Content Strategy for the Masses

A recent article in Mashable pointed me to a new website that promises to help you stay on track of your resolutions: Dorthy. The site promises to give the user a living page that focusses on their specific goals, provides information on said goal, and connect the user to other like-minded goal searchers.  It’s a focussed Google with a bare-bones community attached.

On first visit, I’m left wondering what to do after I input my dream: to find more time to update this website (lame dream, yeah). I’m taken to an overview page (called a dreampage – very Oprah-esque) that looks similar to what I would find if I typed “I want to find time to update my website” into a Google search: I see online articles, videos pulled from You Tube and Vimeo, photos and links to blogs that I think have the “update website” phrase within their copy. Since it seems to work by automatically pulling keywords (even though the site says “We’ve abandoned key words and moves beyond traditional semantics to develop an implicit understanding of what you’re interested in,”) I wonder if this blog entry you’re reading now will eventually show up in this Dorthy feed about updating websites? Vouldn’t that be Veird?

When I click on the community tab, it takes me to other members who have entered similar goals and I can subscribe to their dreams so my own page is updated with their updates. From what I can see, there’s no way to contact the person, which the introvert in me likes but may have helped create a virtual “cheerleader” squadron to the user’s goal achievements. The site uses Facebook Connect, which could translate that community support from Dorthy onto a Facebook page, I suppose.

Snooping around, I see someone entered a dream to run a marathon in Maui. This opens a dreampage that’s a little more focussed than my vague goal but again, I don’t see anything I wouldn’t have seen without entering the same dream into a search engine.

This isn’t to say the site doesn’t have potential… As more people subscribe and enter data, perhaps the algorithms will improve and my Dreampage will be more relevant and less vague.

Maybe I’ll set a goal on this site to review Dorthy in 6 months to see what’s changed on the site.

Let me know what you think and what sites you use to keep on track of your goals.

I went to NYC for 5 days – I just got back using Porter Airlines (managing to land at 12:30 and be home by 1:00) and I’ve returned to over 1000 newsfeed items. Over a thousand!

RSS feeds are a fantastic way to organize the way you read a website. Why is this important? The stuff you read in a blog and on a news site is conveniently categorized for easy reading. Just spend 15 minutes a week to go through your subscriptions. Basically, it’s a pared down version of the things you only want to read, while handily avoiding messy website layouts with birds sitting on branches at the top of the page (hey!) or other things that distract you from the content.

I use Google Reader, which is handy if you have a gmail account, but there are countless other services to help make your life easier. I prefer Google if only because my homepage opens up to the iGoogle, which shows my new emails, new feeds to read, the weather, and other bits of information I want immediately. 

It is something you have to maintain, but there’s this handy “Mark all as Read” button if you just can’t be bothered to go through the posts. 

If you’re interested in trying out the RSS experience, subscribe to mine! If you’re using Google Reader, just enter www.foryourreadingpleasure.com and subscribe. The service will also send you suggestions to other sites you might be interested to follow. Alternatively, just hit the RSS icon in the address bar. 

Have an interesting feed I should know about? Send it my way!