Randy Charles Morin blogs about Really Simple Syndication, RDF, FOAF, The Semantic Web and Social Software.
The RSS Blog
Fri, 01 Jul 2005 03:35:20 GMT
Apple Embraces and Extends RSS

Dare Obasanjo: This sounds interesting. So now developers of RSS readers that want to consume podcasts have to know how to consume the RSS 2.0 <enclosure> element, Yahoo!'s extensions to RSS and Apple's extensions to RSS to make sure they cover all the bases. Similarly publishers of podcasts also have to figure out which ones they want to publish as well.

Randy: I find this weird coming from a M$FT employee only a couple days after M$FT released there own RSS extension. Everybody else's RSS extensions are bad, but Microsoft's are OK? Why?

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 03:18:56 GMT
iTunes Tops 1 Million Podcast Subscriptions

the Mac Observer: Apple on Thursday announced that in just two days since the release of iTunes 4.9, subscriptions to podcasts through the software have topped the one million mark.

http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?b344392533&r=MSNnews

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 21:47:31 GMT
Adam Curry on the record

Another Adam Curry-Gnomedex video. Edited. Higher quality than most other videos out there.

http://news.com.com/1606-2-5768711.html

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 20:46:49 GMT
Rmail and Gmail, or how to collect the world

Saurier Duval: Rmail was puzzling me for a while. It's a free service which allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and it will email you the latest entries. Now this is cool, but why would anyone want this? [cut] But throw in Gmail with its advanced search possibilities into the mix, and what you get is a personalized and searchable repository of your favorite ressources.

More.

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 20:28:30 GMT
The Truth Laid Bear

The cool service categorizes blogs by the amount of inbound links.

http://www.truthlaidbear.com

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:13:52 GMT
Amber Alert on Blogs Needed

pc4media: There should be an amber alert for blogs. We should all add a little javascript snippet that shows missing people/children on our blogs.

http://worcester.typepad.com/pc4media/2005/06/amber_alert_on_.html

Randy: Genius!

Update: Got a great link from a reader [ http://codeamber.org/ticker_code.html ]. Some samples...

Long US

Short US

Long CDN

Short CDN

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 12:32:28 GMT
It also will make Comments Unneccessary
Robert Scoble: I'm playing with some secret new technology that makes the tech blogging world even flatter. Not from Microsoft (the inventor asked me to keep it quiet until he's ready to release it). But, it totally is going to change how I blog (and it really already has although I can't change my style until you all get it too). [cut] It also will make comments unneccessary. Why? Because there are systems coming that'll match up -- in minutes -- a main post and all the comments being made about that post.
Wed, 29 Jun 2005 23:18:23 GMT
WordPress 1.5.1.3 Available

Marc Abramowitz: Another day, another WordPress upgrade [cut]. Damn, a lot of WordPress security exploits uncovered lately.

http://wordpress.org/development/2005/06/wordpress-1513/

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 18:47:54 GMT
Podcast Shownotes As OPML

Steve Lacey: When I was first thinking about this, my mind was in the RSS space, but I had a niggling feeling OPML might be the better choice. Then, after Dave's post I realised that the reason to use OPML (other than there are editors about) is that it's hierarchical.

http://www.steve-lacey.com/blogarchives/2005/06/podcast_shownot_1.shtml

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 14:43:02 GMT
Can't we all just get along?

Tristan Louis: Last week, it was Microsoft's welcome endorsement and a new set of extensions and this week, it's Apple and its announcement of a new specification to add more data to RSS feeds used for podcasting. All this is nice but it seems that we're seeing the beginning of a fairly new battle around RSS.

Read more...

Randy: Begun the RSS Wars Have.

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 12:55:49 GMT
NewsGator Outlook edition 2.5 Released!

NewsGator: The most exciting new feature in this release is improved synchronization; now, not only are subscriptions and content synchronized between machines, but read/unread/deleted status as well.

http://www.newsgator.com/news/archive.aspx?post=61

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 12:23:14 GMT
A first look at iTunes RSS extensions

Edd Dumbill: Here's a quick review of the elements they've specified. [cut] From a professional point of view, I'd say this looks rather embarrassing: Apple clearly don't have enough people who really understand XML.

http://blogdex.net/route.asp?id=12127491

Randy: A great technical review of the new iTunes RSS extension.

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:55:23 GMT
kbSearch Screencast
Screencast of kbSearch
click to view kbSearch screencast

This morning, I produced a screencast that shows exactly how I intended kbSearch to be used. I demonstrate searching the blogosphere, news, the folksonomy databases, images and subscribing to the result feeds using Pluck and My Yahoo!

http://www.kbcafe.com/search.aspx

Looking for feedback.

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:34:25 GMT
My Web 2.0

Something to check out later today. The new version of My Web 2.0. By the way, My Web 2.0 has blog. Subscribed.

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:21:05 GMT
Technorati Screen of Death

Presenting the new Technorati White Screen of Death. I think it looks much better than before. Unfortunately, I'm getting it quite often. In fact, if I click on Most Authority, I get it every time. This is public message (bug report) for Dave.


 ERROR

The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.technorati.com/search/www.kbcafe.com

The following error was encountered:

Squid did not receive any data for this request.

Your cache administrator is noc@technorati.com.

Generated Wed, 29 Jun 2005 03:39:23 GMT by www.technorati.com (squid/2.5.STABLE7)

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:57:29 GMT
iPod Lock-in

Dave Winer: Does Apple not read OPML subscription lists? If so, it's hard to say it's a podcasting client. Do they export subscription lists? If so, in what format? If not at all, that's lock-in, a Roach Motel.

Randy: First there was media RSS, which I ignored, it's both funky and vendor specific. Anybody think Microsoft is gonna release RSS feeds with Yahoo mRSS extensions? Of course not. That's why vendor specific XML extensions suck. They could have worked with the community and released an XML vocabulary in a non-Yahoo namespace, but they didn't. Some didn't ignore it. When the community accepted mRSS, I think the other BigCo's clued in. Last weekend, Microsoft released their proprietary XML extension and this week Apple released their totally funky and proprietary XML. As Tim Bray likes to say, it feels like 1994 again (not an exact quote). Has everybody forgotten all the browser extensions that led to 95% Internet Explorer market share. All HTMLs were so incompatible that Microsoft ran all the other browser manufacturers into the graveyard. I beg the community to ignore all vendor specific XML extensions to RSS. If we continue down the slope, then the iPod and iTunes will become the next Internet Explorer (maybe I should buy shares NASDAQ:AAPL). If the BigCo's want community support, point them to the Atom working group, the RDF working group, the Podcast Spec working group or the completely invisible RSS advisory board.

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 20:55:38 GMT
Control your RSS URLs

Stephan Spencer: Don’t publish to the world an RSS feed URL that you don’t own. I see it as no different from handing out thousands of business cards with an @earthlink.net address proudly printed on it — rather than one @ your own domain name. [cut] Use a URL from your own domain then having your webserver redirect everyone to whatever your feeds.feedburner.com/[your-feed-here] URL.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/scatterings?m=101

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 19:34:33 GMT
FeedBurner support for iTunes, Odeo, and Media RSS

Dick Costolo: Both iTunes and Odeo provide additional information about podcasts above and beyond what's included in a basic podcasting feed. For the more than 7,000 podcasts currently running through FeedBurner, we will very soon (really soon) provide the ability to enter additional podcast description data via our SmartCast service, which we will ensure gets delivered with the appropriate RSS extensions to iTunes, Odeo, and others.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2?m=82

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 17:14:00 GMT
Chris Pirillo

Gnomedex -  Day 2 - 25June2005 - 7

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 15:15:54 GMT
Mark Evans' on kbsearch
Mark Evans: It is a solid first step by offering an easy way to check a variety of sources without having to waste time navigating through the Web. You can also add new feeds to a number of RSS readers - NewsGator, Yahoo, Pluck, My MSN, etc. - with one mouse click.
Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:56:01 GMT
iTunes RSS Extensions

Dave Walker point us to the new iTunes RSS extensions. By the way, this is very frustrating, both Microsoft and Apple have released their extension this week (and Yahoo! previously). None provide new functionality, rather they just replace existing functionality that we already had in other RSS elements and extensions, but of course, everybody wants their name on a spec (a.k.a. vendor lock-in). The worst extension here is the <itunes:category>. This should have been <category domain='iTunes'>Techology/News</category>.

http://phobos.apple.com/static/podcast_specifications.pdf
Winer's thoughts (his Websites are currently down)

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 12:52:01 GMT
More about iTunes 4.9

Frank Barnako: The software includes "Chapter Tool", so program producers can include pictures and Web links with their podcasts.  producers can also include music in their shows.

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 12:21:44 GMT
ITunes for Podcasting

itunes4This week has bought a lot of big news to the blogosphere. Microsoft legitimized RSS. Now Apple is legitimizing podcasting. Around the blogosphere.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
http://www.apple.com/podcasting/

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 05:29:03 GMT
R|mail in Dutch

The R|mail features keep rolling in. I've put a lot of effort this week into i18n and localization. You can now add a subscription box to your blog in Dutch, more languages to come. Here's the HTML. I simply require an additional lang attribute. Please suggest more languages in comments and provide content if possible.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://rssweblog.com/rss2smtp.aspx?rss=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRssBlog&amp;lang=nl"></script>

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 05:06:49 GMT
FeedBurner on Your Terms

Eric Lunt: Now, it pains me to see people not using FeedBurner, so I wanted to list a number of strategies that publishers can employ so that they can leave FeedBurner just as easily as they can try FeedBurner.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/eric?m=261

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 04:57:39 GMT
A really simple future

Chicago Business: After more or less missing the first Internet boom — and bust — can Chicago find a role in the rebound? If so, it could be thanks to a small group of programmers working long hours in cramped, spartan offices above Wacker Drive. From there, the 11 employees of FeedBurner design software to help amateur bloggers and Internet publishers manage RSS, shorthand for "really simple syndication."

Randy: Can't get the entire article, not even with BugMeNot. Copy, paste, mailto.

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 03:14:36 GMT
Proper Content-Type for XML Feeds

Pete Freitag: RSS Feeds have a content type problem. Most people end up serving them with the content-type: text/xml. But this practice is frowned upon for several reasons. The main reason people don't like text/xml is because its very vague, there are content types such as application/rss+xml, application/rdf+xml, and application/atom+xml that describe the content of your feed much better than text/xml does. We should be using these types for our feeds.

http://www.petefreitag.com/item/381.cfm

Randy: Pete gets it!

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 01:12:08 GMT
Gnomedex-Curry Video!

Adam Curry: Let's get one-click subscription working now.

Crowd: Applause!

Video

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:53:55 GMT
Tag subscriptions in NetNewsWire

Brent Simmons: At Gnomedex Niall Kennedy asked me if I got a lot of feedback about the Tag Subscriptions feature in NetNewsWire. I told him that no, I don’t hear about it all that often. It occurs to me that people may not know about it. There were so many new features that we couldn’t really make a huge deal out of any one feature. But tag subscriptions is one of my personal favorites—I find it very useful.

http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=3134

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:46:18 GMT
iTunes release Tuesday or Wednesday
Geek News Central: In Adam Curry's keynote at Gnomedex he made mention that on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week Apple would be releasing iTunes version 4.9 with podcasting support.
Mon, 27 Jun 2005 19:13:13 GMT
Podcasting Legal
Dave Winer: Apparently podcasting was part of the Supreme Court decision, as a non-infringing use of file sharing.
Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:47:47 GMT
xml:base in RSS

User: People are telling me that the xml:base directive at the top of the XML stops this issue.

Bill Kearney: In the purest 'technical sense' it can be made to work. But in the context of an RSS feed relative URLs do not work, regardless of any base declarations. There are *one or two* readers that make it work but most will not.

Randy: Excellent observation by Bill about the use of xml:base and relative URLs in RSS. Yes, you can do it, but few RSS readers recognize this construct. An example use of xml:base, which is discouraged, follows.

<rss version='2.0' xml:base='http://www.kbcafe.com/'>
  <channel>
    <item>
      <link>rss/?guid=20050627094747</link>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:16:29 GMT
Comment on feeds from Gnomedex
James Robertson: Google is pushing Atom via Blogger, but outside of that, it's mostly RSS. You can whine, argue, fuss (whatever) - but that's the reality. In the end though, it doesn't matter that much to end users - most aggregators support all the formats (I certainly do in BottomFeeder), so we are going to end up in a place where users will subscribe, neither knowing nor caring what format they get.
Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:59:38 GMT
Surround Isolate and Replace

Rick Segal: In the past, you wouldn't have seen support for "pure" RSS. Not on my watch, boyz. Nope, what you would have seen is yours truly hawking something along the lines of SIR (Surround Isolate and Replace) Technology or RSS+. [cut] Dave Winer (and others) would have screamed bloody murder about Microsoft co-opting a standard and screwing it up and I would have droned on about making life better for developers slaving away in garages around the world.

Dave Winer: This strikes me as exactly what Technorati was trying to do with OPML, and if it's ridiculous for a gorilla like Microsoft, it's pathetic for a gnat like Technorati.

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:18:51 GMT
del.icio.us Burner

I asked in the FeedBurner support forums if I could splice my del.icio.us links tagged RSS into The RSS Blog feed. Of course, Eric Lunt already thought of this and he pointed me to the solution.

http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=156

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 02:06:00 GMT
Bad User-Agents

Every once in awhile, especially when I'm in a bad mood ;-), I like to publish a list of User-Agents that hit my RSS feed more than 24 (I'll make it 30 to be nice) times per subscribed user.

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 20:46:52 GMT
Chris Pirillo Fan Club, BUT

Chris Pirillo: Anonymous comments have been turned off completely.

http://chris.pirillo.com/blog/_archives/2005/6/26/975313.html

Randy: I think a lot of people joined the Chris Pirillo fan club this weekend. Unfortunately, I can no longer comment on his blog, as I refuse to login. I'm simply exhausted by the proliferation of passwords.

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:08:55 GMT
Subscribe to Your Feedburner Stats

Paul Kedrosky: While Feedburner has launched an awareness API, the folks there have not yet given users a way to subscribe via RSS/Atom to your own traffic data. The absence bugged me enough that I wrote a little script so that you can get your Feedburner traffic stats as an RSS feed.

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/001463.html

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 09:29:24 GMT
Longhorn Team RSS Blog

Subscribed.

http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 08:59:23 GMT
Gnomedex

Gnomedex

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 01:49:10 GMT
Coalition of the unwilling

Steve Gilmour: Dave Winer suggests no one is supporting attention, so why should Yahoo!?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor/?p=115

Randy: Nobody is paying attention. The problem with attention.xml is that it's not useful information, it's geeky data.

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 23:46:16 GMT
Curry broadcasts #200 from Gnomedex

Jan Kabili: Adam Curry closes out the amazing Gnomedex 5.0 by broadcasting the 200th edition of Daily Source Code from the stage.

http://mp3.dailysourcecode.podshow.com/DSC-2005-06-25.mp3

Randy: During his keynote, Adam called for everybody to make one-click subscription happen. In a way, it already has, with the Longhorn announcement. Until then, let's get USM!

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 22:33:58 GMT
FeedMesh 101

Jason Calacanis: Technorati had their huge jump in number of blogs when they tapped into the FeedMesh. [cut] Turns out only Pubsub is putting their data into it--Technoati and Feedster folks are way to smart to give their data (i.e. their entire business) into the cloud. [cut] Pingomatic is getting 70% ping spam. [cut] If the big players only take (as they currently are) and don’t give this service is only going to be 60-80% of the picture.

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 22:21:40 GMT
1-Click Podcast Chicklet

Tin Jaw: As we near announcing a 0.9 suggested/draft/please-look-at-and-comment-on "one-click" specification we find ourselves naked, sans button, buttonless.

http://pswg.blogspot.com/2005/06/calling-all-artists-one-click-button.html

Randy: How about a simple HTML chicklet?

 Podcast 

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 21:16:08 GMT
Audible to offer NYTimes podcasts

News.com: Digital audio publisher Audible plans to release podcasts of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the company's other periodic content via syndicated feeds.

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 20:58:12 GMT
Death knell to Atom?

David Berlind: First, to have Microsoft come out and support RSS and not support the other syndication technology (Atom — yes, I asked) doesn't bode well for Atom. 

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 20:30:58 GMT
Yahoo! 360 Open
The Blog Herald: The beta testing of Yahoo 360, the social networking come blogging tool is now open to the general public. If you never got an invite, or are interested in trying out the Yahoo offering, sign up here if you have a current Yahoo I.D, of follow the prompts if you don't.
Sat, 25 Jun 2005 14:42:16 GMT
Gnomedex MP3s
Techpodcast has both the Dave Winer keynote and Microsoft announcement online (MP3).
Sat, 25 Jun 2005 03:57:55 GMT
The Day RSS Turned Pro

Steve Rubel: On June 24, 2005, the users won. The age of RSS innocence ended and a new era "kicked off." RSS graduated from Geek U and is now on its way to turning pro. On June 24, 2015 we will say that this that today RSS was drafted in the first round to play in the big leagues (millions of Windows desktops).

http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/06/the_day_rss_tur.html

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:51:07 GMT
Simple List Extensions Specification

Sean Lyndersay: The Simple List Extensions are designed as extensions to existing feed formats to make exposing ordered lists of items easier and more accessible to users.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/understanding/rss/simplefeedextensions/

Randy: This seems to be the list RSS extension announced by Microsoft today at gnomedex. My first impression is that it seems unnecessary. Mind you, I haven't seen a practical example. Sample appreciated. Reasoning preferred.

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:32:20 GMT
Atom 1.0

Tim Bray: I’m somewhat amused by the last paragraph’s “We will support Atom 1.0 when it’s released.†That will be in the next few weeks, which is to say at least a year before Longhorn is.

Randy: hehe!

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:22:34 GMT
It's MY Feed, Stupid

Fred Wilson: I'll end this post with a shoutout to Six Apart/Typepad to do the same.  Please provide your users with a "redirect" service so that if we've built sizable audiences for our Tyepad feeds, we can redirect them to Feedburner or anyone else we choose.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/06/its_my_feed_stu.html

Randy: Fred nails it. Blogging providers need to provide us better ways of managing our feeds. I want a simple checkbox to redirect my feed to FeedBurner.

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 20:56:02 GMT
Bloglines Burn-out

Tony Morgan: It appears that something's not working either at Bloglines or with Feedburner. Bloglines has not updated since Sunday for people that have subscribed to my Feedburner feed.

Later: I'm pretty impressed with the FeedBurner folks. I posted a message on their support and discussion forums and had a reply in about an hour [cut]. The Bloglines folks acknowledged the problem was on their end and indicated they hoped to have the problem corrected shortly.

Randy: Gotta love those FeedBurner folk. Read more about the FeedBurner/Bloglines black-out here.

http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=883

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 20:25:12 GMT
USM Registry entires

I added a section to the USM specification describing some important Windows Registry entries.

https://rssweblog.com/usm.html#windowsregistry

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:56:28 GMT
Longhorn (heart) RSS

Channel9: Today Microsoft announced the addition of several new RSS features in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=80533#80533

Video.

Randy: 27 minutes into the video, it gets interesting with the demo of IE7 on Longhorn. M$FT has implemented a common feed list with a full set of APIs, that all applications can re-use. You can subscribe to feeds, very similar to Firefox, but the feedlist is synchronized across all applications. It also automatically downloads the feeds and the enclosures, which I assume is also made available to other applications. M$FT is introduce new RSS elements for lists. This seems weird. Feed is a superset of list. I think M$FT missed that one.

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:58:47 GMT
Subscribers by User-Agent

It's time again for a list of top subscribing RSS clients to my FeedBurner hosted RSS feed.

  1. Pluck
  2. My Yahoo!
  3. Bloglines
  4. Custom Reader Demo 
  5. Firefox
  6. NewsGator Online
  7. NetNewsWire
  8. eCruiser
  9. R|mail
  10. Sharpreader
  11. Juice
  12. FeedDemon
  13. NewsGator Outlook
  14. Onfolio
  15. Free-downloads.net
  16. Opera

The big surprise this week is My Yahoo! which jumped from sixth two weeks past and is now well ahead of Bloglines. Custom Reader Demo, which I never saw until last week and will likely surpass Bloglines this next week. Actually, maybe the biggest surprise is the overall stagnation at Bloglines compared to Pluck, My Yahoo! and Custom Reader Demo. Last, I'm counting 1000+ subscribers. Yahooo!

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:45:27 GMT
Typepad ads
Brij Singh: Typepad rolled out a new text ad serving functionality using  Kanoodle's network.
Fri, 24 Jun 2005 15:28:44 GMT
Pluck for Firefox

click me to enlarge My friends at Pluck invited me into their Pluck 2.0, Firefox Edition private beta last month and I have been using it most of the month of June. They told me to keep it silent until this morning. Thanks for the invitation!

Review: After some initial stability bugs, I got a beta drop last week that rocks! The best thing is that it registers your subscriptions back on their Web application, so when I move from computer to computer, or browser to browser, my subscriptions move with me.  I know a few of my readers have mentionned they use Firefox to surf the Web, but switch to IE and the Pluck toolbar when reading RSS. Now you can unpin IE from the start menu ;)

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 14:56:25 GMT
Weblogs.com

Dave Winer: A snapshot of traffic on weblogs.com. Yesterday it served 34.65 gigabytes of data, took 1.1 million pings and 11000 downloads of changes.xml.

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 13:04:42 GMT
BloxOr

BloxOr: t3h Blox0r only runs in gecko browsers like Mozilla or Firefox.

http://www.bloxor.com/

Randy: It uses XUL. And that's a capital ooh, not a zero. I'll try it out later today and leave a review.

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 05:36:17 GMT
Danny Sullivan and RSS Search

Scott Rafer: At Feedster, we’re betting heavily that Danny Sullivan is underestimating the impact of RSS and the likelihood that RSS will become important for mainstream search.

Randy: I totally agree with Scott, again! I'm particularly interested in where OpenSearch is taking us.

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 05:22:38 GMT
All Typepad blogs blocked in China
Rebecca MacKinnon: Asiapundit first sounded the alarm. Now it's confirmed. All Typepad blogs, including this one, cannot be seen in China. (Note that Blogger has been blocked in China for some time.) 
Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:33:11 GMT
Microsoft, lists, RSS and me

Dave Winer: I asked what part of Microsoft he worked for. He said he was on the RSS Team. I gulped. You mean there's an RSS Team at Microsoft? Yeah there is. On Friday you'll see how deeply integrated RSS is in the architecture of the browser.

http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/2005/06/22#a634

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:15:48 GMT
Just got my invite to Odeo!

Review: evhead just did to podcasting what he previously did to blogging. What a genius! Odeo has a blog. Subscribed.

http://odeo.com - My Odeo Profile - My Odeo RSS

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:13:43 GMT
AllPodcasts.com has USM

Geoff Taylor: Well, every podcast is now one-click subscribable through AllPodcasts.com, so the gauntlet is down. Over to you - you're going to be busy!

Randy: I also notice that AllPodcasts.com supports adhoc RSS search results. How long before they are in kbSearch?

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:06:13 GMT
Charlie's on the Move
Charlie Wood of the Moonwatcher blog is on the move. First, he's left the comfort of NewsGator to pursue his own startup. Also, his blog has surpassed the 500 subscriber mark. Congrats and good luck!
Wed, 22 Jun 2005 23:24:09 GMT
blog.com
evhead: Apparently that guy who had blog.com finally sold it, and someone is doing, ya know, a blog thing there.
Wed, 22 Jun 2005 20:47:04 GMT
RSS is Orange

Orange, anyone?

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 20:43:23 GMT
Odeo Interview w/ evhead
Mathew Honan: Williams’ newest venture is called Odeo, a one-stop shop to help people record, edit, publish, find, subscribe, categorize, and download podcasts. Like Blogger, it has an intuitive, friendly interface, and will allow users to publish from the Web.
Wed, 22 Jun 2005 16:48:23 GMT
Orange Chicklet Guy is a Daddy

Bryan Bell: On Jun 1st at 12:04AM, my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, who for the last few weeks has continually astounded me. We named her Emily Elizabeth Bell.

Randy: Congrats to Bryan and family. Bryan is also the father of the orange XML chicklet.

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:27:28 GMT
Podifier has USM

PR: Red Square has released Podifier 1.03 and Podifier.V 1.03 – upgrades of the popular podcast publishing tool and one of the first tools of their kind to provide support for the new One-Click Subscription standard for podcasting.

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 01:24:40 GMT
Odeo Launches
Anarchogeek: We did it. We have started going through and sending out invitations to the over 11,000 people who've asked for odeo accounts.
Wed, 22 Jun 2005 01:11:38 GMT
Scoble's Linkblog Feedburner Stats

NewsGator: Recently Robert Scoble made public his reader statistics through his FeedBurner subscription via Teja.

http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=19532415&size=o

Randy: Most Web aggregators report total subscribers. My Yahoo reports active subscribers. Desktop aggregators report active subscribers in the last 24 hours.

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 20:19:58 GMT
iPodder 2.1 has USM

iPodder Lemon Team: In response to user voting on the ipodder-dev mailinglist, one-click subscription support has been enabled.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ipodder-dev/message/5221

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 05:48:55 GMT
Cool URIs dont change

Tribe: Either the tribe you have requested could not be found on our system, or you do not have access to this page.

W3:

What makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.
What sorts of URI change?
URIs don't change: people change them.
Mon, 20 Jun 2005 20:49:41 GMT
Top 10 RSS Topic Blogs?

Here's an exercise for the day, I'm compiling the top 10 13 RSS topic blogs. If you have any suggestions, then please email me or put your opinion where it most counts (in the comment section of this blog entry).

  1. ionrss (Richard MacManus)
  2. Raw Blog (Danny Ayers)
  3. RSS Compendium Blog (Antville)
  4. The RSS Weblog (weblogsinc)
  5. Really Simple Syndication (Dave Winer)
  6. The RSS Diary (marketingstudies)
  7. Moonwatcher (Charlie Wood)
  8. RSS Blog (Thomas Gigold)
  9. Read Write Web (Richard MacManus)
  10. RSS Blog (rss-specifications)
  11. Finally Atom (Danny Ayers) 
  12. Newsniche (Allan Burns)
  13. RSS & Atom Tips (Lockergnome)

It's complete!

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 19:50:39 GMT
Your Feed. Your Domain.

Dick Costolo: We now support the ability for partners to point their own domain at FeedBurner, so that the feed [cut] will have the partner's URL. [cut] If you run mysite.com, and you want all your FeedBurner feeds and related services to run through something like feeds.mysite.com, we're ready to set this up.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2?m=80

Randy: FeedBurner = Community Karma.

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 19:45:50 GMT
Pluck Beta tester invitation

Pluck: Pluck announced the release of our beta Firefox Edition and extended an invitation to participate in a test drive.

http://pluck.typepad.com/tips_tricks/2005/06/index.html#a0005216693

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 16:18:01 GMT
Reblg - A Universal Blog This Button

Marc Canter: With ReBlg.com end-users will be able to click on a ‘ReBlog’ button and send a piece of micro-content or microformat to their favorite tool for editing, annotating or just plain prettying up.

Randy: What a great idea!

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:25:39 GMT
R|mail 1K Subscribers

Coolz0r: Good news from Canada travels fast. Randy from R|Mail has informed me through a custom for me designed smtp-script that 1070 users are now happily being RSS'd through smtp. Very cool. Let's see how far we can pull this. The comfort of R|Mail has been proven to be contagious.

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 03:42:35 GMT
Yahoo! buy blo.gs

Jim Winstead: the sale of blo.gs has been completed, and i'm proud to announce that yahoo! has acquired the service.

Randy: Not news, but my trip to Victoria led me to miss this.

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 01:21:51 GMT
Odeo Beta Screenshots
Odeo http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattb/sets/460329/
Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:38:43 GMT
Dave's OPML Editor
Of late, Dave Winer has been advertising that he's shortly going to be releasing an open source OPML editor. This confuses me. Who would use an OPML editor? OPML is a file format, not an application. People don't write RSS, they write blogs. Are people gonna start creating outliners all over the Web? I guess I'll have to wait and see.
Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:00:51 GMT
rel=tag implies rel=nofollow
I was just thinking. Having my own tagspace, you could say, that I'm SPAMming Google and you could say the same about Technorati. This is why you find Technorati climbing the Google ranks (and maybe me too, not likely). This is a problem. The authority link structure is being broken by rel=tag links. As such, rel=tag should, no MUST be treated as a superset of rel=nofollow. We should not be giving authority thru folksonomy tagspaces. MHO.
Sun, 19 Jun 2005 16:57:39 GMT
Pluck Firefox Edition now in beta

Pluck blog: We are pleased to begin rolling out the newest member of the family -- the Firefox edition of  Pluck!

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 16:53:50 GMT
Liferea = DoS

Twice this month, I've been hit by massive DoS attacks from Liferea. Last time, I was hit for 60k+ hits, this time for 100k+ hits. The attack originated from 69.205.44.163. I assume this is a bug in the Liferea RSS reader. If you use Liferea to read this blog, then please consider switching RSS readers. Try Pluck for Firefox

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 13:41:03 GMT
RSS Search

Stephan Spencer: I find it a bit unbelievable that the major search engines — Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves — still don’t offer RSS feed searching combined with RSS search results feeds as part of their Web search.

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 13:10:48 GMT
Unfortunately Incompatibility

Dave Winer: Last night I wrote file converters for Bloglines and RSS Bandit, to make it possible for OPML Editor users to edit, organize, combine and split RSS subscription lists created by these apps. There's been some unfortunate incompatibility, visible for the first time for users.

Randy: It would seem that Dave has discovered the outline/title bug.

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 05:58:49 GMT
Google iPodder?
Dave Winer: I've been hearing rumors that Google is readying an iTunes-clone, based on RSS 2.0, and fully podcast-capable. Multiple sources on this one.
Sun, 19 Jun 2005 04:42:35 GMT
Fagan Finder Translate This

translate this page 

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 01:58:19 GMT
RSS is Orange

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 01:31:58 GMT
RSS at Harvard Law
In a few hours, there will have been exactly one post in 365 days on the RSS at Harvard Law blog and it's already more than a year since we heard from the RSS Advisory Board. I've repeated this message for over a year [1, 2]. I really think its time we move control of RSS to a body that cares.
Sun, 19 Jun 2005 01:01:38 GMT
Feed Subscription Router

Andrew Davey: I've been working on a Feed Subscription Router application for Windows (You must have the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 installed).

http://www.equin.co.uk/fsr/

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 00:38:06 GMT
Inside My Yahoo!

Inside My Yahoo!Late last week, The RSS Blog was added to the Inside My Yahoo! content page rotation. I haven't actually seen this blog appear on the page, but from the increase in My Yahoo! subscribers, it can only be true. If anybody sees The RSS Blog on this page, then please print screen the page to a JPG and send it my way. Thanks to the Yahoo! team for the privilege and big thanks in advance to anyone who can copy me with that screen print.

Update: Screen obtained. See area boxed in orange.

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 18:19:26 GMT
Never Modified

Here's a classic RSS/HTTP response from a Wordpress blog. I replaced the real domain with the fake one. This blog had several auto-discoverable RSS feeds, all of which, replied similarly. It was an interesting blog too, but without a valid RSS feed, I surely won't be reading it very often.

GET /feed HTTP/1.1
Host: www.fake.com

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 18:04:09 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) mod_jk2/2.0.2 PHP/4.2.1
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.2.1
Last-Modified: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 16:39:44 GMT
ETag: "48c51a1310a8126422e5adb115c4871b"
X-Pingback: http://www.fake.com/xmlrpc.php
Content-Type: text/html

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:12:44 GMT
Gataga

Gataga is a very nice looking RSS-based search engine similar to kbSearch. I'm mostly impressed with the UI, which is extremely obvious (copied). I think I'll change kbSearch to follow the same layout concepts. It aggregates the search results returned by del.icio.us and furl. It also has an RSS feed for subscribing to the results.

http://www.gataga.com

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 22:22:44 GMT
inkBlots w/ Danny Ayers

Danny Ayers: I suspect RSS 1.0 was the right idea at the wrong time.

http://inkblots.markwoodman.com/rss-diaries/danny-ayers

Randy: Mark Woodman interviews Danny Ayers on all that is XML syndication.

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 22:13:42 GMT
OpenSearch

I'm getting exciting about OpenSearch. I'm thinking about making kbSearch an OpenSearch aggregator, like A9.

http://opensearch.a9.com/

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 21:46:00 GMT
My Yahoo!

I just noticed a spike in My Yahoo! subscribers. Haven't identified a reason. Could be a bug, a change in reporting method to FeedBurner, or other.

Update: The spike was caused by The RSS Blog being added to Inside My Yahoo. Very cool! Thanks! Yaaaaaaahhhhhhhooooooooooooo!

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 18:21:08 GMT
First Look at Odeo

Philipp Lenssen: I’ve checked out Odeo.com [cut] after my Beta invitation arrived. It’s a very good-looking, smoothly working podcast portal.

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-06-16-n67.html 

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 04:14:42 GMT
Subscribers by User-Agent

It's time again for a list of top subscribing RSS clients to my FeedBurner hosted RSS feed.

  1. Pluck
  2. Bloglines
  3. Firefox
  4. My Yahoo!
  5. NewsGator Online
  6. NetNewsWire
  7. Free-downloads.net
  8. R|mail
  9. NewsGator Outlook
  10. Sharpreader
  11. eCruiser
  12. Onfolio
  13. Opera

I also noticed another new reader on the list, Custom Reader Demo and Demo Custom Reader.

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 03:44:08 GMT
Awareness API

Dick Costolo: Introducing the simple Feed Awareness API that now enables any 3rd party to query feed statistics on FeedBurner feeds.

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/api/awareness

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 03:42:14 GMT
Webjay supports USM

Lucas Gonze: Webjay now supports the whizzy new 1-click podcast subscription standard. I'm not the first publisher on the internet to support it, feedburner got there first, but even so I worked until midnight last night to be the first to ship a non-experimental version.

http://gonze.com/weblog/story/secondpub

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 20:53:20 GMT
FeedBurner support for One Click Subscription

Eric Lunt: Now that some of the dust has settled from the voting, I'd like to announce FeedBurner's support for the One Click Subscription method based on Universal Subscription Mechanism (USM) as part of our "Browser-Friendly" service.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ipodder-dev/message/5179

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:46:20 GMT
blo.gs transfer imminent?
Niall Kennedy: Blo.gs is currently down. [cut] Jim previously announced the domain and its assets would change hands on or after Monday, June 13.
Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:45:01 GMT
+SimplyHired
This morning, I added SimplyHired to the kbSearch engine. Now you can search for jobs from three different sources; Feedster, Indeed and SimplyHired.
Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:38:33 GMT
Translation Test

This is a test of BabelFish. Simply paste this code on any page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.altavista.com/static/scripts/translate_engl.js"></script>

Doesn't seem to work. Any ideas? Paul Rival had better luck with FaganFinder. I'll try that later today.

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 21:47:33 GMT
del.icio.us media support

Joshua Schachter: Bookmarked items in del.icio.us that end in one of a number of filetypes will now automatically get some system tags added.

http://lists.del.icio.us/pipermail/discuss/2005-June/003354.html

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:56:34 GMT
+gritwire

I added a chicklet to the chicklet generator for subscribing to a feed with gritwire. I found the instructions here.

http://www.gritwire.com/general/publishers.aspx

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:26:33 GMT
How R|Mail Makes Things Better

Coolz0r: Not so long ago Randy Charles Morin has been coding around the clock to get ‘his’ RSS to SMPT tool ready for use. Let’s see how that goes. It delivers the latest posts of the blogs you’re subscribed to straight into your inbox.

blognewschannel.com

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:22:03 GMT
ipodder-dev Confusion

There's some debate over on the ipodder-dev mailing-list as to whether the outcome of the mime-type vote truly reflects the community will. As such, I've setup a run-off non-binding staw poll between the two leading candidcate mime-types. It closes soon, so go vote now! Then we can all move on.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ipodder-dev/surveys?id=1216558

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 12:34:38 GMT
blogWatcher

A Japanese blog search engine. Very cool! I'll look at adding it to kbSearch today.

http://blogwatcher.pi.titech.ac.jp/

Update: Done!

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 12:10:44 GMT
Qumana launches blogging tool

Tris Hussey: Qumana Software announces the availability of QumanaLE: a simple and easy–to-use blogging tool.

http://investors.qumana.com/blog/_archives/2005/6/13/933572.html

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 02:52:44 GMT
Sitemap Autodisco
Dave Winer: Submitting the page to a Google server is dumb [cut]. Why not use the convenient link element that HTML already provides. [cut] Try this:
<link rel="sitechanges" type="text/xml" href="http://www.myfoo.com/mancuso/mychanges.xml">

[cut] And I don't have to submit it to Jeeves, Bloglines, MSN, Tom, Dick and Harry and whatever new search engine might come along that I don't even know about.

http://geeks.opml.org/2005/06/08#a56

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 02:04:03 GMT
Blacklisted

Today, while posting a comment on a blog, I got the following message.

your_ip_is_blacklisted_by list.dsbl.org

Checking my IP address against that database and yes, I am listed as an open relay. Clearly, I'm technical and smart enough not to run an open relay, so I figured this had something TODO with R|mail, which runs in my basement, same IP address. I looked deeper into my record and the problem became clear. Last Friday, my router fried. This caused me to take actions that caused my IP address to change. Somebody obviously had this IP address before me, who ran on open relay. This is one reason, I really hate filters that guess pro-actively for SPAM. False negatives, means frustrated users who are likely not going to return to your blog. 

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 01:48:16 GMT
Feedburner and Subscriptions

New-B-Log: We’ve just joined FeedBurner and are real pleased so far. It looks like they’ve got the widest variety of feed subscription services available. through them you can subscribe to the NHO Feeds in farious forms, including BlogLines, My MSN, My Yahoo, NewsGator Universal Subscription Method – USM and a whole load of various feed readers.

http://newbiehangout.com/scgi-bin/txp/index.php?id=152

Randy: Make it easy for people to subscribe. These guys get it!

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 18:56:17 GMT
Ads in RSS Don't Turn Subscribers

Rok Hrastnik: Dick shared their metrics based on the 60,000 feeds managed through their service and made an official statement that feeds with ads are not losing subscribers and have not begun losing subscribers since implementing ads.

Rok Hrastnik: Several publishers stated just the oposite.

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 17:04:32 GMT
Subscribe to LinkStats

The coolest feature on PubSub, is the ability to subscribe to your LinkStats. Subscribe the following URL with your RSS reader, replacing my domain with whatever domain you want to watch.

http://www.pubsub.com/site_stats_feed.php?site=kbcafe.com

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 13:50:49 GMT
Flat Ad Links

You may have noticed that I started running the Google Adsense flat adlinks at the top of the blog. In fact, I placed it below my list of hotlinks. That was intentional. I found that by placing content above your top ads, that the click-thru-rate is much higher. I would suggest to most bloggers that CPM of these flat adlinks is worth the minimal real estate they cost.

Note: You don't actually get paid when the reader clicks on these Ad links, rather it simply navigates the reader to a page of related ads. So, it requires a second click before you actually get paid.

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 13:17:49 GMT
RSS Redirects

A thank you to Eric Lunt of FeedBurner for taking the community leadership on RSS redirection. In response, I've included the best practices for RSS redirects in the RSS Feed State article. Please provide feedback in comments or by email.

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 10:59:15 GMT
+Technorati

I added Technorati's new adhoc tag RSS to the kbSearch engine. Now you can query all the major tag search engines (flickr, del.icio.us, technorati and more) from one interface.

http://www.kbcafe.com/search.aspx?e=t&q=kbsearch

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 09:14:45 GMT
Mime Type for Podcasts

Al Sutton: MIME Type (all in the application/ space)

File Extension

Therefore we have adopted the application/rss+xml as the MIME type and rss as the file extension.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ipodder-dev/message/5140

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 00:44:56 GMT
Adhoc Tag Queries

One thing, beyond all else in the new Technorati beta, makes this new version leagues better than previous. Click tags. Do a tag search.

View posts tagged scoble in RSS format

You can now do adhoc tag searches thru Technorati and spit out RSS. Awesome! Thanks David and Kevin. WS-Nirvana!

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 03:24:55 GMT
HTTP 301

Dave Winer: Feedburner offers a redirect program if you choose to return to hosting your feed. I agree with Randy Morin, in the comments, they should provide the redirect permanently.

Randy: Every once in a while, Dave throws me a bone. Appreciated. Gotta get more work in on the RSS Feed State article.

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:08:25 GMT
Ciao, FeedBurner

Eric Lunt: Let's say you decide you want to stop using FeedBurner. You loved the services, you loved the customer support, you loved everything about FeedBurner, but let's face it: you're going crazy with all the delightful services, and you've decided you can't take it anymore. You want out. You've always been able to do this if you run your own server: just like you redirect your feed traffic to FeedBurner, you can redirect your traffic away from FeedBurner. No problem.

Randy: This is too complicated. I think phase 1 is enough.

New Note: I wanted to thank Eric and his team at FeedBurner for taking a leadership position on issues related to RSS Feed State.

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:15:40 GMT
FeedLounge

The big new del.icio.us SPAM-able link today is FeedLounge. By the way, it requires Firefox. Click here. Click there. Every click went either back to the homepage or was 404. There was no signup page. So where is all the del.icio.us SPAM coming from? Ah, if you sign up for the FeedLounge newsletter (read SPAM), there's a checkbox to signup. yyyawn :-( 

Page not Found

Oops, we've encountered an error. If you got here by clicking a link on this site, please let us know in the forums.

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 16:43:07 GMT
Reboot Feed Down

Podbat: On visiting the reboot site, we noticed that the link to the RSS feed has 'feed:' prepended to the url. That's fine, if you have an aggregator which knows what that means for one-click subscription to feeds, but useless and annoying for those you simply want to copy and paste their RSS urls.

http://blog.podbat.com/2005/06/10.html#a105

Randy: They won't learn. They'll just have very few subscribers. More readers for rest of us ;-) 

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 03:24:30 GMT
New Technorati Beta!

David Sifry: I'm pleased to announce the launch of the public beta of this major redesign of the Technorati service.

http://beta.technorati.com/

Randy: UI is much MUCH MUCHO awesome! And there's an actual Technorati Weblog. Subscribed. And check out what others are saying?

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 21:59:19 GMT
Land here, NO HERE!

I just realized how bad some RSS landing pages are. Imagine you're some mundane RSS user and you find yourself reading the CNN Tech page. You see an RSS icon and you Copy Link Location and paste it into your favorite RSS reader. By the way, you just subscribed to Top Stories, not Tech. You see, the landing page for the RSS link is actually HTML and the first autodiscovery link on that page is for the Top Stories, not Tech  :-( 

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 21:36:08 GMT
Atom-Format-09

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-format-09.txt

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 21:30:17 GMT
BlogmarksEnable your site !

Blogmarks Blog: Just a little howto for those of you who would like to add a nice Add to blogmarks.net link to the articles published on their blog (or anything else).

http://www.blogmarks.net/blog/?2005/06/09/34-blogmarksenable-your-site

Randy: I'm not certain I'll implement this on The RSS Blog. Mainly because of clutter. Judging my the referrers, most of my readers use del.icio.usSubscribed.

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:31:27 GMT
Subscribe to OPML
OPMLDave Winer gave some hints these last few days about his latest project. It looks like some sort of localhost listener for OPML, similar to the localhost RSS subscriber he built for Radio? All this will sit behind a click on a coffee mug. Also, his ego is exploding. Again :-( 
Thu, 09 Jun 2005 18:43:15 GMT
kbSearch

Today is the tenth day of existence of kbSearch and already I'm getting thousands of hits per day. I saw a few people even subscribed to the result feeds. But even better, I'm getting a lot of referrers, mostly in tag-space and much of it in French and Japanese (weird). Thanks!

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:10:00 GMT
MyScreencast.com

Find out how to create, find and share screencasts.

http://myscreencast.com

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:50:35 GMT
Y!Q for $5k

Yahoo!: Show the world an innovative use of Y!Q Beta, our contextual search technology, on one of your web sites and you could win $5,000! Y!Q [cut] is an innovation from Yahoo! Search that analyzes the content of a Web page and provides contextually relevant search results at the moment of search inspiration.

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 18:58:59 GMT
I want relevant SPAM, part deux

Further to my Feedster RSS SPAM blog entry from last month. Now, Feedster is including a credit card ad in their feed results. Feedster response last month was that "RSS users tend to be on the rather highly technically adept end of the spectrum and interested in what Sun has to say." Love to hear how credit cards are relevant to us geekoids. Feedster has gotten very frustrating. Let me suggest they abandon Feedster Media Network, start serving Google's Adsense for feeds and focus on what they are good at.

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 16:40:57 GMT
Subscribers by User-Agent

It's time again for a list of top subscribing RSS clients to my FeedBurner hosted RSS feed.

  1. Pluck
  2. Bloglines
  3. Firefox
  4. NewsGator Online
  5. NetNewsWire
  6. My Yahoo!
  7. NewsGator Outlook
  8. FeedDemon
  9. R|mail
  10. eCruiser
  11. Juice
  12. Free-downloads.net
  13. Opera
  14. Sharpreader
  15. Tristana
  16. Onfolio
  17. Awasu
  18. FeedReader
  19. Liferea
  20. Safari
  21. Sage

The surprise this week is eCruiser, a Japanese RSS reader. Using Babel Fish, I made some sense of the Website.

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 16:06:59 GMT
Google SiteMaps = Less Rich Site Summary

bob wyman: This new format is neither RSS (in any of its many flavors) nor Atom. Perhaps we should refer to it as LRSS (Less-Rich-Site-Summary)... :-) [cut] While Sitemaps seems, on the whole, to be a very positive thing, I must admit that I'm really sorry that the folk at Google didn't take the time to work with the IETF's Atom Working Group to ensure that Sitemaps were just a stripped-down version of Atom feeds -- or at least compatible with Atom feeds. For instance, a Sitemap record for a page contains just four elements: changefrequency, last-modification-date, location and priority. All of these elements, except for "priority" are defined in Atom entries today... Compatibility between SiteMaps and Atom files would have been an easy thing to have achieved. Then, the blogosphere and the traditional web could have used to the same format for publishing site metadata. The existing degree of almost gratuitous incompatibility is simply not useful.

Randy: Excellent point!

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 15:51:25 GMT
Vote your Mime Type

The ipodder-dev community is voting today on a Mime Type for their podcasting implementation of USM one-click subscription.

  1. application/podcast+rss+xml
  2. application/podcast+xml
  3. application/rss+xml
  4. application/audiofeed+xml
  5. application/mediafeed+xml
  6. application/rssenclosure+xml

My vote.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ipodder-dev/message/5058

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 15:21:20 GMT
Google sitemaps

I just started playing with Google sitemaps. I'm guessing that Webpages with RSS feeds need not create sitemap files and need only ping Google sitemap passing the RSS file. Question? Why is everybody writing blogware sitemap generators? I think I'll add Google sitemap pings to Blogomatic.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/stats

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 14:52:34 GMT
The Greatness of R|mail

Coolz0r: The latest stats, roughly one month after the release: 503 people are using R|Mail already, subscribed to 359 different feeds. This is only the beginning, and it means it works. I'm a very satisfied user myself, and have entered multiple RSS feeds to be automatically checked for me. So ONCE EVERY HOUR, i get a mail that informs me about a newly posted item somewhere in the blogosphere.

http://blog.coolz0r.com/posted/the-greatness-of-rmail.html

Randy: Thanks Miel! Much appreciated. By the way, Miel created the R|mail logo. He's been a great help.

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 05:08:42 GMT
RMail - weblog-berichten in je inbox

BabelFish translation: RMail - weblog-berichten your inbox

RMail With RMail you can report of web-unwieldly your inbox to get. You must only introduce Rss-feed of the Internet site and your e mailadres and afterwards get you each time a e-mail as soon as there is a new bulletin. But RMail send? e-mail n.a.v. reported, if someone will modify afterwards still all points and commas, then become therefore not crazily you of RMail-mailtjes.
Do new WebDrain-berichten by e-mail do want receive you? Go then to RMail, fodder your e mailadres in and the address of my Rss-feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/webdrain

http://www.webdrain.com/2005/06/rmail-weblog-berichten-in-je-inbox.html

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 02:03:30 GMT
FeedDemon in Hall of Fame

TechWeb Pipeline: The reason FeedDemon is the best is actually not one reason at all, but a million small reasons.

Randy: TechWeb Pipeline puts FeedDemon into their Software Hall of Fame along side Gmail (totally agree), X1, Movable Type, Mac OS X, ICQ, Dreamweaver, Ecco Pro and Eudora. The mention of Eudora clearly make this a personal hall of fame, nothing more. I mean, is there more than a handful of Eudora users left? One of those, an x-cow-orker of mine, we had no end of trouble getting our alerts to look decent in their viewer. A waste of time. Gmail or Yahoo Mail! or you are losing.

Congrats Nick!

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 15:25:46 GMT
Technorati Touchgraph

This is kinda cool. Integration of the Technorati API with the Java touchgraph viewer. It's very temperamental, but none-the-less cool. It was a winner in the Technorati dev contest.

http://hybrid.ucsc.edu/~dale/technorati/TGGraphLayout.html

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 08:32:36 GMT
Steve Jobs on Podcasting

Ryan Ozawa posted a transcript of Steven Jobs podcasting remarks.

http://www.voxmedia.org/wire/2005/06/06/jobs-podcasting-transcript/

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:13:33 GMT
+Daypop to kbSearch
I added Daypop as a first class citizen and Technorati as a second class citizen to the kbSearch Webpage.
Mon, 06 Jun 2005 20:44:45 GMT
PCMag reviews You Subscribe

You Subscribe: 4.5 red dots out of 5.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1809681,00.asp

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 17:28:25 GMT
Dropdown Chicklets
Chicklets

Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web ask me if there was a dropdown version of the chicklets generator. A little bit of code and here you are.

<div style="float:left;">
<span style="background-color: #f80;
border: 1px outset;
font-weight: bold;
color: white;
font-size: 12px;
padding: 0 0.4em;
text-decoration: none;
font-family: sans-serif;" onclick="chickletsclick();">Chicklets</span>
<script type="text/javascript">
function chickletsclick()
{
if (document.getElementById("kbchicklets").style.display == "inline")
{
document.getElementById("kbchicklets").style.display = "none"
return;
}
document.getElementById("kbchicklets").style.display = "inline";
}
</script>
<div id="kbchicklets" style="display:none;text-align:center;">
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://rssweblog.com/chicklet.aspx?rss=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRssBlog"></script>
</div>
</div>

Don't forget to substitute the feed URL in the above code with your own. Feel free to modify the code to fit your need. For example, you might consider an icon other than the orange chicklets one.

Note: Doesn't work in Firefox. Shall fix later today!

Update: Works in Firefox now.

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 15:40:34 GMT
Leveraging USM

scott: I don't like your solution of relying on service providers to do the right thing when it is not in their interest. This problem should be solved in a standard way, not on an ad hoc case by case basis. We cannot expect companies like FeedBurner to provide solutions that could lead to lost business without explicit rules in place that provide a level field for all those playing in this space. I'd suggest putting the content provider in charge such as by leveraging the Universal Subscription Mechanism (https://rssweblog.com/usm.html).

Randy: Thanks Scott! Although, I'm not certain which Scott in the blogosphere this may be.

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 15:08:50 GMT
kbSearch is del.icio.us

This morning, I added the ability to quickly add kbSearch results to del.icio.us. You can add both the search result page and the individual items of the search result.

http://www.kbcafe.com/search.aspx?e=m&q=kbsearch

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 03:12:44 GMT
Start.com

Richard MacManus: The latest version of Microsoft's Web-based RSS Aggregator, Start.com, has just been released. [cut] It enables users to subscribe to RSS feeds and it is closely integrated with search.

http://www.start.com/myw3b/

Randy: I really like the navigation of the site, but this online RSS readers lacks two things; OPML and River of News.

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 02:32:03 GMT
How Podcasting Works

Peter Rukavina: I thought it might be useful to provide a very simple step by step illustration of how to “subscribe to a podcast.â€Â

http://ruk.ca/article/2802

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 01:32:47 GMT
application/podcast+rss+xml

ipodder-dev and PSWG are deciding between application/podcast+rss+xml, application/rss+xml or other as their preferred Content-Type. I think the argument for not re-using application/rss+xml is that you can register two applications; one for podcasting and one for RSS reading.

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 23:57:49 GMT
Promote Your RSS Feed

Cory Threlfall: 8 TOP Ways To Promote Your RSS/XML Feed For MAXIMUM Exposure.

  1. Build a dedicated webpage for your RSS feed.
  2. Add links to your RSS feed webpage on your website.
  3. Add this HTML tag to your RSS feed webpage.
  4. Some idea's if you have your own newsletter.
  5. Put together a "Signature File".
  6. Submit your RSS feed to RSS Directories and SE's.
  7. Write an article, if you write articles.
  8. Set-Up a PPC(Pay-Per-Click) campaign.

webpronews.com

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 23:33:31 GMT
Liferea DoS
Yesterday, I received 60k+ hits from a Liferea RSS agent, all from the same IP address [66.245.223.31].
Sun, 05 Jun 2005 23:04:42 GMT
Atom better podcasting than RSS

Dave Johnson: Podcasting originated as a feature of RSS, but as the world moves to the new standard Atom format, podcasters will too. Atom can support podcasting through the <link> element. As is the case with RSS 2.0 based podcasts, you can only have one podcast per entry. But, with Atom you can have a different representation for each language and for each content-type.

Randy: Take any XML vocabulary. You can always find some feature unsupported. Then you create a new XML vocabulary that meets this requirement. Then you say it has better support. Unfortunately, supporting one feature that very few have suggested is a requirement, doesn't equate to better support. MHO.

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 22:46:04 GMT
Invalid MSN Search RSS
I've tried to limit myself to kbSearch for all my search needs. Sort of a eat your own shit philogosphy. After about a week of hard use, I'm very impressed that the RSS results are always valid RSS. The only exception, is when I search for Pluck on MSN. MSN returns non well-formed XML. Reported.
Sun, 05 Jun 2005 22:26:21 GMT
Emo Blog

I've been playing with Emo Blog a bit. Emo Blog is another powerful blogging platform. The templates are not that great, but you can edit the HTML and do what you want. My test blog is located here [http://www.emoblog.com/randymorin]. It does lack remote posting capability; no MetaWeblogApi and no email.

http://www.emoblog.com/

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 19:56:28 GMT
RSS Ripoffs

The big news today is about RSS ripoffs. People who republish your content, put ads around them and make money. The company leading this practice seems to be SuperFeedSystem.

I'd just like to add a few things to the conversations.

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 19:48:57 GMT
Search Results as RSS
Niall Kennedy: I often receive questions from people about how search engines gather and distribute subscribed search results such as the results provided by Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, PubSub, and MSN or Yahoo! Search. It's worth a brief explanation.
Fri, 03 Jun 2005 17:46:46 GMT
ipodder-dev picks USM

PSWG : The method is based on the USM (Universal Subscription Method) described at https://rssweblog.com/usm.html.

Randy: I should also mention that I'm a member of the PSWG.

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 16:39:27 GMT
How Atom Publishing Protocol works

Dave Johnson: Atom Publishing Protocol (a work in progress) is a new web services protocol for interacting with a blog, wiki or other type of content management system by simply sending XML over HTTP.

Randy: It's great to see examples of the Atom API. It's changed a lot since version 0.3. Thanks Dave!

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 16:25:40 GMT
MySpace

I just signed up to MySpace. They've been kicking some Friendster ass and I wanted to figure out why.

http://www.myspace.com/

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 15:07:48 GMT
Subscribers by User-Agent

It's time again for a list of top subscribing RSS clients to my FeedBurner hosted RSS feed.

  1. Pluck
  2. Bloglines
  3. Firefox
  4. NetNewsWire
  5. My Yahoo!
  6. NewsGator Online
  7. Free-downloads.net
  8. RMail
  9. NewsGator Outlook
  10. Tristana
  11. Sage
  12. FeedDemon
  13. Sharpreader
  14. Juice

This is the first week I've noticed free-downloads.net and it's moving quickly. I'll have to give it a test drive next week.

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 14:58:04 GMT
Podcasting goes Right

GOP.com: Podcasting. Not Subscribed.

RushLimbaugh.com: Ruch 24/7 Podcast Media Center.

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 02:37:40 GMT
RSS Ping

Google now supports some sort of RSS ping. Unsure exactly what it is. Investigating.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html#s8

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 22:04:36 GMT
Searching Your Blog

Scott Mitchell: The new search page - which you, too, can add to your site in a matter of minutes - is possible in large part thanks to Microsoft's new MSN Search.

http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/3142.aspx

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 19:10:16 GMT
KBCafe Tagspace

Last week, I blogged about my new tagspace. This week, I realized, I didn't like the URI construct I used. I decided to change it. Instead of...

http://www.kbcafe.com/search.aspx?q=tag

I prefer everybody use...

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arssweblog.com+tag

I'll convert my blogs to use the new format. Tag can also be an escaped phrase. I've been experimenting with this tagspace to see if it shows up in Technorati. To get it to show up in Technorati, you simply add something like this...

<a href='https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arssweblog.com+category' rel='tag'>category</a>

to a post, where category (both of 'em) are the actual tag you want to use.

Update: It works! :-) 

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 14:33:18 GMT
IEAutoDiscovery

My log reports have identified a new User-Agent. Can anybody confirm it's what we think it is? Or is this 3rd party?

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 12:22:19 GMT
Jots
Jots is yet another social bookmarking tool. I've been getting an increasing number of referrers from them. They also have RSS, which mean it'll find it's way into kbSearch later today. They also have an XML-RPC API. Very refreshing, compared to the usual del.icio.us rip-offs.
Thu, 02 Jun 2005 12:03:45 GMT
Feedster $$$

PR: Feedster, Inc., a rapidly growing Internet search engine and advertising network for blogs and RSS feeds announced today it closed a Series A round of venture financing.

Randy: Congrats guys! More awesome news.

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 17:48:19 GMT
eNewsBlog

I added eNewsBlog to the chicklet generator. Instructions found here.

Update: add rss.plech.net.

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 12:50:29 GMT
FeedMesh
Matt Hicks: Some of the leading RSS search and aggregation services have begun banding together to build a next-generation approach for distributing update notifications to the syndicated feeds that are a core part of most Weblogs and a growing number of news and portal sites. Called FeedMesh.
Wed, 01 Jun 2005 10:16:21 GMT
RSS...no...XML...no...uh...both?

Marc Hedlund: Use the term that people know -- RSS -- and don't force them to learn yet another new term -- XML -- along the way. I'd still love a better solution, though.

Randy: A lot of people have been thinking about RSS subscription this year. I suspect we're on track to solving the problem by the end of the year, or whenever IE7 is released ;-) 

I think everybody agrees that (proper) autodiscovery in IE is the solution, but there are other solutions that make subscribing easier. Here's my top 10.

  1. Autodiscovery
  2. USM
  3. What is this?
  4. RSS  Chicklets
  5. Subscribe link text
  6. Subscription Chicklets
  7. Rmail
  8. FeedBurner
  9. XML  Chicklets
  10. Feed URI Scheme

Honestly, if you are not using a majority of these techniques, then you are losing subscribers.

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