crowd of intellectuals like the constant stream of gung-ho interns who hope to work here.

On the employee side we need more levels of access. In order to give an employee access to view user data, I end up giving him access to change user data. Not a good idea. We need more granular levels of access so that we can give specific employees a level of access appropriate for their expressed needs and not the ability to unknowingly alter the website or a customers data.