The Web 2.0 Expo officially kicked off yesterday at the Moscone conference center in San Francisco, bringing together thousands of web technologists to learn new things and market new web products. I participated in conference planning as a program chair, selecting a range of topics to educate technical product managers on the latest web technology, specifically in the Web 2.0 Fundamentals track. I’m leading two sessions at the conference on feed syndication technologies and I’ll be in attendance all three days if you’d like to say hello.

Intermediate to Advanced Syndication

Web frameworks and software packages now feature basic support for syndication technologies such as RSS 2.0 and the Atom Syndication Format. I’ll step outside the default settings, introducing session attendees to the many use cases enabled by a standardized syndication format and a well-deployed base of parsing software.

A few of the topics I’ll cover in my 50-minute talk:

  • How is feed syndication used today?
  • Atom Syndication Format walkthrough
  • Common syndication mistakes
  • Optimizing your metadata
  • Feeds as a data API
  • Popular feed parsing libraries
  • Authenticated and private feeds
  • Atom messaging
  • Questions, and possibly some answers

I could go on and on but I somehow have to cram it all into 50 minutes and still leave time for a question and answer period. If you’ve been wondering how Feeds are the Intel Inside, come check out feed syndication talk at Web 2.0 Expo on Tuesday, April 17, from 4:50-5:40 p.m. in room 2008. I’m the last talk of the day, so there are enough geeky people in attendance we can stay after allotted time covering even more advanced or nuanced uses of feed syndication technology.

Feed Marketing Panel

Congratulations, you have a web feed. Now what? On Wednesday I will moderate a panel on feed syndication measurement, advertising, and search engine optimization. Bill Fritter of Pheedo, Don Loeb of FeedBurner, and Stephan M. Spencer of Netconcepts will share their feed marketing knowledge with the crowd, and answer questions from the crowd.

FeedBurner and Pheedo regularly trade veiled attacks on each company’s statistics and click-through rates, so this panel could get really interesting as panelists jockey for feed advertising dollars.

If you’re looking for marketing numbers to help build an argument for deeper involvement in feed syndication this is the session for you. The feed marketing panel takes place on Wednesday, April 18, from 1-1:50 p.m. in room 2002.