RSS, OPML and the XML platform.
 
The RSS Blog
Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:09:03 GMT
Oops! from Feedster

Most Feedster queries are now returning the following.

Oops!
Our Chief Scientist is bringing you something new in January!
In an effort to provide the best services possible, Feedster is currently involved in upgrading the programming for this feature. As a result this feature is temporarily unavailable.
If you would like to be alerted when this feature is resumed, please leave your email address and we will contact you when service is once again available.
Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:54:36 GMT
2006 Web 2.0 Predictions

Requested by up to one million people, maybe more, here's Randy Charles Morin's 10 Web 2.0 predictions for the year 2006.

  1. Let's start with some easy ones. Somebody will buy YouTube for $millions. I love YouTube.
  2. Somebody will release a new version of RSS or a competing syndication format.
  3. Yahoo will release RSS integration in Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft will release RSS integration in Outlook. Although both will be incomparable to Attensa and NewsGator, they will dominate the new adoption of RSS and will become the top two RSS clients sometime in 2007. Microsoft will trail Yahoo! in 2006, but surpass them in 2007.
  4. The number of blogs in the United States will exceed the number of citizens.
  5. Some Web 2.0 companies that failed to get purchased and didn't have a revenue model will begin laying off employees. The majority of the fall out will likely not occur till 2007.
  6. The number of AdSense-based (or YPN or Chitika) Web 2.0 start-ups will accelerate, while free, no ad Web 2.0 start-ups will stagnate and might drop off.
  7. MSN, Google and Yahoo! will continue to compete for the API marketplace. A new API will be released by one the big three in every month of the year.
  8. Advertising on the Web will continue to accelerate, but the massive number of new publishers and new ad servers will create a lot of chaos in the marketplace. More than one ad server will fail to make their payments to publishers and several, most, if not all ad servers will be sued by advertisers for click-fraud. Yahoo and Google will prevail through the storm, maybe Microsoft too!
  9. Dave Winer will get pissed at somebody for doing something. And he'll blog about how much of a jerk he is for several months. I'm guessing it has to do with videocasting.
  10. And here's the cake. RSS-based appliances will make there debut. Recipes on fridges, microwaves, ovens and through the roof from there.
Sat, 31 Dec 2005 20:12:17 GMT
Y2K+38

Any geek old enough to code his own application may remember 6 years ago today was the day we all hoped and prayed that our applications would make it thru Y2K. In preparing for Y2K+38, Bob Amam has done some testing of the Atom format and the handling of far-off dates in the RSS readers. NetNewsWire won! I might wait 3 decades before I file a bug report :-)

http://sporkmonger.com/articles/2005/12/28/y2038-feed

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:58:52 GMT
IceRocket Tag Search

Of late, I've been enjoying IceRocket Tag Search. It's fast and current. But not enough people are getting their blog entries indexed. Like Technorati, IceRocket uses the RSS <category> and tag spaces for tag indexing. Here's some instructions, which I plagiarized from IceRocket (fluff removed). Hope Mark doesn't mind.

How do I start tagging for Blogs.IceRocket.com?
  • If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom (like TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress, Radio, Blogware), just use the included category system and make sure you are publishing autodiscovered RSS/Atom and we will automatically include topics with your posts! Your categories will be read as topics. For example:
    <category> [topic_name]</category> <dc:subject>[topic_name]</dc:subject>
  • If your blog software does not support categories or you are not sure, you can still start tagging. To associate a post with an IceRocket Topic all you have to do is "tag" your post by including a link with a defined topic relationship. For example:
    <a href="http://blogs.icerocket.com/tag/ [topic_name]" rel="tag">[topic_name]</a>
    Once you have posted the tagged post with some topic, there are two ways to have your post included on an IceRocket Topic page:
  • If your blog software is configured to ping IceRocket, you are finished!
  • If your blog software does not support automatic pinging, or you have not set it up yet, or you are not sure, you can ping us manually. You might also want to configure your blog software to ping us automatically so you don't have to do that every time.
  • Fri, 30 Dec 2005 22:20:01 GMT
    River of News Aggregator

    Dave Winer has added a River of News aggregator to his OPML editor.

    http://support.opml.org/2005/12/29#a423

    Fri, 30 Dec 2005 00:19:25 GMT
    Attensa API Coming

    Craig Barnes: I dropped Robert a private e-mail to inform him that we will soon release details of our API (with a simple subset that is compatible with NG's).

    http://craigslemonade.typepad.com/weblog/2005/12/microsoft_buy_n.html

    Randy: Wow! And Subscribe.

    Wed, 28 Dec 2005 20:53:27 GMT
    Google Personalized Homepage RMail module

    Simone Carletti has created an RMail module for Google's homepage that allows you to put an RMail subscription form directly on your Google homepage. Thanks Simone!

    http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/2005/12/google_homepage_rmail.php

    cross-posted

    Tue, 27 Dec 2005 05:37:34 GMT
    <You can have my titles when you learn to behave>

    Phil Ringnalda: From now until the ambiguous time when “I’m satisfied” all my titles will include at least one less-than character, whether they need it or not. Right now, I’m doing possibly the very easiest thing, type="html" in a CDATA section, but if push comes to shove I can always switch to something more difficult.

    Randy: Phil has decided to make his blog a challenge to read for any Atom reader. A marketing faux-pas? I think not. He'll likely get more attention than lost readers and he's moving the bar up for news readers.

    Tue, 27 Dec 2005 04:04:51 GMT
    Google Reader API

    Niall Kennedy has documented the undocumented Google Reader API. 

    http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/12/google_reader_a.html

    Mon, 26 Dec 2005 18:57:03 GMT
    A Thousand Startups Crying

    Nik Cubrilovic: The sound of a thousand start-ups crying as Microsoft announce that the next version of Outlook will have an RSS reader integrated into it. 

    Randy: I think we all remember Web 1.0 and Netscape and how quickly Microsoft caught up and crushed Netscape. Lather, rinse, repeat. If you Web 2.0 start-ups business model is to bought, then you better do it quickly, cause Bubble 2.0 is gonna turn into HTTP Chasm 2.0, my prediction for 2-0-6, if not 2-0-7. Microsoft will do to NewsGator what they did to Netscape. Google will do the same to Technorati. Here's some advice for the Web 2.0's working off of VC money; get a sustainable business model or hook yourself a big fish.

    Mon, 26 Dec 2005 17:42:23 GMT
    A SSAPI Christmas Wish

    Mark Wooman has one big wish for Christmas; a Syndication Synchronization API. His wish has already come true; NewsGator API, Blogslines API and Yahoo! Feed API.

    http://inkblots.markwoodman.com/2005/12/25/ssapi-christmas-wish/

    Fri, 23 Dec 2005 19:29:30 GMT
    Performancing for Firefox

    About: Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox.

    http://performancing.com/firefox

    Randy: I haven't given this the test drive yet. I've been meaning to upgrade my Firefox first, but I've been lazy.

    Update: Wow! Firefox 1.5 (non-Beta) is awesome! Best yet (doesn't hang as much). Tried posting from Performancing to Blogger and got an error "There was a possible error contacting the ATOM server: Error #3: [object Object]". It worked with Wordpress.

    Fri, 23 Dec 2005 19:07:11 GMT
    Sometimes I Cry!

     
    Last week, the Microsoft Team RSS announced they were adopting the same feed icon as Mozilla. Now, someone has launched a Website to harmonize the RSS community around this new chicklet, button, icon, whatever you want to call. MHO, graphical icons don't communicate their message. Make certain you alt that image with "Subscribe to my blog" or something like that. I'm gonna stay with Subscribe for now. It communicates.

    http://feedicons.com/

    Fri, 23 Dec 2005 17:31:49 GMT
    Google on Well-Formed XML

    Mihai Parparita: Here are the top XML errors that we have encountered when parsing all of the feeds that our users have added to Reader.

    % of errors Error description
    15.6% Input claims to be UTF-8 but contains invalid characters.
    14.9% Opening and ending tags mismatch
    13.9% An undefined entity is used (e.g.   in an XML document without importing the HTML set)
    7.8% Documented expected to begin with a start tag, but no < was found
    5.7% Disallowed control characters present
    5.5% Extra content at the end of the document
    4.2% Unterminated entity reference (missing semi-colon)
    4.2% Unquoted attribute value
    3.8% Premature end of data in tag (truncated feed)
    3.3% Naked ampersand (should be represented as &)
    2.1% XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document
    1.8% Namespace prefix is used but not defined
    0.75% Comment not terminated
    0.64% Attribute without value

    http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2005/12/xml-errors-in-feeds.html

    Randy: Some interesting data would be the percentage chance that a feed has ill-formed XML based on the generator (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, MT, etc). Anybody got that data?

    Fri, 23 Dec 2005 04:34:33 GMT
    YRSS!
    The Atom community doesn't like the Yahoo! RSS interface in Yahoo! Mail. It's invalid. No interop. Wait! It's an internal interface, not an external interface. If Yahoo! wants to change the semantics of RSS for an internal project, then why should we care? Why should Yahoo! care what the community says about their internal interface. Now, if Yahoo! was trying to interface with external applications, then funky RSS wouldn't be a best practice, but since it's just internal, then if it works, it works. Intertop is not a priority.
    Thu, 22 Dec 2005 21:39:01 GMT
    KBCafe Blog Award Voting

    Voting for the KBCafe blog awards is open. Remember, you can only vote once, so choose all your selections before clicking the Submit Vote button. You may vote for two blogs in the same category, if you have a hard time deciding. Voting is open till new years eve 6PM PST. Thanks and good luck!

    KBCafe Blog Awards
    1. Best Google Blog

    Inside Google - http://google.blognewschannel.com/
    The Unofficial Google Weblog - http://google.weblogsinc.com/
    Google Blogoscoped - http://blog.outer-court.com/
    John Battelle's Searchblog- http://battellemedia.com/
    Google Blog - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
    2. Best Yahoo! Blog

    The Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog - http://yahoo.weblogsinc.com/
    Yahoo! Search blog - http://www.ysearchblog.com/
    Jeremy Zawodny's blog - http://jeremy.zawodny.com
    3. Best Microsoft Blog

    Inside Microsoft - http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/
    The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog - http://microsoft.weblogsinc.com/
    The Unauthorized Microsoft Weblog - http://www.microsoftweblog.com/
    Mini-Microsoft - http://minimsft.blogspot.com/
    Microsoft Watch - http://www.microsoft-watch.com/
    Channel 9 - http://channel9.msdn.com/
    Microsoft Monitor Weblog - http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/
    4. Best Apple Blog

    Apple Watch - http://apple.blognewschannel.com/
    The Unofficial Apple Weblogs - http://www.tuaw.com/
    Corante: Apple - http://www.corante.com/apple/
    the Apple Blog - http://theappleblog.com/
    Apple Inside - http://www.appleinsider.com/
    the Mac Observer - http://www.macobserver.com/
    5. Best Toronto Blog

    Toronto Transit - http://transit.toronto.on.ca/
    Spacing Wire - http://spacing.ca/wire/
    BlogTO - http://www.blogto.com/
    Torontoist - http://www.torontoist.com/
    6. Best Silicon Valley Blog

    Metroblogging Seattle - http://seattle.metblogs.com/
    Metroblogging San Francisco - http://sf.metblogs.com/
    sfist - http://www.sfist.com/
    7. Best Web 2.0 Blog

    Social Software Weblog - http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/
    Techcrunch - http://techcrunch.com/
    Mashable - http://mashable.com/
    Scripting News - http://www.scripting.com/
    Read/WriteWeb - http://www.readwriteweb.com/
    microformats - http://www.microformats.org/
    Kekova - http://Kekova.ca/
    pc4media - http://worcester.typepad.com/pc4media/
    8. Best Webvertising Blog

    Pro Blogger - http://www.problogger.net/
    AdMoolah - http://www.admoolah.com/blog/
    Google Adsense - http://adsense.blogspot.com/
    Inside Adwords - http://adwords.blogspot.com/
    JenSense - http://www.jensense.com/
    9. Best Syndication Blog

    The RSS Weblog - http://rss.weblogsinc.com/
    RSS Applied - http://blog.rssapplied.com/
    Scripting News - http://www.scripting.com
    RSS Specifications - http://www.rss-specifications.com/blog.htm
    10. Best Internet Communication Blog

    The VoIP Weblog - http://voip.weblogsinc.com/
    The Jeff Pulver Blog - http://pulverblog.pulver.com/
    Om Malik's Blog - http://gigaom.com/
    Skype Journal - http://www.skypejournal.com/
    11. Best SEO Blog

    The Search Engine Marketing Weblog - http://sem.weblogsinc.com/
    Matt Cutts - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
    Online Marketing Blog - http://www.toprankblog.com/
    Search Engine Roundtable - http://www.seroundtable.com/
    12. Best L.A.M.P. Blog

    37 Signals - http://www.37signals.com/svn/
    Loud Thinking - http://www.loudthinking.com/
    OnLamp - http://onlamp.com/
    13. Best Wireless Blog

    The Wireless Weblog - http://wireless.weblogsinc.com/
    Russell Beattie - http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/
    Pocket PC Thoughts - http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/
    Mobile Mag - http://www.mobilemag.com/
    14. Best Music Blog

    Zoilus - http://www.zoilus.com/
    Curry.com - http://www.curry.com/
    Indie Kids - http://www.indiekids.org/
    IndiePodder.org - http://www.ipodder.org/
    15. Best Malware Blog

    Fight Splog - http://www.fightsplog.com/news/
    F-Secure - http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/
    worm blog - http://www.wormblog.com/
    Viruslist.com - http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog
    16. Best Gadgets Blog

    Engadget - http://www.engadget.com/
    Gizmodo - http://www.gizmodo.com/
    I4U - http://www.i4u.com/
    17. Best Photo Blog

    photojunkie - http://www.photojunkie.ca/
    PhotoJenic - http://www.photojenic.ca/
    daily dose of imagery - http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/
    Digital Photography Blog - http://www.livingroom.org.au/photolog/
    Digital Photography Review - http://www.dpreview.com/
    Podia ser assim... - http://www.podiaser.blogspot.com
    FlickrBlog - http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/
    Japan Photo Blog - http://www.japanwindow.com/
    18. Best Video Blog

    Josh Leo's Vlog - http://joshleo.blogspot.com/
    Rocketboom - http://www.rocketboom.com/
    Steve Garfields Video Blog - http://stevegarfield.blogs.com/videoblog/
    amber mac - http://ambermac.typepad.com/
    Crooks and Liars - http://crooksandliars.com/
    19. Best Movies Blog

    Cinematical - http://www.cinematical.com/
    The Movie Blog - http://www.themovieblog.com/
    HD for Indies - http://www.hdforindies.com/
    20. Best Hollywood Insider Blog

    John August - http://johnaugust.com/
    Julie Goes to Hollywood - http://juliegoestohollywood.blogspot.com/
    Hollywood Fun Camp - http://hollywoodfuncamp.blogspot.com/
    21. Best Video Games Blog

    Xbox 360 Fanboy - http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/
    Gamerscore Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/xbox/
    Kotaku - http://www.kotaku.com/
    The Frugal Gamer - http://www.gametab.com/frugalgamer/
    22. Best Baseball Blog

    Baseball Musings - http://www.baseballmusings.com/
    MetsBlog.com - http://www.metsblog.com/
    Baseball Prospectus - http://www.baseballprospectus.com/
    23. Best Hockey Blog

    HockeyDirt - http://www.hockeydirt.com/
    Stats Blog - http://blog.stats.com/nhl_blog/
    The Battle of Alberta - http://www.battleofalberta.blogspot.com/
    Hockey Rants - http://www.jesgolbez.blogspot.com/
    24. Best Scifi Blog

    RJS News - http://rjsnews.ca/
    Craphound - http://www.craphound.com/
    SF Signal - http://www.sfsignal.com/
    25. Best War Blog

    Kevin Sites - http://hotzone.yahoo.com/
    Defense Tech - http://www.defensetech.org/
    Blackfive - http://www.blackfive.net/main/
    26. Best Vehicle Blog

    Autoblog - http://www.autoblog.com/
    Le Blog Auto - http://www.leblogauto.com/
    Leroy Blog - http://yomamali.com/miniblog/blogger.html
    GM's Fastlane Blog - http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/
    Jalopnik - http://www.jalopnik.com/
    27. Best Right-Wing Blog

    The Swanky Conservative - http://www.swankyconservative.com/
    GOP Blog - http://www.gop.com/blog/
    Power Line - http://powerlineblog.com/
    The Hoffman's Hearsay - http://politics.blognewschannel.com/
    Michelle Malkin - http://michellemalkin.com/
    Right Wing News - http://www.rightwingnews.com/
    Ace of Spades HQ - http://ace.mu.nu/
    28. Best Left-Wing Blog

    The Democratic Party - http://www.democrats.org/blog.html
    Daily KOS - http://www.dailykos.com/
    The Blogging of the President - http://www.bopnews.com/
    AmericaBlog - http://americablog.blogspot.com/
    Instapundit - http://instapundit.com/
    29. Best Law Blog

    Sentencing Law and Policy - http://sentencing.typepad.com/
    Groklaw - http://www.groklaw.net/
    Law Dork - http://chrisgeidner.com/blog/
    Michael Geist - http://www.michaelgeist.ca/
    30. Best Library Blog

    zydeco fish - http://zydecofish.blogspot.com/
    Library Stuff - http://www.librarystuff.net/
    Resource Shelf - http://www.resourceshelf.com/
    31. Best Venture Capital Blog

    Venture Blog - http://www.ventureblog.com/
    Venture Chronicles - http://sapventures.typepad.com/main/
    A VC - http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/
    The Post Money Value - http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/
    32. Best Marketing Blog

    Marketing Thoughts - http://blog.coolz0r.com
    Micro Persuasion - http://www.micropersuasion.com/
    Buzz Marketing with Blogs - http://www.buzzmarketingwithblogs.com/
    Gatorade Blog - http://www.firstinthirst.typepad.com
    Seth's Blog - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
    AdLand - http://ad-rag.com/
    My Name is Kate - http://www.mynameiskate.ca/
    33. Best Disease Blog

    The Cancer Blog - http://www.thecancerblog.com/
    Diabetes Mine - http://www.diabetesmine.com
    Dealing with Dad's Cancer - http://dad.vidman.ca
    34. Best Food Blog

    Kitchen Contraptions - http://www.kitchencontraptions.com/
    chocolate - http://www.livejournal.com/users/oftheeye/
    Slashfood - http://www.slashfood.com/
    Thu, 22 Dec 2005 19:31:47 GMT
    2-0-6 Prediction

    Here's my first prediction for 2-0-6. There'll be a new Web 2.0 startup called Ookles.com, run by the x-founder of a Web 2.0 failure. WhoIs? WebProNews has more or not.

    http://www.ookles.com/

    Thu, 22 Dec 2005 01:06:54 GMT
    Kinja is Back

    kinja: After significant upgrades to... welll... everything, kinja is back online.

    http://blog.kinja.com/archives/2005/12/kinja_upgrade.html

    Wed, 21 Dec 2005 23:05:58 GMT
    Bloglines not Polling FeedBurner

    Bloglines appears to be back up and running, but there are multiple reports that they have not polled many (maybe any) FeedBurner feeds since the move. Could be related to the recent Bloglines move of data centers or the FeedBurner performance issues.

    http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?p=10050

    Update: It appears that Bloglines was not reporting subscribers to FeedBurner, but was polling the feeds and the problem should be fixed.

    Update II: The problem still does not appear to be fixed. With My Yahoo! and Bloglines no longer reporting subscribers, subscriber counts around the blogosphere are low.

    Update III: Dick Costolo has the final word. Bloglines changed it's User-Agent.

    Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:28:33 GMT
    My Yahoo! Feed API

    Niall has discovered and partially documented the My Yahoo! feed API. It provides hooks for feed normalization, synchronizing for read items, adding and deleting of subscriptions. Yahoo! has become the API company that Microsoft wanted to be.

    http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/12/my_yahoo_feed_a.html

    Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:07:20 GMT
    Yahoo! Travel Trip Plan APIs

    Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner now has an API. The possibilities are endless.

    http://developer.yahoo.net/travel/index.html

    Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:02:29 GMT
    Yahoo! offers Wordpress Hosting

    Yahoo! has added Wordpress hosting along side their Movable Type hosting.

    http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/problogs.php

    Wed, 21 Dec 2005 03:11:53 GMT
    Attensa Online

    You can request an invite to the Attensa Online beta here.

    http://online.attensa.com/

    And that's me stinking badges they are making fun of on their blog :-)

    http://attensa.typepad.com/attensa/2005/12/we_dont_need_no_2.html

    Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:47:43 GMT
    A Word From Feedster's Co-Founder

    François Schiettecatte: There was quite a bit of conversation in the blogosphere last week about the departure of Feedster's founder. To clarify, I am the co-founder of Feedster and our Chief Scientist. [cut] I developed Feedster's core functionality and I am very involved in the evolution of the Feedster search engine and related products.

    http://corp.feedster.com/blog/archives/2005/12/a_word_from_fee.html

    Randy: I don't really have much to say.

    Tue, 20 Dec 2005 06:08:02 GMT
    Atom <title> Fixed!
    Both Dare Obansanjo and Nick Bradbury have checked in fixes to the Atom <title> issue. Could it be? Is the syndication community moving in a common direction? Time will tell.
    Tue, 20 Dec 2005 02:12:54 GMT
    Podcasting Enhancements

    Apple has added a ping mechanims to the iTunes podcasting support and revised the podcasting spec (unsure what changed).

    http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/techspecs.html

    Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:40:50 GMT
    Where's the Bloglines Plumber?

    Was the Bloglines plumber a casualty of the Ask Jeeves acquisition? Was he laid off? Was he lax on the job?

    The weekly weakly count of Web 2.0 offline casualties is high; del.icio.us, Google Reader, Typepad, Bloglines. How many 9s does Web 2.0 have? Zero or one?

    Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:16:50 GMT
    Oops! I'm Beta

    greader 

    Two months ago, I abandonned development of my private RSS reader, Juice because I found Google Reader amazing. That was a mistake.

    Mon, 19 Dec 2005 17:51:57 GMT
    NewsGator v. Attensa = Attention.xml wins!

    David Berlind compares NewsGator and Attensa head-to-head.

    http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2279

    Mon, 19 Dec 2005 17:45:50 GMT
    Atom Title

    I hope everybody remembers why Atom exists? Some people didn't like the way RSS was specified and decided they wanted a tighter spec. One of their biggest beefs was escaping of the <title> element in RSS. Atom promised to solve this problem. Phil Ringnalda didn't an intial study of the Atom early adopters. I'll leave the reader to decide on Atom's success or failure.

    Sam Ruby weighs in.

    Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:59:22 GMT
    FeedFlare in Sage

    Screenshot of FeedBurner's recently announced FeedFlare in Sage/Firefox. A second image shows you the FeedFlare configuration Webpage.


    click image to enlarge
     

    Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:07:49 GMT
    del.icio.us 410 Gone

    del.icio.us: Due to the power outage earlier in the week, we appear a number of continued hiccups. We've taken everything offline to properly rebuild and restore everything. I apologize and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience.

    Randy: More on the del.icio.us blog, here and here. Every Web 2.0 company at one time uses the power outage excuse. What happened to the power redundancy in the data centers? Or is this an excuse for a larger problem?

    Mon, 19 Dec 2005 04:31:11 GMT
    Blog Export/Import

    Dave Winer: We should begin a discussion, in earnest, about getting user’s data in a format that makes it easy to move between blogging software, and storing that data somewhere that’s not likely to go offline when there’s an outage.

    Randy: All my data is easily exported via OPML and RSS. The starting point is an OPML archive file. Each outline in the OPML is an monthly archive of my blog posts in RSS. Exporting my data takes a few minutes. I used this format to export my original Radio blog. I also used it to export Alec Saunders' old Radio blog and he was easily able to import it into Wordpress.

    Sun, 18 Dec 2005 15:34:04 GMT
    Web 2.0 Doesn't Exist

    Russell Shaw: Web 2.0 does not exist.

    http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=805

    Randy: Flickr, del.icio.us, My Space, About.com, AOL, FeedBurner, YouTube, Odeo. If Web 2.0 doesn't exist, then that's OK. So long as this second round of investment in the Web continues.

    Sat, 17 Dec 2005 21:15:40 GMT
    Libjingle

    About: Libjingle is a set of components provided by Google to interoperate with Google Talk's peer-to-peer and voice calling capabilities.

    http://code.google.com/apis/talk/index.html

    Sat, 17 Dec 2005 15:33:11 GMT
    Standalone RSS Ads Perform

    Pheedo: A standalone RSS ad (the entire post is the advertisement) generates, on average, a 7.99% click-through rate - over nine times more clicks than an inline RSS ad (an advertisement within a publisher's post).

    http://www.pheedo.info/archives/000283.html

    cross-posted

    Sat, 17 Dec 2005 03:53:47 GMT
    It’s still orange

    Microsoft Team RSS Blog: I’m excited to announce that we’re adopting the icon used in Firefox. John and Chris were very enthusiastic about allowing us (and anyone in the community) to use their icon. [cut] We’ll be using the icon in the IE7 command bar whenever a page has a feed associated with it, and we’ll also use it in other places in the browser whenever we need a visual to represent RSS and feeds. Look for more details on the look and feel of IE7 when we post the public pre-release build next year.

    http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2005/12/14/503778.aspx

    Fri, 16 Dec 2005 22:47:10 GMT
    Typepad Outage Hits 13 Hours

    Susannah Gardner: The popular hosted blogging service Typepad has been largely unavailable for 13 hours now.

    Michael Sippey: During routine maintenance of our network and storage systems last night, we experienced an issue with our primary disk system where data from published blogs are stored. [cut] We will be posting updates to status.sixapart.com throughout the day

    http://status.sixapart.com/

    Update from Niall Kennedy: Popular blog host TypePad just came back online after being down most of the past day.

    Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:14:56 GMT
    Structured Blogging Will Flop

    Paul Kedrosky: Darn it all, techno utopians are so cute. Nevertheless, structured blogging — the over-ballyhooed idea that people will post to their blogs using different forms depending on what they’re posting — is going to be a flop. It’s the usual three reasons I trot out repeatedly to technologists with utopian visions who want to change the world on the back of altered user behavior:

    1. People are lazy
    2. People are lazy
    3. People are lazy

    http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/002215.html

    Randy: Paul nails it! The problem? Embedding meta-data always fails. Remember Dublin Core in HTML? Never happened, except with extreme geeks. Meta tags? Didn't go very far. Most bloggers simply won't take the time. Now, don't fret. The data will still be there. You just have to be very creative in extracting it. Tags help, but most of all, links to imdb.com are almost always a review of a movie. It's all about link structure.

    Fri, 16 Dec 2005 18:37:35 GMT
    Scott Feedster Johnson Moving on

    Feedster Corporate Blog: Scott Johnson, co-founder of Feedster, is moving on to pursue other opportunities.

    http://corp.feedster.com/blog/archives/2005/12/good_luck_scott.html

    Randy: WTF? Scott Johnson was Feedster. I always considered Feedster and Scott synonymous. Scott's looking for contract work. Resume. Any Web 2.0 company with the money would be nuts not to hire this guy.

    Fri, 16 Dec 2005 17:54:05 GMT
    KBCafe Blog Awards Nominations

    We're accepting nominations for the 1st ever KBCafe blog awards.

    KBCafe Blog Awards Nominations
    1. Google company blog (specify homepage URL)

    2. Yahoo! company blog (specify homepage URL)

    3. Microsoft company blog (specify homepage URL)

    4. Apple company blog (specify homepage URL)

    5. Anonymous or former employee blog (specify homepage URL)

    6. Toronto blog (specify homepage URL)

    7. New York blog (specify homepage URL)

    8. Silicon Valley blog (specify homepage URL) San Francisco, Seattle

    9. Japan blog (specify homepage URL)

    10. China blog (specify homepage URL)

    11. MiddleEast blog (specify homepage URL)

    12. Web 2.0 blog (specify homepage URL) podcasting, blogging, mashups, startups

    13. Webvertising blog (specify homepage URL) AdSense, Chitika

    14. Web design blog (specify homepage URL) CSS, HTML, Javascript

    15. Syndication blog (specify homepage URL) RSS, Atom, OPML

    16. Web services blog (specify homepage URL) SOAP, REST

    17. Internet Communications blog (specify homepage URL) VOIP, IM, SMS

    18. SEO blog (specify homepage URL)

    19. .NET blog (specify homepage URL) C#

    20. LAMP blog (specify homepage URL) Ruby, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux

    21. Java blog (specify homepage URL)

    22. Wireless blog (specify homepage URL) WAP, RIM, Treo, wireless computing, Wifi, bluetooth

    23. Music blog (specify homepage URL) P2P, file sharing, music sharing, iPod

    24. Malware blog (specify homepage URL) spam, virus, phishing

    25. Gadgets blog (specify homepage URL)

    26. Photos blog (specify homepage URL) ditial cameras, photoblogging, flickr

    27. Video blog (specify homepage URL) camcorder, videoblogging, youtube, tivo, pvr

    28. Movies blog (specify homepage URL)

    29. Hollywood Insider blog (specify homepage URL) rumour or authoritative

    30. Video Games blog (specify homepage URL) xbox, PSP

    31. Gaming blog (specify homepage URL) gambling, poker

    32. Baseball blog (specify homepage URL)

    33. Basketball blog (specify homepage URL)

    34. Football blog (specify homepage URL)

    35. Soccer blog (specify homepage URL)

    36. Hockey blog (specify homepage URL)

    37. Music Band blog (specify homepage URL) authoritative or fan

    38. Scifi blog (specify homepage URL) author or fan

    39. War blog (specify homepage URL) Iraq, terrorism, middle east

    40. Nature blog (specify homepage URL) Camping, Backpacking, RVing

    41. Vehicles blog (specify homepage URL) cars, autos

    42. Religion blog (specify homepage URL)

    43. Republican blog (specify homepage URL)

    44. Democrat blog (specify homepage URL)

    45. Fashion blog (specify homepage URL) jewelry, clothes

    46. Anti-fan blog (specify homepage URL)

    47. Law blog (specify homepage URL)

    48. Library blog (specify homepage URL)

    49. Venture Capital blog (specify homepage URL)

    50. Finance blog (specify homepage URL) trading, forex

    51. Marketing blog (specify homepage URL) advertising, pr

    52. Science blog (specify homepage URL) space

    53. Disease blog (specify homepage URL) cancer, diabetes

    54. Family blog (specify homepage URL) childcare, babies, parenting

    55. Sex blog (specify homepage URL) not porn

    56. Food blog (specify homepage URL) recipes, cooking, restaurants

    Fri, 16 Dec 2005 16:18:26 GMT
    Google Reader Empty

    I woke up this morning with a handful of items in Google Reader. Fifty seconds later, I was finished reading the blogosphere. So, either the blogosphere is dead or Google Reader is broken. Time for a new reader?

     

    Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:15:32 GMT
    Tim Berners-Lee
    TBL is blogging. Subscribed
    Thu, 15 Dec 2005 16:24:44 GMT
    Turn Your Feed into an Crappy Podcast

    I've seen this attempted on a half-dozen occasions already. Feed2Podcast uses text-2-speech to turn your blog into a really bad podcast. Click here to listen to a sample. Is that bad or what?

    http://www.feed2podcast.com/

    Wed, 14 Dec 2005 20:43:52 GMT
    RSS via AJAX with OWA and NGES

    Charlie Wood: Last week NewsGator EVP Sandy Hamilton arranged for me to have access to NewsGator Enterprise Edition (NGES) in a sandbox environment. [cut] One of the most significant aspects of the product is that it integrates with Microsoft Exchange, which buys you all sorts of cool benefits including the ability to read feeds in Outlook Web Access (OWA).

    http://www.globelogger.com/item.php?id=541

    Randy: I wanna sandbox too :-(

    Wed, 14 Dec 2005 16:23:53 GMT
    Reuters Selects FeedBurner

    PR: Reuters, the world’s largest international multimedia news source, has selected FeedBurner, the leading feed management provider, to expand its delivery of text news via RSS subscriptions and to enable advertising within the feeds.

    Randy: Congrats to the entire FeedBurner team!

    Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:01:37 GMT
    Introducing FeedFlare
    Dick Costolo: FeedFlare is a one-step service that enables publishers to configure a very slim "footer" containing customizable actions that will appear beneath each item in a feed. [cut]  

    FeedFlare is initially launching today with seven simple options, including:

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2?m=109

    Randy: A sample of the feed footer is shown directly below.

    Tue, 13 Dec 2005 07:27:57 GMT
    Alexa Web Information Service

    About: The first 10,000 requests per month are free. Thereafter, requests are charged at a rate of $.00015 each (just 15 cents per thousand requests.).

    http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/WebInfoService.html

    Randy: Alexa is offering their data for a price, a really small price. This is very monetizable. Imagine, I construct a page with 3 Alexa Web services calls. The cost is $0.45 CPM. Throw some AdSense on there and surely you can get between $1-10 CPM.

    Mon, 12 Dec 2005 18:17:08 GMT
    300k Folksonomy Editors

    W: Think of it this way: Yahoo paid for 300,000 humans who will categorize (tag) the web for them.

    http://gigaom.com/2005/12/10/first-300000-is-easy/#comment-50377

    Randy: The author is referring to the 300k del.icio.us users.

    Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:40:21 GMT
    Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers

    Reuters: Yahoo said it will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type as part of its existing small business Web-site management service. Yahoo provides customers with a unique Web address, blogging tools and business-class e-mail services with spam and virus protections for less than $12 a month.

    Randy: I was quite disappointed in Yahoo!'s current blog hosting offering and judging by the lack of blogs hosted on 360, so was everybody else. This puts them back in the game.

    Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:32:39 GMT
    IceRocket has a Blog!

    IceRocket started a blog, authored by Blake Rhodes. Subscribed

    http://blog.icerocket.com/

    Sat, 10 Dec 2005 06:00:15 GMT
    RSS Poll

    Everybody likes polls right? How about this one?

    1. Which RSS client(s) do you use?

    GreatNews Pluck Internet Explorer Bloglines Custom Demo Reader
    Rojo NewsGator Online Firefox Live Bookmarks Google Desktop
    NetNewsWire FeedDemon NewsGator Outlook SharpReader
    Pluck Web or Firefox Attensa Online Attensa Outlook My MSN
    Thunderbird Google Homepage Google Reader My Yahoo!
    2. How many RSS feeds do you read regularly?

    0-9 10-29
    30-59 60-99
    100-149 150-249
    250-499 500-999
    1000+
    3. How often do you read news in an RSS reader?

    Monthly
    Weekly
    Weekdays
    Daily
    2-3 times per day
    Hourly
    Constantly

    Update: While you are at it, The RSS Weblog has a similar survey.

    Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:02:31 GMT
    Great Tastes That Go Great Together

    Jeremy Zawodny: And so, is Yahoo interested in buying delicious and integrating it into the Yahoo offerings? :-) I'd like to change the non-committal answer I gave to this: "Yes! And as of today, del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo! family."

    Randy: The biggest winners here will be the end users. As you may already know, I've been complaining about Web 2.0 application that didn't scale and del.icio.us was one of them. Of late, del.icio.us has been very slow and hopefully with some Yahoo! magic ($$$), a new cluster of servers can bring back some responsiveness to del.icio.us. Further, del.icio.us was changing from a bookmarketing-tagging service into a search engine. Now, it can remaining a bookmarketing-tagging application.

    Fri, 09 Dec 2005 20:43:15 GMT
    Yahoo! buys del.icio.us

    Josh Schachter: We're proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family.

    http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/yahoo.html

    Randy: Wow! Here's hoping Josh got a truck full of coin.

    Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:15:38 GMT
    Record Audio with the browser-based Odeo Studio

    Odeo Blog: Today we're launching a new version of Odeo with several big changes. The most notable is that everyone can now record audio with the browser-based Odeo Studio - or via the phone.

    http://odeo.com/

    Randy: I feel a podcast coming on. This seals it, Odeo is the Blogger of Podcasting.

    Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:09:57 GMT
    Protopage

    About: Protopage is a start page, an online notebook, a bookmarks launchpad and a news reader all in one highly customized package.

    http://www.protopage.com/

    Randy: Protopage is very cool, but also very confusing. They also have a blog and an RSS feed.

    Fri, 09 Dec 2005 17:17:35 GMT
    RSStroom reader

    RSStroom readerNow I can stay on top of the latest blogosphere happenings even while dumping a load.

    click the image to enlarge

    Fri, 09 Dec 2005 03:26:08 GMT
    xml:base was a BAD addition to Atom

    Kevin Burton: I've been playing with xml:base support in Atom and can't help but feel it was a bad idea.

    http://www.feedblog.org/2005/12/xmlbase_was_a_b.html

    Randy: I've always been a big fan of absolute URLs. Although I don't agree with Kevin's reasons, I agree with his conclusion. Just give me absolute URLs and don't waste my time. Ya, everybody could write the appropriate algo, or we could avoid the relative URL problems of HTML and stick with absolutes. It's a choice. Maybe I'll just avoid xml:base support in R-mail. I have 10k users. That should mean something.

    Thu, 08 Dec 2005 20:15:30 GMT
    Gmail Web Clips

    Google is rolling out their mini RSS reader inside of Gmail.

    http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=18219

    Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:01:53 GMT
    IceRocket++

    I got two immediate responses to my article on Fighting the Scalabilty Curve. The first was a denial of service attack, which I think my host resolved within 15 minutes, either that, or the attack was temporary. The second was an email from Mark Cuban.

    What features would you like to see that aren't in place? And check out what we added to the advanced search.

    This was in response to my statement.

    IceRocket doesn't compare feature to feature with Technorati, but at least it works and does the basics I need to blog effectively.

    What's Missing?
    The biggest missing feature in IceRocket, compared to Technorati, is the blog profiles and rankings. The only reason I return to Technorati and BlogPulse is to check my rankings (I'm so vain). Mind you, as much as I'd love blog profiles and rankings from IceRocket, it wouldn't stop me from monitoring my rankings in Technorati or BlogPulse.

    IceRocket's new Advanced Search
    As Mark points out, IceRocket has added a lot of options to their advanced search. I don't clearly remember the previous advanced search feature set, but they now offer search by post title, author and awesome date filtering.

    http://www.icerocket.com/

    Thu, 08 Dec 2005 15:00:37 GMT
    FeedBurner Pushing the Envelope on Trust?

    Michael Arrington: In looking at the new feed landing page I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before. An advertisement. It’s just a single line of text - “Download a Free Trial of FeedDemon 1.5″, with a link that begins a download of FeedDemon. I don’t know if it was there before or if this is a recent addition, but I don’t like it. This page should be all about getting new subscribers to the publisher’s feed, not generating revenue for Feedburner.

    Niall Kennedy: The link was there before.

    Randy Charles Morin: Another example of a communist techie who attacks when any Web 2.0 company tries to make a living. I hate this so much. I expected better of Michael. 

    Bad is that he admitted he didn't even know if this was new or not. Worse is that he says "This page should be all about getting new subscribers to the publisher’s feed." Considering that most Web users don't have RSS clients installed, providing a link to download one would fit the description of "getting new subscribers to the publisher’s feed." How did Michael miss that? In fact, I wish FeedBurner would add a link to downloading FeedDemon's sister RSS reader for the Mac. And if FeedBurner makes a buck from that link, then thank you. It means I don't have to pay.

    There's also seven other semi-commercial links on that page. What about them? My Yahoo, NewsGator, Pluck, Rojo, Bloglines, Google and yes, me! Now, I don't pay for that link and neither do any of the six Web aggregators, but I'm pretty sure that every Web aggregator who's missing a link on that page isn't exactly happy with that answer.

    Thu, 08 Dec 2005 03:29:37 GMT
    Fighting the Scalability Curve

    Fighting the Scalability Curve
    As you add new hardware or recode the application to be faster or more scalable, the number of users increases to a point where a new round of scalability enhancements are required almost immediately after the previous round is deployed.

    As we've all noticed, almost every Web 2.0 app is getting intolerably slow and broken. The Web 2.0 developers then spend the majority of their time fighting the scalability curve and fixing bugs. New features fall thru the cracks and eventually a promising start-up is spending a lot of money fixing bugs for an application that isn't returning any revenue.

    I've been there before. I was hired to lead the development of Lemontonic only two weeks before it's launch. The Lemontonic launch was suppose to be an small Beta. Next thing I know, the advertising is kicking in next week and I'm looking at an application that is spending more time failing than it is working. The advertising campaign was big and the business wanted more features. For two weeks, we worked our asses off to stabilize the system and amazingly we were able to get this thing working. Thanks mostly to Sanjeev and Calvin.

    We were so busy trying to get the application to just work that we didn't even bother with scalability and were not able to bring more than one server online. Then the advertising kicked in. Tens of thousands of users were signing up like mad, it was free. The server was overwhelmed and not accessible. The next three months I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to convince the business to stop signing up free users or add new features. Instead, I wanted them to focus on getting the current application to work. I failed and in the end, the users disappeared, frustrated that the product didn't deliver the experience it promised. At this point, the business had no choice but to turn on paid subscriptions, because the free model was draining the bank account. This disillusioned the remaining users and we ended up with hundreds of thousands of sign-ups and revenues that wouldn't pay one employee's salary.

    Remember the frustration that the Lemontonic users felt towards the product that wasn't delivering? That's what I feel about Technorati, del.icio.us, Bloglines, Blogspot, MSN Spaces and many other Web 2.0 apps. I use them all less-and-less every day. I'm now looking at IceRocket and other Web 2.0 replacement apps that are capable dealing with more than a handful of users. IceRocket doesn't compare feature to feature with Technorati, but at least it works and does the basics I need to blog effectively. In the meanwhile, here comes a bunch more applications that promise to fall over with time. In fact, the developers of these application seem to confuse up-time and scalability. Remind me not to use their applications and get my hopes up.

    Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not looking for 7 nines either. In fact, I doubt R-mail.org is up 99% of the time. I spend $15 per month on front-end hosting and $50 per month for that back-end Internet connection (you gotta check out these pics of my Internet cable dangling thru trees and across my neighbours driveway). Most of the time that R-mail is down is because I'm not making enough money to warrant 2 nines. But I could be at 99.9% up-time by simply upgrading the service. The application itself hasn't been down because of a failure in the code in many months. Knock on wood. And if I needed a second server on the front-end or back-end, then I could add it at any time, because the application was built to scale. Even the database has been broken up into distinct application that could be deployed on separate machines or even in separate database clusters. I guess my adventures over the last 5 years have taught me something.

    Wed, 07 Dec 2005 12:38:06 GMT
    Capitalize This!

    I've always wondered why iBLOGthere4iM has zero citations in BlogPulse profiles. Well, last week, iBLOGthere4iM finally got my first citation and this sent the blog from a rank near 10k to about 6.5k. I assume there's 3k other blogs in their profiles with exactly zero citations. This gave me an opportunity to investigate. Turns out, Alec Saunders (my referrer) used the incorrect capitalization of my URL and this matches BlogPulse lower-case() everything bug. Or, so I assume. I'll forward this blog entry to BlogPulse.

    http://www.blogpulse.com/profile

    Wed, 07 Dec 2005 12:19:55 GMT
    Kweschun?

    I've got a Kweschun. What is it?

    Join us as we harness the collective wisdom of the internet to predict the future.

    They've got a blog. It must be a Web 2.0 thingy. Subscribe

    http://kweschun.com/

    Wed, 07 Dec 2005 03:05:07 GMT
    Blog*Spot is Happy Again

    Blogger: You may have noticed a bit of an unplanned outage for Blog*Spot blogs yesterday afternoon. We’re really sorry about this.

    http://buzz.blogger.com/2005/12/blogspot-is-happy-again.html

    Randy: Darn, I thought BlogSpot and all its splogs were gone forever.

    Tue, 06 Dec 2005 15:53:16 GMT
    RSS 2.0 Concat

    The blog entries of my blogs are saved in monthly archive files which are bound together by one OPML file. When trying to inject by blogs into Google Base, as an experiment, I found a limit of 10 bulk packages could be upload to Google Base. The solution, was to concatenate all the monthly archives into one big RSS file. Done and publicly available. Do not subscribe to such a link or I'll have to tear down the service. It's not bandwidth friendly, at all. I'm gonna use it to compile the RSS file (once) and submit them to Google Base. That's an acceptable use.

    https://rssweblog.com/concat.aspx?opml=https://rssweblog.com/archive.xml

    Tue, 06 Dec 2005 02:56:18 GMT
    Blog Not Found

    I didn't make anything of it earlier today when I clicked thru to a BlogSpot referrer and received the Not Found message. I guess the second time sort of caught my interest. I've tried a handful now and they are all gone. What's up! Anybody else notice this?

    http://realgeek.blogspot.com
    http://blogfresh.blogspot.com

    I've gotten a recent comment in an older blog entry indicating that posting to blogger.com is working, but blogspot.com hosting is down.

    Note: Blogger Status is not accessible either.

    http://status.blogger.com/

    Update: Blogspot is back!

    Tue, 06 Dec 2005 02:33:33 GMT
    No Not Atom, RFC 4287

    The cool geeks can now refer to Atom as RFC 4287.

    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287

    Mon, 05 Dec 2005 18:08:13 GMT
    The State of FeedLounge

    Alex King: As previously discussed in some depth, we’ve run into all sorts of trouble with scalability.

    http://feedlounge.com/blog/2005/12/05/state-of-feedlounge/

    Randy: Really? Really!

    Mon, 05 Dec 2005 14:48:59 GMT
    Interview w/ Jim Moore of RSSI

    Attensa announced this morning a new round of financing led by RSSI. This weekend, I interviewed Jim Moore of Attensa on the forth-coming announcement.

    Randy Charles Morin: Congratulations on your first investment announcement. Tell my readers more about RSSI and what it does?

    Jim Moore: RSS Investors is a venture capital fund dedicated to promoting RSS Web 2.0 businesses that are being made possible by the widespread adoption of syndication and interconnected networks of web services. 

    We are interested in companies ranging from enterprise technology platform providers, like Attensa, to consumer media and social networking companies.

    Randy Charles Morin:  What were the one or two reason why you chose to invest in Attensa? Great management? Great product? Great strategy? Current business?

    Jim Moore: All of the above.  The core team has been together for over a decade, and has delivered excellent software again and again.  I personally used Now Contact, one of their early products.  It was blindingly fast, with a great user interface, and totally reliable. 

    Attensa already has three best-in-class RSS products in the market, and a full pipeline moving from lab to customers.  We are excited to have been invited to help them create what we believe will become a central player in enterprise computing.

    Attensa is dedicated to serving enterprise customers who want a robust, secure, effective platform for RSS-based applications.  We believe this market has enormous potential.

    Randy Charles Morin:  What would you advise other startups do, who would like to be funded by RSSI?

    Jim Moore: Work within the Web 2.0/RSS community.  You cannot make a revolution alone.  Many new ideas are being born, and these are early days.  Embrace cooperation and co-evolution.  Give as well as take.  Develop friends and networks in this new world.  Someday you will look back and realize that you were a pioneer. 

    The RSS-enabled revolution is bigger than you or I can grasp.  Within the past 18 months every major newspaper in the world, with few exceptions, has adopted RSS.  Many newspapers have well over a hundred feeds.  And this is just the beginning.  Within the next 18 months more than 110 million desktops will be fully RSS-oriented, simply through the distribution of Microsoft Vista. 

    Ideas are moving just as fast as the adoption numbers, but are more difficult to quantify.  Believe it that today’s most extreme Web 2.0 ideas will seem like child’s play next year.

    Randy Charles Morin: Since RSS is an enabling technology, how do you decide if the investment qualifies for RSS funding? For instance, would an RSS publisher like a blogging network be considered an RSS investment?

    Jim Moore: We are interested in media companies, such as a blogging network—and we are interested in technology platform companies, such as Attensa.  Our use of the term RSS is intended to be inclusive.  We hope to attract and stimulate ideas.  We chose RSS as our name in order to say to the world that we believe in RSS as a revolution.  RSS is a very broad term—not just at our fund, but for more and more professionals in information and communication technology. 

    Really Simple Syndication—the syndication idea—is a fundamental architectural “pattern” for developing vast networks of interacting web services.  RSS is a way of talking about web services that can be created by anyone anywhere in the world, that can be lashed together with other services, and that in total represent a new kind of openness and democratization on the web.  RSS is one of several terms that people use to name the new revolution--others include Web 2.0, interconnected web services, and web superservices.

    Mon, 05 Dec 2005 14:39:13 GMT
    Attensa Inverview

    Attensa announced this morning a new round of financing led by RSSI. Late last week, I interviewed Attensa on the forth-coming announcement.

    Randy Charles Morin: Congratulations on the funding announcement. Tell my readers more about Attensa and your RSS reader.  

    Attensa: We’re a venture backed software company developing an end-to-end RSS Network that cuts through information overload by automatically and intelligently delivering prioritized, relevant RSS information to anyone in the world and on any device. Strategically speaking, and as our name suggests, we are technologically focused on state of the art work around attention data. We are developing an integrated collection of software tools and infrastructure services that organize, distribute process and measure RSS attention streams in an end-to-end RSS network.  

    Our first product, Attensa for Outlook is in public preview beta right now. It works inside Microsoft Outlook to bring up-to-the-minute RSS news and information from your favorite Websites and blogs right into neatly organized Outlook folders. We think, we’ve have built a useful and easy to use RSS reader that takes all of the guesswork and pain out of subscribing, organizing and reading RSS news feeds. Our beta users are telling us that Attensa for Outlook does exactly what an RSS reader should do and that is very gratifying.

    When you download Attensa for Outlook, it’s free during the beta; you get the Attensa Engine, Attensa for Outlook and Attensa toolbars for Firefox or Internet Explorer. The Attensa Engine is a desktop app that works in the background to gather, process, organize and store your RSS feeds whether Outlook is running or not. With background processing, RSS news feeds are seamlessly pulled into Outlook. There is no waiting for feeds to load every time you launch Outlook. The engine keeps track of your RSS subscription preferences and data and keeps your RSS subscriptions up to date. It takes care of downloading any subscription files and updating RSS news feed database on your PC.

    The toolbars for Firefox and Internet Explorer auto-detect RSS feeds and make it very easy to find, preview articles and add RSS news feeds and subscriptions from Websites and blogs. And, you read your subscriptions and articles using the toolbar.

    The toolbars also make it incredibly easy to tag webpages and blog posts using a pull down list. When you tag articles with Attensa your bookmark list on Del.icio.us is updated and synchronized automatically. You can also explore and access your tagged pages using the toolbar. You can also create categories to keep your subscriptions organized. You can publish to LiveJournal, Blogger and TypePad blogs as easily as sending an email. And, you can automatically load audio Podcast files into iTunes and Windows Media Player playlists.

    Randy Charles Morin: Tell me more about Attention stream data

    Attensa: There is more information available today than we can possibly process.  In our personal lives an endless stream of news, weather, entertainment and social information comes at us from everywhere. At work the unstoppable flow of information comes in the form of overflowing inboxes stuffed with messages and documents demanding varying degrees of our attention. We are sprayed to the saturation point with a fire hose of information and there is no adjustable nozzle to control the flow.

    We need a way to cut through information overload and alleviate the enormous demands on our attention by intelligently prioritizing information so the most important information surfaces to the top.

    Attensa is technologically focused on state of the art work around attention data that can help users cope with the enormous demands on their attention by using AttentionStreams to prioritize and suggest highly relevant content. At same time we protecting the user's privacy by giving them user control over how their AttentionStream data is shared.

    Our approach goes way beyond simply noticing which articles have been read and how people are rating articles to track attention. We think of an AttentionStream as a way of noticing all of the steps you take to gather and consume information. With an Attention Stream what you aren’t reading is just as important as what you are reading.

    By intelligently analyzing AttentionStreams, including the obvious and not so obvious ways people consume information, new possibilities emerge to prioritize and recommend higher value content for users while cutting down on useless and duplicate information. Our lightweight AttentionStream enables fast updating of subscriptions at the article level, frequent synchronizations across multiple RSS clients and near real-time analytics to provide prioritized more relevant articles.

    Randy Charles Morin: Why do you think RSSI chose Attensa as their first investment? Great management? Great product? Great strategy? Current business?

    Attensa: I’d encourage you to speak with RSSI to understand their strategy better and why we fit so well. Apparently they looked at over 600 business plans in a relatively short period of time. That said, we believe we are well positioned in the space due to strength on three fronts: management, technology, and strategy. The founding team has deep management experience in the software business in the CEO/CTO/CFO roles, and while a lot has changed in our industry over the past 15 years, building a sound, fast moving, competitive technology business is still a complex endeavor – and it’s something we have done before. This is my fourth venture backed software business as founder, personally, and when I survey the competitive landscape I see management teams that come from the media business, advertising, or even vertical consulting practices.

    We are rolling out best of class RSS aggregator offerings for Outlook, Online, and Mobile. Incidentally, by best of class I mean features, performance, ease of use, and synchronization performance between our clients. But as RSSI learned, this is probably the least interesting part of what we are doing at Attensa. It’s our AttentionStream technology strategy that differentiates Attensa.

    Attention data is the cornerstone of a very deep, massively scaleable infrastructure that sits underneath our clients (and planned enterprise servers) and enables the best user experience possible. Like RSSI, we believe in the pervasive use of RSS in business, and our platform strategy was consistent with their desire to build a “keiretsu” of RSS focused businesses. Our new investors and I believe we can be the hub of this Kieretsu because of the deep and flexible nature of our platform – especially in a post Outlook 12 world when “simple” RSS aggregators become commoditized. We can’t wait until Outlook 12 is commonplace.

    Randy Charles Morin: Do you have other products, other than the Attensa RSS reader for Outlook? Any new products in the pipeline?

    Attensa: Our focus is using AttentionStream technology across a growing product line that is designed to help people cut through information overload by delivering fewer more relevant RSS articles. We think our approach based on improving the user’s experience with RSS and our AttentionStream technology are significant advantages.

    Our approach to AttentionStream technology was developed in 2000 before anyone really cared about RSS. We were working on digital marketing infrastructure software to help Internet marketing agencies analyze and refine marketing campaigns in near real-time. Our approach goes way beyond simply noticing which articles have been read and how people are rating articles to track attention. We think of an AttentionStream as a way of noticing all of the steps you take to gather and consume information. With an AttentionStream what you aren’t reading is just as important as what you are reading. 

    By intelligently analyzing AttentionStreams, including the obvious and not so obvious ways people consume information, new possibilities emerge to prioritize and recommend higher value content for users while cutting down on useless and duplicate information. Our lightweight AttentionStream enables fast updating of subscriptions at the article level, frequent synchronizations across multiple RSS clients and near real-time analytics to provide prioritized more relevant articles.

    We have a three phased product strategy that integrates RSS reader/aggregator clients and client technology, associated workgroup and enterprise servers and an underlying value-add infrastructure that aggregates and triangulates attention stream metadata.

    Attensa RSS Clients
    Attensa for Outlook is the first in a line of RSS readers designed for the desktop, the Web and for Web enabled mobile phones and PDAs that we will be announcing very soon. All of our RSS reader clients will use a single RSS engine which efficiently delivers and synchronizes information across devices via one entry point to the Web. Attensa’s true-syncing capability ties desktop, web and mobile RSS reader clients together so articles read, filed and deleted are treated consistently across all of the clients.

    Attensa RSS Servers
    Attensa is pioneering the development of RSS workgroup servers to bring the power of collaborative workspace software and RSS technology to help businesses solve problems, spark innovation and improve decision-making. Scalable RSS workgroup and enterprise versions supporting collaboration and publishing will provide secure data communication inside the corporate firewall and to external partners through a secure bridge.

    Attensa RSS Network
    Infrastructure Attensa RSS network infrastructure is designed to efficiently organize, distribute and measure RSS news feed articles and their associated attention stream to deliver the most relevant information to readers.

    Randy Charles Morin: Microsoft is integrating RSS reading into the next version of Outlook and Yahoo! is integrating RSS reading into Yahoo! Mail. How do you intend to complete in that future world?

    Attensa: Simply put…Ubiquitous RSS is good. We believe that pervasive use of RSS benefits everybody and that makes our technology more valuable. Who better than Microsoft (and Google and Yahoo) to educate and make available basic RSS capabilities? Attensa is about value-add, not the inevitably commoditized RSS reader. We and our investors are betting that over the next several years Microsoft will do the heavy lifting and educate the masses of the benefits of adopting RSS.

    RSS by itself is dumb. Already users are subscribing to dozens of feeds and receiving hundreds of posts per day. And it is only going to get worse as marketers utilize RSS in lieu of traditional internet media. Further, the enterprise and enterprise application vendors are embracing RSS for every conceivable task. As RSS users (whether through Outlook 12, Yahoo, Google or the common RSS reader) we will soon all be drinking from the proverbial fire hose. The problem will dwarf email inbox overload. At Attensa think this a big opportunity worth solving.

    We think the ultimate promise of RSS is “less is more.” Our business and technology focus is improving the RSS experience through real-time attention stream analytics. Long term (i.e. once Outlook 13 or 14 finally gets it right) our attention stream infrastructure will sit quietly, behind the scenes, making the defacto standard RSS reader simply “work better.”

    In the meantime, and surveying the competitive climate for readers and pondering the en masse adoption of Outlook 12 in the enterprise (early 2008?) we think there is considerable opportunity to provide quality RSS experience for users of Outlook 2000 and later for the foreseeable future. As for Outlook 12, I think most would agree without even seeing it that there will be considerable opportunity to make it better.

    Mon, 05 Dec 2005 14:29:10 GMT
    Attensa Lands Financing led by RSS Investors

    PR: Attensa, Inc., a leading developer of RSS network infrastructure software, today announced that it completed a Series B equity funding led by RSS Investors, the first investment fund specializing in companies based on RSS technology.

    Randy: I was told about the financing last week, so that I could prepare The RSS Blog for the announcement today. I'll follow this post with two other posts where I interviewed Attensa and Jim Moore of RSSI late last week and this weekend.

    Mon, 05 Dec 2005 02:54:47 GMT
    How am I doing?

    If you are in contention or voting for blogs in the Canadian Blog awards, then you can tell how well your vote is doing using the following steps.

    1. Open a browser window an go here [http://multivote.sparklit.com/poll.spark?multiPollID=8597].
    2. Open a new second browser window an go here [http://cba.myblahg.com/].
    3. Select your preferred blogs and click Submit Vote.
    4. Compare the results of the first browser window and the second browser and you can tell how well your blog is doing. The blog you just voted for should have increased by one vote.

    One of my blogs, Game Certainty was nominated as Best Sports Blog and did well enough in the first round. Please vote for me and you can tell me how I'm doing by posting a comment. And don't forget, you can vote everyday. Thanks!

    Sat, 03 Dec 2005 20:08:33 GMT
    PodFathers, Part II

    The PodFathers are at it again. Here's a few juicy quotes while I work on the screenplay.

    Dave Winer: I was very clear that the work that Adam and I did was a partnership, and our deal was a 50-50 split. They never bought me out of that deal and I never heard from any of their lawyers asking what I wanted for it.

    http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/02.html#When:11:52:40PM

    Adam Curry: It was also clear that no one from the group (which included 2 investors) wanted to work with Dave but me. It was a very uncomfortable time for me, and at the end of the week I told Dave I wasn't interested in setting up a business anymore if we couldn't get the business people on board. He freaked out (in a restaurant) and demanded that if I got a television show out of the press at the time, that I would have to pay him his 'share' and drove away without saying goodbye. That event made me realize I had made a wise decision. Some people you just don't want to be in business with.

    http://www.curry.com/2005/12/03#a54414

    Fri, 02 Dec 2005 21:57:57 GMT
    Kevin Marks is the Podfather

    Adam Curry: Thanks to this posting I was able to find this video of Kevin Marks demoing an applescript downloading mp3 enclosures straight to his ipod.

    http://www.curry.com/2005/12/02#a54336

    Fri, 02 Dec 2005 20:19:28 GMT
    New RSS Advisory Board

    Rogers Cadenhead: I was appointed to the RSS Advisory Board in 2004 at the same time as Curry, so you might expect that I'd have a personal perspective on the glory hog. But we've never really worked together. The only contribution he made on the board, appropriately enough, was to write his member bio.

    https://workbench.cadenhead.org//news/2818

    Randy: We have three people on the RSS advisory board. Rogers claims Curry has done nothing to contribute to the board but write his bio. Steve Zellers has done what? That's two out of three doing nothing for RSS. Dave, Rogers, how about replacing them with members that actually do shit.

    Suggestions?

    Fri, 02 Dec 2005 03:29:33 GMT
    Podcast Hijacked, Held for Ransom

    eWeek: In an assault reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, Podcaster Erik Marcus recently found that his RSS feed had been inexplicably redirected.

    Randy: I have yet to see an technical explanation of how it's possible to hijack an RSS feed by redirecting it. Does anybody have a coherent explanation of what happened here?

    More on CyberLaw.

    Thu, 01 Dec 2005 22:40:17 GMT
    Remember R-mail

    Pick a random blog and odds are that blog doesn't provide a facility to subscribe to its RSS feed via email. I find that quite strange. Why would you not provide an R-mail widget on your blog? Some of the blogs I host have a significant numbers of their subscribers from R-mail and one has more than 50% of their subscribers (46 of 79) from email services. In fact, two blogs (that I don't host) have over 100 R-mail subscribers. Honestly, if you don't provide your readers with an RSS-2-email solution, then you are not really trying to maximize your subscribers. The best part is that adding an R-mail widget to your blog is trivial.

    Email:
    R-mail powered

    Simply place the following HTML code on your blog. You can see a sample floating on the right.

    <form action='http://www.r-mail.org/' method='post'><div>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        var rmail_rss = "http://feeds.feedburner.com/Rmail";
        document.write("<input type='hidden' name='rss' value='" + rmail_rss + "' />");
    </script>
    Email:<input type='text' name='mailto' value='' /></div>
    <div><input type='submit' value='Subscribe' /></div> 
    <div style='font-size:xx-small;'>
    <a href='http://www.r-mail.org/'>R-mail powered</a></div></form>

    And don't forget to replace the RSS feed URL in the first line of the <script>, third line of the HTML with your own RSS feed URL.  Also, feel free to modify the HTML, add styles, etc.

    http://www.r-mail.org/

    Thu, 01 Dec 2005 22:23:50 GMT
    RSS of All Google Blogs

    Philipp Lenssen: Danny was asking for a “unified RSS feed" for all official Google Blogs... so here goes.

    http://blog.outer-court.com/google/rss.xml

    Randy: Subscribed.

    Thu, 01 Dec 2005 16:23:10 GMT
    Corante Hubs

    About: Corante Hubs are topic-specific web “destinations” for readers who are interested in staying abreast of the latest developments in specific fields. Corante Hubs will be launched in our core content areas – marketing, law, web technologies, science, and media - and will grow from there.

    http://hubs.corante.com/

    Randy: Corante currently has three hubs; Marketing, Media and Web. Here's the OPML of the Web hub contributors. You can view the entire list of contributors in the browser with the OPML surfer. I'm subscribing to the Web editorial feed.

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