So you really, really, really want people to contribute to your new, grassroots, user-driven site? If you want to invite my content in, you'd better let me get it out.

That means offering per-user RSS feeds for all user-contributed content. (If you're new to RSS, check out our rsstocracy.com site for an intro.) If I'm adding content to your site, I need an easy way to suck the content back out for republishing on my site. (In fact, my AlexandraSamuel.com site now consists pretty much exclusively of the content I'm posting on other sites, including this one, and then re-aggregating back onto my own site.)

A useful cautionary tale in this regard is LinkedIn. LinkedIn Answers rely on users to contribute questions AND answers to create a great (and very useful) repository of advice and referrals on just about every business topic imaginable. We often encourage folks to participate actively in LinkedIn as a way of raising their professional profile. But I'm rethinking the wisdom of that advice now that I see there's no outbound RSS feed for my own LinkedIn answers. If I'm going to make LinkedIn the go-to place for my contributions of professional intelligence, I expect to be able to republish the answers I'm writing on my own blog.

And LinkedIn should make it easy for me to do so, for three reasons:

1. By making it easy for bloggers to republish their LinkedIn answers on their own blogs, LinkedIn encourages bloggers to contribute more actively, which will help them build up high quality content.
2. By making it easy for people to subscribe to answers that come from their favorite experts, LinkedIn increases the returns to becoming a top LinkedIn expert, which again encourages high quality contributions.
3. By making it easy for people to republish their answers -- possibly as teasers that link back to the full answer on LinkedIn -- LinkedIn could get a ton of topic-specific inbound links, which would bring in lots of visitors directly from blogs AND boost LinkedIn's Google juice on topical Google searches.

If you're creating a user-driven site of your own, keep LinkedIn's example in mind. Seize the opportunity LinkedIn is missing by making it easy for your users to get content out -- recognizing that's the best way to bring content in.

You might think there's no other social network out there these days with the rush to Facebook. But while they're the undeniable 800-friend gorilla on the block, there's still good reason to spread your social networking around a little.

A case in point: LinkedIn. This business-oriented site was long on the networking and short on the social for a long time, but early this year they introduced a feature named, prosaically, Answers. It's a simple idea: you post a question, your network of contacts is notified, and they or anyone else on the site can then answer.

Which means you can now draw quickly and easily on the expertise and experience of your professional network. And there's a strong incentive to share knowledge, especially in a professional environment. You can become known for your expertise and judgment, which raises your profile and, potentially, your commercial attractiveness. (No word on whether it increases your attractiveness in other spheres; my experience in high school suggests otherwise.)

All of which makes a strong hard-headed case for jumping in. But don't underestimate the urge to simply be helpful. That urge is the social nudge that makes LinkedIn Answers both powerful and fun.

Here's an example of someone using LinkedIn Answers to find out more about RSS feeds:

RSS: Is there an alternative to it?

I would like to be able to read articles off-line. RSS appears to be used only as notification service only - title and a small description. I would like to receive the whole article. Does not have to be fancy, text is just fine.

So far, three people have answered his question. I'm one of them: 

These are two good answers. I'd add that some blogging platforms have a default setting that puts only excerpts of posts into feeds, which is another reason you see so many abbreviated RSS feeds. So half the trick is doing a little evangelism among bloggers about why full-post feeds are a good idea.

RSS, by the way, can distribute not only the full article of a post, but also much more. Even though the feed itself is text (it's in a format known as XML, or extensible markup language), it can include pointers to sound or video files, which is how podcasts and videocasts work. I distribute my cartoon, Noise to Signal, via an RSS feed that contains pointers to the individual GIF files, and many photographers use them to allow others to subscribe to their work. (You can find photo feeds on Flickr, for example.)

Finally, as Christopher notes, there's another format for feeds known as Atom (not to mention a variety of flavors of RSS). Most modern feed-reading software and services can accept any of them, and feed publishers can use a service like Feedburner to avoid compatibility issues altogether.

Links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
• http://www.rsstocracy.com

Making friends in the real world can be hard. You need to overcome issues of trust, intimacy, vulnerability and, sometimes, conflicting loyalties. But the payoff matches the effort: a good friend is invaluable.

In the world of online social networks, the word "friend" is a lot less meaningful; it includes your most casual of virtual acquaintances. Until you have a chance to build a certain level of trust with them, respect and affection, your interaction with your online friends (a.k.a. "buddies" or "contacts", depending on which social network you're using) will often be the digital equivalent of nodding at each other as you pass in the hall.

The good news? It's much, much easier to make "friends" than to make friends. These folks will come in two flavours: people you already know from elsewhere, and people you've met through this particular social network. Here are some tips for adding people from both groups to your buddy list. We'll use Facebook as the example, but many of the tips here will work just as well on other services:

• Start with the obvious: Tools like address book importing and search will actually take you a long way. But you may be surprised at just how many of your friends aren't in your address book, or who signed up with different email addresses than the ones you have for them, or whose names don't jump to mind when you're searching. So you'll need to use some of these other strategies.
  
• Find friends from work and school: Once you've entered your work and education history in your profile, Facebook lets you browse people who also worked for your past employers, as well as people who graduated in the same year as you did.
  
  And don't limit yourself to that one year. Facebook also lets you choose other graduating years. Chances are you knew people who graduated a year or two before or after you.
• Look for birds of a feather: Scope out the groups that speak to your interests... especially niche interests. Browse the member lists for names you recognize.
• Use a friend to find a friend: Just as you'll often run into one friend talking with another in the real world, chances are good your online friends have already linked up with other folks you know. Flip through their friends lists and you're bound to run into somebody.
• Participate: Did you ever read those Ann Landers columns where someone would write in asking how they could meet people, and Ann would suggest that they get involved in their local church? The same thing works well in social networking sites. Start a group or join an existing one, and get active. Post on the wall. Comment on forum posts and people's notes. As you take part, you'll also get to know new people – and you'll soon be sending them friendship invitations, if you haven't received them yourself.
• Bag on the boilerplate: I know we're using Facebook as an example, but I can't resist adding a LinkedIn tip. When you invite someone to join your network, don't use the canned boilerplate text that LinkedIn gives you. Instead, write a personal invitation, something in your own voice that makes some reference to your relationship with the recipient. You'll start getting a lot more of your invitations accepted.