RSS

Tabbloid – Your Website Magazine

Posted by Nolan at 12:14 AM on October 2, 2009

Many people are still very simple in their use of the internet. They check email and a handful of websites on a regular basis. They are not users who follow large numbers of RSS feeds or use an RSS reader. For those people let me give you an option that I have used on occasion.

I follow maybe six or eight tech sites on a regular basis. My brother recommended Tabbloid.com. Tabbloid delivers you a daily electronic magazine composed of the RSS stories from your chosen favorite sites. You put in the website addresses you desire and Tabbloid does the rest. An easy to read PDF document, Tabbloid, is delivered to your inbox at the chosen time. For me that is in the morning. With a quick easy glance I can read through the headlines and stories from my favorite sites. Maybe you have a certain type of web content you don’t check every day, Tabbloid is like the newspaper and magazine that waits for you. No more looking way down the list of titles or sifting through the archives of sites. Just open and read.

This is not for the power RSS user, but for the basic user it may be perfect. Registration is quick and easy using the email address you want it delivered to. Everything is so easy and slick you may be astounded that its free. The site does one thing and does it well. It is website content delivered to the common man.

Tags: email, magazine, news, RSS, webazine

Posted in Information, RSS

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Using Friendfeed for Reading Feeds

Posted by KL Tech Muse at 11:11 AM on June 24, 2009

The feed reader you use is a very personal decision, I prefer Feedly which is a Firefox add on. I like its interface and how it works. However it does have one weakness and that is it can only be used on Firefox and Flock. This meant I needed to find a new solution for my Iphone. My solution is Friendfeed. This is how I did it.

The first thing I did was divide my feeds into categories, tech, social media, food etc.. I took those categories and created a Yahoo Pipe for each of them. I published all of them so you can find them at Yahoo Pipes. I then created a group for each of them in Friendfeed.

These are the steps on how I created the groups. First go to your Friendfeed account. If you don’t have one, then sign up at Friendfeed.com, even if you don’t use it for this purpose you will find Friendfeed worth joining. Once you are on your account, go to the right hand side column and under groups go down to the bottom and click on Browse/Edit Groups. On the next screen click on Create a Group. Name your group, which will also create the URL for the group automatically. At this point you can choose whether you want your group to be public or private. Then click on create feed, this will bring you to a page with a title of your group and nothing else. On that page click on edit setting. A small screen will pop up and you can add a description to your feed. Then click on Import feed, which will bring to a page to add services, go down to Custom RSS/Atom and click on it, in the blank you want to insert the URL for your Yahoo Pipe for that category. You can then decide if you want to import the feeds with a entry description as comment, or just the feed. You can also import them as texts only with no links. Once you finish your page will look something like this, you then can add a picture if you want or share the Group with other people. You can now read your feeds on any platform, where you can access Friendfeed. For images of the step you can go to my Friendfeed Folder I created on Screencast.com

by Qumana

Tags: feed reader, Feedly, Friendfeed

Posted in Information, RSS, application

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Innovation or Death in the PMP Market

Posted by Nolan at 8:49 AM on May 6, 2009

Every single day sees the launch of numerous, unremarkable, and short lived portable music and media players. Shiny black, white, red, glossy screened players with a shelf life of about 14 days. If you watch very carefully you may even see one in use by someone in the general public. Maybe.

Since Apple invented the iPod it has cornered innovation in the personal media player market. Surely Apple is not the only company with innovative ideas. What are the keys to innovation? Finding a need and filling it. Finding a problem and solving it. Finding a market that is untouched or with room to grow. Innovation is more than copying the features of a competitor and adding a slight twist. Have we reached the end of innovation in this market? What more can be added to the music, video, wifi, phone, recording, and camera gadgets?

Perhaps the next wave of innovation will come in content and delivery. iTunes could use a revamp in the search and listing functions of it’s free media. Hulu.com is gaining more and more traction, but is fighting Boxee at every step. RSS may be really simple, but few people use a RSS reader or podcatcher. The Amazon Kindle has brought a library into the home, but focuses on paid content. The problem with most of these? They are either proprietary or to complicated for the average consumer to implement. I want to watch video on my PMP but how do I get it, do I have to resize it, compress it, etc. This is a nice shiny gadget but what now? That is why you seldom see one of the dozens of new PMP’s on the street.

Innovation is there for the taking. Competition is fracturing and flooding the market instead of uniting it. The physical PMP gadget market is reaching a point of critical mass. Wikipedia defines critical mass as a “socio-dynamic term to describe the existence of sufficient momentum in a social system such that the momentum becomes self-sustaining and fuels further growth” Who will be the people to cause this tipping point? What will be the next idea to pull the market through to another few years of exponential growth? You may have the answer. Let’s hear it.

Tags: ipod, Media Player, PMP, walkman

Posted in Apple, Information, RSS, ipod

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Google Blogsearch Relaunches?

Posted by geeknews at 3:30 AM on October 2, 2008

I have used Google Blogsearch for a long time. It has been mainly for entertainment. But today they re-launched the site and it could end up giving Techmeme.com a run for its money.

Except for one thing NO RSS for main category feeds, what the heck was Google thinking. Someone did this on purpose no one leave a RSS feed out especially when the service has RSS before.

Posted in RSS

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Don’t Use FeedBurner and you will not have these Issues

Posted by geeknews at 2:27 PM on September 26, 2008

Bloogers and podcasters are finding that FeedBurner is taking it’s sweet time updating people’s feeds after they post and ping the service. This is nothing new this is a issue that has been around since the beginning.

So when Marshall Kirkpatrick starts making noise that he is getting beat on release of stories because his feed is not updating, my reply is tough. You all knew the risk in allowing a third party service to control your RSS when your blogging application is capable of making one all on its own..

So just sit back and wait till FeedBurner gets around to indexing your feed and don’t be surprised if it takes awhile.

Marshall does give some tips to help speeding up the process that FeedBurner uses to update your feed. Because I control and serve up my own RSS feed it’s available here the second I hit publish .

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It’s no wonder I don’t Trust Feedburner Numbers

Posted by geeknews at 1:11 PM on August 4, 2008

This site does not use Feedburner nor it never will because I knew a long time ago that I can measure my own readership statistics a lot better than any third party will ever be able to.

I never understood why people would use a service in which they don’t need. My blog application creates perfectly good RSS feeds, to ask a third party to copy that data and then redisplay under their branding never made any sense.

But now it turns out that spoofing ones subscriber numbers with Feedburner turns out to be pretty easy.. [Hack your FeedBurner Numbers Today]

Posted in Information, RSS

1 Comment

Have RSS Feed Standards Changed?

Posted by geeknews at 12:07 PM on October 19, 2007

I have used FeedValidator.org to validate my feed for several years and noticed a couple of days ago that 2 new errors were showing up. I am not sure what prompted the change. For years my feed has been ok.

But now I am seeing this error “Missing atom:link with rel=”self”” and I have no idea what it means and or how to fix it. Another error that cropped up was one that now requires and actual name to be in the contact email section.

My feed used to have this <managingEditor>geek@GeekNewsCentral.com</managingEditor> but now has to have this <managingEditor>geek@GeekNewsCentral.com (Todd Cochrane)</managingEditor> to be error free.

I wonder if Dave Winer would like to weigh in on these new changes? Is this just those that are now the proclaimed specification managers playing around with the spec?

Posted in RSS

5 Comments

How do we ignore things better?

Posted by todd at 8:00 AM on October 15, 2007

Cory Doctorow has an interesting point about the growing difficulty we all have dealing with the sheer amount of information we have access to. With notices from Facebook friends, Digg hot sites, delicious feeds, twitter and RSS subscriptions, email, etc, the amount of information at our fingertips is huge and growing.

We develop our own heuristics to determine at a quick glance whether a particular piece of information is likely to be relevant enough to warrant closer examination. This helps to manage the load but does not ensure that we are getting all we could from our information. Cory puts it well, stating that our determination of relevance is probabilistic rather that deterministic. By definition this means relevant information will fall through the cracks and some dross will still get in.

The easy way to deal with this is to go with the group-think, and this is unfortunately where some of the more popular sites can be as bad for us as they can be good. As sites get big enough to generate revenue and build value and staff, the trap of necessity is set. These sites need more and more to ensure the continuation of their revenue flow above innovation. There is nothing evil in this and it is no different from any other company. It remains though that there is a tenancy for information sources to become more conservative in their scope as they grow.

The nature of Blogging and other new media provides the antidote to this though. Unlike traditional media, the barriers to entry are virtually non-existent. I started my blog with a $10 domain name and a $20 hosting plan, and I could have used an online blog for free, the only other cost is my time. This ease of entry forces the larger sites to avoid the conservative trap otherwise others will quickly rise to fill the gaps left behind.

I have been using a new RSS reader recently (BlogBridge) which has been helping me deal with the information flow. It has moderated subject guides that include more than the well known sites which helps me to find new content sources. It then has a personal rating system that allows me to flag when I see a good article in a feed and build a partially automatic heuristic, there is also automatic features to this I am yet to fully explore. There is still much greater scope to improve the sorting of our information sources though.

Posted in RSS

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Microsoft unofficially replies on RSS

Posted by todd at 8:24 PM on December 24, 2006

Sean Lyndersay a member of the Microsoft RSS team has responded on the Microsoft Team RSS blog on the Microsoft RSS fiasco, and after reading the post I can tell he was painfully careful in his words.

According to Sean they are essentially claiming innovation in a number of areas, and while I do not see innovation in their application as their in my opinion is plenty of prior art this sadly this will be up to the patent office to determine.

What I would like to see though as others in the space have been calling for, is official assurance from a officer of the corporation that they are using the patent as a defensive filing only. [Microsoft Team RSS Blog]

Tags: Microsoft, patent, RSS

Posted in Microsoft, RSS, patent

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The Microsoft RSS Patent Issue!

Posted by todd at 4:31 PM on December 23, 2006

As I have been watching the Microsoft Syndication (RSS) Patent dispute over the past couple of days the single word that comes to my mind is “Arrogance” and lets look at the definition of the word Arrogance.

Arrogance – Overbearing Pride evidenced by a superior manner toward inferiors

Microsoft’s actions are such that they have made it very evident that they do not respect those that should rightfully be labeled as inventors of RSS and they outrightly slap those that developed RSS in the face.

The overall debate in the community has been quite negative with a few voices asking for reasoning. In my opinion big corporations are always looking to use their muscle and lay claim to something they have no right to lay claim to. When Microsoft came to Gnomedex in 2005 and announced how they were going to have RSS/XML integrated into there forthcoming applications I think we were all pretty much pleased.

But the current situation with this patent application has a lot of people pissed off and highly concerned. There are a lot of prior art issues and I think Microsoft will have an up hill battle on its hands to get this approved, but they have a army of patent lawyers, and I am sure that the patent office treats Microsoft patent applications a lot more seriously than the average persons application.

I am hoping that Microsoft will make an official statement on the issue but I am not holding my breath. If the succeed in getting this patent approved it will be a great tragedy and I am sure the source of some serious litigation.

[Scripting.com] [Scripting.com] [Nick Bradbury] [Nial Kennedy] [Open] [WatchMoJo.com]

Tags: Crime, Microsoft, patent, RSS, xml

Posted in Crime, Microsoft, RSS, patent

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Does RSS Auto Discovery work on your Website?

Posted by todd at 2:38 AM on November 2, 2006

For some reason last Saturday when a buddy of mine said to me hey you know that IE7 has RSS Auto Discovery correct? Well it made me think, had I added the code necessary for Auto Discovery before? I immediately loaded one of my templates, and saw I had the auto discovery code already installed. Which was a good thing!

Now that IE7 has RSS Auto Discovery, a lot of new people are going to be investigating the feed icon, and once they get hooked into syndicated content stand-by as your RSS subscriptions are going to increase dramatically.

If you need instructions on how to add the code it is very simple and should take you about 30 seconds to get it added to your templates. [Microsoft Publishers Guide]

Tags: Feed, ie7, Microsoft, RSS, xml

Posted in Microsoft, RSS, ie7

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Some claim 2007 Will Be A Big Year For RSS?

Posted by todd at 3:12 AM on October 11, 2006

The author of the Read /Write Weblog says that 2007 will be a big year for RSS. Personally I am not as optimistic, but I have been wrong before. His reckoning is that because IE7 will have RSS integrated the masses not using RSS to get content will essentially see the light and join the party.

Sites that are going to benefit the most of course are major media outlets, web sites like mine which attract a niche crowd probably will not see such a significant impact. The main problem of course will be educating people on the power of syndication. When you have a large number of companies and bloggers using services like feedburner that makes your RSS feed look pretty in a browser some will get confused and bookmark the RSS page.

I see a lot of people doing that already! When someone clicks on my RSS link they get a page that when it loads they know is meant for a machine to read and not a human. I would love to see the statistics at Feedburner on the number of RSS page views they get a day that are from ordinary browsers.

So will 2007 be a big year for RSS? Will our RSS subscriptions climb by 90%? Your guess is as good as mine we will see if the prediction holds true. I would really love to be wrong on this one. [www.readwriteweb.com]

Tags: ie7, internet, Microsoft, RSS

Posted in Microsoft, RSS, ie7, internet

1 Comment

GNC-2006-08-18 #197

Posted by geeknews at 4:10 AM on August 18, 2006

This show is packed end to end with a lot of content with a special appearance of Chris the two year old who brings the house down. We have a new spokes person for GoDaddy in his segment!

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