RSS, OPML and the XML platform.
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Six Apart the creators/owners of Movable Type, Typepad and Live Journal are about to release a new blogging platform at vox.com. The new blogging platform will blend social networking with blogging. Sounds like LiveJournal, MySpace and MSN Spaces. Stay tuned!
Have you checked out the stack lineup on The RSS Advisory board?
This is quite a team that will define the future direction of RSS. Rogers Cadenhead took the flak for restarting this beast back in late January. Four months later, this is starting to look more and more like an authoritative board (with the exception of myself). I'll take this opportunity to thank Rogers for his great work getting this going. Feel free to post your own thanks in the comments.
John Tropea: Wow, the other day I just posted on an idea like podcasting but for text, and now it’s a reality, it’s called textcasting. Basically, you download an RSS feed to your iPod (or whatever), but instead of listening you read.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/05/29/textcasting-podcast-for-text/
Paolo has created Share Your OPML images. So, now you can link that image to your OPML on Share Your OPML.
http://paolo.evectors.it/myImages/sharemyopml/
This raised, at least in my mind, a concern about Share Your OPML. Share Your OPML isn't sharing. Shouldn't someone else be able to access my upload OPML file. I can't find it. Can you? If I think Joel Ross is cool, then shouldn't I be able to download and/or import his OPML file?
BTW Scott, get the f- off of Blogspot. What do you need instruction on how to use Wordpress? I was gonna link to you instead of Joel, but decided not too. You are too cool for Blogspot.
Shaun Orpen: I figured GreatNews must be something worth checking out. So I downloaded the installer (windows version), and within minutes GreatNews was up and running on my PC after a flawless and very easy installation. Next I exported the OPML file from SharpReader and imported it into GreatNews, another easy process. Then I closed down SharpReader, it turns out for the last time. GreatNews is everything I ever wanted in an RSS aggregator.
Randy: How many times have you read this in the last 12 months? It's funny how the average Joe reader just loves GreatNews. It's even funnier how you'll never see it mentioned on most of the other RSS and Web 2.0 related blogs. Since most everyone who has tried GreatNews thinks it's the best, I can only believe that they've never even tried it. They should!
Brady Forrest: We've sent a followup letter to Donagh Kiernan, agreeing that IT@Cork can use the Web 2.0 name this year. While we stand by the principle that we need to protect our "Web 2.0" mark from unauthorized use in the context of conferences, we apologize for the way we initially handled the issue with IT@Cork.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/controversy_about_our_web_20_s.html
Randy: Lightning quick and elegant response. Congrats to the O'Reilly team for handling a bad situation in the proper manner. We all make mistakes, but only the biggest of men, admit to it and apologize promptly.
Michael Arrington: I sense that a lynching is about to occur in the blogosphere, and Tim O’Reilly is going to be the person lynched. [cut] [Bloggers] are going to shoot first and ask questions later.
Nick Bradbury: I keep running across sites that offer the same exact content as an RSS feed and an Atom feed. What's the point of this?
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/pick_a_format_a.html
Randy: I have to completely agree with Nick. Don't publish multiple feeds. Remember that most of your readers likely don't know the difference between RSS and spaghetti. Presenting your readers with options is confusing at best.
Let me add, don't use a deprecated version of RSS. If you are using anything other than RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0, then you're likely losing readers. Most RSS readers now support both of these formats better than all others. I'll add that RSS 2.0 tends to be better supported than Atom 1.0, but Atom is catching up. For podcasting RSS 2.0 is likely your only choice. Some blog hosting services, like Google's Blogspot, are still using Atom 0.3. That's simply too bad, because newer RSS readers aren't going to support the cooler features of a deprecated version of RSS. And Typepad is still defaulting to RSS 1.0. Even worse, I still run across an occasional RSS 0.9x. Yikes! If you're interested in acquiring subscribers, then give them one RSS feed, a good one, like RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0.
I'm amazed how many people fall for blogging techniques that basically make it impossible for other people to subscribe to your blog. Today, I found out from an irate reader that he was unable to subscribe to my link blog, hosted on wordpress. It turns out that the default template for Wordpress uses the feed URI scheme in a link in the footer. The user tried to copy that link into GreatNews and of course, the RSS reader responded Invalid rss content. I can't imagine how many Wordpress users must be missing out on subs because Matt listened to such ridiculous advice.
I'm sure some readers will respond that GreatNews is the problem, not Wordpress. I just wanted to point out that the feed URI scheme doesn't work in Google Reader either. Nor does it work in IE7. I think it works in FeedDemon, but I didn't try it.
Here's a great experiment. I'd like the readers to test the feed URI scheme in my link blog. Try to subscribe with whatever RSS reader you have and report on the results. Make sure to include the feed scheme when copy/pasting the URL into your RSS reader. The RSS feed is...
feed:http://randymorin.wordpress.com/feed/
Sorry, I couldn't hyperlink the feed URI scheme. It's not supported by my editor. I would of had to edit the HTML manually to make it work. Yuck!
Tom Raftery: The upcoming Web 2.0 half-day conference is the target of a cease and desist letter (below) from the legal team of O’Reilly publishers. Basically O’Reilly are claiming to have applied for a trademark for the term “Web 2.0″.
Randy: Wow! This is quite amazing. Now that the money is flowing into Web 2.0, the folk are selling out like mad. Not that I mind anybody making a little money, but a trademark on Web 2.0 is about the dumbest thing I've read in quite awhile. And of course, everybody will be up in arms about this until they get their invite to Tim's next conference and sell-out themselves.
Thank Sterling for the pointer.
The coolest new happening in Web 2.0-land in that last month is Share Your OPML. At least once a day, I skip over there to discover some new cool blogs. I'm at 505 subscriptions, which ranks me 70th on the most prolific subscribers. But the coolest feature is the subscriptions like mine. I go there every few days to find out who is like me. The rankings change day-by-day (it's new) as new people upload their OPML reading lists. Today, the top 10 subscribers like me are...
1. | Simone Carletti | 178 | 5.083 |
2. | SterlingCamden | 46 | 2.452 |
3. | Joel Ross | 941 | 2.040 |
4. | Brad Feld | 744 | 1.939 |
5. | Tom Simpson | 536 | 1.269 |
6. | Alex Barnett | 593 | 1.194 |
7. | Matt Terenzio | 82 | 1.176 |
8. | Matt Craven | 1,059 | 1.140 |
9. | Yaron Galai | 132 | 1.140 |
10. | Larry Borsato | 678 | 1.130 |
The next thing I do is pick someone in my top 10 and find subscriptions that in their list that I'm not subscribed too. Check them out and maybe even subscribe. It's a pretty awesome way of finding new subs. I also try to find the blogs of the people like me and subscribe to their blogs. It's quite amazing that I was already subscribed to the blogs of the 4 most like me.
I would appear that Hugh is reading my blog about the a-list selling out. This is for Dave and Michael. I'm sure you'll dispute it, but the blogosphere is onto you.
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002885.html
Share Your OPML has a listing of the top 20 podcasts, based on subscriptions from submitted OPML. Adam Curry has two shows in the top 5.
PR: comScore World Metrix’s proprietary audience report for April 2006 showed the total number of unique visitors to MSN Spaces has more than doubled in the past 12 months, from 41.65 million to 101 million.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/may06/05-24SpacesLargestPR.mspx
Randy: MSN is claiming that MSN Spaces is now the #1 blogging service worldwide. This claim seems to be based on the facts that they received 101 million visitors over 12 months and that MSN Spaces have blogs. How many visitors has MySpace had over the last 12 months, they have blogs too! Stats anyone?
The Street Sign Generator is worth a blog entry. Not all that useful, but fun. Thanks Sterling!
Dave Winer: What I object to about "Web 2.0" is that it was created to exclude people from the conversation, and by the way, I'm one of those people. They're planning the third Web 2.0 conference, and I haven't gotten an invite to present, and I'm not holding my breath.
http://www.scripting.com/2006/05/24.html#iStillSayNoToWebTwoOh
Randy: It appears Dave deleted this post from his blog. I didn't get an invite either :-)
Nicholas Carr: Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," was a nice experiment in the "democratization" of publishing, but it didn't quite work out. Wikipedia is dead. It died the way the pure products of idealism always do, slowly and quietly and largely in secret, through the corrosive process of compromise. [cut] The end came last Friday. That's when Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, proposed "that we eliminate the requirement that semi-protected articles have to announce themselves as such to the general public." The "general public," you see, is now an entity separate and distinct from those who actually control the creation of Wikipedia.
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php
Randy: Nicholas has seen the light.
Dave Winer continues to bash FeedBurner for stealing peoples feeds. He argues that by giving up the feed URL to FeedBurner that you put yourself at the mercy of FeedBurner going out-of-business. I wonder what would happen to Dave's wordpress.com blog if Matt went out-of-business? Where would all those blogspot blogs go, if Google terminated their hosting service? Why has Dave not mentioned these issues?
FeedBurner actually provides protection against going out-of-business in a service called Your Brand. You can host your feed in your domain, but point that domain to FeedBurner's server. If FeedBurner goes out-of-business, you can simply point the feed back to your server and nothing is lost. Does Dave mention this service in his argument? No.
It would seem to me that no matter what FeedBurner does, Dave is simply out to get them. Of late, I'm finding that many a-list bloggers are using their blogs to misinform the average user and redirect eyeballs to projects where they are a stakeholder. Another example of the blogosphere turning into the mainstream media that it is trying to replace.
http://www.scripting.com/2006/05/21.html#howToCompeteWithFeedburner
RSS Board: The proposal to request "application/rss+xml" as the MIME media type for RSS has passed with all 11 members of the RSS Advisory Board voting in favor.
https://www.rssboard.org/news/53/vote-board-supports-rss-mime-type
Randy: This is the rubber stamp that penetrates stone. That is, although we've alway known this to be true, it's now official. If you don't respond with the Content-Type: application/rss+xml, then your RSS is slightly invalid. It would be awesome if the FeedValidator spit out a warning for this case.
Nick Bradbury: The feed URI scheme was invented to deal with the problem of mainstream browsers spewing XML when a user clicked a link to a feed. In theory, MIME types were supposed to help in situations like this, but in practice MIME types weren't a reliable solution. [cut] I agree with Scott that it's odd that IE7 doesn't support feed://.
Randy: Nick wonders why the feed URI scheme isn't implemented in IE7. He knows that the feed URI scheme breaks the architecture of the Web and fails to mention that. I guess, if you ignore the why, then you don't know the why. It follows! The reason people don't support the feed URI scheme is because it's a HACK!
I saw a little LinkedIn widget on Chris Abraham's blog. I thought it was cool, so I put my own in the right sidebar. I'm not much of a LinkedIn user. About the only thing I do is accept connections. I did update my profile today. Anyhow, if you read this far, then click on the LinkedIn widget thingy and add me as a contact. I'll do an axe murderer check and we should be good to go.
Pete Cashmore of Mashable has 5 billion readers. He's my hero!
FeedBurner has been adding some new functionality (like always). They now have a live hits page that shows you which User-Agents generated the last 25 hits on your feed. And you can now get historical daily User-Agent data (starting from the 18th of May). And they still have RSS landing pages.
No matter the ethics, eventually the money gets so great that the founders sell and the buyers try to recoup their investment. Well, unless you run it into the ground first or become the next Google. So, I pose the question, what next for Wikipedia?
Pierre Rouarch has created an RSS to Google Co op XML converter. Here's The RSS Blog RSS feed converted to Google Co op. Very cool! I gotta admit, I still don't quite understand Google Co op.
Michael Arrington has begun threatening Feedpass with click-fraud and lawsuits.
lovely. I’m on the feed page, clicking ads like crazy so my lawyers can point to actual damages for the eventual lawsuit.
http://saunderslog.com/2006/05/22/courtesy-of-feedpass-ive-stolen-mike-arringtons-feed/
These comments were followed by a smiley, so I really hope they are in jest. Regardless, Jim Woolley of Feedpass sent me the following in an email.
I admit, I'm nervous about legal issues etc. I pulled the ads for now to protect myself a bit from Michael Arrington's click-fraud threats, but that's it.
So, Feedpass has had to break their revenue model because of Michael Arrington's comments. I'm really hoping that Michael can confirm to Feedpass that this was in jest and that click-fraud and lawsuits are not forthcoming. And this constant attack on a small guy from the blogosphere must stop and people have to stop pandering to bullies.
This weekend we saw the blogosphere mob go after Feedpass. The issue started over on the The Social Software Weblog, where Marshall Kirkpatrick raised a concern about Feedpass. Then Michael Arrington posted it on TechCrunch where he turned that concern into Feedpass Does Absolutely Nothing. That's quite a jump. But worse, it was obvious reading the article that Michael was slamming Feedpass only to get favor with a new competitor that was releasing this week. Then Dave Winer jumps on the bandwagon and says Feedpass does more than nothing, basically saying that Feedpass is hijacking your RSS feed. Again, more talk without using the brain. Feedpass is a landing page and doesn't replace your RSS feed. Wake up Dave. And Dave basically begs this new company releasing later this week to work with him. You see now that people are posting in the dark about Feedpass, misinterpreting in the worse way everybody who blogged previously. You should all be ashamed.
This morning, things get even worse, Mark Evans posts on Alec Saunders's blog that Feedpass is FeedBurner (see correction below in update II). Mark, should know to check his facts, he's a long time reporter for a major Toronto newspaper. And Mark re-iterates another lie on his own blog, Feedpass does absolutely nothing. What a blogosphere pile-on. You should all be ashamed of yourselves. Behaving like school children picking on the new kid.
What is this about? It's about the fact that Feedpass could be used by malicious people to make money off another persons feed. Nobody is saying that that has happened, only that the possibility exists. It's all about protectionism, one of the corner stones that built the blogosphere. The blogosphere was built on nay-saying the protectionist aspect of the current media. In full circle, the blogosphere has in turn become that protectionist media. So you can all add hypocrite to the shame I see in you.
Somehow, Technorati was built upon taking your feed and adding ads. But now that you're big-shots, NO MORE companies get a free ride off your feed. Take a look at this page.
http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.kbcafe.com/rss
It's Technorati taking my feed and putting ads on it. Technorati is doing nothing wrong, so why is Feedpass doing something wrong by giving that ability to just everybody? Why? Because if you went after Technorati you'd get eaten up, but if you go after some small guy, then you feel big about yourself.
But the worse part is the why. You know why Alec and Mark posted this stuff? It's the blogosphere BOGU. Praise everything Michael says and maybe next week he'll link to me. Try thinking instead of just repeating what Michael says.
Update: I've also noticed that Jim Woolley, the guy behind Feedpass is trying desparately to change his service to meet the requirements of the mob. He added a step to validate your blog, which no longer makes it usable by non-geeks.
Update II: Mark said that his use of FeedBurner was a typo and that he meant Feedpass, that he didn't mean to associate them.
Geek News Central: Well it is pretty obvious that Microsoft did not get Podcasting support built into Windows Media Player 11 and all I can say is that they obviously blew it. [cut] At this very moment in time all I can say is Microsoft and especially the Windows Media Player team you Suck!
Randy: Dave continues the conversation about Feedpass.
Dave Winer: I certainly don't approve of newcomers doing what Feedburner does, without even asking for permission to do so! Who are these people? How do we know whether we should trust them? Why should I have to trust them?
http://www.scripting.com/2006/05/21.html#feedpassDoesMoreThanNothing
Randy: This is completely unfair. This sounds like nobody is allowed to make a business around RSS except those approved by Dave. Feedpass is simply a landing page and it can be swapped out with a slight modification to the blog template. Dave clearly doesn't understand what Feedpass is.
Dave also tells us How to compete with FeedBurner. But he admits, his model will cost $7/yr. FeedBurner cost me $0 for my 100+ feeds. We're also told by Dave and Mike that a FeedBurner competitor is about to launch. This now sounds a lot like Dave and Mike are bashing the competitors to curry favor with this new competitor. Dave even invites them to work with him. Don't let them ever tell you again that they are unbiased in opinion.
Previously on Feedpass.
I don't usually like to link to Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, because I find his view of Web 2.0 to be tainted. But this time, his post is overboard. He specifically says, Feedpass Does Absolutely Nothing.
There might be an argument of whether Feedpass is breaking copyright laws, but turning that into "Does Absolutely Nothing", is quite a leap. Clearly, it's the best RSS landing page application on the Internet. There are many other RSS landing page applications, like solosub. But compare that to Feedpass.
There's a big difference. Feedpass is far better. Far far better. Yet, TechCrunch says that SoloSub takes a step towards fixing RSS and Feedpass Does Absolutely Nothing. Go figure. Either Michael Arrington is a complete idiot or Feedpass didn't pay him enough for a good review.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/21/feedpass-does-absolutely-nothing/
While we're on the subject, here's Dave Winer's thoughts on Feedpass, which are a little more sane, although still negative. If I were Jim Woolley, then I'd simply excerpt the blog entries and the controversy over reproducing an RSS feed is nullified.
Also on Feedpass
Philip May: Do you use FireFox? If so, try dragging the following links to your 'bookmarks toolbar'...
[cut] When you click them, they'll take you to a page that shows what blogs link to whatever page you were just visiting.
http://phlydwg.blogspot.com/2006/05/useful-bookmarklets.html
Randy: And they appear to work fine in Internet Explorer, in addition to Firefox.
I've gotten tired of the endless splog that comes from blogspot. I've begun posting the following comment on blogspot hosted blogs.
If you leave blogspot, then I'll refer to you once in awhile. If you don't, then I'll never refer to you again. The only way to make Google listen and prevent splogs is to take action against its users. Sorry!
I'm simply tired of the 100s of splog referrers that I get each week. If Google doesn't get it, then let me spell it out in plain English. CAPTCHAS don't work! Try something new. I encourage others to post similar comments on all blogspot hosted blogs in their blogroll. Let's tell Google we're not putting up with splogs anymore.
BTW, I still love you Google. I love Google search. I love AdSense. I love Google Reader. I just don't love blogspot anymore. And IceRocket is better than Google blog search only because they aren't indexing the blogspot splog. Make it go away! Close it down. Get rid of the splog or the blogosphere will harass your users until you have only sploggers left.
And now to the rumour mill.
David Berlind: Either I just encountered a very strange browser bug, or Yahoo has just acquired Technorati. Just moments ago, [cut] when I hit the back button, I got an apology that was clearly generated by Yahoo!'s servers telling me that the page couldn't be found on Yahoo!'s servers. The tab's title in Firefox [cut] also showed the Technorati logo along with the text "Yahoo! - 404 Not Found."
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3075
Randy: On one hand, Yahoo's previous purchases indicate that it's willing to buy. On the other hand, this is hardly enough evidence (hearsay) to make any conclusions and David, IMHO, is often wrong when projecting.
Feedpass is an alternate landing page for your RSS feed. It has a large array of subscription chicklets, an even larger number of supported RSS readers, 4 email subscription chicklets (including Rmail), chicklets for all the tag spaces and on and on. Looks like the most complete feed landing page devised to date. If you are gonna create one, then save yourself some time and use Feedpass. Jim Woolley of Feedpass was nice enough to create an RSS landing page for The RSS Blog. It's even featured on their homepage. Check it out!
More on Feedpass
Two weeks ago USA Today launched their own online RSS reader called MyUSA Today. Later, it was revealed that it's a private labelled version of NewsGator. Congrats to Greg and team! Now that's a big fish to hold onto.
Google has added one-click filters in the left sidebar to filter your blog searches. The filters include Last hour, Last 12 hours, Last day, Past week and Past month. Since I check my referrer searches at least every 12 hours, this is gonna be a real time saver. Now, if only they could get rid of that Blogspot splog.
Pheedo has published their RSS usage data. The big surprised was a drop of 7% marketshare from Bloglines.
RSS Xpress is a classic three pane native Windows RSS reader with rolling popups. It had been more than 6 months since last I tried it, so I fired it up last night. They've fixed some of the bugs I enumerated back then. It's mostly used by the French community, but is also translated to a half dozen other languages. I imported my 500+ feed OPML and began reading within a few seconds.
The Flickr Organizer just got even better.
RSS Blog reader: Have you ever heard of talkdigger.com?
Randy: No I hadn't. I checked it out. Wicked! It just a first impression, but I couldn't believe how much stuff I found that everybody else was missing. Try it! I'll report more later tonight, time permitting.
Update: A further investigation revealed that Talk Digger is an Ajax based meta-search engine. It appears they are breaking Google's terms of service of not meta-searching their results (similar to what gada.be use to do before I assume Google set them straight). Overall, it appears to be a step up on gada.be, but since the best results are pulled from Google blog search, it's not gonna be a new tool in my toolbox.
Last week, I presented my readers with a simple survey to determine which RSS readers are most used by my readers. The results indicate some very surprising numbers. I compiled an XLS with the results, feel free to download it and points out mistakes.
https://rssweblog.com/best.rss.readers.xls
I was actually interested in three numbers. What percentage of people have used each RSS aggregator and say it's their favorite RSS reader, have it installed and have it bookmarked. Of course, native RSS readers are installed and not bookmarked and Web-based RSS readers may be bookmarked but not installed. Let's start with the percentage that say it's their favorite RSS reader, minimum 10 users.
Reader | % Favorite |
GreatNews | 86% |
Bloglines | 39% |
Attensa for Outlook | 33% |
NetNewswire | 33% |
News Alloy | 17% |
Google Reader | 17% |
FeedDemon | 15% |
Pluck IE Edition | 13% |
Onfolio | 9% |
Rojo | 8% |
IE 7.0 | 6% |
SharpReader | 5% |
My Yahoo! | 4% |
NewsGator Online | 3% |
Pluck Firefox Edition | 3% |
Firefox Live Bookmarks | 2% |
Google Desktop | 2% |
RSS Bandit | 0% |
Pluck Web Edition | 0% |
Hello GreatNews. GreatNews is also my favorite native RSS reader and I can understand your voting. GreatNews pretty much dominates this rating. Bloglines, Attensa and NetNewswire form a second tier of RSS readers in this category.
Now let's move on. Let's examine the percentage of RSS readers that are installed versus used.
Reader | % Installed |
GreatNews | 96% |
Firefox Live Bookmarks | 71% |
IE 7.0 | 68% |
NetNewswire | 58% |
Google Desktop | 45% |
Attensa for Outlook | 33% |
Onfolio | 26% |
FeedDemon | 26% |
RSS Bandit | 25% |
SharpReader | 23% |
Bloglines | 22% |
Pluck Firefox Edition | 20% |
Pluck IE Edition | 19% |
Again GreatNews dominates, followed by the two browsers, Firefox and IE, which are there most because the users are using them for reasons other than RSS reading. The same can be said of Google Desktop which places 5th. The two other RSS reader which do place well are again NetNewswire and and Attensa.
Last let's move to the used RSS reader which are most often bookmarked.
Reader | % Bookmarked |
Bloglines | 73% |
News Alloy | 58% |
Google Reader | 50% |
My Yahoo! | 42% |
Rojo | 41% |
News Gator Online | 31% |
Onfolio | 17% |
Pluck Web Edition | 12% |
Bloglines is far and away the favorite RSS reader bookmarked. Surprisingly New Alloy places second, a rather less known RSS reader followed by Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Rojo and NewsGator.
From this survey, it's pretty easy to determine which RSS readers are liked more often than not; GreatNews, NetNewswire, Attensa, Bloglines, News Alloy and Google Reader. Which RSS readers are generally uninstalled, because they are not liked; Pluck and RSS Bandit. Which RSS readers are used for reasons other than reading RSS; Firefox, IE and Google Desktop.
Although GreatNews basically dominates almost every score in this survey, it gets no where near the same attention as other top RSS readers.
I've always wondered why this is. The only explanation is that the folk of GreatNews don't have the right connections into the blogosphere a-list. How many times has Michael Arrington blogged about GreatNews? Never! How about Bloglines? Constantly. NewsGator? Constantly. Pluck? Constantly?
Anyone wanna bet that none of the a-listers pick up this thought?
Just me podcasting with Odeo Studio and FeedBurner. It worked! It was really trivial. A couple of very minor bugs. The HTML that Odeo tells you to include in your blog post is invalid and I had to manually edit the HTML to make it work (the <embed> tag is closed twice).
Joe Friend: Word is a great tool for writing stuff, right? Blogging is all about communicating with words (and pictures, too). So, why not use Word to write your blog posts? [cut] In Beta 2 we support MSN Spaces, SharePoint 2007 (of course), Blogger, and Community Server (which is used for blogs.msdn.com). You can also set up a custom account with services that support the metaweblog API or the ATOM API. All the blog providers seems to interpret these APIs a bit different so there kinks we're still working out.
http://blogs.msdn.com/joe_friend/archive/2006/05/12/595963.aspx
On the heels of the relaunch of Share Your OPML, we also have a new OPML service called OPMLworkstation. OPMLworkstation has several fold the features of Share Your OPML. They host your OPML, allow you to mark them public or private, add them to their directory, co-operative editing and the list goes on. The number of features actually makes it quite difficult to use. For instance, I had to fill in a few dozen controls just to upload one OPML file. Then, it was rejected because it was invalid (more like a broken validator). Fortunately, there was an option to upload an invalid OPML file. Once you get past the usability issues, the site is by far the best OPML hosting service I've ever seen and by a long mile.
Bela, the author of OPMLworkstation, I know you are listening. You might want to consider simplifying the upload. Maybe a wizard style would be better suited. Allow the user to upload his feed before presenting all the options. Also, remember the power of defaults. Default to public, not private. Default to add to directory, not hide.
One more thing Bela, I'm subscribed.
Today's reading includes my list of the top 10 blogging tools. I'm sure many of you already use many of these, but hopefully I'll introduce a couple tools to the newbies and even pros that they weren't already aware of. Everybody likes lists right? Order is determined by how often I use them. Here goes.
Please feel free to add your own favorite tools in the comments so that other readers can grow their own toolsets.
I'm amazed how many bots hit my websites. I'm not just talking Google bot, I'm talking all variety of bots. The fastest growing genre of bot is the referrer bot. This is a bot that simply goes to your website to get listed in your referral logs, so that someone looking at your referral logs will check them out. These referral bots are easily detected because you'll get a ton of referral hits from the same domain, but if you navigate back to the referral URL, you won't actually find a link to your website (examples include sitemeter.com).
But that's not the only case. Often website will put links to your website and create bots that go to their site and click thru. These bots are much more difficult to discover, but there's more tricks to find these. Some referral bots, navigate to your page, but never further. So pageviews per visitor is very close to one (examples include langocha.com). Other bots go further and actually pretend to navigate your site randomly (like a user) and thus increase pageviews per visitor to something more akin to human traffic. But even these referrers have one fatal flaw. They generally only click on HTML links and not javascript generated links.
Let's examine the referrer logs of sensibleerection.com. Hundred of hits, many even click HTML links to navigate to other pages on my website, but not once has anyone ever clicked on a javascript link. Are these real users? Other referrers like that include geocities.jp/net_style3050.
Anyhow, I decided to compile a list of sites that fall into this category. It's not a list of site I think are running bots, but rather sites where I get a lot of referrers but almost zero clicks on javascript links. There are many reasons why this data is so and I'll try to explain some of those reasons.
Google's image search wraps the referrer in a frame, thus reducing the likeliness of the user clicking on your site links altogether, which explains the low numbers there. Google blog, eurekster.com and tankride.com all link to pages that have few javascript links that I'm tracking. Both Technorati and YouTube have very low CTR on my tracked javascript links, but not zero. The interesting one is gada.de. You would think that out of the thousands of referrers I get monthly from them that just one user would accidently click on a javascript link. I wonder about gada.be referrers and I honestly wonder about YouTube and Technorati too. Now, don't get me wrong, clearly I must be getting some legitimate referrers from all three. I'm going to tighten up the reporting to try and find an alternate explanation. Does anybody have an alternate explanation?
Michael Arrington: From recent buzz and confirmation from two trusted sources, it sounds like Yahoo closed its rumored acquisition of Joe Kraus’ Jotspot, and will be entering the wiki market.
Yep, Google has entered the tagosphere. Their offering seems a little complex. I don't get it! I looks like dmoz for tags. Yuk!
Jake Savin, the developer behind Userland these last few years, is now working with Microsoft. Which means that Microsoft now has a representative on the RSS Board, along with Attensa, Six Apart, FeedBurner, Socialtext, Google and FeederReader. Congratulations Jake and Microsoft (nice pick-up).
Steve Rubel: WhoLinked is a nifty little javascript widget for a blog or a Web site that shows you who's linking to you.
Randy: A sample should appear immediately below this paragraph.
I found it didn't format very well. I had to wrap it in a table or it would clear my right sidebar.
Charlie Wood: Last month it was pointed out on the feed-tech mailing list that feeds that implement the current version (v 0.91) of the Simple Sharing Extensions specification will incorrectly display deleted items in current RSS aggregators.
http://www.globelogger.com/item.php?id=655
Jens Alfke: Joe User turns on SSE in his shiny new blogging app, writes a post, then deletes it the next day. A few days later he finds that a lot of his readers are still seeing that post in his feed. Joe will angrily conclude that his blog software is broken, and either turn off SSE or switch to a different program.
Randy: This behavior is no different than what the majority of RSS readers are doing today. For instance, I publish an article, your reader picks it up, then I delete it. Most readers will not delete the article just because it disappears from the RSS feed, so you continue seeing it until you purge it yourself. In fact, a deleted flag is an improvement. We can now communicate to the client that the item was specifically deleted. SSE does not break current aggregators.
I tried to create an account to upload a job listing to edgeio today. I got...
You entered the wrong text for the antispam image. Please try again.
...four times in-a-row before I gave up. It's not that the captchas are difficult, they looked easy enough. It just seems their captcha system is borked. Hopefully, this will find the right person to get it fixed.
Update: I got an email from edgeio support asking if I was using IE7 (they're having problems). I switched to Firefox. This time, the captcha passed, but the reply was "Verify email address - {removed to protect user}@gmail.com", which is not my email address. I assume they sent my registration to somebody else. Edgeio is definately Web 2.0. More bugs than features.
tech.memeorandum.com has been redirected to a much easier to spell TechMeme.
Rogers Cadenhead, Jon Hanna, Bill Kearney and Greg Smith have put together an Internet Draft for the application/rss+xml media type. If approved by the RSS Advisory Board, it will become an official standard, rather than the de facto standard it is today. Rogers and gang are also gonna try to get the draft approved by the RSS working group and the IETF.
The best part of Dave Winer's Share Your OPML website, is that you can find out who is subscribed to your blog. Dimitar Vesselinov is subscribed to The RSS Blog and 8000+ others. Ya right! Dimitar, if you read this, leave a comment. Richard Banks, on the other hand, is subscribed to The RSS Blog and only 22 other feeds. That's quite an honor. Thanks Richard. Of course, the list is growing (currently 37) as Share Your OPML gets seeded.
http://share.opml.org/whosubscribes/?feed_id=2823
I see Robert and Jeff and Nick and Simone and Cori and Sterling and John and Scott and ....
Rogers Cadenhead: Matthew Bookspan, the director of product management for the RSS aggregator developer Attensa, has joined the RSS Advisory Board.
Dave Winer rebooted his Share Your OPML website. He first started the site back in February 2004. Later that year, the site stopped working and fell into disrepair. It's back! The premise is that you upload your OPML for sharing with other users. The data is aggregated and compiled into a few reports, like the Top 100 Feeds, Most Prolific Subscribers (I'm #6), Who Subscribes To... and Subscriptions Like Mine. Subscriptions like mine is a matching score for people who subscribe to the same feeds. My top 10 and others follow.
Steve Rubel #18, Chris Pirillo #19. Upload your OPML today. NOW!
Seth Goldstein: Strong web bloggers no longer link.
Randy: hehe! I'm not linking to Seth. In fact, if you don't link, then I won't link to you either. I'll prove it. Send me a URL of your blog and if you link to great stuff, then I'll link to you. And if you send me that link via the del.icio.us for:randymorin tag, then you might just win a book.
Help me determine which of these RSS reader should be in the sidebars of the KBCafe blog network blogs and the chicklet generator. Simply complete this small survey. Write in votes to the comments, if your favorite reader isn't in this list. The list contains my top 19 user agents according to FeedBurner plus Google Reader, which currently doesn't report stats to FeedBurner.
Steve Rubel: iTunes has quietly started to offer PDF enclosures subscriptions in the podcast section of the store.
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/05/itunes_offers_p.html
Randy: What's next? Bookcasting?
evhead: We've taken a big samurai sword and split Odeo down the middle, so there are now two Odeo sites: Odeo.com and Odeo Studio (at studio.odeo.com).
http://odeo.com/blog/2006/05/odeo-now-twice-as-good.html
Randy: I've been really meaning to start podcasting with Odeo, but the problem is the amount of effort required to do something unordinary. Maybe, I'll just go for ordinary.
Of late, I've doing a lot of complaining about the failures of the blogosphere. So, I thought I'd change it up and point to things in the blogosphere that are working better than most and that I generally find useful.
Twice in the month of April, I reported that Blogware was blocking incoming Google referrers. I sent a note to a friend at tucows and even got the attention of Siobhan McLaughlin, Associate Product Manager at Tucows. Siabhan responded in my blog comments.
Thanks for posting about this. We are not blocking Google Referrers. We had a temporary issue that has now been resolved.
This response was truthless and even today, if you search for Siabhan's blog on Google, you'll get an error message.
access from http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3asiobhan.blogware.com has been denied
This only happens for some Blogware blogs and not all. I've now sent emails to a half dozen addresses at Tucows and the issue remains unresolved. Weirdness.
Ben Goodger: We have just enabled an experimental Feed Handling feature, which will be available in nightly builds starting Friday May 5 2006. When you click on links to RSS or Atom feeds, you will be shown a preview page that lets you subscribe to the feed using your favorite reader.
Bloglines News: Here ye, here ye... Bloggers & publishers, Bloglines can now accept pings directly from you in two ways.
http://www.bloglines.com/services/api
Randy: I have to wonder if they've fallen for stop polling, rely on pings metaphor that's working so well for Technorati and PubSub.
Dave Winer: When bloggers get together, the topic of every session drifts into "How do we make money doing this" no matter what the original topic was. [cut] No matter how you try, the discussion never actually uncovers any ways to make money.
http://www.scripting.com/2006/04/30.html#theUtterFutilityOfGeekness
Randy: Lot's of people are making money blogging. Like me. For years, I worked for software companies and the executive constantly asked that question "How do we make money doing this?" I kept answering, "You sell products and advertising." They would always respond, "It's not that easy." Well, they were right. It's not that easy. You actually have to try, which they weren't prepared to do. After ten years of excuses, I decided more than a year ago that I was gonna do it on my own because these business f-ks can't answer the simple question, "How do we make money doing this?" A year later, I've got multiple recurring revenue streams so large that I don't have to work for the rest of my life. Want to learn how to make money blogging? I'm telling you how on the Besting Adwords blog and you are just not listening. Dave and the business types are wrong, there's lots of money to be had.
Rich Ziade: A friend of mine pointed me to this oddity. If you visit a Flickr page (for example this one) and try to save the displayed image either by dragging it to your desktop or right mouse-clicking "Save Image As...", the downloaded image isn't there.
http://www.basement.org/archives/2006/04/is_flickr_protecting_photos_fr.html
Last week, I made the claim that the Blogosphere Ping is Broken. Bob Wyman, one of the curators of the Blogosphere Ping and Feedmesh responded that my claim was a bit light on data. I responded in his post with facts that showed the PubSub SiteStats was not keeping up with the blogophere. His response follows.
Randy, we're having some "issues" with our LinkRank and LinkCount applications. At this point is that the statistics we're publishing don't accurately reflect the items we're picking up, processing and "indexing" from the feeds we read. Yes, this is embarrassing... Please note that the various statistics applications we host are layered on top of the basic publish/subscribe content-routing system. Thus, an issue with the statistics does not necessarily indicate an issue with the underlying system. (It might, but in this case it doesn't.) So, it would be reasonable to say that our stats are temporarily screwed up, however, that doesn't make it reasonable to suggest that the core matching system is broken. In fact, in recent weeks, the core system has been running massively better than it has in a very long time.
We then discussed issues offline and came to the conclusion that if I subscribed to a feed using the PubSub subscription list, then I'd be able to see better that the PubSub matching engine was working and that pings, as I claimed, were not being dropped en masse. He suggested that I setup a subscription to "SOURCE:feedburner.com/TheRssBlog", which should show me whenever new blog entries from my blog are indexed by PubSub. I immediately showed him that I already had a subscription to "kbcafe" which was returning a small subset of the results and was even able to pinpoint blogs which were clearly pinging PubSub regularly, using the term kbcafe, but not appearing in my PubSub results. Bob said he would look into it.
Now we stand a few days later and I've written eight new blog entries, pinged PubSub a handful of times and still nothing appears in my PubSub results. I've emailed Bob twice since indicating my negative results confirming, in my view, that the blogosphere ping was truly broken. He hasn't responded.
Now, proof by example is not really a proof at all, but when you setup a experiment to confirm your analysis and the results confirm your analysis, then the likelyhood that you are correct is growing in strength. Does anybody else have a reason why PubSub SiteStats and PubSub subscriptions, which are both based on the blogosophere ping, are both not working? Otherwise, the ship has docked and the blogosphere ping is official broken.
Brian Oberkirch: First, as we monitor for our clients and help them track conversations, it's clear that no one tool is comprehensive enough to rely on. Secondly, we waste a good deal of time on spam blogs & the leading services have yet to really work through that problem.
Randy: Did he just say blogosphere search sucks?
Jon Dube: USAToday.com has launched a beta personalized news site [called My USAToday], which is essentially a branded RSS reader that doesn't require readers to know anything about RSS.
http://my.usatoday.com/tech/news/myusatoday.aspx
Randy: I don't think Bloglines, Rojo, NewsGator and Pluck are gonna be worrying too much about this one. Wow, that sucks! Not only do you not need to know anything about RSS, but in order to use it, you'd have to not know what you are doing altogether.
Chris Pirillo has decided that this years Gnomedex will be an unconference. Unconference is like the latest buzz word you want associated with your conference, but in most cases, the conference planner have no idea what an unconference. Chris knows.
http://chris.pirillo.com/blog/_archives/2006/5/2/1929342.html
Rogers Cadenhead: I used to feel differently, but now that I've worked with it extensively, OPML's an underspecified, one-size-fits-all kludge that doesn't serve a purpose beyond the exchange of simple data. There's little need for an XML dialect to represent outlines.
Randy: On a regular basis, I export my subscriptions from Google Reader and import them into Bloglines, GreatNews and whatever other RSS reader I'm testing that week. A need fulfilled. No?
Coolz0r: Okay. I’m out of YouTube. [cut] The site is very very slow. [cut] The people I used to know on YouTube got banned, saw their accounts set to zero or just left by themselves. No matter how hard they try, YouTube isn’t the attractive videohoster it used to be. It became too corporate, too yadda yadda and far too bloathed with options, groups and whatever.
http://blog.coolz0r.com/2006/05/02/screw-youtube/
Randy: Most of all, the slowness throughout the weekday is no longer tolerable. I often try to find the same video on Google Video, just to avoid the jerky playback.
Last month, I challenged my readership to send me links via del.icio.us using the for:randymorin tag. I got more links than I care to count (hundreds). The best link would be awarded a Amazon book (up to $20 USD). The best link for April was from Coolz0r who sent me the American Dad vs Family Guy flash game. I told Coolz0r to pick a book and he picked Permission Marketing by Seth Godin. Honorable mentions to astreet, femetal, scotbuf, Chris Nolan, Dave Walker, and Sterling Camden, whom also gave links that I re-blogged over the last month.
If I didn't point back to your blog, it's because I'm not sure who you are and simply left your del.icio.us ID. Ping me and I'll update with a link. Thanks to all that participated.
We have another blogosphere search engine. Considering how broken blogosphere search currently is, the competition is welcomed. Unfortunately, sphere.com doesn't seem to be doing any better. It's dominated mostly by splogs, even when I sort by relevance. I tried to find The RSS Blog and searched for rss blog, rank by relevance, filter for last week only and the top two entries are actually ads for RSS2Blog, the #1 splogging tool on the market. I even search for kbcafe, rank by relevance, filter for last 4 months and the top two entries were splog entries. The 3rd entry was by Sam Ruby. How does a splog rank higher in relevance than Sam? That can only be a broken algorithm. I searched and searched and I really couldn't find anything much at all. Search for Besting Adwords, splog #1. Occasionally I stumbled into a non-splog result, but about 90+% are SERP (search engine result page) spam. Sphere.com is likely worse than PubSub, Feedster and Technorati, which I've already written off as completely useless.