Comments on: Automation’s great – but I trust humans more

By: The PR Friendly Index for March 2009 « Brendan Cooper, your friendly neighbourhood social media strategist

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:04:07 +0000

[...] the Cloud came to my rescue. I’ve ranted a bit about cloud computing’s drawbacks in the past, but as a last-gasp attempt to get this to work, it proved a viable solution. I imported the [...]

By: Brendan

Brendan — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:35:20 +0000

Hey Joshua, no idea! But a good call, I will most definitely check on this. Could be useful as a dashboard.

Another candidate that Jonathan put forward is RSSMixer (http://mashable.com/2008/09/08/rssmixer-makes-mashups-easier/). To my mind this is a really nice tool for readily bringing together feeds, but that’s all – no filters or queries created from keyword entry. Still, it’s a good addition to the mashup arsenal.

For the record, Yahoo Pipes seems to be a bit more stable now. But it’s those jitters that give me the jitters, if you know what I mean.

My take on all this is that even the pro companies will be using RSS for a lot of their work and that, by definition, means they’re dependent on the blog platforms, feed providers and aggregating tools they use too. I guess it really does all come down to SLAs – that is, we’re dependent on the platforms, so we can only do as well as they can.

I still think this is a big issue for general cloud computing however. Obviously an entire enterprise would be foolish to invest all its computing requirements in a third party without paying something towards ensuring a decent level of service. But individually we are becoming increasingly dependent on them, and one day, the stuff is going to hit the fan for one – or many – of us.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:02:22 +0000

I have been exploring…is FeedMedic no good? Seems like Feedburners way of helping you keep track of issues etc. Still a problem with the feed is a problem with the feed.

I like Jonathan’s phrase Professional DIY…although potentially contradictory is does reflect well much of the social web.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:05:38 +0000

@Jonathan – exactly – Radian6 offer SLAs that incur cost. That’s really what we pay for when we employ services like that – peace of mind. But increasingly we’re going to be dependent on the cloud for so many things that sooner or later someone is going to lose out big time. The problem is, it won’t just be someone either – it’ll be *everyone*.

@Ike I’m not sure I like Popfly as much – the interface is way over the top – but it’s worth a shot.

By: Ike Pigott

Ike Pigott — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:52:57 +0000

Way to go, Brendan!

I was seeing many of the same things myself, as some of the Pipes commands were not pulling what they ought.

And good catch on the Popfly… this is the first I’ve heard of the tool and I will definitely give it a spin.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:30:06 +0000

Great post Brendon. I feel your pain too. There’s definitely room for a professional DIY social media monitoring service/set of tools – to get over that dependance on duct-tape solutions. Problem is – where someone’s cracked it (Radian 6 et al), they’re selling it . . . not giving it away for free. Maybe there’s something in that though. Maybe agencies (and individuals) are all working on that perfect solution for their clients? Or maybe they’re all dependent on things that break way too frequently and suffer the same pain as yourself.