ERROR: You have accessed this program via an invalid url: www.myblogsite.com |
Randy Charles Morin blogs about Really Simple Syndication, RDF, FOAF, The Semantic Web and Social Software.
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spid.ero.us helps you discover the hot and fresh bookmarks from various SBM.
Randy: This looks pretty cool! Two negative comments. What's with all the javascript exceptions? RSS 0.92? WTF? Subscribed.
I just setup this blog to link the <category>s to Blogdigger searches. Why blogdigger? Cause it responds very quickly and sorts results with most recent first. If I find Blogdigger slows down, then I'll switch the search on the backend to somewhere else. A little incentive for the search vendors to focus on sub-second responses. Basically, I'm redirecting all clicks on the <category> links to...
http://www.kbcafe.com/search.aspx?q=category
Where category is the actual category tag. Feel free to be a copycat. I could use the hits
I added Furl, BlogMarks and Feedfinder to the kbSearch engine.
It's time again for a list of top subscribers to my FeedBurner hosted RSS feed.
I haven't seen FeedReader and Sage up there in many months.
I just finished my Blogomatic utility. It's very simple. It polls a feed every hour on the 30 minutes and if the ETag changes, then it pings a bunch of ping servers (extended, basic or HTTP, whichever I determined works best with each ping target). I'm pinging Feedster, Moreover, Yahoo!, Blogdigger, NewsIsFree, Blo.gs, Syndic8, Blogrolling, Technorati, Weblogs and Pubsub. I'm pinging only those that I think are most important. Am I missing anybody important? Why did I do this? A few months back, I converted everything to ping-o-matic, but there's nothing automatic about it. You still have to ping ping-o-matic and it rarely, if ever, completes successfully (it's broken).
del.icio.us blog: You can link to http://del.icio.us/post with a GET argument of "url" containing the URL-encoded URL, and you can supply a title in the "title" field, similarly URL-encoded.
Randy: Subscribed.
Niall Kennedy: Technorati Japan just entered beta.
Dave Winer: I've been playing around with Blogger on and and off, and was surprised to find out after all this time that they don't have an easy way to edit a blogroll.
Randy: It's amazing how little Blogger has progressed and how much it has regressed in the last year.
Another del.icio.us knockoff.
Google: If you'd like to have a label view in your aggregator, just add the label name to the end of the feed URL. So, to view your 'work' label as a feed, it's https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom/work/.
Randy: Now you can apply a filter to incoming mail, have it automatically labelled and appear in your RSS client without have to subscribe to your entire Gmail inbox.
I wrote a search engine last night. It indexes exactly 9 Web pages, fortunately all 9 are URLs into RSS search engines. You can search the entire Web in many different ways, one-click subscribe to the results and even get real-time email alerts on the results. I call it kbSearch. It's like A9 meets RSS.
http://www.kbcafe.com/search.aspxFEEDcombine is a script to combine multiple RSS feeds into one. Unlike other similar services, you can use FEEDcombine as an API and create new adhoc feeds. Unfortunately, it seems extremely slow, which suggests that it's polling each feed, everytime, one-at-a-time.
Marc Canter: Today we're announcing our support for Media RSS output.
Today, I'm making massive changes to the sources for RSS search performed by Juice. I use to support five sources; Feedster, Yahoo! News, MSN, Flickr and del.icio.us. I decided that I could support upto a dozen sources.
I'm going to add news services like MSN News, Blogpulse, Blogdigger, IceRocket. In order to qualify for this list, you have to provide search results in RSS format (not just any XML). If your a vendor and think you should be included, then please do ping me.
Update: I quickly discovered that IceRocket, similar to Technorati, does not allow for ad-hoc queries. You have to go to their Website and build the query URL there. This makes it impossible to integrate these with Juice.
Dave Walker is looking for non-geeks to provide him some feedback reguarding news aggregators and syndication.
http://www.freeke.org/ffg/tech/computers/internet/nongeeksyndi.html
Pluck maintains a friends of Pluck list. Of which, this blog is a member. Anybody can join.
Massive list of RSS and Weblog ping services.
http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/11/21/a-list-of-rpc-and-rpc2-to-ping/
This morning I decided to check out Rojo as a Web-based RSS reader. First things first, I subscribed to the Rojo blog and added the Rojo chicklet to the chicklet generator. Next, I imported a bunch of feeds. Problem! I don't see them. Seems Rojo pre-subscribed me to a bunch of stuff that gets priority when reading. I click around, delete some feeds and the following Web page becomes quite repetitive
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Robert Scoble: Whoa, hundreds of RSS feeds for Microsoft's knowledge base.
Randy: I think I just doubled my reading list
<description>Priscilla Owen's confirmation is the bitter fruit of the unprincipled "compromise" on judical nominations.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheNationWeblogs?g=92"/> </description>
The img tag at the end of this description loads the web bug, a transparent one-by-one pixel graphic. Nial l Kennedy wrote earlier this month that they're part of a paid statistics package.
Every few days, I'll report all those User-Agents that are reporting more than 24 polls per subscriber. Today's list.
Update: I just wanted to point out that FeedJumbler (uses FeedLib) Newsburst, Rojo and Waggr are Web-based RSS aggregators. That means they may be polling on behalf of many users, but simply not reporting those stats to FeedBurner. That really only leaves the Universal Feed Parser as the bad agent.
Dick Costolo: If you have been approved for the Google AdSense for feeds public beta, you can now use FeedBurner to run the program without editing your publishing templates at all.
Randy: I guess you can do this only with feeds with 100 subscribers. That would exclude most blogs. Maybe I'll try it with The RSS Blog. An experiment, which I would provide an alternate feed (without the ads) and would turn off after the brief experiment. Should I?
Pluck is not my RSS reader of choice. I roll my own thanks! But, my readers have clearly signaled that Pluck Outlook Edition is being downloaded a lot and being used a lot. Most of the new subscribers to this blog are via Pluck. The question is why? The answer is, because it works. I installed it a few times this month to play around with it and this is the RSS reader for the non-techies. The install was easy. I imported my OPML without a problem. It started picking up the feeds. It gave me notifications. It gave me the River of News. It runs inside IE. Easy to subscribe to new feeds. Ya, I have a few gripes, it hangs up the browser momentarily from time to time, especially when I navigate to an XML file, but that's not something my dad or wife would do very often. Pluck works!
How to Save the World has 17 Rmail subscribers in less than 2 months. How? They added the Rmail <script> to the right sidebar. I've done the same with the benefit of 9 new Rmail subscribers in two weeks. And thanks again to Miel, who has really helped Rmail succeed, by reporting bugs, creating logos and just being a great user.
Anne van Kesteren: By the way, do you know why RSS 2.0 has not been updated to RSS 2.1 to make it interoperable and safe from data loss? The sole reason is that Dave Winer wanted everyone to leave his format alone. That, and only that, is the reason I support Atom these days.
Randy: I feel a storm coming. Syndication Wars, Episode III, Revenge of the Atom. I guess RDF v. RSS was Episode I and Atom 0.3 v. RSS was Episode II. Question is? Is Dave Winer going to turn into Darth RSSius.
Qumana is counting down the seconds till they launch their next generation software. They claim to have the easiest, fastest and most fun way to post to your blog. Stay tuned!
User: Could you please add RSS feeds for your news postings?
Marc Hedlund: Why, sure, I respond. No problem. In fact, they're already there -- every one of those feeds is already on the site. The thing is, see, we used an icon that reads "Atom Feed" to mark them, and apparently lots of O'Reilly-site-reading Java-programming feedback-sending feed-requesters don't know what an Atom feed is. And who can blame them? [cut] Let me tell you what we should have done, and what we're going to do real quick now:
Randy: Great advice! And I don't have to change a thing to be in compliance.
User-Agent rankings for the last 24 hours.
Only reported User-Agents with minimum 3 unique visitors. I left out Rmail, which would have ranked 4th and Juice, 14th as their numbers are artificially high since I'm the author of the tools.
Today, I looked at a couple online RSS aggregators, Bloglines and Pluck Web Edition. Not my first look at either, but I wanted to know if there was any progress in the general usability of online aggregators. I have to say I was disappointed. Both still have performance problems that make them very painful to use. Bloglines is impossible to use, unless you have the special power to read the Mark Fletcher's mind. Sorry Mark, hire an usability expert quickly! As for Pluck, I simply couldn't get my blogroll imported. When I imported the items, it would respond "The item already exists in that folder" but when I clicked on the folder, it reports "There are no items in this folder." I also got a phantom subscription, which was weird. It definately felt like a data integrity issue
Update: I think I figured out the Pluck OPML import bug. It's one of those bugs that has been passed down thru the ages. Dare and the original users of OPML used the title attribute instead of the text attribute in exporting their blogrolls. Most aggregators now look for both to compensate for the earlier bump in the OPML highway.
Now that I've worked around the OPML import bug, I find one thing lacking from Pluck, I don't like the Inbox paradigm, rather I'd prefer a River of News.
On a bit of a chicklet spree this month, today I created the Chicklet generator. You see those chicklets from Pluck down to NewsBurst in the sidebar. You can easily put them all on your blog with this small little script. Check it out!
The Podcasting Specification Working Group is considering USM as a means of one-click subscription.
Tim Jaw: The following open letter was released by the Podcasting Specification Working Group (PodSpecWG) on MAY 11, 2005.
http://pswg.blogspot.com/2005/05/open-letter-to-podcasting-community.html
This weekend, I got quite a few emails and comments that MyBlogSite was down. At the moment, I can login, see my site, but I can't see their homepage.
ERROR: You have accessed this program via an invalid url: www.myblogsite.com |
Frank-ly: Het zou mooi zijn als in RSS 2.0 een extra attribuut aanwezig is waarin de uitgever aangeeft dat een feed niet meer actief is en dus uit de reader verwijderd kan worden. Het lijkt er op dat de HTTP-code 410 een oplossing kan bieden.
Translation: It would be beautiful if in RSS 2.0 an extra attribute is present in which the editor indicates that feed are no longer active and therefore from the reader can be removed. It seems there on that Http-code 410 the solution can offer.
Randy: Spread the knowledge in every language.
Marc Abramowitz has been doing some interesting XSLTing of RSS. He's hacked disable-output-escaping into Firefox. This is has been the one bug in Firefox that has really pissed me off.
Steve Makofsky: RSS is NOT email. Email is stuff that I (usually) need to address right away, where as with RSS I'm reading (and searching) content based on a topic.
Randy: I don't like the RSS Inbox either. Mind you, I hate Outlook and my Gmail inbox is cleared several times per hour. But, to each his own. What I don't understand are people who install RSS ad-ins for Outlook. Why not just use an RSS to SMTP gateway like Rmail?
Bill Flitter: These Best Practices boil down to a few simple rules, which are:
Randy: I bolded relevant. I bolded relevant. I bolded relevant.
Feedburner is reporting 0 readers today. My ego hurts
Update: Fixed!
Stephen Baker: The CEO of Bloglines (now a division of AskJeeves) says that his company will release a blog search engine this summer which will surpass the likes of Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub.
Randy: Doesn't sound that difficult. Technorati and PubSub simply don't work and Feedster has polluted their feeds. BlogPulse responds slowly, but faster than Technorati and Pubsub. Now, beat BlogPulse and you'll have yourself a customer.
Earlier this month we blogged considerably about how Google's Web Accelerator was breaking the Web, or showing which Web applications were already broken. That's because we didn't follow the guidelines for doing a POST when the request has the potential to change the state of the resource. Do you think we learned our lesson? Of course not. In fact, I bet most of you haven't even read the Architecture of the Web. Still hacking. Repeating the same mistakes. Rael has decided that feed:// is the new http://. Web? How many ways may we break thee?
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/05/feed_is_the_new.html
Earlier this month we blogged considerably about how Google's Web Accelerator was breaking the Web, or showing which Web applications were already broken. That's because we didn't follow the guidelines for doing a POST when
Earlier this month we blogged considerably about how Google's Web Accelerator was breaking the Web, or showing which Web applications were already broken. That's because we didn't follow the guidelines for doing a POST when
Earlier this month we blogged considerably about how Google's Web Accelerator was breaking the Web, or showing which Web applications were already broken. That's because we didn't follow the guidelines for doing a POST when
Earlier this month we blogged considerably about how Google's Web Accelerator was breaking the Web, or showing which Web applications were already broken. That's because we didn't follow the guidelines for doing a POST when
Earlier this month we blogged considerably about how Google's Web Accelerator was breaking the Web, or showing which Web applications were already broken. That's because we didn't follow the guidelines for doing a POST when
Dave Winer: Instead of having to hunt for new stories by clicking on the titles of feeds, you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal. You can even make the river flow backward by moving the scollbar up.
FeedBurner is reporting subscribers to my FeedBurner feed this morning. Very cool! Thanks to all my readers, especially the plucky ones. I'm honoured to have such a large audience. d.w., selling out to the bigCos really paid off.
daBlogs is another free blog hosting platform. Very similar to JournalHome. Lacks remote posting (MetaWeblogAPI, BloggerAPI, AtomAPI, post-by-email). Templates are nice and you can customize the HTML. My new rankings for top free blog hosting platforms.
Matthew Haughey: I can't believe how dumb the NYT is being about this.
Randy: I forsee a decline in the inbound links. When they purchases about.com, I thought they didn't get it (Blogosphere). Now, I know.
When writing Rmail, I considered that it might be used by SPAMmers. So, you can't be subscribed to a feed unless you click a link I send you in the message body of an email. This didn't stop the SPAMmers from trying. Somebody has been sending random requests in what looks like an attempt to subscribe users automagically. Since it doesn't work that way, the attempt was in vein, but I shutdown the mailing agent until I figured out what was up. If you didn't get your Rmail today, then you now know why. Unfortunately for the SPAMmers and fortunate for the rest of us, you can't use Rmail as a SPAM agent. Sorry!
Google Blog: Enter AdSense for feeds, launching today in beta. [cut] Publishers who want to participate in the public beta can apply here.
Randy: I'm a little busy on other projects right now, but if you send me reviews, then I'll link to them.
//item[link/text()='{0}'] first they took the simple out of RSS //rss:item[rss:link/text()='{0}'] then they put the complex into RSS //atom:entry[atom:link/@href='{0}' and atom:link/@rel='alternate']
Robert Scoble: A note to Dave Winer. I'm not sure why the Syndicate Conference didn't want you to do an advertisement as part of your session (Dave pulled out of the conference after the conference organizers insisted that he not do an advertisement as part of his session). I'm sitting in a session right now and the whole thing is an advertisement for the speaker's employer.
This morning, I took some time to play around with FeedTagger. FeedTagger is a lot like del.icio.us except that instead of tagging URLs, you tag feeds. I had previously tried FeedTagger and found it had too many javascript exceptions and popup windows (not ads). As I return today, I find there are no more javascript exceptions and less popup windows. Hurray! I imported a bunch of feeds via OPML. Nice! The next step was tagging all these feeds. I might tag a few, but this seems like a lot of work for little benefit, but others might like this feature (those who read less than 500 feeds). One big problem, I found with the site, is that it implements AJAX even where AJAX is unnecessary. This makes the site entirely unlinkable, which is kinda weird for a Web RSS aggregator. Overall, this is very impressive for a Beta. Move over Bloglines.
Rael: Continuing it's tradition of throwing in a link to more juicy data or metadata whenever the opportunity presents itself, Google has added del.icio.us tags and straps one of those ubiquitous orange [XML] RSS bugs to every result sporting an RSS feed.
Randy: Subscribed.
NewsGator buys FeedDemon? Truth? Fiction? Ya never know with Chris. Dave confirms. Nick deals the truth. All of FeedDemon, NewsGator Outlook Edition, NewsGator Web Edition are among the more popular RSS aggregators. According to my subscription counts, the most popular RSS clients are...
Some are suggesting that this consolidation may eventually include NetNewsWire, the best RSS reader for the Apple.
Bill French has specialized in business systems integration since the 1980âs and is co-founder of MyST Technology Partners; focused on building new products in the business blogging and enterprise syndication services arena
KYOU: It's open source radio fresh from your local farmer's market.
Randy: More specifically, it's a place where you can upload your podcasts to gain exposure and a place where you can listen to podcasts.
Podcasting is the complete do it yourself guide that will have readers not only finding, downloading and listening to podcasts, but creating and broadcasting their own.
Today, I'm returning to chicklet heaven. That is, I'm putting all the subscribe to buttons back on my page. I'm doing this because I've been asked by most of the five big chicklet providers. The fifth, which, by the way, didn't ask, is My MSN. My MSN is clearly losing the chicklet race and I'll tell you why. Pretend you are a naive blogger and you want to place such a chicklet on your page. How do you do it? Here's the steps...
You can't. Because it's actually an image, not escaped HTML. Second, the HTML is invalid. Third, the image src is likely 404. It took me five seconds to realize this and make the appropriate mods to make it work. This isn't true of 95% of the blogosphere
SPAM. But not me. I like SPAM. Let me tell you the ways. You see, SPAM is good. We get TV SPAMmed all day. We call them commercials. And while I watch Hockey Night in Canada (NOT), they SPAM me with beautiful frames of hot girls drinking beer. I drink a lot of beer. Yes, I really do love SPAM. Now ask yourself how many tampon commercials run during Hockey Night in Canada. Do you get it? Do you understand what I'm saying? If you don't, then please read on.
Everybody hatesIt's about relevancy. The reason we hate email SPAM, is because they blast us with irrelevant crap. I don't need Viagra, or at least my wife isn't complaining YET! So, when I get Viagra SPAM filling up my inbox, I get a little frustrated. Now, on the other hand, when I get an email telling me I won a trip to Orlando Florida... I stop... and read it. Because my kids love Disneyworld. This SPAM was relevant to me. It doesn't matter that they SPAMmed ten million other people with this crap. I like big black ears. This is why we hate email SPAM. Because it's irrelevant. This is also why we love Google, because Google adwords are relevant. Are you getting the picture yet?
Fast forward! RSS. I don't mind if you put ads in your RSS. They better be relevant. If you try to sell me tampons, then I'm gonna switch the channel. I'm never gonna buy tampons. OK, I did once or twice for my wife. But, I didn't really have an influence on the brand. She told me the brand. So, the ads really didn't affect the purchase decision and they most likely never will.
By the way, if you don't work for Feedster, then this blog entry is irrelevant. (hint: click the last link) (yes, the irrelevant one).
Bookmarked for later USBing to iPod.
Just a note. Rmail is down. Stupid me! Yesterday, my father-in-law and I were working on the wiring outside and in the basement. I recycled the power and forgot to restart the computer that Rmail is running on .
Note: That's the new chicklet for NOT k00l
.Note: That's the new chicklet for HOT. Unfortunately, it doesn't render the same inside the feed.
MSN: The MessageCast LiveMessage service has been acquired by Microsoft Corporation.
Randy: This is the service, which I provide in the right sidebar (see Alert Me chicklet), that allows you to subscribe to an RSS feed and have the items delivered via MSN Messenger.
WordPress 1.5.1 was released Monday. If you already have WordPress, then consider an immediate upgrade, as it includes a very important security fix.
http://www.kbcafe.com/mlb.aspx
Someday, I'll write a Web services with a circular loop and shutdown the Web.
Update: I'm finished loading all the data. Now, you can find out the latest about every team in the league, by simply bookmarking the page. They load slow, sometimes and fast others. That's because, none of the data is held locally and I'm querying Feedster and Flickr, filtering it thru FeedJumbler and tada! I wanted to use BlogPulse, but it responds very slowly.
A new version of the Atom publishing protocol. It's changed. Alot :(
http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-04.html
FeedTagger: If you have any suggestions/comments etc please reply to this post!
Randy: FeedTagger is looking for feedback. Give it a try and tell them what you think.
Review: FeedTagger is too buggy too use at the moment. Hopefully, it'll get better.
Has anybody else found that Friendster Blogs is full of 404s? What's up with that?
So you have your own blog, maybe two. Well, that's not enough. I want my own blogging platform with blogs from all my friends, cow-orkers and classmates. Introducing 21publish. You can have upto 100 blogs in your community (for free and more with $). Here's my personal blogging community for ultra geeks. It took me about 2 minutes to create the community.
Do you write code for an RSS aggregator? Have you read this? Today, I had to warn a couple more RSS services about their excessive polling. One service has pulled over 150k RSS files thru my Website this month already. I decided that from now on I would report any User-Agent that pulls aggressively. Here's the list for today.
These are malbehaved RSS clients. If you have one installed, then uninstalled it. If you visit one of these sites, then stop going there.
Dick Costolo: The people who bring you great free feed statistics (that would be us) today announce the launch of Total Stats Pro. [cut] Total Stats Pro gives feed publishers a more detailed analysis of feed statistics by going another level deeper beyond feed circulation. [cut] Pricing starts at $4.99/month for publishers that want to apply pro stats to 1-3 feeds. [cut] Are you going to say "$4.99 is less than the price of a latte and a bagel" or something like that? No. We don't drink lattes so we don't know how much they cost*.
I updated the Rmail User-Agent.
kb.Rmail (https://rssweblog.com/rss2smtp.aspx; x subscribers)
Another RSS to javascript application, but this one will also splices RSS feeds. This could be very useful. I'll test drive her tonight. Subscribed.
Review: Wow! This really is good. Extremely flexible and easy to use. A sample is shown floating right, which took a couple minutes to produce. You can see the entire configuration of the feed jumble at the link below. No login required. It loads slowly, which is a slight concern.
http://feedjumbler.com/8f25e7ee/
Update: FeedJumbler is considerably faster now.
With the launch and reasonable level of success of my Rmail service, I began wondering how to get that subscriber count reported by FeedBurner above 1. Since Rmail is a centralized Web based service, FeedBurner reports one subscriber regardless of the actual number of subscribers. But Bloglines, another similar centralized Web based RSS aggregator reports the actual number of subscribes by passing extra bits in the HTTP request. I spun off an email to Eric Lunt and he responded with the How-To's.
Bloglines overloads their User-Agent HTTP header and stuffs in the number of subscribers. Example shown.
Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 12 subscribers)
You then fork off an email to the FeedBurner team and they re-config their back-end to pick up the extra info. That's it! Very simple.
Update: MyYahoo! and LiveJournal also report subscribers.
I just downloaded and re-installed Pluck, trying to figure out why I'm getting so many Pluck subscribers. After the install, I get a list of 5 highlighted feeds, of which, The RSS Blog, is one. Pluck includes the following extra comment about The RSS Blog "Got it? They speak RSS, so you're in good hands with The RSS Blog." Very cool! And mucho thanks to the Pluck team. What comes around, goes around, so I've added the Get Plucked chicklet to the right sidebar.
Review: Plazoo is very solid. You can also subscribe to search results, similar to BlogPulse and Feedster. RSS validates. The clear differentiator is the advanced search, of which, Plazoo is far behind the other two. But still very useful.
I seem to be stuck on the term interesting thought, so here's another interesting thought. Goto Amazon.com. Search for star wars. Cut the URL. Open another browser session. Navigate to the URL and you get "Browser Bug?" In fact, if you click the star wars link I provide, then you'll see what I mean. Who writes this stuff? Now return to the original search results page. View source. Search the source for the term RSS. Not found. But they do have RSS. And they could easily write an XSLT to RSS their XML. All the pieces are there. But there's no auto-discovery and there's no orange XML buttons. No stock analyst is required to explain this.
RSS Mix: Mix any number of RSS feeds into one unique new feed!
Randy: Interesting! I wonder how it handles conditional-GET and how we could hook it up to an OPML input. The limit of 4 is also a bummer. Here's a new feed for all four of my blogs. Hmmm! It's only showing results from one of the feeds. Sounds like this service is broken. Too bad, it was a good idea.
Alex Halavais: Yeah, sure, Amazon and ebay were popular, but online porn was making money way before either were breaking even. [cut] What is the state of Porn RSS? A quick googling of âRSS pornâ calls up some interesting musings that suggest I am not alone in seeing the connection here, but few actual feeds.
Randy: Let's just leave it at interesting thoughts.
Alex Halavais: Yeah, sure, Amazon and ebay were popular, but online porn was making money way before either were breaking even. [cut] What is the state of Porn RSS? A quick googling of âRSS pornâ calls up some interesting musings that suggest I am not alone in seeing the connection here, but few actual feeds.
Randy: Let's just leave it at interesting thoughts.
Alex Halavais: Yeah, sure, Amazon and ebay were popular, but online porn was making money way before either were breaking even. [cut] What is the state of Porn RSS? A quick googling of âRSS pornâ calls up some interesting musings that suggest I am not alone in seeing the connection here, but few actual feeds.
Randy: Let's just leave it at interesting thoughts.
Sauce Reader Weblog: Sauce Reader 2.0 is a complete rewrite and no longer requires the .NET framework.
Randy: It's been so long since Synop released a version of Sauce Reader it had dropped off my map. Now, where's the 1.0 for Sharpreader? I'm a little disappointed in Sauce Reader's continued use of the Outlook/Inbox UI and the term Beta.
I've always found this title to be funny. You see, Bloglines claims to remove the bottleneck in RSS, which is a distributed network, by centralizing all requests for RSS data. Think about it!
Global Syndication: Use this generator to display and format RSS feeds on your website -- no linkback required!
Google has removed Syndic8.com from their index. This is about the best reason to play nice. Google doesn't seem to be afraid of purging your records.
I've been watching Jeff Barr's blog. Nobody's mentionned anything there yet. Maybe I'll comment. I also noticed that Jeff and Bill Kearney are busy on the syndic8 message board. No mention there either. Bill's blog hasn't been updated in a long while.
Brad Hill: We can expect much more experimentation, and we should rejoice in it.
Randy: Brad makes a great point about accepting character blogs.
Vortex offers blog hosting w/ Wordpress for only $25/yr. Wow!
eBloggy is a very simple hosted blogging platform. It has both a simple and HTML level template editor. There's no remote posting via email or API. Both HTML and WYSIWYG editor. Comments. You can't upload files. You can have private blogs, public blogs, group blogs and you can have more than one blog. Here's mine (empty).
Update: Major gap in functionality. I can't find the RSS feed.
Thanks to Miel, we now have a logo for Rmail. Subscribed.
Dave Winer: I'm speaking at the Syndicate conference in New York on May 17. [cut] But mostly I expect to talk about how to make money on the Internet. [cut] Anyway, since one of the hot topics is advertising and sponsorship, and since the conference isn't paying me a fee, or even covering my expenses, I thought I'd offer sponsorship opportunities to people or companies who would like to be talked about, briefly, from my speaking space.
I noticed a few people using the rmail tag. Very cool!
Frank Barnako: Almost two out of three advertisers want to spend money on blogs!
Randy: This is great news for the blogosphere. More revenue for Feedster, FeedBurner and 6apart. More revenues leads to better services, while maintain the low end-user costs.
Bob Wyman: If we are to have advertising in RSS and Atom feeds, advertisers must provide those ads in such a way that they don't break the existing blogging and syndication infrastructure. In particular, once an ad is inserted into a feed, it must not be changed unless the content in which it is embedded is also changed. Not following this rule will result in the duplicate detection code of numerous feed readers incorrectly presenting posts to users when those posts have only had their ads, not their content, updated.
Randy: This sounds like a software problem, not a problem with the ads. Using a simple hash of the <description> to determine uniqueness is pretty much a flawed algorithm. Sounds to me like ads are breaking PubSub.
I've been asked often today to produce a list of the top subscribers to the RSS blog. Remember, that these don't reflect the real distribution, but rather those who express an strong interest in RSS.
All other readers report 2 or less subscriptions today. These six readers almost always make up the top six RSS readers for all of the blogs I host or have statistics against.
Update: A reader and Yahoo! employee asked about My Yahoo! which doesn't show up on FeedBurner at all from what I see. I'm investigating. He also noted that Bloglines reports total subscribers, even dormant ones, whereas My Yahoo! reports active subscribers.
Resolution: Turns out I didn't have any My Yahoo! subscribers to the FeedBurner feed. This doesn't mean I didn't have any My Yahoo! subscribers, I had at least two subscribers to my old feed. Bloglines reports 51 additional subscribers to that old feed. I wish I had an easy way of 302ing all the old feed requests to FeedBurner. Suggestions welcomed (C# ASPX, no ISM).
Today, I took a look at the blogSpirit hosted blogging platform. This one was also very good. The customization framework is extremely easy to use and flexible. Other than the lacking blogging API support, everything seems to be here. At first glance, blogSpirit is second only to MyBlogSite as a free hosted blogging platform.
Richard MacManus: Which is better: an excerpted RSS feed (where you have to click through to read the whole post), or a full-text RSS feed with some ads? Personally I'd prefer the latter.
Randy: Or a full-text RSS feed with no ads? Like mine. That said, I don't mind partial-text or ad supported RSS feeds. My world is open to all types of feeds (even Atom 0.3).