Awakened Voice

As with any new industry there are many entrants who rush to be on the cutting edge of new markets and technology. I one heard that there were thousands of car companies in the U.S. in the early days of the automobile. Now we’re down to a handful of American car companies. Will this be [...]

I recently made the decision to unsubscribe from a number of RSS feeds that only included summaries of the content contained in the blog posts that were being distributed via the feeds.
The act of unsubscribing from these feeds was based on two factors. First, it is highly frustrating to browse my RSS reader of choice [...]

I think that the list of no shows for the 2006 Podcast Expo says as much about what’s going on as the list of companies that were in attendance. I feel like this is a must attend event for companies who claim to be in the business of podcasting. After all, this is the type [...]

Three days after departing Ontario I’m back in the social media jetstream. For a few days there I was in the eye of the storm. I met lots of people. I walked the floor of the exhibit hall many times, stopping at almost every booth to see what was happening.
A comparison to last year is [...]

Moderating comments is a simple but powerful way to protect your social site from the evil ways of spammers.
When you moderate comments they are pushed into a queue for review prior to being made viewable on the website. This feature adds an extra step to your process as the proprietor of a social site because you [...]

I’m dubbing this week Tools Week on the Awakened Voice Blog. That means I plan to write about the tools that can help business become more social on the web.
I define a tool as a piece of software that you can host on your own domain. This is in contrast to the many services that run solely on [...]

I’ve been doing some research on the best way to consume RSS feeds on a mobile device. Dave Winer’s New York Times River is great but you only get summaries of the stories and when you click through it takes you to the NY Times regular website.
Dave has also taken a few select blogs and [...]

This post will surely elicit some controversy as it dives into the social media hornets nest known as statistics.
I started thinking about stats again after seeing that the FeedBurner stats for TechCrunch indicated that blog eclipsing 100K readers. Interestingly enough that number has dipped to around 87K as I write this post.
First off, I want [...]

In my recent discussion with Josh Hallett about corporate responsibility with respect to commenting on viewed blog posts I mention that bloggers should use a channel created by the corporation if they want to ensure a direct response.
In the comments, Josh indicated that some firms don’t have good direct channels. That’s a shame because those businesses [...]

The previous two posts on this topic set the stage for providing a concrete definition for blogs and podcasts. Not an easy task by a long shot but worth a try just the same.
I think that one of the limiting factors in widespread adoption of social media tools involves the ability of the everyday person [...]