Feeding the frenzy for TRIRIGA feeds

Long time, no TRIRIGA! While I haven’t discussed TRIRIGA much since my bouncing IBM design post or included it in a blog title since my splitting IBM TRIRIGA post, I’ve experimented with socio-mobile brainstorms to reimagine TRIRIGA information delivery ever since my killing XML post last year. Now, following the successful spark of a colleague’s TRIRIGA Flipboard magazine, I’ve a new brainstorm!

I’ve recently wondered, “Why don’t I open Flipboard as often as Twitter?” Then I realized that despite its striking visual layout, Flipboard flips are not as quickly or easily digestible as Twitter streams. But maybe that’s the point. If I’m scanning with my smartphone, 12 articles flipped on Flipboard might take 6 to 12 finger swipes, while the same 12 articles tweeted on Twitter might take only 3 or 4 swipes.

TRIRIGAFEEDIA @ WordPress

Hi, my name is Jay, and I’m an IBM TRIRIGA information developer at IBM. I admit, we don’t need a Twitter presence that simply duplicates our Flipboard. But then my brainstorm struck! Why not build a WordPress presence that collects tedious-to-search articles then streams them as more visible posts? In turn, why not feed this WordPress stream into a Twitter stream? Voila, TRIRIGAFEEDIA!

What is TRIRIGAFEEDIA?

In a nutshell, “TRIRIGAFEEDIA is an experimental WordPress hub that collects feeds from multiple IBM TRIRIGA forums, blogs, and channels into a single, searchable, and social stream. In turn, its WordPress stream also feeds its Twitter stream @tririgafeedia.” In other words, these WordPress and Twitter streams attempt to boost searchability and findability of less visible or less sharable articles.

To establish a solid foundation for this official announcement, TRIRIGAFEEDIA currently contains 123 WordPress posts and 94 Twitter tweets. With the technological help of Feedly to aggregate various source feeds and Twitterfeed to automatically feed the published WordPress posts into Twitter tweets, these numbers will continue to grow as I discover new content on a weekly if not daily basis.

If you’re curious why the number of WordPress posts and Twitter tweets don’t match, it’s easy to explain. Although I published the majority of posts by their original source dates in sequence from oldest to newest, I also discovered random older articles along the way. Consequently, Twitterfeed can’t create a tweet if I publish a post with a date older than my newest published post. No worries.

If you’re curious why TRIRIGAFEEDIA is all capitalized, the reason is that TRIRIGA is always in caps!

What are my final thoughts?

What about content strategy? Do I need to coordinate my streams with other teams? Not necessarily. I see two vectors at play. The first vector is company size. While small companies might struggle with content consistency to gain credibility, large corporations with hundreds or thousands of products might struggle with content visibility and findability. At IBM, my TRIRIGA approach tackles the latter.

The second vector is customer contribution. While companies should strive for stylistic coordination across their own marketing and technical content, I don’t expect them to exercise the same editorial control over the questions and comments posted by their own customers. So it’s tricky to enforce consistency. Luckily, my approach doesn’t. Instead, it spotlights and shares that customer content.

What about Flipboard and sharing the spotlight? Do I foresee a conflict? On the contrary, I foresee a fantastic synergy between the more visual Flipboard approach and the more textual WordPress or Twitter approach. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if TRIRIGAFEEDIA content found its way into our Flipboard magazine. But this time, we won’t be neglecting the folks who prefer tweets over flips.

Last week, I also heard about another colleague’s plans to assemble an IBM-based “content portal” that identifies content gaps. Similarly, I foresee another dynamic synergy among these 3 approaches where not only can this internal IBM repository feed content into our external TRIRIGA Flipboard and TRIRIGAFEEDIA streams, but our external social streams can feed our internal repository too. Sweet!

What else? For dessert, let me feed you some tasty screenshots from WordPress and Twitter. Enjoy!

TRIRIGAFEEDIA @ WordPress

TRIRIGAFEEDIA @ Twitter

Podcast

For some bonus dessert, here’s my next Jay@IBM podcast! So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!

Jay@IBM Podcast

Jay@IBM Podcast

00:17 “Hi again! This is Jay@IBM.”

00:31 “So my post: What is TRIRIGAFEEDIA?”

01:09 “Another thing: If I take random technical notes or forum questions…”

02:08 “And then once it’s published, Twitterfeed will automatically create a tweet…”

03:07 “Even for Flipboard, I still have to find the good content and actually flip it…”

04:10 “Now I also mentioned the IBM-based content portal that is being planned…”

05:28 “So now we have these 3 approaches…”

06:08 “Or in the opposite direction, the content portal can say…”

07:05 “So yeah, so till next time, happy holidays…”

07:39 End.