Blogging about Really Simple Syndication, RDF, FOAF, The Semantic Web and Social Software.
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ITBusiness.ca: What is a Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed and how can I use it to advantage in my business?
Randy: One of Canada's leading RSS researchers, Stephen Downes speaks to CDNian businesses. Stephen also has a Website, Stephen's Web.
Jason Calcanis: The best content out there will be either ad-supported or subscription.
Randy: IS, not WILL BE. The top ten feeds according Bloglines includes...
Here's an example feed.
Today, I discovered a new great blogging platform; JournalHome.com. You can get either a free (w/ ads) or paid account (w/out ads). Their terms specifically allow advertising for both free and paid account. Their stock templates are lacking, but extremely customizable (HTML). The only gaps are the lack of moblogging and API blogging, which really are not a big deal for most bloggers.
I would rank this as one of the best hosted blogging platforms available. Here's my list of top hosted blogging platforms.
And my JournalHome.com blog can be found here.
Nick Bradbury: So, the question is, should FeedDemon strip ads? [cut] I don't wish to deprive income from those who rely on ad revenue - that in itself would shut out voices we might wish to hear.
Randy: Nick sounds off on the ads in my RSS thread.
0xDECAFBAD: My ears have perked up with the 'last call' noises coming from that direction, so I'm getting the sense that I should start paying attention again.
You always have to remember that RSS is a network, not only a file format. A certain billionaire blogged something a few days ago that wasn't too smart. He deleted it within a few minutes. I assume by that, he doesn't want me to reblog it and I won't. But, the RSS network picked it up. It's in my reader, as well as many other RSS aggregators. It's a network. Hitting delete doesn't delete it everywhere. I Gmailed it to myself for permanent safe keeping. I didn't Gmail David Stern and never will either. I saved him a few $Ks. Hopefully, he'll donate it to my favorite charity.
Eric Lunt: Looks like My Web is Yahoo!'s answer to del.icio.us. Gather links and search results, publish your My Web links via RSS, and use the API for My Web. It's a beta and it shows ... del.icio.us is still miles ahead.
Randy: Agreed!
Yahoo: Today, we launched a 'My Web', a new personal search engine fully integrated with Yahoo! Search. [cut] We're also experimenting with Attention.XML as a way to ship around My Web data. To try it out, go to any My Web RSS feed and replace the "rss.xml" filename with "attention.xml".
Randy: Now, this sounds cool!
Update: Looks like I was wrong on the cool front.
Dick Costolo: Google is currently testing this program with just a few publishers, but as the program becomes more widely available, and your Google AdSense id is approved for use with RSS ads, FeedBurner will take care of the rest as part of our suite of services.
Randy: Very cool!
Robert McLaws: So many of you might have already noticed that we have Google AdSense in our RSS feeds. [cut] I can't talk a whole lot about this yet. I can tell you that this is a pilot program for a new AdSense product that Google is looking into.
Chris Pirillo: Oh, it's pretty much official now - Google is putting AdSense in RSS. Take a look at LonghornBlogs (run by my good friend, Robert McLaws). Specifically, their feed.
Technorati: Enter a URL to a list of sites you frequent like your blogroll, or upload the current subscriptions list from your favorite newsreader, and Technorati will help you to reorder the list, based on the time the sites were updated, and return the list in Attention.xml format.
Randy: I still don't see why we need Attention.xml.
NewsGator: NewsGator Technologies, Inc., the leading RSS software platform company, announced today that it has closed a third round of funding led by Masthead Venture Partners and with continuing support from existing investor Mobius Venture Capital. This brings the total capital raised by the company since June of 2004 to over $10 million.
Randy: Congrats Greg!
Today, my FeedBurner feedstats reported a jump in the number of subscribers to the RSS Blog. Investigatng, I now have 27 subscribers using the Pluck RSS reader, whereas, I had one or two before. I didn't get any such boosts on other blogs with a similar number of subscribers. FYI.
Update: Pluck = 30.
Update: Pluck = 34. I thought at first that this rise was caused by a change in the way pluck reports fetches from FeedBurner, but the continued rise since then suggests another cause.
I just uploaded a new version of Juice. I'm gonna install it on a few computers before I move it to the download page. But, for those willing to test a release candidate, feel free to download it. Feedback please.
Dave Winer: Audible joins Team RSS.
Randy: Let me start with THEIR RSS IS INVALID. But even worse, audible.com doesn't have audio enclosures (based on my sampling). BORRRIING! The blocked popup was uhmm, interesting.
MLBlogs: Blogging has become a way of life, and now MLBlogs are here to make it even more fun.
http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/news/blogs/index.jsp
Randy: Wow! Brilliant.
Confusability: Here is the data for the 16,121 bloglines user who have more than ten public subscriptions.
Chris Nolan: However lately I have noticed some lags when using them so I might run some experiments to try and pin-point the cause. What I mean is when i issue a ping to them, it used to be that the sites they then pinged would come and hit me right away. Now it seems that blo.gs are the [only] ones that do. Even syndic8 doesn't anymore. A few others will come around in 10 or 15 minutes, but others still never seem to grab me :-(
Randy: I converted all my code to use Ping-o-matic in the last month. Sounds like a CVS rollback is in the wind.
Tim Bray: So far I've tested basic writing-in-the-browser, bloged, Ecto, MarsEdit, and w.bloggar.
Randy: Tim test the existing blogging software products. Of course, he missed Juice, but then I'm still really in an Alpha or early Beta stage. Having written a blogging client, I think Tim missed the interop problems of XML-RPC and RSD. Of course, he's probably trying to blog to his blogs, which might be better programmed than most. His intent is clear, the Atom WG is now working on a blogging API.
IETF: The IESG has received a request from the Atom Publishing Format and Protocol WG to consider the following document: 'The Atom Syndication Format ' <draft-ietf-atompub-format-08.txt> as a Proposed Standard.
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-format-08.txt
Blogger: Today Blogger has implemented captcha (a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether or not the user is human) on new blog creation.
AP: Unfortunately, none of the five free or semi-free services satisfies me fully, and which one you choose depends on the specific features you value most.
Randy: Agreed! Try MyBlogSite.com.
Looks like there was a DoS attack on my feed from the 10th thru the 12th of April. I didn't even notice until I checked my FeedBurner logs. FeedBurner might have saved me a day of bad response times. 26k hits on the feed on the 11th of April. I wish! Don't know if it was intentional, bad software or what. Investigation begins.
Update: Attack originated from 82.133.127.5. There's a nice Website on that IP address. Which looks like the DEV site for FeedNation.com. Funny enough, I'm subscribed to their blog. In fact, I was the first subscriber, cause the FeedBurner count moved from 0 to 1 the day I subscribed. The site seems to be registered to Ivan Pope. I sent him an email.
Update II: Ivan replied and is investigating.
I really like the new Yahoo! News Beta. Let's start by doing a search for the term RSS. I can setup all kinds of alerts, via email, MSGer, RSS, My Yahoo! Just a couple thoughts...
evhead: There's a new feature in Gmail called Web Clips, which displays little headlines above your inbox or message and is fed via, um, feeds.
Randy: I don't have this yet, so I assume it's being gradually rolled out. Doesn't sound very interesting.
I was getting so much trackback SPAM that I gave up deleting them until I could figure out a better approach, which I implemented just now. When you trackback to my blogs, I do an HTTP request of the URL and double check that you are actually linking to me. Let's see if things improve.
If this actually works, then the next step is to apply that routine to all previous trackbacks and get rid of all the bad karma Google Juice in my blog comments.
Update: This worked! I encourage others to copy the algorithm.
Ross Mayfield: One of the many disturbing points a Spammer made when interviewed by Chris Pirillo was that they could even spam RSS. Chris said something to the effect of, "bullshit, there is an unsubscribe button." But when he explained that RSS provided perfect fodder for creating blogs that looked real, there was an Oh Shit moment.
Joshua Schachter: I accepted an investment from a group of thoughtful and influential investors. [cut] Union Square Ventures leads the investment group, and the other members are Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O'Reilly, and Bob Young.
Randy: Congrats Joshua!
Tim Bray: Are tags useful? Are there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you want to do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly work better than old-fashioned search? I really want to believe that tagging is big, a game-changer, but the longer I go on asking this question and not getting an answer, the more nervous I get.
Randy: I have reasons, that are obvious to my friends, to subscribe to the Flickr hummingbird tag. I'm certain that PR people at XYZ Corp would benefit tremendous by subscribing to the XYZ tag. It's an easy way of tracking stuff. Or maybe I want ideas around a word, like Juice. Could this not all be done with URIs and URNs? I doubt it, because there is an element of small world in tags that is not captured by URIs and URNs. What do I mean by that? Well, not every picture with the same tag are actually related. This allows information to flow across community boundaries. And as we know, that's where all the interesting stuff lies.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of Technorati tag URIs. I much prefer simple RSS 2.0 categories.
Dave Sifry has released three new blog entries on the state of the blogosphere.
I spent a good couple of hours working MyBlogSite. The site claims, "MyBlogSite is by far the best blog tool on the net. It's easy to use for those that need the help. But it has the most comprehensive tool set for web savvy experts." And IMHO, they are correct. In the matter of a few minutes, I was able to configure a blog, which is mostly done by dragging and dropping spaces around a Web Form, but you can also edit the HTML behind these spaces. You can add your own Adsense, remove their Adsense and post using APIs or their WYSIWYG control.
Compared to Blogger. It's a lot more responsive. Like Blogger, it's free. Both are equally very easy to use as compared to most blogging tools. Blogger doesn't support RSS or MetaWeblogApi, whereas MyBlogSite does.
Compared to Typepad. I like to consider Typepad the best achievement in technical blogging platform. Now there's a tie for the lead technical blogging platform. The tie breaker is that MyBlogSite is free, whereas Typepad is not free. You can get a free version of Typepad thru Friendster, but free friendster blogs are ad supported and although MyBlogSite is also ad supported, the ads can be easily removed.
Yet another RDF-based syndication format. Sam is missing this one.
Stefano Mazzocchi: The problem is rather simple, really: words are not unique identifiers for concepts. Everybody knows this very well: synonyms exist in every language. So, all you need to start is to create unique identifiers for your tags, but if you don't do it well enough, it doesn't scale globally.
Randy: Great thoughts on folksology. I love his URN syntaxes. What's the difference between folksology and folksonomy? :)
Steve Rubel: BlogPulse has launched RSS alerts for blog searches. Taste a sample.
Randy: Feedster's got some competition.
Notes: The feeds from BlogPulse are invalid.
Update: I did a little looking around and BlogPulse has a lot of features that simply don't work. This isn't competition for Feedster, it's more like a compliment to Scott Johnson and his development team.
Update: This service is broken. The RSS views OK in a Web browser, but responds badly when you try to actually use the RSS. For instance, I get no <items>, when I use Web Sniffer.
I have an MSN Spaces blog. I also have a Yahoo! 360 blog. I've been asked, "Which do you think I should use?" Well, I have an easy answer for you. NEITHER! Both systems were thrown together to try and compete with Google's Blogger. I once said it was a small step up from Blogger. I was wrong. Truth is, they are light years behind. I've come to realize this in this last week while working on a blogosphere personal project. Now, let me tell you what's wrong with MSN Spaces and Yahoo! 360.
Now, don't get me wrong. Blogger isn't the best either. See Typepad. But Typepad isn't free. Please correct any mistakes/misunderstandings above in my comments.
Tim Bray: XML was frozen and published in February 1998. As it came toward the end and it became obvious -- well, not obvious, but likely anyhow -- that this was going to get a lot of momentum, we were besieged by requests for extra features of one kind or another. We basically lied and told the world, we would do all that stuff in version 2. You have to shoot the engineers and ship at some point, right? I think there will never be an XML version 2. There is an XML version 1.1, but it's controversial and not widely supported.
Dave Winer: Emphatically, that XML is frozen is a good thing. If it were a moving target nothing would get done. And the same is true of RSS.
Randy: Everybody wants their spec to be frozen. Everybody wants to rewrite everybody elses spec. Who wins? Tech consulting firms like IBM, who hire out consultants to solve the problems caused by the proliferation of specs. Which, BTW, IBM is most responsible for creating. If only the Ses in SOAP and RSS stood for simple.
Blogger Buzz: You will be so what? Frustrated? Wrong! You won't care because all you need to do is start it up again and click "Recover post." Blogger now auto-saves as you type.
Blogger Buzz: You will be so what? Frustrated? Wrong! You won't care because all you need to do is start it up again and click "Recover post." Blogger now auto-saves as you type.
Blogger Buzz: You will be so what? Frustrated? Wrong! You won't care because all you need to do is start it up again and click "Recover post." Blogger now auto-saves as you type.
Blogger Buzz: You will be so what? Frustrated? Wrong! You won't care because all you need to do is start it up again and click "Recover post." Blogger now auto-saves as you type.
Blogger Buzz: You will be so what? Frustrated? Wrong! You won't care because all you need to do is start it up again and click "Recover post." Blogger now auto-saves as you type.
Blogger Buzz: You will be so what? Frustrated? Wrong! You won't care because all you need to do is start it up again and click "Recover post." Blogger now auto-saves as you type.
BBC: Search engine firm Google is to begin an experiment in "video blogging", according to co-founder Larry Page.
Blogger.com is the most flexible free blogging service in the blogsphere. Problem is that everybody uses it and it's gotten slow as hell. Searching for alternatives, I came across MyBlogSite.com. I created a blog in about one minute and was I impressed; customizable down to the HTML level (I can host Adsense) and support for BloggerApi, MetaWeblogApi, USM and much more. Recommended.
I just found out that Danny Ayer's book is nearly ready to go. Get your copy. I'm getting one.
Dare Obasanjo: As some of you may have noticed the MSN Spaces homepage changed last night. It is officially out of beta and there have been a few enhancements to the service made in the transition.
Every few months, I get the following or similar email.
I have just received a message via RSS that my headline reader has been banned [by Slashdot].
I investigated and found that this RSS reader is also subscribed to some of my feeds. It seems well behaved. Couldn't figure why it would be banned. I'm not personally subscribed to Slashdot, I find its content trivial, predictable and often immature, so I've never experienced a ban myself. That said, I think our friends at Slashdot need to get off their high horses. Also, while investigating, I found the following HTML on their homepage.
<LINK REL="alternate" TITLE="Slashdot RSS" HREF="//slashdot.org/index.rss" TYPE="application/rss+xml">
Obviously, a lame attempt at RSS auto-discovery. Hopefully somebody at Slashdot.org will read this and fix their behavioral and HTML issues.
Tim Bray: In any case, the world of RSS has been kind of wild and woolly and prone to flaming and bad behavior, and partly as a result, there are a lot of versions and none of them is specified that well. So I'm co-chairing an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) working group that is publishing a protocol under the name Atom that tries to capture all of the prior art in this stage and might provide a good basis for winding down the syndication wars. I think it's going to have an impact.">great interview with one of the founders of XML and Atom, Tim Bray. Some excerpts follow.
Tim Bray: The XML serialization of RDF is horrible; it's a botched job.
Tim Bray: In any case, the world of RSS has been kind of wild and woolly and prone to flaming and bad behavior, and partly as a result, there are a lot of versions and none of them is specified that well. So I'm co-chairing an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) working group that is publishing a protocol under the name Atom that tries to capture all of the prior art in this stage and might provide a good basis for winding down the syndication wars. I think it's going to have an impact.
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=282&page=1
Anne van Kesteren: Feed autodiscovery is in my opinion far more effective than the rel="self" thing. O well.
Randy: Agreed, but this isn't a question of either/or. We require both. Some RSS clients will use autodisco exclusively, some will use USM exclusively, some will use both.
Dave Stewart: I had to update Atomizer to add support for blogger.com's change to how they do authorization.
Randy: My old BloggerApi classes have stopped working on blogger.com :( I've inquired with bloggerDev as to why. I'll try Dave's Atomizer to fill the gap until I have another solution.
Update: I'm been posting this morning w/ Atomizer. It's excellent for blogger.com.
Bob Wyman: Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it's as simple as that - formatting blog entries around their content. To see what we're talking about, check out the sample content on the blog. On another level, it's a bit more complicated - what we want to do is create structure (in the form of XML) around each of these types of entries, to organize the data inside and to let machine readers - other programs, sites, and aggregators - better understand the content.
Randy: The PubSub team is doing some great work to promote better meta-data in your RSS. He calls it structured blogging, I call it the Realistic Semantic Web.
Dick Costolo: We are pleased to announce that we have completed a $7 million second round of financing for the company.
Randy: Congrats Eric and Dick!
Tim Bray: We're getting real, real close to sending the Atom data-format draft off for general IETF review. [cut] Via Technorati and PubSub, I subscribe to a bunch of synthetic feeds based on various keywords searches and URL linkages. They are infested with duplicates.
Randy: I don't see how Atom is gonna solve the Technorati duplicate problem. What Tim seemingly doesn't realize is that Technorati scrapes more than just the RSS feed, they also scrape the HTML. Most of the hits I get from Technorati are not present in the RSS, but rather in the HTML (blogrolls, sidebar lists, etc.) and the duplicates, from what I see, come from this HTML scraping, not the RSS.
Dave Winer: Obviously Atom is the way to go. Anything would be better than RSS!
Randy: Dave apologizes for creating the failure that RSS is.
Bob Wyman: To satisfy people's apparently insatiable hunger for statistics and to provide folk with something to digest while we continue to refine and rebuild our LinkRank system, we've started to publish some of the raw data extracted daily from the more than 9 million blogs that PubSub monitors.
Randy: Link Counts for kbcafe.com. Very cool!
Dave Winer: Today is April Fool's Day, so look out for some laughs. But in all seriousness, today is also the birthday of two of my creations, Scripting News and Frontier.
Randy: Scripting News is undoubtedly the center of the blogosphere. Is the blogosphere just one big April Fool's Day joke from Dave and the gang. That would explain a lot of the flamage. Happy 8th Dave!