Spreading the Word one PDF at a Time
SteveThis week at the HRevolution Unconference one of the important themes will be how to drive more awareness in mainstream and corporate HR leadership of what is going on in the growing HR Social Media community, and to discuss and create strategies and approaches to guard against those of us in this space from simply talking to ourselves all the time.
In fact the closing session of the event (full agenda is available here), is titled:
Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber: Expanding the HR Social Media Community
In this session Laurie Ruettimann and Lance Haun will lead the discussion on ways to increase participation, awareness, acceptance (you get the idea) of these new methods of connection and collaboration in the 'old-school' HR community. I am personally really looking forward to the session.
In that light, I wanted to share a little service that I have been using to try and get more 'non-blog readers' aware of what is going on here on my blog. I am sure if you are a blogger, or at least a reader of blogs, you often talk to people at your organization or at events that say they never read blogs, or they can't be bothered to search, locate, subscribe to, and read even a few of the scores of excellent HR blogs that are written every day.
The service is called Tabbloid, a free utility from Hewlett-Packard that lets you register your favorite blog's RSS feed, set up schedule for how frequently you would like to receive updates, and then get a PDF file of your personal 'magazine' of blog posts and articles delivered to your email. 
Think of it as an easy way to be able to get a document that can be read offline, can easily be printed in a 'print-friendly' format, and distributed to less social media inclined people in a method and manner that they are likely more comfortable with.
In fact, you can even use Tabbloid as an ad-hoc document creation and publishing mechanism for a given RSS feed (or group of feeds) content. So if you are about to walk into a meeting or an interview, or get on a plane and need some additional 'offline' reading you can quickly produce a document with the last collection of posts from your favorite blogs.
For an example of what the created Tabbloid magazine looks like, here is the last week's worth of posts from this blog, wrapped up in a nice little 4-page document - Steve's Last 5 Posts.
For now the service is pretty basic, there is no way to modify or customize the 'magazine' title or place a custom header or footer on the document, but if you want an easy way to hand a doubting colleague or executive an nice, familiar looking document that contains a selection of content from your blog or from a collection of blogs that you recommend, then I think you should give Tabbloid a try.
Reader Comments (7)
I'm also excited to hear Lance and Laurie lead the session on how we can create more outreach opportunities. I also like that you presented a solution to this problem by using Tabbloid. I've been using this for awhile and friends and family really enjoy it when I share. I also like keeping a copy in my files. Thanks for sharing the idea.
Thanks for the great tip! The service is even available in Dutch. Just subscribed and awating my first pdf.
Steve - Way to break the box down on the unfortunately narrow-focused HR community. I hope that the presentation by Laurie and Lance is something that bridges us with Social Media. I know that is something that I am particularly passionate about. Time to wake HR up !!
@Trish - that is awesome that you are using the service, it is a really neat way to easily share with people that are offline
@Marco - very cool - I hope that you find the service valuable
@Steve - Thanks my friend, I hope to see you very soon!
What a cool tool! As always, thanks for sharing the great tip. See you on Friday.
@Jason - Thanks very much - look forward to meeting you this week!
Thanks for the Tabbloid tip. That's a new one for me and I can't wait to test drive it.