Posts Tagged ‘rss’

Free DAM – Digital Asset Management with Wordpress for free!

Posted by tom.altman on November 12th, 2008
Matrix Code

Image by David Asch via Flickr

Over the past year to year-and-a-half I’ve been working with an “old media” company and a new start-up, then back to the same “old media” company.  The big buzz is DAM or Digital Asset Management.  Everyone is trying to get all their content into a repository.

The other thing you have to know to make this all make sense is my latest “fanboy” idol app – Wordpress.  Yea, I admit it – I think WordPress is flipin’ awesome.  I pretty much say it can do everything including wash the windows.  Now granted – a lot of this is through rose colored glasses, I’ve implemented a handful of sites and used a bunch of different plug ins…its not wholesale, mega-leverage action; but this is smokin’ hot-hot-hot.

People are spending big bucks to find the holy grail in the DAM world, I know of a few that are north of $250,00 and they go up from there – and that is a base package.  Then the other day I stumble on this WordPress plugin, yea a plugin that is free.  It’s called WP-O-Matic.

This is a killer little plugin.  I think it was designed to kind of leverage the SEO world by converting RSS to WordPress posts…yea – RSS to WP posts.  By dumping RSS news feeds into a website, it will draw search engine traffic and bring more eyeballs.

Check out these options, I have added comments…mostly for humor, but seriously, this is good stuff – this is classic DAM bullet points:

  • Campaigs Feeds and all settings and options are now organized into campaigns for the perfect organization and comfort.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “You contorl “campains” for organizational purposes – great for our DAM.”

  • Multiple feeds / categories: it’s possible to add as many feeds as you want, and add them to as many categories as you want. It’s not obstrusive, so you can also write your own posts to any of those categories.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “all the feeds and categories you want, plus we can add hand entered posts.  cool and cool.”

  • Every form of XML syndication supported. This includes RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 formats, the popular RSS 2.0 format, and the emerging Atom.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  • Feed autodiscovery, which lets you add feeds without even knowing the exact URL. (Thanks Simplepie!)

    TOM’S COMMENT: “I’m not sure what this means – but I can tell you this.  IT IS COOL!”

  • Unix cron and Wordpress cron jobs For maximum performance, you can make the RSS fetching process be called by a Unix cron job, or simply let Wordpress handle it.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “looks like it is flexiable as far as how the automation happens…can be an external bot – or part of WordPress”

  • Comfortable interface. The admin is powered by a state of the art ajaxy interface that lets you handle your feeds with ease. Updated!

    TOM’S COMMENT: “Me loves the AJAX.  Got ot have some buzz words – yes?”

  • Images caching for extreme performance and hotlinking bypassing.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “Um, thank you – I’ll take it.”

  • Words Rewriting. Want to replace the word “Poker” with “Texas Holdem”? We have it covered. Want to use regular expressions? We have it covered.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “I’m sorry – are you telling me I can replace some of the words…OK, if it must be included – I can only think of 1,000,000 ways this will be helpful.”

  • Words Relinking. Define custom links for words you specify.

    TOM’S COMMENT: “Nice.”

  • Post templating. Define a global header and footer for the posts, or even for a specific feed. Add ads

    TOM’S COMMENT: “So after this gets pulled in I can reformat it?  Wow – what of a guy could use hidden fields and ‘hide” meta data int he post.  Ummm, sure.”

  • Campaigns import/export using OPML files. Easily import hundreds of feeds into new or existing campaigns!

    TOM’S COMMENT: “ok – this might be helpful!!!!”

You can see why I’m excited.  This is truly a valid option, I know I’m being a bit cheeky – but this is a real, super inexpensive option.  Plus the database is MySQL and open source.  This means we can add some more magic after we get things into the database.

That is when something like Zemanta steps in – after you have the content data in, you hit it with a dose of Zemanta.  Systematically charaterizes the content for quicker use later.

So, as my buddy Nick says – there are a million ideas out on the intranets; its solutions that are hard to come by.  I really want to work on this myself, but I’m too excited – so I want to put it out to see if someone else has the time and energy…if you do – let me know, I’d like to help – or at least watch.

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Posted in innovation, new media, web concepts, wordpress, wordpress plugin Tags: , , 7 Comments »

Flip that thought…consumer first?

Posted by tom.altman on August 14th, 2008
Surveyor at work with a leveling instrument.Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working with a newly formed team of people who are trying to build some new offerings on the web.  Some of it’s the same old same old and some of it is taking that same old and putting a fresh spin on it.

But the biggest thing I keep talking about, and the thing that seems to be met with the most resistance is the concept of consumer first.  It’s hard for people (especially if they’ve spent too much time in “old media”) to move away from the mindset that we have to serve business.  This is simply not true.  Web sites are in the business of providing he consumer with a destination.  And today – that means it has to have compelling, relevant content.  That part is a given – but the site must also function at a certain level.  It must be able to offer two-way communication in the form of RSS, emailing and membership/community.  These are expected.

When I read the post from Derek Sivers today called “Reversable Business Models” it just reminded me so much of what we are trying to do with this team:

In China, some doctors are paid monthly when you are healthy. If you are sick, it’s their fault, so you don’t have to pay that month. It’s their goal to get you healthy and keep you healthy so they can get paid.

this part too:

Professor Dan Ariely told his class that he would be doing a reading of poetry, but didn’t know what it should cost. He handed out a price survey to all students, but secretly half of the surveys asked if they’d be willing to pay $10 to hear him read, and the other half asked if they’d be willing to hear him read if he paid them $10!

Those who got the question about paying him were willing to pay. They offered to pay, on average, $1, $2, $3 for short, medium, long readings.

Those who got the question about being paid demanded payment. They wanted to be paid, on average, $1.30, $2.70, $4.80 for short, medium, long readings.

There are a couple other examples too that are worth reading – but he ends with this question i really love:

What current business models might as well be flipped around, or get their income from a different source?

And that is my point. We get caught up in the same old garbage, day after day and loose site of the prize.  We say:  “We can’t do this because the business’s people won’t buy it.” or “No – that’s not an option because we’re not sure if the billing system can ’see’ it.” – but we really need to cut the crap and figureout what we can flip and provide to do what they say can’t be done.

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Posted in new media Tags: , , , , 1 Comment »

In Plain English

Posted by tom.altman on July 16th, 2007

I have recently discovered a site called CommonCraft which has been trying to explain some of the newer web technologies “in plain english”.

Three of the most popular are: wikis, RSS and social networking.

It is very cool to see some people trying to help promote and educate about web 2.0.

Posted in web concepts Tags: , , , Comments Off
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