RSS, OPML and the XML platform.
 
The RSS Blog
Thu, 01 Feb 2007 01:54:09 GMT
Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: There's Some Mighty Pissed Off Flickr Members Right Now
more Yahoo! dumbness
Tags:

Hiring Stephen Colbert to Help with Wikipedia NoFollow Campaign | Marketing Pilgrim
Tags:

Time to Upgrade
Tags:

inkBlots
Tags:

Dave on Atom
Tags:

WP 2.1: Still No Atom 1.0 Support « Geof’s Relentless Kvetching About WordPress
Tags:

NewsGator Integrates Spanning Salesforce to add RSS Functionality to Salesforce.com
Tags:

Pitch4Profit_contest
Tags:

Snipperoo: Gorgeous girls in thongs
the most popular widget in the Snipperoo Widget Directory
Tags:

Bloggers Blog: Snap Preview Anywhere: Fantastic or Annoying?
Tags:

Tyme's Not Too Geeky :
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Wed, 31 Jan 2007 20:20:47 GMT
NOFOLLOW Wikipedia
OMG! I just heard the news about Wikipedia adding NOFOLLOW to external links. For more than a year now, Wikipedia has been internalizing its linking in a campaign against spam. This turned into a witch hunt and the editors started removing all external links, even very useful ones. Further, it was severely affecting the usefulness of their wiki and led me to saying Wikipedia sucks. This did not stop the link spam. Did anybody actually think that would work? Now they've implemented a new strategy of using the NOFOLLOW attribute on external links. This is clearly a better approach, but adding this to its previous actions and they are looking like Google juice hogs. This will further increase the SERP rankings of Wikipedia pages. Yikes!
Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:40:34 GMT
Technorati WTF?

Technorati is the latest in a long line of companies trying to create their own Digg. This Digg clone will be called WTF (Where's The Fire?). Steve Rubel has a screenshot. WTF was launched, but is currently 404 (missing).

http://www.technorati.com/wtf

More bloggers blogging about WTF...

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:59:54 GMT
Wikipedia OCD

There's a new blog about Wikipedia OCD patients. It's pretty funny and so true.

http://wikipediaocd.wordpress.com/

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:34:53 GMT
Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Geeking with Greg: MyBlogLog and spam
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:02:40 GMT
OPML Workstation

Jim Moore imported the base OPML file for the iBLOGthere4iM blog and showed me some of the new features in OPMLWorkstation. If you clicks Next Action in the header bar, you'll see a bunch of options to export your outline. From there you can get the HTLM to embed a Grazr widget or subscribe to all the RSS feeds in the OPML via Rmail. Very cool!

http://www.opmlworkstation.com/browse/kbcafe/

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 01:05:33 GMT
Monday, January 29, 2007

MyBlogLog Straining Under the Load? | Marketing Pilgrim
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Mon, 29 Jan 2007 03:21:56 GMT
Sunday, January 28, 2007

IE7 RSS Reader notification add on - TechLifeBlogged
Tags:

EnhanceIE.com - Feeds Plus
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Mon, 29 Jan 2007 03:16:59 GMT
Removing MyBlogLog?

One of the top blog entry titles of late is Removing MyBlogLog. The reason. It's too slow. I will have to do this myself, if performance doesn't quickly improve. Is anybody else tired of Yahoo! taking over great products and killing them?

Update: Changed my mind. I'm removing them. I was updating my AdSense. Two birds. One stone.

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 01:54:15 GMT
Saturday, January 27, 2007

rssmarketing.fr » Blog Archive » Le RSS popularisé grace à Window Vista
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Sat, 27 Jan 2007 20:52:15 GMT
My Life As An RSS Junkie
"My name is Kirk Biglione and I have a problem. I’m addicted to RSS."

read more | digg story
Sat, 27 Jan 2007 20:09:10 GMT
Finish Your RSS

Where Do You Think You're Going, Mister!?

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 03:02:29 GMT
Friday, January 26, 2007

Geeking with Greg: The endless nagging of RSS readers
Tags:

danbri’s foaf stories » Doxory FOAF and OpenID
Tags:

Bloggy Network Sells Blog Directories at The Blog Herald
Tags:

Bloggers Blog: Three Blog and RSS Directories Sold
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Fri, 26 Jan 2007 04:13:01 GMT
Thursday, January 25, 2007

Nick Bradbury: Google Groups Feeds
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Thu, 25 Jan 2007 03:59:09 GMT
Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Wired News: Supersize Your RSS
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Wed, 24 Jan 2007 05:33:03 GMT
Tuesday, January 23, 2007

More advice for RSS developers
Tags:

Google Operating System: Google Adds Blog Search OneBox
Tags:

Google Adds RSS Snippets To Personalized Home Page
Tags:

RSS Company Syndicate IQ Shuts Down
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:03:50 GMT
Pop goes the Bubble

The announcements are starting to flow. More and more Web 2.0 startups are shutting down as predicted.

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:05:37 GMT
MyBlogLog + Flickr = ?

MyBlogLog has done some sort of integration with Flickr, another Yahoo! property. The integration point seems to be that you can now see your Flickr photos in your MyBlogLog pics and select one of them as your default.

http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/now_with_flickr.html

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 05:01:47 GMT
Monday, January 22, 2007

Getting Visitor Ownership in a Cluttered Internet World
Tags:

All Good Things… « François Schiettecatte’s Blog
Tags:

Sam Ruby: Overriding xml:base
Tags:

Egress - RSS Reader for the PocketPC
Tags:

RSS for checking blogs still hasn't caught on - Internet - www.itnews.com.au
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:51:50 GMT
Sunday, January 21, 2007

rssmarketing.fr » Encore un site Yahoo sans flux RSS
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Sun, 21 Jan 2007 16:43:15 GMT
RSS rally turns violent, one killed
One person was killed and three were wounded when police opened fire to quell communal violence during a RSS function [cut] on Sunday.

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1075584

OK, the syndication wars have gone too far this time ;-)

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 00:28:20 GMT
Saturday, January 20, 2007

Are You Paying Attention?: Who invented RSS?
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Sat, 20 Jan 2007 00:57:02 GMT
Friday, January 19, 2007

Technorati: Some days you get the bear… « Crazy Canuck Chronicles
Tags:

Are You Paying Attention?: Told ya so... Myspace bans widgets
Tags:

Bloggers Blog: Bloglines Still Dominant Web-based RSS Reader
Tags:

Micro Persuasion: Yahoo Launches Another Site Without RSS
Tags:

Friday Poll: What Type Of RSS Reader Do You Use?
Tags:

» FeedButton Adds Stats » InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel
Tags:

PlagiarismToday » Safer Without FeedBurner?
To Eric and Dick, this is a feature request.
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Fri, 19 Jan 2007 02:52:36 GMT
Thursday, January 18, 2007

The Social Networking Weblog: MySpace Is a Natural Monopoly
so WAS Friendster
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Thu, 18 Jan 2007 16:30:12 GMT
Not so del.icio.us?

Marjolein Hoekstra is reporting that links she's sending via the del.icio.us for tag are not arriving at their destinations.

Update: More from Marj.

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 15:47:19 GMT
Blogosphere Search Survey

I'm preparing to write a fifth segment in my State of Blogosphere Search articles and was looking for some feedback on which blog search engines are actually being used. Please complete this small survey (4 questions) on Blogosphere Search Engines if you want a voice in what blog search engines will appear in the article. The survey will close in one week. All the results are public.

http://multivote.sparklit.com/web_poll.spark/15152

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 03:48:15 GMT
10 Advanced RSS tricks

Nicolas D'Agostino gives us 10 advanced RSS tricks. Some new RSS related websites he introduced me too.

  1. http://feedblendr.com/
  2. http://www.feedshake.com/
  3. http://www.simpletracking.com/
  4. http://www.pligg.com/
  5. http://www.xfruits.com/
Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:18:48 GMT
DTD for RSS 0.9 and 0.91

Chris Finke: Until July 1, 2007, the DTDs for RSS 0.9 and 0.91 will be available via my.netscape.com. If you are a software developer, use this time to ensure that your RSS software is capable of displaying RSS feeds even if the DTD is unavailable, or have a backup copy cached locally for your parser to use in the absence of the specified DTD. If you are a content provider, either update your feeds to point to another copy of the DTD, or accept the fact that your feed may not be available through feed readers that don't have a backup plan in the case of a missing DTD.

http://blog.netscape.com/2007/01/16/to-dtd-or-not-to-dtd/

Randy: Let me suggest an alternative to anybody that is producing a DTD dependent RSS feed. Use RSS 2.0 instead. The upgrade is quite simple, sometimes requiring only the deletion of a couple lines of code and upping the version attribute.

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:11:51 GMT
Coupons via RSS

Mark Woodman points us to Saletastic.com's coupon RSS feed. You simply create an account (yuk), select which categories or companies you want coupons for and they provide you with your own custom RSS feed.

http://www.saletastic.com/rss/signup.asp

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 02:54:00 GMT
Sunday, January 14, 2007

RSS Tools and Services - The Best Picks From Sharewood - Robin Good's Latest News
Tags:

Introduce Us To Your Neighbors! « Lonely Marketer
Tags:

SocialCASTER confessions from a marketing zombie: MyBlogLog Meme
Tags:

PurpleWren: Who's In Your MyBlogLog Community?
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Sun, 14 Jan 2007 01:28:42 GMT
RSS Feed State Draft

This is a first draft of an RSS Feed State specification that I intend to present to the RSS Advisory Board for adoption as a specification. Any feedback would be great. Typo checkers would be very welcome. Grammar checkers would be adored. It's based on an older RSS feed state document, I wrote several years back.

RSS Feed State

by Randy Charles Morin

Introduction #

The RSS Spec describes an XML format, but does not describe how RSS feeds change or when and how RSS clients should be checking for updates to the RSS file. This specification attempts to fill this gap.

RSS is just XML #

It's very important to remember that RSS is just structured XML , that is, the elements, attributes and their order is defined by a specification. Their are three widely used RSS formats; RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. I suggest that RSS publishers use RSS 2.0 as it's the fastest growing of the formats and most widely supporters by RSS readers. Because it's just XML, most of this document is about XML feed state and applies equally well to other XML formats, like CDF and Atom. In fact, many of the techniques described here-in also apply equally well to other non-XML formats. It's not like were inventing the wheel here, these techniques have been used for years by Web client and servers to interchange documents.

Syndication Hints #

RSS itself specifies several techniques for guiding the RSS reader in pulling RSS feeds over the Web. These techniques are quite often neglected by both RSS publishers and RSS readers. In order for these syndication hints to be affective, both the RSS publisher and the RSS reader must respect them.

skipHours and skipDays #

Who should implement?
RSS readers MUST and RSS publishers CAN.

How useful is this mechanism?
Very useful in specific circumstances.
Not widely implemented.

Many of us sleep and during those sleeping hours, we rarely blog. Many of us work and during those working hours, we rarely blog. So, why then are RSS readers pulling our feeds during those down hours? Well, truth is, they don't have to. RSS 2.0 and 0.91 both implemented a great syndication hint that told RSS readers when to avoid reading the RSS feed. By adding these elements to our RSS feeds, we're telling RSS readers to stop polling during these hours or even days. This can have a very positive affect on the bandwidth requirements of your Weblog. The following is an example RSS 2.0 feed that tells the RSS reading client not to poll the RSS feed during the six hours from 6AM GMT to 11AM GMT (until noon) and neither to poll the entire day of Sunday.

<rss version="2.0">
   <channel>
      <description>News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.</description>
      <link>http://www.scripting.com/</link>
      <title>Scripting News</title>
      <skipHours>
         <hour>6</hour>
         <hour>7</hour>
         <hour>8</hour>
         <hour>9</hour>
         <hour>10</hour>
         <hour>11</hour>
      </skipHours>
      <skipDays>
         <day>Sunday</day>
      </skipDays>
      <item>
         <title>stuff</title>
      </item>
   </channel>
</rss>

This would reduce the bandwidth required to serve the feed by about one third. Of course, this depends entire on whether your readers use well behaved RSS readers and the times of the day they read your blog. Of course, if you blog all days of the week and all hours of the day, then this syndication hint won't be of much help.

A technique I once used to reduce bandwidth in rare blogging hours was to put every second hour. This allowed RSS readers to poll my feed every second hour during my non-blogging hours and every hour otherwise. I didn't want a six hour polling gap, just in case, I was awake at 3AM and wanted to get my message out as quickly as possible.

TTL #

Who should implement?
RSS readers SHOULD, centralized RSS
aggregators MUST and RSS publishers CAN.

How useful is this mechanism?
Somewhat useful.

TTL or time to live is another great syndication hint available in RSS 2.0. It's defined as "a number of minutes that indicates how long a channel can be cached before refreshing from the source." It's a hint telling you how long you can cache the RSS feed. An RSS reader could use this hint to automatically set the polling interval for the RSS feed. The following is an example RSS feed that sets the refresh hint to two hours.

<rss version="2.0">
   <channel>
      <description>News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.</description>
      <link>http://www.scripting.com/</link>
      <title>Scripting News</title>
      <ttl>120</ttl>
      <item>
         <title>stuff</title>
      </item>
   </channel>
</rss>

Most RSS readers poll the source RSS feeds once per hour by default . If you don't blog very often and are not concerned with how quickly your message is read by your readers, then a larger TTL value can significantly reduce the bandwidth requirements of your RSS feed. On the other hand, if you want to get your message out there quickly and are not worried about the bandwidth consumption, then a lower TTL can get RSS clients to pull your RSS feed more often.

It's very important to note that nobody is suggesting that an RSS reader shouldn't poll the RSS feed more frequently than the TTL value indicates. Rather, the TTL value is telling the RSS reader that the feed data is good for so many minutes and that it only needs to refresh from source when the TTL is exceeded. This is a very small distinction, but an important one, because there's no contract that says an RSS client can't poll an RSS feed every five minutes regarless of the TTL value.

Syndication Module #

Who should implement?
RSS readers SHOULD and RSS publishers CAN.

How useful is this mechanism?
Somewhat useful, but not widely implemented.

RSS 1.0 implements a mechanism similar to TTL called the RDF Site Summary Syndication Module. This module is a bit more flexible than TTL, but rarely used. Again, the technique is not a contract telling RSS readers to limit polling to this interval, but rather a hint to the RSS reader as to how often the feed is generally updated. Although the syndication module is intended for RSS 1.0, the extensibility of RSS 2.0 allows you to use it, but you might find it's not well supported.

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
   xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
   xmlns= "http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"><BR>  <channelrdf:about="http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/?_fl=rss1.0">
      <title>Meerkat</title>
      <link>http://meerkat.oreillynet.com</link>
      <description>Meerkat: An Open Wire Service</description>
      <sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
      <sy:updateFrequency>2</sy:updateFrequency>
      <sy:updateBase>2000-01-01T12:00+00:00</sy:updateBase>
 
   </channel>
</rdf:RDF>

The exactness of this RSS extension would normally allow you to exactly control the polling of the RSS feed, but both the RSS publisher and RSS reader must implement the mechanism and it is sparsely implemented.

HTTP is not stateless #

To this point, I've identified a few RSS mechanisms for controlling the state of RSS feeds. The next few sections describe the state of your RSS feed as a Web document. Remember that your RSS feed is really just another object that is transferred over HTTP, the protocol of the Web. As such, it takes on all the attributes of HTTP objects and contrary to what we'd like to believe HTTP is not stateless. Whenever you make an HTTP request and whenever you receive an HTTP response, the HTTP package contains a set of headers that are easily extended to provide HTTP with all sorts of state data. Many of these state attribute and other HTTP attributes are described in the following sections.

Cacheability #

Who should implement?
RSS readers MUST and RSS publishers CAN.

How useful is this mechanism?
Somewhat useful.

HTTP implements are very elaborate mechanism for increasing performance called response caching. The algorithm is describe in the HTTP/1.1 RFC in various sections. The RFC sections on Caching in HTTP and Cache-Control describe most of what you would require in order to implement an HTTP response cache, but the protocol is quite extensive and many HTTP libraries have these mechanisms built-in.  I suggest implementing one of the existing libraries.

The advantages of Cacheability in the arena of RSS only arise when you use shared caches, that is, when serveral RSS readers are behind the same Web proxy. If several RSS readers were behind the same Web proxy, then the feed can be cached by the Web proxy and served to more than one user.

The question always arises on how to implement HTTP/1.0 cacheability. First, any RSS readers or publishers that implement HTTP/1.0 are simply wrong. HTTP/1.1 is widely implemented and every RSS reader should be making HTTP/1.1 requests. That said, there are a lot of RSS readers that have chosen for some ridiculous reason to implement HTTP/1.0. I almost feel like telling you to ignore HTTP/1.0 requests, but you might not like this response. Rather, I suggest that all RSS readers should make HTTP/1.1 requests, knowing that all RSS publishers have implemented this version of the protocol and that RSS publishers handle HTTP/1.1 request as best possible and HTTP/1.0 requests as minimally as possible. In other words, do the least work possible when handling cacheability and all the other HTTP attributes of HTTP/1.0 requests. Again, that said, if you find your bandwidth is out-of-control, implementing HTTP/1.0 attributes for cacheability and compression can help, but not much.

If you need more help implementing Cacheability, then Mark Nottingham has a great article on HTTP Caches.

Entity Tags #

Who should implement?
RSS readers MUST and RSS publishers SHOULD.

How useful is this mechanism?
Very useful in reducing bandwidth requirements.

Entity tags or ETags are a hash of the response content, a.k.a. cache validator. It is passed in the HTTP response headers. The client saves the Etag and next time he requests the same URL, he includes the Etag as the If-None-Match header. If the Etag matches the current representation, then Web server responds with the HTTP 304 status code and no content. This tells the RSS reader that the content has not changed since the previous request. If the Etag doesn't match the current representation, then the RSS feed is returned in the response content, as usual.

Last Modified #

Who should implement?
RSS readers MUST and RSS publishers CAN.
RSS publishers SHOUD use Entity Tags.

How useful is this mechanism?
Somewhat useful in reducing bandwidth requirements.

Another form of cache validation is the Last-Modified header. It works similar to the ETag, except that it's based on time, rather than some sort of content hash. That's not to say that ETags can't also be dates, but ETags are not limited to dates, whereas Last-Modified headers are dates and only dates.

ETags are often referred to as the strong cache validator, that's because ETags are not based on artificial hash of the image. Dates on the other hand are an artificial hash of an image. To explain, if you have a hit counter on a page, then two simultaneous pulls would produce the same Last-Modified date, but two different ETags. An insignificant difference, but one none-the-less. This is not to say that an ETag must be a strong cache validator, it may also be weak.

Last-Modified works in the same manner as the Entity Tags, except that the Last-Modified header value returned in an HTTP response is passed as the If-Modified-Since HTTP header in future HTTP requests.

Gzip #

Who should implement?
RSS readers SHOULD and RSS publishers CAN.

How useful is this mechanism?
Very useful in reducing bandwidth requirements.

HTTP also provides a mechanism for compressing the response content. The RSS reader can pass either gzip or compress in the Accept-Encoding HTTP header to tell the Web server that it is capable of understanding compressed responses. Gzip works the same for both HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1.

GZip, ETag and Cacheability are not widely supported by all RSS publishers and readers, but the goal of this document is to change that. RSS software developers, let's get busy.

Redirect #

Who should implement?
RSS readers MUST implement 302 redirect.
RSS readers SHOULD implement 301 redirects.
RSS readers SHOULD implement XML redirects.
RSS publishers CAN implement any.

How useful is this mechanism?
Very useful in maintain subscriptions.

Sometimes you need to move a feed from one URL to another. For example, services like FeedBurner host your RSS on your behalf. After hosting with FeedBurner you might decide to move your feed back to a URL within your own domain. FeedBurner implements an HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect for a ten day period after you decide to move your feed URL.

Most RSS readers currently treat HTTP 301 permanent redirects as temporary redirects and don't update their database. This is a good start, but his causes an extra redundant network cycle forever going forward. Rather, RSS clients SHOULD update their database, replacing the original RSS feed URL with the new RSS feed URL returned by the HTTP 301 response.

RSS feed publishers may also temporarily redirect your RSS feed URL by returning an HTTP 302 Temporary Redirect. RSS clients MUST NOT uupdate their database when they receive an HTTP 302 response.

A last type of redirect is an XML level redirect. These should be treated the same as HTTP 301 response.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<redirect>
   <newLocation>http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRssBlog<newLocation>
</redirect>

Gone #

Who should implement?
RSS readers MUST and RSS publishers CAN.

How useful is this mechanism?
Somewhat useful.

Finally when an RSS feed is over, when it's life has been served and you no longer want to incur the bandwidth of clients repeatedly requesting a stale RSS for the rest of time, how do you tell the client to stop requesting me. This is simple. If you respond with an HTTP 410 status code, then you are "notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed." That's a quote from the HTTP RFC.

But, not everybody has the Web server control to respond 410 to requests. Especially if you have a shared Web server, this may not be possible at all. In this case, I suggest you respond with the following tidbit of XML that tells the RSS reader that you are no longer servicing this request.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<redirect>
   <newLocation/>
</redirect>

User-Agent #

Who should implement?
Centralized RSS readers that poll on behalf of multiple
end-users SHOULD and RSS publishers CAN.

How useful is this mechanism?
Somewhat useful.

RSS feed services like FeedBurner and Fedafi use the User-Agent header to determine which RSS clients are polling their feeds. They can even use the volume and IP address of polls to determine how many clients are actually polling a feed. When trying to compile accurate reader stats, a problem occurs when a single RSS client is polling a feed on behalf of more than one end-user. In this case, many RSS clients have adopted a mechanism of overloading the User-Agent in the RSS request to pass this meta-data. A sample HTTP User-Agent header is shown with the overloaded data.

User-Agent: kb.Rmail (http://www.r-mail.org; 500 subscribers)

Pinging #

Who should implement?
RSS readers and RSS publishers CAN.

How useful is this mechanism?
Somewhat useful.

Most of this document has been about reducing bandwidth by controlling when an RSS client polls your feed. Pinging has the exact opposite purpose. If you want a RSS client to immediately poll and index your feed, then you can use an HTTP GET or XML-RPC ping to tell many RSS clients that you have new or updated blog entries that are ready for indexing. The ping has long been a part of the blogosphere infrastructure and was started by Dave Winer on a website called weblogs.com, which he later sold to Verisign.

HTTP Ping #

An HTTP GET ping request is very simple. It's a very simple HTTP GET request. For example, if I wanted to tell Weblogs.com that The RSS Blog has been updated, then I issue the following HTTP GET requests.

 http://rpc.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm?name=The+RSS+Blog&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com/rss

Simply change the name and url parameters to URI encoded values for your blog to ping the Weblogs.com website. If the ping request succeeds, then the response should have the HTTP 200 status code and the content should be an HTML human readable page indicating this status. If the ping request files, then the response should have the appropriate non-HTTP 200 status code and the content should be an HTML human readable page informing the user why the request failed.

XML-RPC Ping #

Who should implement?
RSS aggregators CAN and RSS publishers SHOULD.

How useful is this mechanism?
Very useful in specific circumstances.

The XML-RPC ping is a lot more complicated. In fact, there are two different kinds of XML-RPC pings; simple and extended pings.

Simple Ping Request #

In the simple XML-RPC ping, the request contains two parameters, the name and url of the website or blog that has changed. The url can either be the HTML homepage of the site or the RSS feed for the site. The XML-RPC method is 'weblogUpdates.ping' (without the quotes). A sample simple XML-RPC ping request is shown.

POST /RPC2 HTTP/1.0
Host: rpc.weblogs.com
Content-Type: text/xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
 <methodName>weblogUpdates.ping</methodName>
 <params>
  <param>
   <value>The RSS Blog</value>
  </param>
  <param>
   <value>https://rssweblog.com/</value>
  </param>
 </params>
</methodCall>

Extended Ping Request #

In the extended XML-RPC ping, the request contains four or five parameters. The first two parameters are still the name and url of the website or blog. The second parameter in the extended ping is always the url of the homepage and not the url of the RSS feed. The third parameter is the url of the webpage that has changed. The fourth parameter the url of the RSS feed. The fifth parameter and only optional parameter is a delimited list of categories or tags associated with the blog. The delimiter is the '|' character. The XML-RPC method is 'weblogUpdates.extendedPing' (without the quotes). A sample extended XML-RPC ping request is shown.

POST /RPC2 HTTP/1.0
Host: rpc.weblogs.com
Content-Type: text/xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
 <methodName>weblogUpdates.extendedPing</methodName>
 <params>
  <param>
   <value>The RSS Blog</value>
  </param>
  <param>
   <value>https://rssweblog.com/</value>
  </param>
  <param>
   <value>https://rssweblog.com/</value>
  </param>
  <param>
   <value>http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRssBlog</value>
  </param>
  <param>
   <value>rss|opml</value>
  </param>
 </params>
</methodCall>

Ping Response #

Whether  you issue a simple or extended ping request, the response has similar form. The response is a struct with two named parameters, flerror and message. The flerror is a boolean. If the request succeeds, the flerror is 0 (false), otherwise it is 1 (true). The message describes the success or failure of the requests in human readable language and can be used to best describe the reason for any failures. A sample response is shown.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/xml
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 20:02:30 GMT

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodResponse>
 <params>
  <param>
   <value>
    <struct>
     <member>
      <name>flerror</name>
      <value>
       <boolean>0</boolean>
      </value>
     </member>
     <member>
      <name>message</name>
      <value>Your ping succeeded!</value>
     </member>
    </struct>
   </value>
  </param>
 </params>
</methodResponse>

Who to ping? #

There are many different ping sinks on the Internet that want your pings, too many. I'll list a few of the major ping servers.

Ping Sink Instructions HTTP GET XML-RPC
Weblogs.com http://www.weblogs.com/api.html http://rpc.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm?name={0}&url={1} http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
Yahoo! http://publisher.yahoo.com/submit.php http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u={0} http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com/services/api/ http://www.bloglines.com/ping?url={0} http://www.bloglines.com/ping
IceRocket http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping&url={0} http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
Technorati http://technorati.com/ping http://technorati.com/ping?url={0} http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
FeedBurner http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/ping http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink={0} http://ping.feedburner.com

Note that you wouldn't normally want to ping FeedBurner unless they were hosting your RSS feed.

Retrieving Pings #

One unfortunate part of the pinging infrastructure is that the ping sinks get advance notification of changes to most blogs. This makes it very difficult for new blogosphere services to participate on equal footing with the established services. Helping those new services compete is weblogs.com changes.xml infrastructure. As weblogs.com receives new ping, they update two files; changes.xml [http://rpc.weblogs.com/changes.xml] and shortChanges.xml [http://rpc.weblogs.com/shortChanges.xml]. The first contains all the recent pings in the last hours and the second contains all the recent pings in the last 5 minutes. Further, weblogs.com archives a list of all the pings its receives in each hour. All pings received in the first hour of January 1st 2007 would be archived in the file http://www.weblogs.com/2007/01/01/01.xml.

The format of these XML files is pretty straight forward. A very small sample of the XML file is shown.

<weblogUpdates version="2" updated="Sat, 13 Jan 2007 19:08:00 GMT" count="2000001">
 <weblog name="The RSS Blog" url="http://www.kbcafe.com/rss" when="1"/>
 <weblog name="iBLOGthere4iM" url="http://www.kbcafe.com/iBLOGthere4iM" when="2"/>
</weblogUpdates>

The root element has three unimportant attributes; version, updated and count. The updated attribute is a formatted date representing the time this file was retrieved. The count attribute is the total number of pings received by weblogs.com.

The important part of this document is the weblog elements contained within the weblogUpdates root. For each ping received, a new record is created with three attributes; name, url and when. The name and url attribute are the name and url submitted in the ping request above. The when attribute in the number of minutes since the ping was received.

Note that you shouldn't pull the changes.xml file too frequently, but should rather use the shortChanges.xml when you need updates as frequently as every 5 minutes.

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 00:16:44 GMT
Saturday, January 13, 2007

RSS Ping
Tags:

MyBlogLog Community Meme - Andy Beard
Tags:

ConverStations: MyBlogLog Community Meme
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Sat, 13 Jan 2007 21:19:48 GMT
Friday, January 12, 2007

rssmarketing.fr » Boutons d’abonnements pour promouvoir vos Flux RSS
Tags:

Cornwall SEO » Why Mybloglog.com is the worst social network in the world
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Sat, 13 Jan 2007 15:26:42 GMT
MyBlogLog in Sidebar
I wanted to get a little more familiar with Yahoo! new MyBlogLog. I've added a widget to the sidebar and setup the entire kbcafe.com domain as a site. The immediate coolness is that I can now read (and subscribe) the blogs of my readers.
Sat, 13 Jan 2007 03:10:16 GMT
RSS Subscriber Count in User-Agent

A couple years back, many RSS clients started communicating subscriber data to FeedBurner via the User-Agent HTTP header. Now Fedafi wants to do the same thing. I think it's time that the RSS Advisory Board formalize some of these mechanisms. I'm going to include this in my RSS Feed State document and recommend it for adoption by the board.

http://blog.fedafi.com/2007/01/12/rss-subscriber-standard-for-user-agents/

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 02:10:56 GMT
Thursday, January 11, 2007

The Digital Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Seven ways to quick add feed subscription buttons to your blog
Tags:

RSS Tuning with Attensa and Real Time Matrix
Tags:

Kris Brower » Blog Archive » Top 100 Duplicate Digg Comments from 2006
Tags:

Micro Persuasion: Disney.com 2.0 to Get Widgetized, But Is It Enough?
Tags:

Snipperoo: Disney.com 2.0 to Get Widgetized?
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:48:36 GMT
Ask The RSS Advisory Board

Mark Woodman asked the RSS Advisory Board some tough questions.

I would very much like to see a clear statement about the vision of the board moving forward. Since the RSS 2.0 spec can't be changed - as per DW - what are the significant contributions the board intends to make?

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/message/1210

As a member of the board, I tried to clarify one point on the list, that is, that the board is responsible for changing the spec. In the year since I was appointed to the advisory board, I think we've made some great progress.

I expect the next year to be just as productive. And I've already got some stuff in the works.

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:27:16 GMT
Wednesday, January 10, 2007

OPML Icon Project
Tags:

Micro Persuasion: OPML Icons and Hacks
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:02:15 GMT
Tuesday, January 09, 2007

iPhone Revealed - TechLifeBlogged
Tags:

Boom! iPhone Rocks Tech World
Tags:

Technorati Weblog: We fixed a bug; link counts increase!
kbcafe.com rank is 701. r-mail.org rank is 827.
Tags:

Zoli's Blog :: Let's Not Spam MyBlogLog
Tags:

U-DOO for Wirefly
Tags:

Yahoo buys MyBlogLog — but why? » Mathew Ingram: mathewingram.com/work
Tags:

Conde Nast Courts Brides on MySpace · MarketingVOX
In its first Myspace advertising campaign to promote website Brides.com , Conde Nast is offering bridal widgets for brides to be.
Tags:

The Ag - Aggregated daily news from Time Magazine - TechLifeBlogged
Tags:

MyBlogLog joins Yahoo, is this good? -- A View from the Isle
Tags:

The MyBlogLog Blog: The Jig is Up -- MyBlogLog joins Yahoo!
Tags:

MyBlogLog Acquired by Yahoo - Grist To The Distributed Network Mill
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:31:13 GMT
Monday, January 08, 2007

davidrothman.net » Blog Archive » 5 Best Tips for Reducing RSS Information Overload
Tags:

RSS aggregator that gets podcasts to play on the TV
Tags:

Gallery and Hands On: Sony BRAVIA Internet Video Link Box - Gizmodo
Tags:

Sony Electronics News and Information
Tags:

Digg Scares Me (403 Go Away!)
More anti-Digg ridiculousness
Tags:

Assigning Blame is Not a Solution
Tags:

Sifry's Alerts: Happy Taggiversary!
Tags:

Geeking with Greg: Findory API expanded
Tags:

ProgrammableWeb.com » Blog Archive » Personalize via the Findory APIs
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Mon, 08 Jan 2007 22:38:06 GMT
Blogroll Returns

I've returned a blogroll to the right sidebar (bottom) of The RSS Blog. It's a list of blogs of the existing and past members of the RSS Advisory Board and a few feeds specific to the board. Here's the OPML. If you think your blog deserves to be there, then drop me a link. Hey Mark.

https://rssweblog.com/rssadvisoryboard.xml

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:00:05 GMT
It's Time for Blogs

Time.com: Now you can start your day by checking our news blog, The Ag, which smartly aggregates and summarizes the most important stories from daily newspapers and blogs around the world.

http://time-blog.com/theag/

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:45:08 GMT
The DeadPool

Is it the beginning of the end of Web 2.0? Of course not. The web didn't die when the dotCOM bubble burst and neither will Web 2.0. But, if you read the headlines, there's a lot of talk about DeadPool. Zoli. Fred. Mike. This year we've seen several layoffs already and a photo-sharing website selling at approximately its paid-in capital. It appears the Web 2.0 money is beginning to dry up. It was fun.

More...

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 03:03:23 GMT
Sunday, January 07, 2007

» Blogger Lets You Use Your Own Domain » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel
Tags:

Share Your OPML » View Shared Feeds Of Randy Charles Morin
814
Tags:

I'm a big RSS user - 20 feeds or so
hehe, I'm at 814
Tags:

Bloggers Blog: Should Digg Fear Pligg?
The price of success? Everybody wants to predict your demise.
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Sun, 07 Jan 2007 03:46:19 GMT
Saturday, January 06, 2007

How to Get More From Google Reader - TechLifeBlogged
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Sat, 06 Jan 2007 00:33:52 GMT
Friday, January 05, 2007

Jason Blogs » Nexus Trade Has Wishlists
Tags:

Improved caching on tag cloud widget for WordPress -- Chip’s Tips for Developers
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Fri, 05 Jan 2007 17:54:58 GMT
Thursday, January 04, 2007

Burning Questions • A 360 Degree View of Audience Engagement
Tags:

» Google Reader Shows Trends » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel
Tags:

How to Change the World: Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn
Tags:

Track Your RSS Reading Trends With Google Reader | Marketing Pilgrim
Tags:

EirePreneur: Google Reader's new tag clouds and personal trends
Tags:

Practical Blogging » Blog Archive » LinkedIN Launches Answers
Tags:

RelevantNoise.com » BuzzMetrics Lists 18 Blogs Responsible For The 100 Most Popular Posts Of 2006
Tags:

Official Google Reader Blog: I like big charts and I cannot lie
Tags:

Are You Paying Attention?: Congratulations to Google - Attention Data Matters
Tags:

Googlified » Blog Archive » Google Reader Now Shows Stats
Tags:

Micro Persuasion: Google Reader Tracks Personal Attention Metadata
Tags:

25,000 items read on Google Reader « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Thu, 04 Jan 2007 07:41:19 GMT
FeedBurner SiteStats

Simone Carletti is reporting (in Italian) that SiteStats is available to PRO users. I can confirm that I see a new Site Stats item in the left sidebar of the Analyze tab in FeedBurner. I was able to go to Standard Stats and enable site tracking. Since I already have FeedFlare, I don't need to add additional code. I'll report back what happens. FYI, I'm not a PRO user of FeedBurner. Really!

http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/2007/01/feedburner_site_stats.php

More...

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 07:19:32 GMT
Wednesday, January 03, 2007

The Next Net: 2007: The Web Widget
Tags:

Bloggers Blog: 2007 Year of the Widget?
Tags:

Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard » Blog Archive » The "invention" of RSS and the snowball effect
Tags:

Random Bytes...by Ross Rader :: RSS: Not Invented Here
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Wed, 03 Jan 2007 06:32:07 GMT
Tuesday, January 02, 2007

The unedited voice of a person
Tags:

Bloggers Blog: A Blog Without MyBlogLog is Still a Blog
Tags:

Blogging Roller: Dear Digg.com, please fix your MetaWeblog API support
Tags:

Amazon Web Services Blog: Welcome to 2007 - Let's Talk Mashups
Tags:

Wikians versus busblog
Tags:

Wired 15.01: START
Tags:

The MineThatData Blog: Four Out Of 150 Online Retailers Truly Leverage RSS Feeds
Tags:

2007 trend maps (kottke.org)
Tags:

Snipperoo: Widget Predictions
Tags:

Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | Atom Publishing Protocol Draft 12'
Tags:

Blogging Roller: New Atom protocol spec draft and Queen City planets
Tags:

Google Holds Off Migration of Large Blogs to New Blogger » Digital Inspiration © Amit Agarwal
Tags:

The Race to Beat Google
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Wed, 03 Jan 2007 04:45:13 GMT
Technorati Favorite Buttons

Technorati has three buttons that allow your readers to add your blog to their Technorati favorite list. Samples of the buttons are shown. Note that the source given for the second button is incorrect (change the .png image extension to .gif).

Add to Technorati Favorites

Add to Technorati Favorites 

Add to Technorati Favorites

http://www.technorati.com/account/favbuttons.html

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 02:51:32 GMT
BuzzMetrics Ranks Top 2006 Posts

Bloggers Blog: Nielsen BuzzMetrics has released its list of the top blog posts in 2006. [cut]

  1. 2006 Petition Against Changes in the Livejournal Interface on mother.livejournal.com, linked by 801 posts
  2. Colbert Does the White House Correspondents Dinner on Crooks and Liars, linked by 622 posts
  3. Keith Olbermann Delivers One Hell Of a Commentary on Rumsfeld from Crooks and Liars, linked by 359 posts
  4. State of the Blogosphere, August 2006 from Sifry.com, linked by 339 posts.
  5. Keith Olbermann's Special Comment on Bush: Who has left this hole in the ground? We have not forgotten, Mr. President. You have. May this country forgive you. from Crooks and Liars, linked by 330 posts.
  6. Support Denmark: Why The Forbidden Cartoons Matter from MichelleMalkin.com, linked by 307 posts.
  7. SNL: If Al Gore were President from Crooks and Liars, linked by 286 posts.
  8. Milking it? from EU Referendum, linked by 284 posts.
  9. State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth from Sifry.com, linked by 282 posts.
  10. State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth from Sifry.com, linked by 269 posts.

http://www.nielsenbuzzmetrics.com/release.asp?id=172

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:11:37 GMT
RSS wasn't invented
Dave Winer says that "RSS wasn't invented". I usually agree with him on what happened, but surely someone at Netscape named Dan Libby surely did invent RSS. Did he contribute much to its growth? Not really. We can thank Dave for that, but Dan can still say he invented it. Not that I was there.
Tue, 02 Jan 2007 19:03:37 GMT
Technorati Link Count Widget

The Technorati link count widget looks pretty cool! I've got a lot of widgets right now, so I'll skip adding this one under fear of more reader complaints ;-)

http://technorati.com/tools/linkcount/

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 18:43:12 GMT
Social Website Survey

Please take this very small (4 questions) social website survey. We'll publish the results in February. Thanks!

http://www.kbcafe.com/myspace/?guid=20070102104016

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 16:38:07 GMT
2006 KBCafe Blog Awards

Voting for the KBCafe blog awards will terminate at 11PM PST on January 10th. You can vote with the following form. You can vote for zero, 1 or more blogs in each category. Thanks!

KBCafe Blog Award
1. Best Google Blog

Inside Google
Matt Cutts
2. Best Yahoo! Blog

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search Blog
3. Best Microsoft Blog

Alex Barnett
The Unauthorized Microsoft Weblog
Carnage4Life
InsideMicrosoft
4. Best Apple Blog

AppleWatch
The Unofficial Apple Weblog
The Mac Observer
5. Best Toronto Blog

Spacing Wire
Torontoist
BlogTO
6. Best Sillicon Valley Blog

Metroblogging Seattle
Metroblogging San Francisco
7. Best Web 2.0 Blog

Techcrunch
Read/Write Web
microformats
8. Best Webvertising Blog

ProBlogger
AdJab
Inside AdSense
JenSense
9. Best Syndication Blog

Intertwingly
RSS Applied
Scripting News
10. Best Internet Communication Blog

Skype Journal
The Jeff Pulver Blog
GigaOM
11. Best SEO Blog

Matt Cutts
Online Marketing Blog
Search Engine Roundtable
12. Best L.A.M.P. Blog

OnLamp
Loud Thinking
37 Signals
13. Best Wireless Blog

Pocket PC Thoughts
The Wireless Weblog
14. Best Music Blog

BGBlast
Zoilus
Curry.com
15. Best Malware Blog

F-Secure
worm blog
16. Best Gadgets Blog

I4U
Gizmodo
Engadget
17. Best Photo Blog

Mike Zamora
Cute Overload
FlickrBlog
photojunkie
daily dose of imagery
18. Best Video Blog

Josh Leo's Vlog
Steve Garfields Video Blog
Rocketboom
19. Best Movies Blog

Film Gecko
Cinematical
HD for Indies
The Movie Blog
20. Best Hollywood Insider Blog

Hollywood Fun Camp
John August
21. Best Video Games Blog

joystiq
The Frugal Gamer
Xbox 360 Fanboy
Kotaku
22. Best Baseball Blog

Baseball Musings
MetsBlog
Baseball Prospectus
23. Best Hockey Blog

Stats Blog
HockeyDirt
Hockey Rants
24. Best Scifi Blog

SF Signal
Craphound
25. Best War Blog

Talking Points Memo
Defense Tech
Kevin Sites
26. Best Vehicle Blog

Autoblog
GM's Fastlane Blog
Jalopnik
27. Best Right-Wing Blog

Little Green Footballs
The Hoffman's Hearsay
Michelle Malkin
Power Line
28. Best Left-Wing Blog

Think Progress
The Huffington Post
Wonkette
Gun-Toting Liberal
AmericaBlog
Instapundit
The Hoffman's Hearsay
29. Best Law Blog

The Volokh Conspiracy
Michael Geist
Groklaw
30. Best Venture Capital Blog

Venture Chronicles
The Post Money Value
Venture Blog
31. Best Marketing Blog

Seth's Blog
Micro Persuasion
Marketing Thoughts
32. Best Disease Blog

Diabetes Notes
Diabetes Mine
The Cancer Blog
33. Best Food Blog

Vegan Lunch Box
Cooking Gadgets
Megnut
Kitchen Contraptions
Slashfood
34. Best Anonymous or Former Employee Blog

Mini-Microsoft
Xooglers
35. Best New York Blog

Gothamist
Gawker
36. Best Japan Blog

Tokyo Times
Masamania
Sushi Cam
Japan Window
37. Best Middle East Blog

Iraq the Model
38. Best Web Design Blog

Zeldman
A List Apart
39. Best Web Services Blog

Ajaxian
Yahoo! Web Services Blog
Amazon Web Services Blog
40. Best Gambling Blog

OddJack
The Gambling Weblog
41. Best Basketball Blog

True Hoop
Chuck Swirsky
Blog Maverick
Raptor Blog
42. Best Football Blog

NFL Cheerleader Blog
The Blue Gray Sky
43. Best Religion Blog

GetReligion
The Evangelical Outpost
44. Best Anti-Fan Blog

Eye on Winer
Mini-Microsoft
45. Best Family Blog

Breed 'Em And Weep
flagrantdisregard
Dooce
46. Best Sex Blog

Sex Drive Daily
FleshBot
47. Best MySpace Blog

Mashable
Pimp MySpace

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 04:16:11 GMT
You don't Snap? You Suck!

I've seen this on a few blogs lately, but most recently on Ross' blog. These guys are onto something amazing. Here's hoping they have a couple patents in their backyard. It took me about 2 minutes to install their script on The RSS Blog. Hover over a link and check it out!

http://www.snap.com/

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 03:15:50 GMT
Top 5 Mashup Questions for 2007
What will be the trends, topics, etc. for mashups in 2007? “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future” said physicist Niels Bohr, or maybe it was Yogi Berra, but in that spirit I’m offering up questions, not...
blog.programmableweb.com/...

Some insightful questions and answers from John Musser

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 03:09:43 GMT
Monday, January 01, 2007

Welcome to Coladia : Postino - RSS/Atom Reader for MacOS X
Tags:

Posted with R|mail.
Mon, 01 Jan 2007 22:44:41 GMT
Web 2.0 Predictions for 2007

Yes, I know, up to one million, maybe more, of you have been waiting for just this post. Well here it is, Randy Charles Morin's Web 2.0 predictions for 2007. Let's just start with an acknowledgement that my 2006 predictions were near perfect, even if Joey is poking fun at one of them.

  1. At least two of the core Web 2.0 stars of NewsGator, SixApart, Technorati and FeedBurner will sell-out. I doubt Google would buy NewsGator, SixApart or Technorati, as they are competitive, not complimentary. Do the math. I'm guessing FeedBurner to either Yahoo! or Google. Congrats to Dick and Eric in advance!
  2. Somebody will release a new version of RSS or a competing syndication format. I'm stealing this one from last year. Whenever in doubt, somebody will simply re-create RSS.
  3. Following up on my predictions from last year, the Web 2.0 bubble is gonna blow in 2007. The fallout will not mirror its dot-Bomb forefather. It will be mild. But Web 2.0 companies that don't get bought or reach profitability are going to find it harder to raise additional capital. Some will fail. Some will sell-out below their paid-in capital.
  4. Microsoft's RSS Platform will become the new meat of the RSS universe. Many new RSS readers will emerge based on the platform and some will become Web 2.0 stars before Santa's next visit. Many of these new RSS readers will not be blog readers, but rather will be components of much broader applications.
  5. Windows Vista will spur a buying cycle in the PC industry. Expect Intel, Dell, HP and AMD to have great years. Microsoft will again break their all-time earnings, but this will be the last Windows-based PC buying cycle. The buying cycle will last two years and Vista will reach critical mass in 2008.
  6. RSS enclosures will enjoy new life as podcatchers move to the mainstream and to video. Download Rocketboom or your favorite YouTube series to your video capable handheld device.
  7. What about MySpace? The social network that is so ugly that every teenager in America has to have a really horrible looking profile where they can reveal private details to pedofiles? Expect more of the same. Continued, but slowing growth. A lot of partnerships, especially with other News Corp properties. The prediction is that nothing major is happening to the behemoth of social software.
  8. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is the rock of social software. Slow and steady growth (at least compared to other social websites) has been its trademark. This is gonna change. Sequoia Capital, the money, isn't in the business of running profitable companies. Expect them to flip LinkedIn for good coin, like they flipped YouTube, PayPal and others before.
  9. On the back of MySpace, widgets will enjoy accelerated growth. If you can't beat MySpace, then you might as well get your content on as many MySpace profiles as possible.
  10. Dave Winer will not retire his blog, as promised. He can't. It would be like me or you giving up breathing.

More predictions...

Copyright 2022 World Readable
RSS Spec
Drudge Retort
SportsFilter
Local Farmers Markets
Wargames.Com
Winnetoba Radio