This video is good introduction to RSS - should you be bored to explain the advantages of RSS to others. It only puts to much emphasis on web based RSS readers such as the Google Reader and Bloglines, and forgets to mention applications such as FeedDemon or even Opera Mini (both of which I use). Via FE.
Rick Klau of FeedBurner has an interesting piece on providing full feeds versus expecting click-throughs to the site.
His argument is that feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. I guess he´s right, readers want their focus to stay in the feed reader and not cross into the browser. On the other hand, even though publishers may try to monetize those RSS feeds by providing action items in the feed such as Feedburner´s feed flares, many publishers do not want to present all their content in feeds. So it´s not about usability, it´s about control - he who owns the content, owns it all! After all, for many publishers it´s a big step to open content accessibility through RSS already!
Telekom Austria now offers news (presse releases and investor relations) as RSS feeds (German / English).
.. and the new quarterly results.
Finally: Austrian Press Agencies (APA) OTS news feeds are now also available as RSS. Press releases by RSS. Why did it take them so long - and why is Pressetext Austria not offering them?
Online Journalism Review´s Staci Kramer reports that OJR article: RSS feeds can help built web traffic even for closed system sites as the Wall Street Journal.
This is exactly what I´m saying about getting news this way:
... it makes their lives easier. They either find a way to do it or they move on, abandoning sites that don't make the effort to provide feeds.
Increasingly savvy news consumers - like myself - demand that news sites provide an RSS feed.
MyYahoo gets on the aggregator bandwagon and adds RSS:
"My Yahoo! now supports the various flavors of RSS and Atom, allowing you to add virtually anything to your page. Choose from thousands of sites that syndicate content."
Actually, this won´t make Yahoo any more interesting for me, and won´t turn MyYahoo into another Bloglines services, but it may help bringing RSS to the masses. (via the shifted librarian)
I´ve now added del.icio.us content to my RSS feed, so there´s another reason to switch to that feed (Feedburner based) if you haven´t done already.
Marc Hedlund over at the O´Reilly Network takes a look at the new bloglines web services and it´s advantages in helping solve the RSS overload problem by acting as a feed cache.
BTW, for providing client HTTP functionality in an application (including authentication) HTTPClient (for Java and Groovy (java based scripting language)) is recommended; while for Windows wget and cURL can be used (for application in PHP or whatever).
The article also mentions further ideas for using the Bloglines API, such as a RSS-to-mobile gateway (to strip out information not necessary for mobile devices/phones or simply to reduce bandwidth requirements).
Update: Another approach for feed caching is distributed checking, sort of checking RSS over a P2P network.
Cool. Get your GMail as a RSS feed. Just add https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom to your RSS reader and provide your username & password. However, in FeedDemon (and probably other feedreaders as well) it only list From:, To:, Subject:, Date/Time and the first line of the message body, so you still have to login into GMail to read the rest.
Nick Bradbury comments on Glassdog´s post on what´s wrong with feed readers, but then however only discusses watches, filtering and other features to help locate and navigate information.
An aspect which is missing from Nick´s post is mentioned at generationneXt (quote from the Glassdog post):
Why can’t I synchronize state information to a server, so I can read feeds at home without having to re-read them the next morning at work? (Dear BlogLines users: shut up. Web apps suck.)
I also love FeedDemon, and I wouldn´t want to switch to BlogLines. But I hope there will be a solution to the synchronisation problem.
Meanwhile, of course it´s possible to copy the FeedDemon cache to a USB drive and carry that around. Or to copy it onto a FTP server and synchronize it that way. A built-in synchronization assistant would be perfect!
This is an interesting application for RSS: Check a POP3 or IMAP mailbox for new email and deliver it by an RSS feed to your RSS reader. Could be a functionality built in the RSS reader (such as here or network-centric as an ISP hosted service or part of webmail.
Gush™ is another IM & news aggregation client, which looks great - but then do I need another RSS client if I´m satisfied with FeedDemon?
Anyway it makes sense to combine instant messaging and a RSS news reader in one client - especially when the screenshots look that good!
Its obvious since publishers will need it: RSS Ads coming soon. It will allow publishers to enter more than just headlines and links and provide full content in their feeds.
Although some users are happy with clicking through to the full text article (and having a banner ad served), we feel its more convenient and quicker for users to read entire articles within an aggregator.
Note: actually adding ads markup in RSS will be easier with Atom.
Now MyYahoo can include any RSS headlines, not just those from Yahoo, making MyYahoo a truly personalized news portal. That´s really an open approach, as you can add feeds from competitors sites. On the other hand, MyYahoo increases stickyness.
Any yes there´s an OPML import. Ah, yes this is also interesting: you can ping at http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 or by fetching http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=yourblogURL
Creating a PubSub subscription is "like running a web search, except the results are returned when they happen - in the future. The results of your subscriptions will be delivered as an RSS file you can view on the web or in an RSS reader. "
It´s worth a try, though I´d see it rather integrated into the Google Newsalert service, as this is related to a search engine. In fact, even this service brings some false hits, which include the search term but aren´t really about the search topic. Monitoring events, products and companies should though be much easier with a RSS feed.
In case, you haven´t noticed yet.
RSS gets even better: Get Yahoo New Searches via RSS: e.g. RSS news search for IM (found via Jeremy Zawodny's blog).
Update: There are even more RSS pages @ Yahoo, like a page listing the top searches (XML) and the top movers (XML) -> more information on that.
Update 2: available also for Google - in English, German, French and Italian.
Bloglet is now also an RSS-to-eMail converter:
Bloglet's RSS support is a radical departure from the way subscribers sign up for Bloglet. Before, a site owner had to sign up for Bloglet before anyone could subscribe to the site. Now, subscribers can subscribe to any site with an RSS feed, even if it isn't a member of Bloglet.
RSSNewsTicker is a cool software, like a news ticker on CNN or on the computer screens of brokers. Will try it, lets see when it will start annoying me.
Mary Roach: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Very very good!
Scott Berkun: The Art of Project Management
My 2nd project management book.
Hannes Stein: Endlich Nichtdenker
Not a book for idiots, actually!
Kara Knafelc: Tokyo
Japan. Ah. What more should I say?
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