Introducing PositivePress

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.

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!