RSS, OPML and the XML platform.
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Every once in awhile, I get a request to import stuff into MT. Most of the time, I can export a blog to RSS, but not to MT import format. So, a little XSLT magic and TADA! RSS2MT.
JounalHome, a second tier blog host, has been sold for an undisclosed amount to an anonymous party. The platform was less than ideal. The owners, I found, tended to jerk around their bloggers, changing policies as the wind's changed.
edgeio blog: Tonight (Sunday 26 Febrary 2006) at midnight Pacific time we removed the password from edgeio and it is available, worldwide, for all users.
Randy: Edgeio uses RSS tags to aggregate classified listings. You can inject your listings into edgeio by tagging them 'listing' and pinging their ping server.
Burning Questions: Happy Birthday to us! Though the company was founded back in October of 2003, today is the official two-year anniversary of our pre-alpha launch.
http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001687.html
Randy: Happy B-day to the FeedBurner gang!
Rogers Cadenhead: The RSS Advisory Board now has a wiki provided by member Ross Mayfield and Socialtext.
Randy: I'll make an effort to populate it this weekend.
Byrne Reese: Six Apart is beginning the process of submitting TrackBack to the Internet community and establishing TrackBack as a standard. To that end, Six Apart would like to invite anyone who is interested to join a provisional TrackBack Working Group by signing up for the TrackBack-protocol mailing list, and engaging its members in a discussion about the future of TrackBack.
http://www.lifewiki.net/trackback
Randy: I've long stopped sending trackbacks, because I found that the majority of trackback entry points were dead. That is, the Webpage contained a reference to a trackback URI, but the trackback handler was removed or didn't process my pings, most likely to avoid trackback SPAM. Assuming the trackback working group is more than a rubber stamp, this could be the revitalization of what use to be a cool part of the blogosphere.
Rogers Cadenhead: I propose that we change the charter to expand the RSS Advisory Board to 11 members and that the two new members be Scott Johnson and Greg Smith.
I was really hoping for good things from the RSS public mailing list, but like every RSS 2.0 mailing list before it, the RDF/Atom people have taken over and there's more links to the Atom wiki of late than anything that could be considered constructive. There does not appear to be a path forward, as nobody has the guts to stand up and tell the Atomites to get lost. As such, I've decided that I'm gonna work independently of that mailing list and create RSS documentation to help RSS users on The RSS Blog. Anything I create will be presented to Dave Winer and the RSS Advisory Board for approval. The first thing I would like to create is an RSS interop document that inherits RSS as-is, does not try to change it, and simply provides guidance to RSS developers when publishing and parsing RSS documents. Please feel free to suggest other things that we can work together on, to make RSS better. Comments of the line "use RDF" or "use Atom" will be deleted. Sorry, but there has to be a forum where people can discuss RSS without getting RDF and Atom jammed down their throat.
Nathan Weinberg: Google has released Page Creator, an AJAX-powered web page creation and hosting service.
Dave Winer: This evening Google launched a totally unremarkable page creator web app.
Nathan Weinberg: Well, I'm sure this has to be a new record! Google has closed Google Pages to new registrations already. Since Stu was the first to report this to me at 11 a.m., and I first noticed Pages at around 2 a.m., that would mean a nine-hour beta.
Rogers Cadenhead: If no group has the authority to resolve the enclosures issue, all podcasters relying on multiple enclosures will be publishing RSS feeds that don't work for what is potentially their largest audience.
Rogers Cadenhead: There ought to be a framework for the development and business community that has arisen around RSS to solve these long-standing questions or decree that they are never going to be solved. In the absence of any other such effort, the board exists as an attempt to serve that purpose.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-board/message/42
Randy: Hear, hear!
Robyn Tippins: The Ricky Gervais show becomes the first major podcast to go from completely free to available only on a paid basis. Audible will charge $1.95 per episode or $6.95 for the season.
http://blog.rssapplied.com/public/item/116698
Randy: $2 for a podcast? I don't even listen to the free ones.
Mark Woodman: Long overdue, I believe, has been public discussion on how to improve RSS and clean out the harmful wastes and toxins. [cut] So, get out the warm saline of thoughtful discussion, and jump right in. It is going to be messy, but I think we’ll all benefit in the end.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/woodman/inkblots?m=7
Randy: Mark's post must be read in full. Click thru. It's worth it :-)
Rogers Cadenhead: The RSS Advisory Board proposal to recommend the Feed Validator has passed 8-0, with members Meg Hourihan, Jenny Levine, Eric Lunt, Ross Mayfield, Randy Charles Morin, Greg Reinacker, Dave Sifry and myself voting in favor.
Randy: Rogers also setup a form on The RSS Advisory Board Website that submits validation requests to the Feed Validator.
Dave Winer: I would also like to know what interests the other members of this group have. Are they receiving money from the companies? Do they have any conflicts of interest? Do they assume a responsibility to disclose any conflicts of interest?
Randy: That sounds fair. Here's my resume. I run a semi-popular blogging network and search engine called KBCafe. I also run a free RSS-to-email service called Rmail. I run a variety of advertising on both KBCafe and Rmail, including but not limited to AdSense and BlogAds. I use to be part of the Corante blog network. I do consulting work from time-to-time with a variety of Web 2.0 start-ups. Almost all of my work depends on the success of RSS and therefor I have an interest in RSS succeeding (is that a conflict?). Contrary to popular belief, I have not sold any not-for-profit Websites to Verisign for $5 million ;-)
Steve Kirks: Anyone can take the original spec and repurpose it as long as the CC license rules are followed.
Adam Green: So go ahead Rogers and the rest of the RSS Advisory Board. If Dave wants to put his considerable intellect into improving RSS, his suggestions will be given a great deal of respect, but this time around change is coming whether he approves or not.
Sam Ruby: In the long run, the success of the [RSS Advisory Board] work currently under the working title of RSS 2.0.2 depends little on what Harvard thinks, but instead depends very much on what people like Nick and companies like Microsoft actually do. The leadership that Rogers is providing has been exemplary. [cut] I believe this work is important and should continue.
Q: What does the advisory board actually do?
A: We [cut] make minor changes to the spec per the roadmap [cut].
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/advisoryBoard#whatDoesTheAdvisoryBoardActuallyDo
Roadmap
[cut] We anticipate possible 2.0.2 or 2.0.3 versions, etc. only for the purpose of clarifying the specification, not for adding new features to the format. [cut]
John Palfrey: We've heard from a number of people about an uneasy (and unfounded) sense that something is happening with respect to the RSS 2.0 spec. [cut] While we are delighted to know that many members of the RSS community continue to work on relevant issues to move the industry along in various ways, including related to the spec itself, Harvard has no involvement with any of these efforts.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2006/02/17
Randy: Translation. Harvard is divorcing itself from the RSS Advisory Board.
Greg Smith, author of Feeder Reader has written an excellent Guide to RSS Elements.
Niall Kennedy: I am leaving Technorati to pursue new opportunities. I submitted my resignation letter this morning and I will be a free agent on March 1. I joined Technorati in February 2005 excited about changing the world of weblogs and introducing people to a new kind of search. Almost a year later my passions at work have eroded and it's time to find new horizons.
Randy: Good luck Niall! Bad luck for Technorati. Niall's one to keep an eye on, or hire.
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
Randy: Google juice added.
If you don't live in the United States, the recent upgrade of Google Video has made it absolutely useless. Almost every video now is U.S. only. If it's U.S. only and you know I don't live there, then why not exclude those from the results in the first place?
Today, the draft of the next version of RSS took on a version number; 2.0.2. Please take the time to read it and post your thoughts on our Yahoo! Group.
<rss version="2.0.2">
...
Chris Gilmer: Why isn’t Google pushing the Orkut online community for friends?
Randy: I suspect Chris has been privileged with the Bad, bad server. No donut for you nonsense. Google is likely hush-hush about Orkut because it's horribly broken. I recently invited a couple friends who were interested in checking it out. Both reported problems and have yet to see Orkut's server get that prized donut (a successful account activation).
TMC: The Japanese Olympic Committee is telling athletes competing at the Turin Winter Olympic Games not to open web logs because the Olympic Charter bans athletes' journalist activities when the games are on, and violators will be disqualified.
Ted Bridis: The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.
Scott Matthews as created a new home for his Bitty Browser. If you haven't used Bitty Browser, it's pretty neat. Here's the KBCafe blog network reading list displayed with the Bitty Browser.
Joshua Porter: Adam Green and Danny Ayers joined Alex Barnett and I for a podcast on OPML Reading Lists. Reading List Podcast with Adam Green and Danny Ayers (11MB .mp3 - Alex’s notes).
Derrick Oien is wondering why "the blogosphere said nothing about the fact that 45 million people now see RSS and podcasting on their number one addiction." Well, MySpace's treatment of RSS is very similar to LiveJournal, that is, RSS is a 2nd class citizen. Take a look at my MySpace blog. Note the link Subscribe (left sidebar) and the link rss (header at right). MySpace users subscribe to each others blogs via the Subscribe link (1st class citizen) and RSS users via the RSS link (2nd class citizen). Now, log into MySpace and try to subscribe to The RSS Blog or any blog not hosted on MySpace. You can't. You see, MySpace is a closed sphere in itself and doesn't really participate actively in the blogosphere. Yes, they have token support for RSS, but token support with a feed that returns the Content-Type "text/xml" is only confusing the majority of MySpace users. I mean really, take a look at my MySpace RSS in IE6. What do you think most MySpace users are thinking when they see this (reaching for the Back button). That's always been the reason RSS hasn't been adopted by the majority. Subscribing remains a game of copy and paste. IE7 may change that.
Slacker Manager: No need for your bookmarks to remain trapped in del.icio.us. If you have a blog, you can export your links a number of ways. You can have a list of each day’s bookmarks auto-posted to your blog by going into the settings section and clicking on the ‘daily blog posting’ link in the experimental section. There isn’t much documentation on this, but if you’re using Typepad look here, if you’re using MovableType look here (note the Blogger instructions in the comments), and Wordpress folks look here.
Google: We're testing a new service with the school by hosting Gmail accounts with SJCC [San Jose City College] domain addresses (like student@jaguars.sjcc.edu).
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/big-mail-on-campus.html
Janice Myint: In its commitment to continually improve its service, Technorati has recently brought me on board as a full time Customer Support Specialist.
http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/01/80.html
Randy: I wonder if Janice realizes what she just got herself into. After reading this, I went to the Technorati ping Webpage, just to check how long it had been since Technorati realized some of my blogs had changed. Some which are updated several times a day, hadn't been indexed by Technorati for several weeks. One of my blogs wasn't indexed in 84 days. From this form, you can ping Technorati and I did for all my blogs, some several times. In fact, I do this once in awhile, when I feel I need a little bit more frustration in my life. They remain 20, 30, 40 days unindexed.
I use FeedBurner's PingShot to ping Technorati. At one time, the great guys at FeedBurner tried to help me. I don't think the problem is FeedBurner, because manually pinging Technorati doesn't work either.
David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati, Eric Lunt, a founder at FeedBurner and I are members of the RSS advisory board. David had asked that the board members tag their blogs with the tag rssboard. I did such, but the rssboard tag remains empty. I described the problem to David on the board mailing list (it's publicly readable) and never received a reply.
Frustrating. Web 2.0 is really broken.
Of late, I've been experimenting with posting my del.icio.us links to a Wordpress.com blog that I setup. This morning, that blog seems to be empty. I setup a second Wordpress.com blog for Rmail reviews. It too seems to be empty. So is Dave's scripting.wordpress.com. And Scoble's blog too. Yikes!
Update: Wordpress.com is back!
I created an OPML reading list of my favorite Google blogs.
Rob Hof: The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word "listing" (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the "listing" tag and index them on Edgeio.com.
Randy: That's very cool!
Garet Rogers: Based on information found buried deep within the javascript source, we can start to see the bigger picture for GMail — what else could they possibly add to this mail client? Their next big move will likely be GMail for domains — a powerful way for anybody who owns a domain to utilize GMail as a mail server, not just a client.
Niall Kenedy: The team is still growing and adding new features including a public Google Reader API to allow other developers to create and extend applications on top of the Google feed ecosystem.
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2006/02/story-of-google.html
Randy: If y'all don't know, I use Google Reader as my primary news reader, although in any given week, I'll use upto a dozen different readers to test out new announced features. Of late, Google Reader is getting more and more buggy, but it's still the best there is. That said, I like GreatNews a lot and it's the only native RSS reader that you'll find installed on my harddrive for more than a week at-a-time. Down the road, a public Google Reader API and an RSS engine built into IE will mean that the back-end and the front-end of your RSS reader are likely to be developed by two different groups. This could be interesting. Note, GreatNews already does this today with Bloglines. Download it and see the future.
I just found Zobbler, a great Website for those looking for MySpace layouts (they have hundreds) and lots of other cool stuff.
As you may have heard, Feedster is experiencing a major fall in terms functionality. As such, all my Feedster feeds in Google Reader are no longer valid. So, what do you do? You unsubscribe.
Ooops! Seems you can't. In fact, I can't unsub from any feeds from the Edit subscriptions tab. The problem with mashups is that more than one piece has to work and in Web 2.0-land, it's more likely that more than once piece doesn't work. Argggg!
I'm now pretty much doing email by the seat of my pants. If you sent me an email in the last 24 hours, then I likely didn't read it. It all started about 17 hours ago, when I started receiving the same SPAM email over-and-over. No matter how many times I marked the email as SPAM, Gmail continued to drop the email in my Inbox. I reviewed the email's original content and each email is identical except the sending and receiving email addresses. What's new? Gmail SPAM filtering sucks and is getting worse.
I created a filter to automatically move the missed SPAM into the Trash folder. Then I went to sleep. ... I wake up in the morning and for the first time in years, I have no email in my Inbox. Nothing for 14 hours. It seems that Gmail is no longer accepting any of my email. Period. I even sent an email directly to my Gmail account and it hasn't arrived. No email in the Trash or SPAM bucket in 16 hours.
I switched my Inbox over to Yahoo! mail. Yahoo! mails interface sucks and I haven't got my invite to the beta. I also tried Hotmail and live.com, which suck even more.
Moz Wiki: Clicking the subscribe button subscribes the user to the feed in their selected feed reader.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Feed_Handling#Subscribe_Button
Randy: Awesome! With Firefox 2.0 and IE7, both browsers will have hooks for developers to capture subscription data.
You can now save your Google Talk chat history in Gmail. This makes your chats instantly searchable. Google also intends to integrate Google Talk directly into Gmail, allowing you to see your contacts in the left sidebar, change your online status and chat within the Gmail Webpage.
Alan Graham: As a quick recap, just last month it was pontificated that Feedster was dead or at least on some serious form of life support. And regardless of our reassurances that, yes we were very much alive and simply taking steps to make our systems better and stronger, people love to kick you while you’re down. And they did. Some of it was deserved, and some of it not. But we took our lumps, and just kept our noses to the grindstone, focusing on the task at hand…the launch of the first phase of our new site. And here we are.
http://www.feedster.com/blog/2006/02/06/new-feedster-sitenew-features/
Randy: Hmmm, reviewing the site, the only thing that is new is the HTML layout. Where's the new features? Lot's of removed features; MyFeedster, link search, FeedFinder. I don't see anything new. Still on life support?
Nathan Nutter: To export your podcasts list to OPML you just go to Podcasts. Then choose File > Export Song List… when you save the file choose the Format OPML and you’re done. [cut] You can import it by going to File > Import… then just select the OPML file.
http://nnutter.com/wp/2006/itunes-602-can-importexport-opml/
Highlights from Dave Sifry latest State of the Blogosphere blog entry.
Using Google Reader, I came across Chris Pirillo and clicked thru to find this.
access from http://www.google.com/reader/lens/ has been denied
Hmmm! Political statement? Repeatable!
Nick Bradbury: I'm sure I'll get questions from people wondering when FeedDemon will support the new Feeds API. [cut] Supporting the API requires a lot of extra work, so there's less incentive to support it right away. More importantly, I haven't seen any statement about what Microsoft plans to do with the user's feed (attention) data, and I can't give customer data to Microsoft without some idea of how this data will be used.
Dave Winer: There are two barriers to brain-dead simplicity.
http://scripting.wordpress.com/2006/02/05/fred-is-right/
Randy: Disagree. Simplicity only happens when subscription becomes brain-dead simple. I use a dozen or more RSS readers on any given week. The primarily mechanism for subscribing is cutting and pasting the RSS URI. Yes, there are subscription chicklets and auto-discovery, but I don't remember the last time I clicked on a subscription chicklet or used auto-disco. The chicklets are usually missing from most blogs or the auto-discovery involves an additional toolbar. Does IE7's centralization solve this? Only on Windows and only for RSS readers that piggy back on IE7's API. Currently nobody. I don't understand why it can't be like this...
click here to receive updates to this Webpage
...or even better, like this...
{this is a placeholder for nothingness}
Danny Ayers: But when subscribing to a feed, let’s have the default option to make it temporary. After a given amount of time, the feed will drop from the list unless the user has said otherwise in the intervening period.
For the millionth time, there's a new discussion on how HTML should be encoded in RSS. The permathread continues, this time on the RSS board public mailing list .
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/message/24?threaded=1
Greg Reinacker: NewsGator is launching a new product at DEMO 2006. Be sure to come see us...I'll be on stage with Walker Fenton at 10:47am Wednesday Feb 8, and we'll of course have some folks in the Pavilion throughout the conference.
http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=797
Randy: The problem about chasing the curve is that the leader control the curve. NewsGator could move the curve slightly or drastically. The later could mean a sustainable leader.
Bloggers Blog: 13 blogs on the Technorati 100 are MSN Spaces blogs.
http://www.bloggersblog.com/cgi-bin/bloggersblog.pl?bblog=202063
Randy: I checked out the MSN Spaces blogs in the Technorati 100 and many hadn't been updated in weeks. Many are also in foreign languages, so it's difficult to see exactly why they are popular. None seem to be high quality content. A best guess is that the Technorati 100 is compromised.
Attensa: After eight months in Beta, Attensa for Outlook has emerged and is now a real product. The big news is the additon of AttentionStream article level synchronization with Attensa Online. Attensa Online, our free Web based reader, is live and open to everyone. Sign up and try it at attensa.com [cut] Attensa for Outlook is only $20 and includes a one year subscription to synchronization with Attensa Online.
http://attensa.typepad.com/attensa/2006/02/attensa_release.html
Randy: Last night, Matthew Bookspan gave me a demo of Attensa for Outlook and Web. Looked pretty awesome. I'll download and try them out for myself today. The Outlook client uses the AttentionStream API to synchronize your data. This API will be publicly available in the future. I'm sure it wouldn't take much to reverse engineer it Niall.
Shouldn't you be reading the blogs of the 9 members of the RSS advisory board? I put together an OPML file to make subscribing to all 9 blogs easier.
https://rssweblog.com/rssadvisoryboard.xml
Update: I added the four RSS feeds for the RSS Website and Mailing lists.