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Please check it out as we won't be updating here any longer.

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Killer New Features For PositivePress

This week we’ve made some significant additions to PositivePress. These additions are direct results of input from our customers. All these features are available today. If you are a PositivePress customer or someone evaluating it under our 30-day free test drive period, these features will just magically appear.

First, we have made some significant changes to the overall navigation. We reworded some of the top navigation elements to be more logical. But I assure you everything is still there as well as some new features that we believe you will really like. Without further ado, the new features are:

Topics: We built PositivePress using best in breed Open Web technologies (read: RSS feeds). This works for some customers who like the ability to monitor specific media sources. But the number of people who feel comfortable working at this level is admittedly a subset of the general populace. Some people told us they just want to enter a term and not get into the details of where the data comes from. So we built Topics.



A Topic can be a product, a company, a person, a place…whatever you want to monitor. Sometimes you may want to monitor a set of products. Other times you may want to monitor a product as well as the products that compete with it. Under the covers, we do the work to scour the web for information on a Topic. With this in mind, we’ve also changed the way we charge for PositivePress. We now charge by the Topic and Feed – so that you can choose the right combination for you.

Overview Dashboard: Users told us they would like one spot to get an overview of what they are monitoring. The Overview Dashboard is just that place. Under the Overview tab you will see both a place to get a quick, at-a-glance look at what you are monitoring in PositivePress as well as a workspace to compare various types of web traffic. If you want to understand what makes up the coverage for a certain point on a graph, just click on it and you will be redirected to the Web pages in the Archive that make up that point in time. (Slick, huh?). The Overview Dashboard has 3 sections, as described below:



Workspace: The workspace is where you can track and compare Web traffic by Topic and Date Range as well as by Tag and Folder. The workspace defaults to showing overall traffic across all Topics by channel – Blogs, News, or Twitter – and allow you to change the parameters to compare just about anything interactively.

All Topics Overview: This view gives you a quick at-a-glance look at the relative coverage of each of your topics. This is especially valuable when comparing a product or company against its competition.

Individual Topics: Each topic displays a line and pie chart showing the mix of coverage – Blogs, News and Twitter. This is useful for tracking coverage in greater detail. And any time you see something of interest and want to look deeper, just click on the point on the line graph to be directed to the articles that make up that point in time.

Automatic Reports: Based on user feedback, we created a way to email reports automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. These Automated Reports contain graphs to give you an overview of your coverage. To use Automated Reports you simply give the Report a title, determine frequency (daily, weekly or monthly), decide which Topics to include, address the report, and select OK. PositivePress will send the reports out as instructed. As well, a copy of each report sent will be kept under Reports-> History for referral at a later time.



View Slideshow: This feature exists under the Archive Tab and is optimized for review of the details of a set of pages. Each page is shown in full size – as opposed to the thumbnail view in the Archive view – and across the top are controls optimized for tagging and adding notes to a Web page. View Slideshow is very useful when you want to examine a set of articles over a period of time, commenting on some, tagging others, and perhaps deleting some that were captured by error.

This sums up the major features of or new release. We hope you find these new features useful. Either way, we appreciate it if you let us know what you think.

Check out PositivePress media intelligence.

Tracking our launch using PositivePress

In the spirit of eating one’s own dog food, we thought it a good idea to show you how to use PositivePress to capture, archive and report on the launch of… (drum roll please) … PositivePress! (I bet you saw this coming).

The video below walks you thru the process of setting up PositivePress to capture and archive media coverage, how the review and report process works and finally, the resulting report. Enjoy.



Click here to see the report.

Introducing PositivePress

Today we are announcing the launch of PositivePress™, Iterasi’s premium service designed for business professionals who depend upon knowing what is being said about their products, company and marketplace. With PositivePress we have made it easy to track stories, build a private searchable archive of Web coverage, and generate reports to colleagues, clients and executives. We’ve also extended our archiving technology in some new ways. For example, for Twitter we not only archive the entire message (or Tweet) but we also crawl the links within each Tweet and archive those pages as well, thereby providing the most complete archiving of Twitter available.
We have also made significant changes to the Iterasi free site – now called Iterasi Personal™ – that add some features folks have been asking for and streamlines server performance.

Introducing PositivePress™

With PositivePress we’ve added the ability to easily capture the Web, archive it forever, and report on what you’ve captured. And we’ve done it in a way that allows users to leverage the best-in-breed technologies to deliver results in a powerful and cost-effective way. PositivePress builds on top of Iterasi archiving technologies to provide what other solutions can’t; the guarantee that the article is there when a client, colleague or executive wants to see it and the ability to build a searchable database of Web-based coverage.

Capturing the Web

We really didn’t have to look too far to find the best method to monitor and capture interesting stories on the Web. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is both simple and ubiquitous. It is simple in that it exists on virtually every news source, blog, search engine and social media source. Most browsers identify RSS feeds automatically. RSS has emerged as the de-facto technology used throughout the Internet to pass information. Think of RSS as the silk that makes the Internet into a Web. From simple tools like browser-based readers to complex programming tools like Yahoo Pipes, RSS is the answer to subscribing to information flow in the Open Web. Click here to see Wikipedia’s definition of RSS.

PositivePress leverages RSS to allow you to capture the Web from whatever source you like. We have a widget that contains a number of pre-loaded RSS feeds from popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, bing, ask.com), news sites (BBC, Fox, and Yahoo News) and blogs/social media/blogs (Twitter, Bloglines, Technorati, DIGG). We also include a small bookmarklet that allows you to grab a feed of any page that has an RSS link. As well, we offer advanced Add Feed to use once you get the hang of how RSS works.

If you don't already, you'll really appreciate the power of RSS. Nothing else, be it proprietary or custom, comes anywhere close to the ease and power of using RSS to monitor your Web presence.

PositivePress Reports

Once you collected the stories of interest you need a way to share them with those you work with. Sharing can have many meanings. In a PR or media related firm, you want to share coverage with your clients. Within a company, you may want to share stories with peers or executives. Whatever the reason, reporting on digital coverage is the key to showing how a company, product or individual faired in the rapidly changing world of digital media.

We learned a lot in researching PositivePress. In the public relations (PR) world there are lots of powerful tools available. Many of these tools are very expensive and limited in their report capabilities to a single, large and complex report meant to be published monthly. People we spoke to wanted a lightweight method to deliver digital coverage to their clients. Some wanted to deliver reports on a weekly basis, others whenever the news hit. All of them said it was important to be able to make a report quickly and that it must look good. It was important that they were able to convey information quickly. Since a report would flow through the clients’ organization, branding and an easy way to contact the author were mentioned as important as well. Finally, it helps to know if the report has been opened, at what time and by how many people.

From this input we created a simple and powerful report generator. In the picture below you see a sample report from a make-believe firm called Acme Media Tracking. In the top center is the Summary where the Acme account manager summarizes the week’s coverage. In the upper right-hand corner is the firms’ logo and below the logo is a link titled Email Report Author. These features provide a simple way for readers to know where the report came and get back to the reports’ author.

Finally, the bottom of the report contains Thumbnails and Notes of individual stories. Each Thumbnail refers to an individual story in the PositivePress archive. So stories are never lost and you or your clients can refer back to them without having to worry about losing coverage from days, weeks or months ago.

With PositivePress you can generate simple and powerful reports with the assurance that coverage will not go away.

Iterasi Personal™

We’ve made some significant changes in our free offering which we now call iterasi personal. The first thing you will notice is that My Pages has changed significantly. By popular request we have added the ability to perform operations on large numbers of pages. Now you add a Tag to a group of pages, or a common Note, or Delete in Bulk, or make pages Public or Private. This feature should make operations within your My Pages account much easier.

We have taken away the Search column on the left side and replaced it with a Search box at the top. That was the source of some of the performance latencies our site was experiencing. As accounts got bigger the search required to display the contents of that panel became excessive (and less useful). Also, most of what was on the home page for searching the public archive has been moved to a top Nav element called Public Pages.

We have also removed ‘Import Bookmarks’ as an option. This feature costs us a lot in terms of bandwidth and performance and was getting limited use. It may reappear but, frankly put, it requires too much horsepower to be given away for free. So if it reappears it will most likely be as part of a monthly-subscription product.

Finally, on the free site you will be getting pitched to try out our premium products. We hope you will give them a try – PositivePress is the first and we have more in the pipeline. Click here to learn more about a free 30 day trial of PositivePress.

Conclusion

We are excited about these changes! With PositivePress we feel we’ve opened the door to a world of possibilities for customers to use the full power of the Open Web, build a permanent, searchable library of coverage, and quickly deliver powerful reports.

For our Iterasi Personal users, we think you will find the improvements meet some of the requests you have made of us over the last year. Hopefully many of you will find tremendous value in archiving whole streams of information with PositivePress!

pete

RSS is the best tool for the job

Currently at Iterasi we are in beta with a brand new product. I have dropped hints about this for months now via posts here and ramblings on twitter. One element of this not-yet-released-so-I’m-not-gonna-describe-it-yet product is its integral use of RSS. The problem: I have had a lot of angst in counting on a technology that many non-tech savvy users see as pretty raw stuff.

Please do not take me wrong; I am a huge fan of RSS. However when I utter those three letters to the tech-challenged potential customer I often get a glazed response. I then proceed to show that, in fact, it’s called Real Simple Syndication for a reason; it really is simple. Still glazed. As previewing a new product with potential customers is critical – and one can't ignore the feedback – this has bothered me for some time.

Maybe I am doing something wrong. Thoughts race through my mind. Maybe I should build some ‘wrapper’ in our product to ‘hide’ the complexities of those three letters? As the sleepless hours drag on, I envision some fancy UI that allows someone to just drop in a term or phrase and magically get the answer. With this magic, my customers won’t have to learn the mysteries of the scary RSS hobgoblin.

I was lamenting this situation with a trusted friend (whose identity shall remain secret) over IM:

Petegrillo: funny thing... I was feeling like we should have more 'front end handholding'

Petegrillo: but in fact, the entire web runs on RSS

Mystery_friend: i think so

Petegrillo: so we would in effect limit our users abilities by obfuscating the power of all these RSS capabilities

Mystery_friend: i like that

Petegrillo: hey a good quote huh?

Mystery_friend: it is

(Sounds like the answers one would get from a therapist, huh?)

There is it. The elusive moment of clarity. I could spend tons of engineering energy to hide the power that RSS provides across the Open Web. Or I could let the Open Web work for me. RSS exists on most all news site/blogs, browsers, search engines, and on twitter as well. For more sophistcated applications Yahoo Pipes provides an extremely powerful tool set built around RSS. (One noteworthy exception to RSS acceptance is Facebook. They seem to dabble in RSS and then run away from it).

So now I get it. I am at peace. I will not try to hide the power of the Open Web. I will have to deal with some initial resistance with the belief that my customers will learn the power of RSS and find greater value in our product by working with the best tools available.

It’s a gamble. But I think it’s the right move for our customers.

pete

Change coming

Change is constant. Right now is certainly a time of change for businesses of all shapes and sizes. And we are no different.

Changes have been hyper-accelerated by the current economic situation. In the months since the most recent bubble burst – as measured by the famous Sequoia Capital R.I.P. slidedeck of October ’08 - most startups have either closed shop completely or gotten real serious about turning themselves into sustainable businesses. The events we all read daily about have had an effect on customers as well. Customers now are expecting to pay for services they value and questioning either the sustainability or the value of free software. Feedback from users has been pretty direct on these points.

At Iterasi we will be acting accordingly. We have been giving away way too much for free. Many users have told me this. We have experimented with various business models with some successes. Shortly we will move to a model where we will charge for premium services. As has been rumored for some time (by me mostly) we will be offering for-fee products built on top of our core archiving technologies. The first of these products will be available a little later this summer. These products will be provided as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model billed on a monthly basis. Without leaking too much, let’s just say that if you are in the business of tracking Web-based media, you might like what we will be offering.

We will, however, continue to offer free Iterasi accounts for the foreseeable future. You can expect that there will be some limits on what we provide for free, and a way to increase the features available to you for a reasonable fee.

There are some things we won’t do. We will not do away with your ability to archive pages for free. Nor will we hold the pages you have archived in the past at bay by requiring you to pay to access the pages you already have archived. We may reduce the number of pages that you can archive for free. Likely we will also reduce some of features available for free use. The details are being decided as I write this.

These changes are good for Iterasi as well as our customers. We want to be around to provide our services to as many people and businesses as we can. It’s what we do.

Importing Furl pages into iterasi

Earlier this month it was announced that Furl, an early innovator in the world of social bookmarking, had been purchased by Diigo. The announcements we read said that the Furl service would be rolling into Diigo in a future release. 

Since that announcement we have had quite a few Furl users ask us if they could import their Furl pages into iterasi. The answer is ‘Yes, sort of’.  Let me explain. At this time we have an import tool that would let you import your bookmarks and their associated metadata and use iterasi to make fresh archives of those Webpages. To be clear, we do not (yet) offer the ability to import the pages as they were captured by Furl users days, months or years ago. 

We have talked about the effort to import Furl pages and it would not be hard for us to develop. Currently our plate is pretty full so the decision to add this capability will be based on how many people ask for it. So let us know if this is something you would like. If we get enough requests and decide to add this feature I’ll make an announcement here at a later date.

In the meantime, if you want to import the Furl URLs into iterasi and get a fresh archive of the webpage, then do the following:

EXPORT your Furl items as bookmarks:

1)  Login to your Furl account

2)  Go to 'Tools->Export My Archive'

3)  Click on the 'Browser Bookmark' link to select the export format used by IE and Firefox.

4)  Save the file locally somewhere that you can remember

5)  If you want to import your Furl 'Categories' as iterasi 'Tags', then you will need to modify the export file to change the label "CATEGORIES" to "TAGS" and replace the semicolons used to separate the tags with commas. The easiest way to do this is to open up the file in notepad, and do a global replace for CATEGORIES and semicolons.  Choose 'Edit->Replace' and replace 'CATEGORIES' with 'TAGS'.  Repeat the previous step replacing semicolons with commas.  (NOTE:  Use ‘Replace All’ to replace all occurrences in the document at once, saving you from having to go through the file one bookmark at a time)

IMPORT your Furl bookmarks into iterasi

1)  Login to iterasi

2)  Go to 'Tools' and click on the 'Import' button

3)  In the import form, click on the 'Browse' button and locate your saved exported Furl file.

4)  If you want to add extra tags to your Furl item – perhaps you want to tag all of these with the Tag ‘ImportedFromFurl’ you can do that by adding to the Tags box.

5)  If you want your Furl items to be private, check the Private checkbox. 

6)  Click on the 'OK' button when you are ready to import

7)  Our servers will browse to each of your imported Furl URL's and archive a fresh copy of that URL's webpage and save it in your account. You can see the progress of this in your 'Pending Archives"

Again, let us know if the full webpage import from Furl into iterasi is something important to you.  We will count the votes and if there is enough interests we'll post here at a later date.