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Insight, Information and Inspiration on women's careers, business, technology and the Industry.
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In recent years XML has gained a lot of popularity in the IT industry, mostly because of its ease of use. XML provides a standard method to access information, making it easier for applications and devices of all kinds to use, store, transmit, and display data.
XML has no dependencies on the programming language type, operating system platform, databases type, or even human languages and that makes it the perfect data format to allow programmers to build cross platform applications.
With the wide adoption of blogging, one of the most successful uses of XML has been RSS. RSS is a tool that uses the blogging data that is stored as XML and allows bloggers to push that data to ANY RSS reader on ANY device.
While XML is here to stay and is important to learn, it can be overwhelming to get started. Below are some great resources that will help you get on your way.
XML in 10 Points
Getting Started with XML: A Manual and Workshop
How Can XML be Used?
Using XML
A few months ago, I was speaking with a client who was telling me an all-too-common story of business blogging: he and his team had set up a brand-new, visually-pleasing blog site. It looked great. It matched their corporate website. It had a URL. It had a cool masthead. It had links to other websites and bloggers, and it was ready to go.
But there was one problem. A pretty big problem. The blog was empty. Actually, it wasn’t totally empty, it had a few random posts here and there but they were few and far between.
As he told me his tale of blogging woes, he even diagnosed the problem himself: Unattended Blog Syndrome or “UBS.” (I am not making this up, he really called it that.) Blogs are insatiable when it comes to having enough copy – there is no such thing as ever being “done” with your blog as you might be with another marketing vehicle, like a brochure or a web page.
Don’t let yourself or your company fall prey to UBS. Here are some basic but very important tips for keeping UBS away from you and your team:
Continue Reading “The Not-So-Hidden Dangers Of Unattended Blog Syndrome”
By: Nelly Yusupova
Posted: April 8, 2008 Topics: Events, Marketing, Women in Technology, Blogs, Business, Career, Technology Tags: brand equity, marketing, SEO, social media
Last week, I had the pleasure moderating a panel/case study at the BlogHer Business ‘08 conference here in New York City, where I interviewed three prominent Microsoft bloggers. The panelists were Ani Babaian, Sara Ford and Ariel Stallings, and we discussed how their blogging helps to build a bridge between the world of corporate social media and their own personal technology passions.
I really enjoyed getting to know these three very dynamic women and learning how their efforts are helping Microsoft add a new dimension to the corporate perception.
Ani Babaian is a senior product manager with the LiveSearch team at Microsoft and she blogs on a variety of topics with a focus on SEO.
Sara Ford is a program manager for codeplex.com, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site. She is a hardcore techie and blogs about the Microsoft product that she works with, interacts with the open source community, and participates in the conversations to help users find solutions to their issues.
Ariel Stallings is a marketing manager with staffing marketing. It’s her job to convince you that working at Microsoft is cool. She profiles microsoft employees by focusing on the diversity and life style of the Microsoft employees…their fun side…their personal side.
Continue Reading “Microsoft Social Media Outreach Case Study”
I am at BlogHer Business conference today and this morning we heard the results of the social media benchmark study that BlogHer conducted in conjunction with Compass Partners.
The study consisted of more than 6,000 women. 1,250 female Internet users were surveyed via a nationally representative panel, and 5,000 visitors to BlogHer’s network. The results?
* 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogsophere every week (15.1 publishing, 21.1 reading and commenting)? (Page 3 of report below)
* Women are so passionate about blogging that large percentages of women said they would give something up to keep the blogs they read and/or write:
- 55% would give up alcohol
- 50% would give up their PDAs
- 42% would give up their i-Pod
- 43% would give up reading the newspaper or magazines
Continue Reading “Social Media Benchmark Study”
Recently someone asked a great question on the Interaction Design Association’s discussion list: What music do you listen to while you design? Over the next few days, designers of all ages chimed in. Though some said they like it quiet and others commented that they were usually stuck listening to the sales guy’s phone calls, there was a strong, recurring theme: While we’re working with our ear buds in, we designers have background noise we don’t have to pay attention to to understand.
For example, many people said they listen to classical, jazz, electronic, and world music in other languages (like the Plutomayo series). Others said they let their iPod shuffle through very familiar songs. New music was off limits to most (though some people cited online college radio stations known for new indie music). To be fair, there was a punk streak, a little NPR, and a handful of nods to Rammstein. A wise soul acknowledged it’s nice to break from designing and play a little acoustic guitar. Even though hip-hop soars in the charts, it was mentioned only as a side note that people turn to when they’re in a certain mood.
One after another, people piped up about their favorite spots online to get endless streams of custom music on demand. Here are some cyber-music suggestions that came up in that discussion that I wanted to share with the Webgrrls community to keep you designing to the beat.
This site has canned channels or lets you build your own. They even have an Irish channel for St. Patrick’s Day. One cool feature is that you can put in an artist and it will tell you what radio stations play them.
The best feature on finetune is their widget that lets you put play lists on your blog. They say that “it’s the soundtrack for your life and anyone can tune in.”
Continue Reading “Online Music to Help You Design”
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