RSS, OPML and the XML platform.
 
The RSS Blog
Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:10:33 GMT
OPML Surfer Bookmarklet

Tech.Life.Blogged: I hacked up my Google Search Bookmarklet and changed the code to work with OPML Surfer. It helps stop all that messy copy and pasting. When you have an OPML page open in your browser you just click the 'Surf this OPML' link and a new window will open up containing the OPML in browsable form. Magical!

First, you need to drag this link to your browser's tool bar:

>>> Surf this OPML <<<

Now go to an OPML file like: http://hosting.opml.org/techcrunch.opml.org/techcrunch.opml and then click your new 'Surf this OPML' bookmarklet.

http://techlifeblogged.blogspot.com/2005/09/tools-for-viewing-opml-in-your-browser.html

Randy: Note, in IE, you may have to right-click on the link, select Add to Favorites and choose the Links folder.

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:46:50 GMT
It's about Finding New Links, Part V

Earlier this week, I start another test of the blogosphere search engines. You can read my notes and where/how I got the results on that blog entry.

https://rssweblog.com/?guid=20050927230013

The final score is here and now.

  1. Bloglines - 11 of 17
  2. Technorati - 7
  3. IceRocket - 6
  4. PubSub - 6
  5. Google - 4
  6. BlogPulse - 3
  7. Blogdigger - 0
  8. Feedster - 0

The winner by a long shot is Bloglines. Very slow and down at least once per day, but it's simply better at finding links. Disappointing is the results from Google. It seems, my blogs are well indexed by Google, but most others are not.

I think I'm gonna make this a weekly feature starting every Monday or Tuesday and running thru to Thursday, Friday or the weekend.

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 20:12:09 GMT
RSS Xpress

I just installed RSS Xpress. It's a free RSS reader. Classic 3-pane. A lot of functionality. Import via OPML worked great. There does appear to be a lot of bugs. Not sure what makes it different from many other 3-pane RSS readers.

http://www.rssxpress.net/en/

Bug enumeration follows.

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:33:11 GMT
Technorati Improving

Technorati Weblog: We've been making a lot of updates and tweaks to our backend, as described at the beginning of the month. Most of these changes have been around speed and performance, and I hope that you've noticed the difference.

http://www.technorati.com/weblog/2005/09/50.html

Randy: Yes, I've noticed a different. Not only is Technorati competing in my blogosphere search tests, they were one link away from the #1 ranking (Bloglines still winning).

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:25:46 GMT
OPML is a really, really crappy format

James Robertson Really crappy. I had massive headaches implementing OPML support for import/export in BottomFeeder. Why? Because there's no real specification. Like everything Dave Winer has ever been involved with, the specs are all in his head, and it's up to the rest of us to figure out wtf he actually meant. Here's the "spec" - and look at all the meaningless crap in it.

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?entry=3305486922

Randy: I gotta agree that OPML like RSS is very loosely specified. Something James fails to point out is that the spec he references is for version 1.0, but the most common used version is 1.1. Where's the spec for version 1.1? It doesn't exist. That said, like RSS, OPML is really simple. If you're having a hard time implement stuff in it, then you're working too hard.

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 02:51:49 GMT
PingShot + 2
I noticed FeedBurner has added two new ping sinks to its PingShot service; TailRank and Blogdigger. I added them across all my feeds. They've also added an Email Subscriptions panel, powered by FeedBlitz.
Thu, 29 Sep 2005 20:03:33 GMT
Favorite Blog Rank Tracker

laist KB Cafe Profiles, which is currently our favorite blog rank tracker (since it uses multiple tools), lists gfy at 32nd amongst all blogs, just behind our big sister Gothamist.

http://www.laist.com/archives/2005/09/29/a_profile_in_fug.php

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:40:56 GMT
Thanks!
If you look over in the right sidebar, the FeedBurner chicklet is reporting 2060 readers today. Wow! I'm honoured.
Thu, 29 Sep 2005 14:03:11 GMT
TechCrunch.opml

Dave Winer has added a OPML directory to his blog. The directory is edited by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Here's the same OPML viewed in the OPML surfer.

http://hosting.opml.org/techcrunch.opml.org/techcrunch.opml

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:38:58 GMT
Hmmmm....
 Subscribe 
Wed, 28 Sep 2005 19:59:49 GMT
Cyclical Pinging

Kailash Nadh: Feedburner launched a pinging service named "PingShot" recently. Its supposed to ping to a number of services, just like Pingoat does, every time you update you feed. But odd enough, they have included certain Ping services like Pingoat, that again ping the same sites Pingshot pings individually.

http://www.pingoat.com/goatlog/post/index/25/Feedburners-PingShot

Randy: PingShot, Pingoat and Pingomatic are blogosphere ping sources, which I'll define as a ping source that pings ping sinks. MHO, one ping source should never ping another ping source or accept a ping from another ping source. Of course, you could devise an algorithm to minimize the damage of redundant pings, but wouldn't it be simpler if you just followed rule #406.

Rule #406: One ping source should never ping another ping source or accept a ping from another ping source.

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 06:00:13 GMT
It's about Finding New Links, Part IV

Earlier this month and before Google launch its blog search, I documented all blog search engines capability of finding new links. When Google blog search was released, I was amazed how much better it was then the other engines. Since then, Technorati has improved, IceRocket has improved and maybe now we have a four-way challenge with Bloglines (the best last month) and Google (the newcomer). Let's start it again. For any links discovered on posts tomorrow or later, I will document and aggregate the results to see who's the best blogosphere search engine, this month.

Enumeration of competitors

  1. Bloglines [http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com]
  2. KBCafe [http://www.kbcafe.com/links.aspx?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com]
  3. PubSub [http://www.pubsub.com/site_stats.php?site=kbcafe.com]
  4. IceRocket [http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com]
  5. BlogPulse [http://www.blogpulse.com/search?boolean=link&link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com]
  6. Technorati [http://www.technorati.com/search/www.kbcafe.com]
  7. Feedster [http://feedster.com/links.php?url=www.kbcafe.com]
  8. Blogdigger [http://www.blogdigger.com/linkSearch.jsp?link=www.kbcafe.com]
  9. Google [http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=link%3Akbcafe.com&scoring=d]

Am I missing anybody? Splogs or self-referential blogs will not be included in the results.

Results:

Notes:

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 04:57:39 GMT
Technorati indexes Memeorandum Well!

I've always struggled using Technorati. It seems that my blog entries are rarely indexed and blogs that point to me are usually indexed days, if not weeks after the post. But, it seems that everytime my name appears on Memeorandum, I get those results in zero time. We've all heard the rumours that Technorati is pinged first, but is Technorati also indexing blogs based on a preference for high profile blogs? Judging by the ethusiasm of some a-listers, I'm pretty certain I know the answer.

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:19:28 GMT
The Easier Route To Generating Subscribers

Rok Hrastnik: If as a marketer you're trying to generate RSS subscribers, simply using an RSS subscribe button is the worst way to go for you and for the RSS industry as a whole as well.

Randy: Roy provides alternatives for acquiring RSS subscribers. If you follow Roy's advice, then you'll get yourself a couple extra subscribers, but why no go the whole nine years. Take a look at the right sidebar of The RSS Blog. I provide eight chicklets from the most popular blog aggregators and an easy way for users to simply subscribe via email, not to mention a (What is this?) link immediately beside my RSS chicklet. Don't cut corners, you need all this stuff to truly generate subscribers. If you end up with a user-friendly XSLTed feed like your typical Blogger.com blog, then you'll end up with less subscribers, not more.

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 18:31:49 GMT
Subscribers by User-Agent

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

  1. GreatNews
  2. Pluck IE
  3. My Yahoo!
  4. Custom Reader Demo 
  5. Bloglines
  6. NewsGator Online
  7. Rojo
  8. NetNewsWire
  9. Firefox
  10. R|mail
  11. FeedDemon
  12. Google Desktop
  13. Juice
  14. NewsGator Outlook
  15. RSS Bandit
  16. Sharpreader

The list really didn't change must at all. Seems to be moving into a stable state. I might decrease the frequency of these posts. Boring!

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:30:47 GMT
Don't like our aggregator? Take your OPML somewhere else!

Robert Scoble: Yesterday Dave Winer noted that Yahoo's RSS aggregator lets you export your list of feeds to OPML which is really great cause you can then try out other aggregators.  [cut] So, yesterday, I was interviewing Sanaz who is one of the people who works on the start.com team [cut]. I asked "why don't you do what Yahoo does?" She answered "we already do." Yeah, Start.com lets you both import and export OPML lists of your RSS feeds.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/27.html#a11268

Randy: The best part is that you can now manage your subscriptions at My Yahoo or start.com and simply export them for use with various readers. Now +My Yahoo chicklets have value.

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:18:49 GMT
One-Click Subscribe

Danny Ayers: Remember that little orange [XML] icon, which when you clicked on it took you to a page of raw XML? Thing of the past. From now on it’ll say [Subscribe], and "When you click on it you should subscribe to whatever it is you’re looking at."

http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/09/27/button-progress/

Randy: If Danny and David can agree on this, then I'm buying me some flying pigs.

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 21:36:41 GMT
Shouldn't Google Alerts include blogs?

David Berlind: Google's alerts, as it turns out, don't cover blogs. 

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1898

Randy: Why do you need Google? Simply go here, type your email text control and click the Subscribe button. All the alerts you could want.

http://www.kbcafe.com/blogs.aspx/vista

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 21:08:02 GMT
A channel changer for the Bloglines river of news

Jon Udell: For a while now, I've been wanting to amp up my ability to scan the river of news in Bloglines. So I wrote a Greasemonkey script that adds a next channel link to the per-channel linkbar.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/09/26.html#a1308

Randy: It's not really river of news, but it's a lot closer than Bloglines straight up.

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:51:46 GMT
Yahoo Doing OPML

Dave Winer: Something Yahoo is doing that is very cool, they're supporting OPML export of the user's subscription list

http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/2005/09/26

Randy: Very cool!

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 18:41:28 GMT
Where to Report Adsense Splogs?

I report any splogs with Adsense ads to Google. I do this by clicking on the Ads by Goooogle link in the offending ad unit and filling out the form. Google has responded by email with a better way of reporting Adsense splogs.

Google Adsense Team: In the future, to allow us to investigate any issues more efficiently, you can email our specialists directly at adsense-abuse@google.com.

cross-posted

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:32:38 GMT
PubSub to Measure Blog Influence by Category

ClickZ: PubSub is today expected to unleash a new site ranking tool, called LinkRanks, that measures the "strength, persistence, and vitality" of links pointing to and from a given Web site. Additionally, PubSub has begun an effort to compile lists of influential Weblogs by category, which could be of use to media buyers and planners eager to buy advertising in blogs.

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3551241

Randy: Weird, they've had LinkRanks running for over a month. Not sure what has changed? They do have an OPML top 1000 list. Which I'll add to KBCafe profiles tonight. BTW, on the weekend, I added MyFeedster's top 100.

Update: KBCafe is ranked 843.

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 14:07:43 GMT
RSS Xpress 2.0

About: RSS Xpress is a freeware (which will remain free!) created by Bull allowing to read RSS feeds versions 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 2.0.1 and atoms.

http://www.rssxpress.net/en/download.php

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 13:54:45 GMT
Attensa v.99

PR: We’ve just posted the latest version of Attensa for Outlook, version .99. Download it here. We’ve integrated an incredibly easy way to tag articles and feeds using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

http://www.attensa.com/products.php?page=outlook

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 13:13:04 GMT
Submark 1.1 Released

Submark is a chicklet generator similar to my own chicklet generator, but it's a Wordpress plug-in, not a javascript widget. This latest version includes an R|mail chicklet. Let the subscriptions flow!

http://www.ahknight.net/submark/

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 15:26:09 GMT
Ping IceRocket

If IceRocket isn't indexing your blog, then don't forget to add them to your list of ping targets. Instructions here. If you have FeedBurner, then you can enable PingShot and have it ping IceRocket automatically for you.

http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 14:52:49 GMT
Gawker OPML

Bored, chatting with Chris Batty over at Gawker media. Wanna subscribe to all the gawker media blogs? Here's the OPML I wrote. The OPML on crack.

http://www.kbcafe.com/gawker.xml

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 21:02:11 GMT
Ping Tailrank

Kevin Burton: If you're a blog pinging service I'd love to get your ping data.

host: rpc.tailrank.com
port: 4096
router: /RPC2
method: weblogUpdates.ping

Randy: I wonder what that is?

About: We're introducing the world's most powerful and personalized weblog ranking system (at least we think so). [cut] If you'd like to keep track of TailRank's progress you can always read our blog. We're also hanging out on #tailrank on irc.freenode.net if you want to chat.

http://www.tailrank.com/

Randy: Cool!

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 10:38:24 GMT
Is Google News a Blog? Memeorandum?

John Roberts asked me in my comments yesterday: Randy, what is your definition of a blog? [cut] But why is, for instance, news.google.com a blog?

Randy: My immediate reaction was "How did that get there?" Here's how. news.google.com is a blog. Yesterday, I didn't think it was. Today, I know it is. Did you know it has an RSS feed? Is it the unedited voice of a person? No, but I never liked that definition. It kinda feels like a community link blog. Autogenerated. No different than memeorandum. I notice The RSS Blog find itself on memorandum once or twice per day? Anybody know how they pick the discussion blogs? Oh, that's how. Link to me. Memeorandum is a blog and has a blog. Subscribed.

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 02:49:57 GMT
Red Cross Ad Performance

These guys are great! I just noticed FeedBurner has a new chart in their analysis tools called the Red Cross Ad Provider Ad Performance chart. It tracks impressions and clickthrus. Kind of gives you a good feeling seeing that The RSS Blog got 65 clickthrus for Red Cross donations. Do you need another reason to get burned (ala FeedBurner)?

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/feedcirculation

Notes

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:05:45 GMT
FeedBurner PingShot

Dick Costolo: If you use FeedBurner, we now provide a service that notifies aggregators, search engines, and directories about your content updates as quickly as possible. When you use the new PingShot service, we will 'ping' a collection of services that you choose whenever we detect that your feed has new content. It's that simple. Select the new PingShot service for your feed from the "Publicize" tab, and you're done.

http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001433.html

Randy: This pretty much does everything blogomatic does. I'm gonna shut it down and refer everybody to FeedBurner. BTW, you should be able to burn a feed at FeedBurner for free and not publicize the FeedBurner feed URL and take sole advance of this one feature.

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:35:03 GMT
Google's Lackluster Blog Search

BusinessWeek: The long-awaited tool is fast and sorts by relevance. But it misses results and lets in too much spam.

Randy: WTF? Technorati and Google. 13 hours since Technorati found an article linking to BusinessWeek's blog. Google has found 5 in the last 13 hours. One is a splog. Three are not extremely current. Results will change. But, my feeling is that Google is finding more results. I'm seeing more and more of these supposed tests showing that Technorati is winning. But when I run the tests myself, the opposite seems to be true. Although, not perfect, I'd put Bloglines and IceRocket ahead of Technorati, behind Google.

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:19:20 GMT
RSS Security

Two days ago, I fired off an email to Jason Calacanis about the new KBCafe profiles project I'm working on. Jason noticed that I was linking to an Engadget feed hosted on FeedBurner. Jason was righfully concerned that he no longer had control of his RSS feed.

I CCed the good folks at FeedBurner into the conversation and next thing you know we're joined by a couple more a-listers. Long story short, it would seem that somebody unrelated to Weblogsinc.com set up a feed for Engadget on FeedBurner and set the feed loose on the world. I think the feed had 5 figures of subscribers. FeedBurner has since redirected that feed back to Engadget's true feed. I sourced the feed URL from Feedster's top 500 OPML file.

I then decided that getting the correct feed URL had to be a priority for KBCafe profiles, so I rewrote the engine only to source blog homepages and to auto-discover the RSS feed. I then deleted the entire database and repopulated from scratch. As a result, I've introduced some new bugs, which John Roberts has helped uncover.

Notes:

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 02:20:03 GMT
PubSub wins Horizon Award

Bob Wyman: Computerworld has posted a special report on the winners of their first annual "Horizon Awards." PubSub.com is one of the winners and they profile us in their story: "PubSub Concepts' Prospective Search Search Tool for Tomorrow".

http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/09/pubsub_wins_com.html

Randy: Congrats to Bob and team! Deserved!

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:54:32 GMT
Yahoo! Finance MSG boards in RSS

MobileRead: YahooMsg2RSS/1.00 allows you to track Yahoo! Message Boards of stock-quoted companies through RSS.

http://www.mobileread.com/yahoomsg/

Randy: Totally cool! I hope this guy has bandwidth. I'm subscribing to everything.

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:34:50 GMT
Email Subs in FeedBurner
FeedBurner has broken out a new Reader Type category in their Readership stats called Email Subscription Services, of which, Rmail is grouped. They now have four reader types; Readers and Aggregators, Email Subscription Services, Browsers and Bots.
Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:25:59 GMT
Reuters Launches Text to Speech Initiative

Robert Scoble: Reuters has a new site: http://labs.reuters.com/. Their first project? Convert some of their text-based news to podcasts. Interesting. The voice isn't too computerized either.

http://labs.reuters.com/audio/news/

Randy: I find the voice difficult to follow.

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 19:04:30 GMT
FeedBurner burns 100k

Dick Costolo: As you can see from the front page of the FeedBurner Web site, we now manage over 100,000 feeds.

http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001422.html

Randy: Congrats!

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 17:40:44 GMT
Work in Progress

Try to keep it quiet until it's more stable. Lot's of bugs.

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

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 14:16:58 GMT
This is GreatNews

Lars Dahlin: I bougth a small USB-memory and I placed Great News on it! The big advatage is that I can carry the program with me and use it on any computer without leaving any traces.

http://www.alopex.se/wordpress/?p=62

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 14:09:44 GMT
Review: Switched to Pluck

Scott Schecter: Until recently I had been using Sage for my news reader of choice. I tried Pluck the other day and I have converted. Pluck is really a well written piece of software and will work with Internet Explorer and Firefox for both PC and Mac. However, probably my favorite feature is how it allows you to access and sync all your news from whatever PC you happen to be at.

http://blog.scottschecter.net/PermaLink,guid,03c843ab-a7d6-4dc8-8c3f-1c67f1faa64e.aspx

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:00:04 GMT
Google Blog Search Bookmarklet

Tech.Life.Blogged: I hacked up an old bookmarklet to make it use Google Blog Search. [cut] Drag this link to your toolbar --> Google for Blog Links.

Randy: Bookmarked :-) 

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:57:43 GMT
FeedBurner is Podcasting

Burning Question: Somebody told us the other day that this podcast thing was getting big, and we figured we better get out in front of it. So why not create our own podcast?

Listen.

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:58:18 GMT
The RSS Blues

Leland Rucker of NewsGator sings "The RSS Blues."

http://sandyhamilton.blogs.com/sandy_hamilton/files/02_track_02_21.mp3

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:01:57 GMT
Amber Alerts in RSS

Project Safekids has an RSS feed for Amber Alerts.

http://www.projectsafekids.org/AmberAlert.xml

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:54:26 GMT
GreatNews adds Google Blog Search

GreatNews Blog:  I added Google Blog Search to GreatNews search channel list in nightly build 331.

http://www.curiostudio.com/blog/9

Randy: This feature isn't in the Beta release yet, but you can always download the latest installer from the nightly build.

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:32:59 GMT
BottomFeeder 4.0 released

James Robertson: What's new? Here's the list I posted:

  1. Tabbed Browsing Support
  2. Cleanup of the search engine accesses. External Searches have a single dialog, as do internal searches.
  3. Addition of a "Feed Builder Wizard", enabling end users to add search engines as feed builders as they appear
  4. Reorganized the toolbar
  5. Added full support for Atom 1.0
  6. Enhanced the Blog Posting plugin
  7. Fixed some bugs in the network layer related to HTTP 1.1
  8. Added support for more search engines: IceRocket, DayPop, and Google Blog Search
  9. Various and sundry other bug fixes and enhancements

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/BottomFeeder/downloads.html

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:56:52 GMT
Declaring Gadgets for Start.com using RSS

Scott Isaacs: For defining manifests, we basically reused the RSS schema.  This format decision was driven by the fact we already have a parser in Start.com's application model for RSS, there is broad familiarity with the RSS format, and I personally did not want to invent yet another schema :-).

http://www.start.com/developer/

Randy: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The purpose is syndication. Are we syndicating gadgets here. No! Are we trying to get the gadgets to work in an RSS reader. No! What happens, if I import these RSS feeds in my RSS reader? They tell me the feeds invalid? It seems that RSS was re-used, in this case, for the purpose of re-using RSS and nothing else. I don't get it!

Update: Phil Ringnalda also has some reservations.

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 14:38:38 GMT
Pluck InSite

PR: The Pluck InSite suite of solutions offers interactive blogging and industry leading RSS capabilities as fully-managed, hosted services ready to be embedded into any web site. [cut] Key components of the Pluck InSite Suite include:

PR: The Statesman is using Pluck InSite Blogging to provide a free community blogging service on the Statesman's web properties, including www.statesman.com and www.austin360.com.

http://www.pluck.com/partners/solutions.html

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 10:55:45 GMT
Ricmac on ZDnet

Richard MacManus: Introducing Web 2.0 Explorer, my new ZDNet blog about the Wild Wild Web 2.0. Some of you may know me from my personal blog, Read/Write Web, which is also focused on the Web as Platform.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/

Randy: Subscribed.

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 15:37:05 GMT
Monster RSS Feeds

I should add them to the KBCafe job search engine. I find it weird that monster.com has RSS, but monster.ca doesn't.

http://jobsearch.monster.com/rss.asp

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 03:49:12 GMT
Mark Cuban on Google Blogsearch

Mark Cuban: Google has done a great job of putting together a blog search engine.  Its exactly what you would expect from Google. Fast and simple. But there are a lot of things it does and doesnt do, that when you add them all up, will result in increased traffic for Icerocket.com

http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000247058976/

Randy: Google's entrance into blog search means more traffic for everybody in the blogosphere, more hits for blogs and more interest in blog related Websites, like IceRocket. I'm carefully watching my traffic. Wednesday, the same day they released Google blog search, was my best traffic day in nearly two months. But Tuesday was also my best traffic day in nearly two months and within 1000 pageview of Wednesday. Thursday dropped off to a level below that of Tuesday. Overall, I don't see any significant traffic changes yet. Yet!

Update: I broke down the numbers and noticed that I was getting more hits on less popular blogs (+25%) and about the same on my more popular blogs. Of course, the popular blogs have higher overall hits counts that make the increase in the less popular blogs insignificant on the aggregate numbers.

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 03:03:33 GMT
Feedster Top 500 Blog Update

Beverly Parenti: The next edition of the Feedster Top 500 Blogs will be released at the beginning of October.

http://corp.feedster.com/blog/archives/2005/09/feedster_top_50.html

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 02:49:55 GMT
The Odeo Player Widget

Odeo: The Odeo Player is an Apple Widget that makes it easier to listen to your favorite shows. If you have an Odeo account, the Player gives you quick and easy access to the shows in your Queue.

http://odeo.com/blog/2005/09/odeo-player-widget.html

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 02:48:06 GMT
Media RSS 1.1 - Last Call

David Hall: I've incorporated most everyone's requests and suggestions. Please take a few moments and look over the document:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-media/files/

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 02:39:24 GMT
People Blog as Therapy

AOL: A new AOL blog survey shows most bloggers are not aspiring "cyber journalists" or political activists; they blog as a form of therapy.

Randy: Since I started blogging, I stopped growing new gray hairs. My older brother and my younger sister have continued to gray. I blame it on blog therapy.

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 18:41:06 GMT
Atom 1.0
Today, I stumbled across a blog that advertised its Atom 1.0 feed near the top of its sidebar, no 0.3 and the RSS 2.0 was burried down the sidebar. This sorta got me going on some Atom 1.0 projects. XSD? C#? Java?
Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:52:40 GMT
IE7 will have A9 OpenSearch

IEBlog: In conjunction with A9.com, we’ve also announced OpenSearch 1.1 in order to allow users to easily populate their search engine of choice. We’re working together with A9.com to provide backward compatible extensions to OpenSearch 1.0 to allow the OpenSearch to define search engines that output HTML as well as RSS. [cut] IE 7 implements a native XMLHTTPRequest object for Javascript applications.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/13/465338.aspx

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 19:48:29 GMT
Blog Search Index Size

Kevin Burton: It seems that Google Blogsearch only has about 8M posts. [cut] If you break it out to posts per day with an 8M document index size this is about 106k posts per day. This is 160% smaller than Technorati's current index rate. These numbers might be wrong though. I'm not sure if my 8M index size number is correct. I'm also not sure if Google is removing more duplicate posts or spam posts.

http://www.feedblog.org/2005/09/more_on_google_.html

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:38:43 GMT
Trackback Hell!

Geek News Central: After 6 hours of being back online here are the preliminary results.

This is after I have had the mt-tb.cgi file removed from the server for over 60 days!

http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/004894.html

Randy: When I get a trackback, an agent loads the referring page and checks that it actually has a link to the trackbacked blog entry. This eliminates 99.99% of that trackback SPAM. I got 380 trackback pings yesterday (mostly all, if not all trackback SPAM).

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:33:47 GMT
Subscribers by User-Agent

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

  1. GreatNews
  2. Pluck IE
  3. My Yahoo!
  4. Bloglines
  5. Custom Reader Demo 
  6. NewsGator Online
  7. Rojo
  8. NetNewsWire
  9. Firefox
  10. R|mail
  11. FeedDemon
  12. RSS Bandit
  13. Google Desktop
  14. NewsGator Outlook

I cut-off the list today at minimum 10 subscribers. I should note that I redirected people who were on my old feed, to the new feed. This seems to have helped Bloglines, NewsGator and Rojo the most. Google Desktop dropped considerably, after starting in the 6 slot its launch week. In other words, a lot of people tried Google Desktop and have since stop using it.

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:53:40 GMT
Feedfetcher: Google's Feed Grabber

Google: Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users choose to add them to their Google homepage.

http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:41:22 GMT
Update on Google Blog Search

Alec Saunders: I recreated a couple of my Pub/Sub searches yesterday on Google Blogsearch.  This morning I deleted the Pub/Sub feeds from my RSS reader. 

http://saunderslog.com/2005/09/15/google-blogsearch-first-casualty/

Randy: After one day, it seems pretty obvious to me that Google blog search is the blog search we always wanted. I find only two other blog search engines are even approaching Google; Bloglines and IceRocket. The results from Technorati, Feedster, PubSub, BlogPulse, etc. seem completely inadequate now that we finally have a blog search engine that works.

JoĂ«l CĂ©rĂ©: A dedicated blog search could prompt Google to remove blogs from its main search index, thus "improving" the quality of its search results. This speculation was based on Google removing Usenet postings from search results after acquiring Deja.com. [via Inside Google]

http://beyondpr.blogspot.com/2005/09/google-search-blogs-end-of-bloggers.html

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:53:42 GMT
BottomFeeder 4.0

James Robertson: I think BottomFeeder 4.0 is just about done.

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?entry=3304169053

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:16:45 GMT
Google in KBCafe

The natural response to Google's new blogosphere search RSS feeds was a few dozen emails asking me when I was gonna add Google results to the KBCafe.com meta search engine. The answer is found in the Google terms of service.

TOS: You may not "meta-search" Google.

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:08:36 GMT
Splogs with Adsense

Q: How do you report a splog with Adsense to Google?

Randy: When you find a splog (a SPAM blog) that has Adsense on it, then...

  1. Click on Ads by Goooooogle.
  2. Fill out the popup form (the form is not always the same).
  3. Click Submit.
  4. Pretend I just thanked you.
Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:32:49 GMT
Google wins!

I've been playing with Google blog search all morning. Here's my evaluation.

Responsiveness

Kicks ass! Technorati and the others have always struggled with response times that are not acceptable. Google blog search always responds sub-second.

Timeliness

Kicks ass! Technorati and the others often don't pick up links until the next day and Technorati sometimes a month later. Google blog search seems to pick up every link within one hour.

Coverage

Kicks ass! Technorati and the others pick up less than 70% of the links each (and sometimes much less). Google blog search seems to pick up every link (100%).

Overall

Game over! There's still tag search where Technorati is the leader, but I suspect Google will have a tag search shortly that will kick ass. If Technorati want to hang onto that pie, then I suggest Dave Sifry get to work on making a tag search that is responsive, timely and has full coverage.

http://blogsearch.google.com/

Update: A chink in the armor, Google has not report this link. Mind you, neither has anybody else. Google missed it because the RSS feed is partial content. Anybody want a new reason to publish full content feeds?

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 11:24:43 GMT
Google does blog search

David Sifry: The blogosphere is abuzz with Google's launch of their Blog Search.

http://www.technorati.com/weblog/2005/09/48.html

Randy: The giant rolled over. This is fast! It's backed up with both Atom and RSS feeds. Everybody else is dead.

Dave Winer: Speaking of Technorati, okay, Google's blog search isn't perfect, but now there's a benchmark to compare against. It sure performs well. [cut] Neither company is much-loved in the community these days, but in balance I trust Google more, which is pretty amazing, considering how small Technorati is. We knew the day would come when Technorati would have to compete with Google. They could have prepared much better for this day, imho.

Anil Dash: First, the new Blog Search works. All the basic functions you'd expect from Google search results are present, including ranking results by date or by relevance. (Interestingly, the default is by relevance, like other Google searches, instead of by date, which is the default for most blog displays.) But more importantly, the advanced search offers powerful functionality such as searching by date ranges and limiting to individual blog authors, in addition to features like searching for words in a blog post title or by language, which have been deployed in the past on other services.

Blogfresh: So some of the "zippy, side-scrolling goodness wasn't working too well for me in Firefox this morning, but that's OK. Here's another search tool for us to enjoy.  There's a pretty darn groovy feature I wanted to highlight. When your search results (for a keyword, say) display a post that has inbound links, you'll see a "references" link next to the name of the author, & you can jump straight to the cosmos for that post.  How long 'til supported tagging? Soon, I think?.....

Jason Calacanis: When Google puts blog search on the home page traffic to blogs—all blogs—will double or triple. In the case of smaller blogs it might grow 100x.

Randy: Missing in the advanced search is an inbound link search. I wanna know who's linking to me. Although it's not in the Advanced Search options link:kbcafe.com seems to work.

One thing I don't like is the browser-friendly formatting of their Atom and RSS feeds. That's ugly.

FAQ

Update: How many people have linked to me today? Same in RSS. Too cool!

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 23:42:14 GMT
NewsGator Announces API Competition

NewsGator: NewsGator Technologies, Inc., the leading RSS platform company, today announced that the company is hosting a competition, open to developers around the world, to see who can develop the most cutting edge application using the NewsGator Online API that was recently made available to the public. Contest details include:

http://www.newsgator.com/news/archive.aspx?post=66

Randy: For some reason, I think I need a new laptop.

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 20:02:42 GMT
The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems

Scott A. Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman: In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/tags/tags.pdf

Randy: In finding this article, I also found another great blog, called You're It, on tagging. Subscribed.

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:37:22 GMT
NewsFire blocks RSS ads

Niall Kennedy: I noticed something new and interesting in the NewsFire release notes today: NewsFire now blocks advertisements from Google and FeedBurner.

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:32:27 GMT
KBCafe tag search

funponsel: Since I found KBCafe/Tags tool, I usually spend my time there to find a good topic to blogged. To refresh your memory, KBCafe/Tags is a tags-based search engine which will search for del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati based on the tags you submitted.

http://www.funponsel.com/blog/archives/2005/09/13/spiderous-discover-social-bookmarks/

Randy: Gotta love positive user feedback.

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:09:24 GMT
Office 12 has cool RSS Support

Michael Gartenberg: RSS support in Office is nice. Not only does the system track RSS via subscriptions in IE 7 (and has an RSS gadget built into the new Vista Sidebar) but Office supports RSS as well. Outlook finally adds integrated RSS support (which is my preferred way to read RSS). In general, it looks like RSS aggregators are indeed a commodity.

http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg/archives/010450.html

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 17:44:47 GMT
Tips on writing content for your blog

Piaras Kelly: Here are some tips on writing content for your blog:

  1. Use catchy titles
  2. Be unique
  3. Make sure to credit your sources
  4. Think before you post
  5. Stay on topic
  6. Link, it’s polite
  7. Be conversational in tone
  8. Respond to comments
  9. When to post
  10. Be controversial
  11. Blogging is not email
  12. Assuming makes an ass out of u and me

http://pkellypr.com/blog/2005/0913/tips-on-writing-content-for-your-blog/

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 03:00:33 GMT
10k Downloads of Juice

Wow! Just checking the download stats and guess what. You got it, Juice has been downloaded more than 10 thousand times. Thanks! And you can expect a new version around the corner.

http://www.kbcafe.com/juice/download.html

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 22:15:24 GMT
Marketing Optimization 101 for Blogs

Roy Hrastnik: Here are the absolute 101 basics you really shouldn't ignore ...

  1. Don't Forget E-mail Delivery  Randy: try R|mail.
  2. E-zine Publishing is Still a Must
  3. E-mail and RSS Subscriptions
  4. Explain RSS  Randy: hint.
  5. Top Content
  6. The Headline
  7. Lead Your Visitors to Your MDA
  8. Look Different
  9. Use Your Own Domain
  10. Don't Forget Your Keywords
  11. Interact With Your Readers
  12. Blog Specific Promotional Tactics 101
  13. Don't Forget About the Content

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRssDiary?m=286

Randy: Cool, another blogging top 10 13 list. Roy's always got the best lists.

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 19:09:28 GMT
Nick Bradbury recovering

Nick Bradbury: Last week's surgery was a success.

http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2005/09/signs_of_life.html

Randy: Nick, author of the FeedDemon software, had surgery to remove a tumor. Let's all drop by his blog and wish him well.

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 14:15:23 GMT
Tell me about your blog

Tim Yang: I have a list called “Readers” in my RSS feed reader, but it’s still very thin and I’d like to boost it. So leave me a comment or write me an email. Thanks!

http://timyang.com/2005/09/tell-me-about-your-blog/

Randy: This is a great idea. If you are reading this blog regularly, then leave me a post or email once in awhile with a pointer back to your blog. Even, if it's just a "Hello, this is my blog."

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 13:46:26 GMT
Helping publishers, bloggers get the word out

Chicago Sun-Times: Nearly 70,000 publishers use FeedBurner, ranging from Chicago-based Coudal Partners, an advertising, design and interactive firm, to VNU Business Media in Europe, a global media company and parent of ACNielsen, Billboard and other major brands. [cut] FeedBurner has won the attention of venture capitalists, attracting more than $7 million in investment from Portage Venture Partners in Chicago, Mobius Venture Capital in Denver and Sutter Hill Ventures in Silicon Valley. [cut] FeedBurner, which does not disclose revenues, has 14 employees, up from five in March.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/tech/cst-fin-feed06.html

Randy: A great article on FeedBurner services and its history.

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 11:46:33 GMT
Top 10 Things You Can Do To Get Blogged

TechCrunch: I believe that if more companies approached us differently, a much higher percentage would be blogged.

  1. Build a kick ass company
  2. Approach Bloggers Directly
  3. Be Persistent
  4. Start a Blog
  5. Be humble
  6. Be confident
  7. Be descriptive
  8. Tell a Story
  9. Don’t hide information
  10. Don’t be a Jerk

http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=215

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 05:41:05 GMT
Podcasting Creation in Vista

Paul Thurrott: Here's how the product editions will break down [two excerpts follow]:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/47665/47665.html?Ad=1

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 02:30:08 GMT
What RSS is

Dave Winer: When people ask me what RSS is, I say it's automated web surfing.

http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/2005/09/11#a951

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:13:17 GMT
Orange is cool!

Robert Scoble: Orange XML icons makes a site seem more up-to-date. Sites with orange XML icons look cooler to me than sites that don't have orange XML icons.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/11.html#a11104

Randy: I'm even drinking more orange juice than I use to. I think it helps me look cool!

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 14:43:31 GMT
RSS Security

Greg Reinacker: I was on a call the other day with some folks in the industry, and someone made a comment to the effect of "we really need to come up with some kind of solution for securing RSS feeds - then we can really do some cool stuff." Before I could get on my soapbox, someone else on the call concurred with the first person.  When I mentioned that this stuff has been figured out already, and started describing the existing widely-used mechanisms, they were both a bit surprised, and suggested I write something about it. 

http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=775

Randy: From now on, when somebody asks about RSS security, I'm gonna point them here.

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 16:53:53 GMT
Testing 2 R|mails per Hour

Today, I'm testing a long requested feature of R|mail. Sending multiple R|mails in the same hour. If you posted twice or more in an hour, then R|mail would only send the most recent post. I did that to prevent 821 bombing, that is, filling up your inbox with R|mail alerts. Today, I changed the algorithm to send up to two postings per hour (Atom 0.3 and RSS 2.0 only, RSS 1.0 is still limited to once per hour). Give me some feedback. If the tests go well and the requests for more R|mails continue, then I'll increase the limit to three.

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

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 16:48:43 GMT
OPML -> RSS -> R|mail

R|mail allows you to subscribe to an OPML subscription list.

http://www.kbcafe.com/rmail/opml.aspx

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 01:00:36 GMT
Technorati first!

WSJ: David Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, says his company gets an edge from exclusive deals in which some blog-hosting companies ping Technorati before anyone else. After receiving a heads-up, Technorati visits the blog and updates its database.

Bob Wyman: If these claims are true, then the WSJ has revealed behavior most foul… [cut] This is not a good thing.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/feedmesh/message/459

Randy: The Internet routes around obstacles. Blogging clients can ping PubSub before they even post to LiveJournal. Businessmen that go around with a negative attitude will get pinged after businessmen what go around with a positive attitude. Stuff happens.

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 19:49:10 GMT
Technorati is Working
Somebody just unclogged the Technorati indexer and the results are streaming-in like mad. Congrats to Sifry and team! I hope it last.
Thu, 08 Sep 2005 18:26:37 GMT
Blogspot SPAM Gone?

I'm checking my inbound links and I came across a Blogspot blog and clicked on it. Then it hit me. Where did all the blogspot splog inbound links go? This blogspot inbound link isn't SPAM. It's not a splog. It's legit. I started looking around and all those Blogspot splogs are 404. What happened? Some investigation and I came across a lot of blogs like this one. This splog was using Adsense to monetize itself and Google has cut them off.

Three cheers for Google! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:51:58 GMT
Comment SPAM

...has making the following two sentences very common across the Web.

"You need to be registered to comment on this site."

"Comments (0)"

If I was a young entrepreneur, looking for my next big thing, then I'd be looking for solutions to this problem. I'm certain Google or Six Apart would pay for anonymous comments without the comment SPAM. For that matter, why don't Google or Six Apart do something that works and make it available to all?

cross-posted

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:21:13 GMT
HotLinks

Did you know, there's a HotLinks blog? Subscribed. HotLinks also has OPML for all their public feeds, all HotLinks sources. They also have a legacy HTML view for their HotLinks sources.

http://dev.upian.com/hotlinks/

Surfing the HotLinks OPML; public feed and sources.

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 13:20:38 GMT
FOAF 2.0

Johannes Ernst: The brilliance of RSS 2.0 does not lie in all the features it has, because it has very few. Instead, it lies in how many features are left out, so it could be a trivially simple format, while remaining extremely powerful. [cut] We need a version of FOAF, the social networking format, that is like RSS 2.0 is to RSS 1.0. [cut] We need something much simpler, so FOAF-type information can explode like RSS has.

http://netmesh.info/jernst/Big_Picture/need-simpler-foaf.html

Randy: Johannes is correct. Further, we need a completed FOAF spec, not the half-baked FOAF spec we have today.

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 16:35:40 GMT
Feedster Scores Investment

PR: Mitsui & Co., Ltd., today announced it has made an investment in Feedster.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/9/prweb281866.htm

Randy: Big congrats to Scott, Scott and team!

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 04:28:42 GMT
Wordpress.com

Niall Kennedy: WordPress.com is a new hosted version of the popular open-source software WordPress.

http://wordpress.com/

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 01:50:42 GMT
Media RSS 1.1

David Hall: I hereby humbly submit 1.1.0 for your viewing pleasure.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-media/files/

Randy: Yahoo! is preparing a new version of their media RSS specification. They are looking for feedback on the changes. At first glance, the changes don't seem all that interesting.

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 01:27:01 GMT
Antisplog.net

Island Dave: Antisplog.net is a barebone product at current (it just launched days ago), and honestly, I'm not completely clear on what it does. I've used both the blog pointer mentioned here, and gotten it to return 1s and 0s a few times, as well as the bookmarklet, and gotten fairly accurate reads on the site's I've reported.

Randy: And they have a blog. Subscribed.

cross-posted

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 21:10:36 GMT
Atom borked in Bloglines

Tim Bray: Several people have written to tell me that the ongoing Atom 1.0 feed is thoroughly borked in bloglines.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/09/06/Bloglines-Atom-Problem

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 21:06:15 GMT
Red Cross Dog Ears

Brian Alvey: This afternoon we took another step and added those Red Cross corner buttons you see on all of our sites. [cut] You can add the same buttons to your own site.

http://alvey.weblogsinc.com/2005/09/04/adding-the-red-cross/

Randy: Brian has instructions for adding some pretty cool graphics to your site that allow your users to donate to the Red Cross Katrina relief. Check out the top-right corner of many (maybe all, didn't check) Weblogsinc blogs for samples.

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 19:52:37 GMT
Feed Your Reader

FYR: Feed Your Reader allows you to use the RSS Autodiscovery in firefox to launch external aggregators, such as Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon.

http://projects.koziarski.net/fyr/

Randy: An awesome plug-in which enables one-click-subscription via RSS auto-discovery in Firefox by overriding Live Bookmarklets.

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:18:53 GMT
a Weekly Podcast on Marketing

Steve Rubel: Joseph Jaffe and I [are] ready to formally announce our new weekly podcast on marketing. It's called Across the Sound.

http://www.acrossthesound.net/

Randy: Subscribed.

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 03:04:55 GMT
It's about Finding New Links, Part III

Tim Yang via email: Could I make a request? A couple weeks ago I was reading about your study on blog search tools. What did you make of it? I'm really interested to know which is the best and for what each of them is good for.

Randy: Tim was referring to my It's about Finding New Links study. Beyond the final numbers, this is my in-depth (or very shallow) analysis.

I found most of the links first with Bloglines. Bloglines is really the best at finding new links, except when it goes AWL for days at a time. PubSub finds a lot of links too, but 12 hours after I first find them with Bloglines. When Bloglines is experiencing those sick days, I turn to IceRocket for timely links (you can translate that to 2nd best). Blogpulse finds less real links and a lot of blog SPAM. Technorati finds few links these days and usually I find those links days after Bloglines, but sometimes weeks and even months. Feedster finds few real links and mostly blog SPAM. I didn't find anything at all with Blogdigger.

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 00:13:31 GMT
Support the Red Cross

Dick Costolo: In response to requests from a number of publishers, we have added a service that enables publishers to splice into their feeds the following graphic and link for Red Cross donations in support of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. The service is located on the "optimize" tab for your feed.

redcross.jpg

http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001410.html

Randy: +10 million karma for FeedBurner.

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:37:24 GMT
Introducing Blog Finder

Derek Powazek: Blog Finder takes the power of the folksonomy - bottom-up, user-generated tags - and applies it to the Blogosphere.

http://technorati.com/blogs/

Randy: Some results that include The RSS Blog; folksonomy #5, longhorn #2, adsense #3, screencast #1, myyahoo #1, friendster #1, feeddemon #1, gnomedex #7, blogpulse #1, pluck #1, odeo #2, greatnews #1, mediarss #1.

My RVDad blog is #1 for rving. I got two blogs listed for adwords #3 and #7 and Nathan got #1.

This is pretty cool! Congrats to the Technorati team #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 :-)

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