Category Archives: Feed aggregators

Feed aggregation and filtering software.

  1. Brands will be widgetized, but who is the author?

    Companies who embrace widgets may be less likely to suffer phishing attacks and bloated bandwidth consumed by third-party creations. Popular content will eventually find its way into widget platforms by scrape or by frame, and it's best to get ahead of the potential pitfalls and embrace the new medium. Two types of widgets have been on my mind this weekend as a potential issue for companies who fail to ride the widgets wave. Protecting user information Sites with personal user data placed behind a username and password may be subject to new types of phishing attacks from the widget web....

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  2. Feed publishing best practices

    Web feed syndication is made up of two base vocabularies: RSS 2.0 and the Atom Syndication Format. These base vocabularies are extended using namespaces to create a common set of expressions for your web feed data. In this post I'll walk through some best practices for publishers syndicating their data via web feeds. Should I use RSS or Atom? The RSS 2.0 syndication format has been around for about four years and over that time it has been used by web publishers large and small to represent their data for syndication. The New York Times publishes its top stories via...

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  3. Declaring alternate web content for searchability and discoverability

    Web authors may declare alternate versions of a single web page, exposing additional languages available or various file formats. HTML documents express these relationships using the link element in the document header. Alternate language A single Wikipedia article about "search" might have alternate representations and translations, such as "buscar" in Spanish, "suche" in German, "rechercher" in French, etc. A search engine or web browser software can discover the availability of these alternate document versions if declared by the publisher. <link title="Arabic" href="http://ar.example.com/" rel="alternate" hreflang="ar" type="text/html" charset="ISO-8859-6" /> The example markup above advertises an alternate version of example.com available in Arabic...

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  4. EmTrace WidgetStation

    A Korean company specializing in smartphone development is releasing a hardware device next year focused on widgets. The WidgetStation from Emtrace Technologies has both a mono and color LCD and receives content update over Ethernet and/or USB connections. It's a mini computer with an ARM processor, NAND flash memory for local storage, and RAM. The mono LCD is designed for long-term display items such as a clock or weather while the color LCD displays built-in and customizable content from the Internet or your desktop, including support for audio playback. Emtrace's past developing for smartphones in a mobile-heavy culture such...

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  5. Google Personalized Homepage for your domain

    Users of Google Apps for Your Domain can now add a homepage with a custom set of configured gadgets for their users. The new feature lets companies configure mail messages, calendar data, specialized web feeds, and more as their employees' portal to the web. The group customization feature was previously only available to large partnerships such as Dell and Gateway. The Apps for Your Domain program launched in August and includes custom branded and custom addressable access to Google Mail, Talk, Calendar, webpage creation, and now your own start page to bring it all together. The Google search box...

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  6. Speaking at PubCon on Tuesday

    I'll be in Las Vegas early next week speaking at PubCon on feed syndication best practices. The session takes place from 10:15-11:30 a.m. on Tuesday if you are attending the search conference. I have not been to Las Vegas in a few years so I'll be checking out new pieces of grandeur at the Wynn, new Caesars Palace, Treasure Island, etc. Hopefully there will be lots of search geeks in attendance leading to interesting conversations....

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  7. Preparing your feeds for IE7

    Internet Explorer will be released in just a few weeks, pushed to Windows XP users as a critical update. The Windows RSS Platform ships as part of IE7 and will likely become the most popular desktop aggregator by the end of the year. Are you ready for the switchover? There are changes to CSS and JavaScript handling and an OpenSearch search box you should probably code against if you would like quick and easy access to your site and its archive. I'm mainly interested in the changes in feed syndication so I'll walk through some areas that might trip...

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  8. NetRatings finds 40% of online Britons use news feeds

    A study by Nielsen//NetRatings found 40% of Britons receive automatic news feeds to their browser or desktop but 69% had never heard of Really Simple Syndication. About 15% of the people surveyed have heard of an iPod but are not sure what it is. A three-page PDF summarizing the study is available from NetRatings. The use of acronym's caused a marked drop in user knowledge. 29% of those surveyed knew what "IM" meant but 86% knew the term "instant messaging." The average online Briton now owns 4-5 digital or networked devices. 3G mobile phones were more common than iPods and...

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  9. Netvibes 2.0

    Netvibes pushed their latest release live tonight, unveiling new visual designs and a few new modules. Founder and CEO Tariq Krim refers to the release as Netvibes 2.0 on the official Netvibes blog. The new version of Netvibes features themes, video search, blog search, a MySpace module, and more. You can choose your favorite color backdrop ranging from gray to pink. It would be cool if I could set a theme by tab, such as making my soccer tab blue to match Chelsea but keep my other tabs green. The new MySpace integration allows you to track the latest information...

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  10. Google Reader courts the Gmail crowd

    Google Reader has launched a major update to its web front-end about a year after its initial launch, redesigning its online feed aggregator to create a feed reading experience that should feel natural to users of Gmail. New features include a shared clippings service, better read/unread tracking, and the ability to share feed items easily over e-mail. The coolest new feature is Google Reader's continuous scroll of feed items combined with automatically selecting each feed item as you move around the news flow. You'll find a lot more access keys in the new Reader, mapped to the common Gmail...

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