Service Collaborations and New Toys

If you want an example of what a HITSP service collaboration does, this blog page serves as a simple illustration.

I've been experimenting here with new toys to link up three (actually four) different web services. This blog is where I do my writing on standards. Then I'm using another online service to announce my blog posts to my twitter account. Finally, I've just begun using that twitter account to announce new standards actitvities. Since they always contain certain keywords, I can use a twitter widget to search for those posts. You can see it on this page just to the righthave. Since most of my posts here are already included on twitter, there's really no need to repeat them on this blog. So I configured the widget to search for posts I make to the twitter account containing certain keywords. It's not as pretty as I'd like, but I haven't found another better widget that lets me include the results of a search on these pages. Finally, I used a fourth service to create a little twitter badge for me so that you can easily find and follow me there.

I can now easily post on my blog OR announce new standards activities on twitter, and both places are updated without me having to manage the exchanges between the different services. To add to that, I've been writing a lot more often, and strategically e-mailing links to relevant posts to different people I know in the industry from when I know they will be interested.

The end result: Readership this past month nearly 250% of by previous best month, and about 400% overall, this past week is up 150% my best week, and about 500% of my previous average, and Friday topped the charts doubling my previous best day, and again, about 300% my previous best week.

How do I know that? Because I've been using a fifth service to measure the results and check the quality of my posts, and have been doing that since day 2 of this blog. Remember, measurement needs to baked in.