Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Okay, in the genre of blog silliness, but worthy of celebration:

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.

Cheers! Via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

There was a great article in the NY Times last week about social networking sites catering to older folks.

Not only was it fascinating reading (one of the sites, Multiply, had a 96% retention rate), it was a bit of an eye opener that VC’s were looking seriously at funding this kind of social network (finally) because of the demographics and stickiness of the over-50 population.

“Teens are tire kickers — they hang around, cost you money and then leave,” said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog “Infectious Greed.” Where Friendster was once the hot spot, Facebook and MySpace now draw the crowds of young people online.

“The older demographic has a bunch of interesting characteristics,” Mr. Kedrosky added, “not the least of which is that they hang around.”

Some interesting factoids from the article:

• There are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace.
• The number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

Sometimes a video is just the best way to explain a technical subject. Common Craft (by Lee and Sachi LeFever) created a great little video back in April explaining RSS:

Click To Play

For those folks who’ve been challenged at explaining the beauty of RSS to others, pass it on…I’d only add that the readers they recommended are the “plain vanilla” readers - if you want a powerful reader that you can use online, from Outlook or on your Mac, download one of Attensa’s free readers here.You might as well be subscribing to RSS feeds with the best possible tools out there - now that you get what they can do for you.

Great post today over on Abraham Harrison’s blog by Chris Abraham on whether or not to engage a bloggers’ attack.

He outlines a very cogent case for setting up RSS “persistent searches” (where you have your RSS feed reader watch for keywords you want to be alerted to) and exactly what to do if you’re ever attacked negatively. In the wild, wild west of the blogosphere, it happens!

Chris’ bottom line:

“Anyway, engaging attacks are generally a bad idea. Counter-messaging is truly the only recourse you have, and defensive SEO, to do your best to clean the sheets after all the mayhem is done.”

Scott over at Attensa has just posted their new suite of RSS feed readers online - these free RSS readers are available for Mac, Windows and Outlook.

For those of you who haven’t upgraded your feed readers lately, have a look at the kind of instant communication tools Attensa provides:

• Safe and Secure Subscriptions to Internal and External RSS feeds, so your IT guys will be happy - no embarrassing feed leakage!
• One click blog republishing - I no longer have to leave my news source to blog about it..
• Powerful automated persistent search tools search across 18 Web and blog search engines - it searches many available information sources, vs. plain Google or Yahoo news, etc. I’m more enlightened and aware of mentions that others may not pick up.
• Create, import and export custom reading lists (OPML files) - it’s easy to move your feeds into Attensa.
• Keep feeds and articles organized with tagging and categories. Attensa tags can now be imported and exported - so I don’t have to duplicate tags - once tagged, ubiquitously tagged.
• Easily play audio and video content directly in the River of News - again, I don’t have to leave my reader to gain complete awareness of things that interest me.

You can download Attensa’s free RSS readers for the enterprise 2.0 knowledge worker here.

And for you IT guys, you can download an evaluation version of Attensa’s Enterprise RSS server platform here.