Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 19 of 72.

FeedBurner adds 7 pieces of flair

FeedBurner introduced FeedFlare this morning, a new way to easily add information to the bottom of your post content. FeedBurner creates small GIF files — about 300 bytes each — for each feature allowing supplementary information about the post to be updated without changing an item’s read status in an aggregator. FeedFlare launched with the following 7 features: E-mail a link to this post to a friend or colleague. E-mail the author of the post. This feature only works if you have already have defined the author’s e-mail address somewhere in the feed such as managingEditor element in RSS or…

Ruby on Rails 1.0

Congratulations to David Heinemeier Hansson and the rest of the Ruby on Rails team for releasing version 1.0 of the development framework. It’s an important milestone and the framework has made a big impact over the last 15 months and changed the way some people think of programming online applications. Tags: rubyonrails, rails, ruby…

Technorati Kitchen: it’s what’s cooking

Technorati just introduced the Technorati Kitchen, an area where we can post projects we have been working on that we do not feel are ready for integration on the main site. The first project available in the Technorati Kitchen is Explore, a way to discover the most popular recent blog posts around a specific topic of interest. You can use Explore to see emerging trends in the areas you care about or just catch up with the top stories of the day in a few minutes. The beta moniker is so overused and abused no one can really take it…

Yahoo Widget Engine

Yahoo! just released a new version of Konfabulator, now known as Yahoo! Widgets Engine. The new version includes new default widgets for Yahoo! search, maps, notepad, address book, and mail. Also included are improved widgets for Flickr, Yahoo! Photos, Calendar, Weather, and Finance. According to Toni Schneider of Yahoo! there have been 1.5 million downloads of Konfabulator since it was acquired by Yahoo! in August. Downloads are currently about 90% Windows, a low number considering Apple’s latest operating system features a very similar application, Dashboard, already built-in. 50-100 widgets are submitted to the widgets gallery every week. Yahoo! Widgets…

Six Apart partners with Yahoo!

Yahoo! and Six Apart just announced a deal to make Yahoo! hosting the preferred small business host for Movable Type. Yahoo! currently hosts about 30 million individual websites including hundreds of thousands of small business sites. Yahoo! is using FastCGI, making Movable Type run a bit faster than a typical hosting install. Movable Type is available on all hosting plans including the starter $11.95 package. Users of other blogging software may have to pay $8 more for Perl, PHP, and MySQL support for their accounts. Customers can visit a special page on Six Apart’s website to purchase a Yahoo! Small…

Podcast with 37signals

Earlier today I had the opportunity to interview Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals for my podcast with Om Malik. We talked about scalability’s role in business planning, built-to-flip startup companies, and programming using the Ruby on Rails framework. Our interview with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is 29 minutes and 50 seconds in length and a 13.7 MB download. Om posted earlier this week about companies that don’t take scale into account when building a web service. David Heinemeier Hansson responded to Om with his own experiences building Basecamp and other hosted applications. We took the…

Urban blog advertising

I was walking home tonight when I came across a very different form of lamppost advertising. Someone had posted two of their latest blog posts at a busy street corner in San Francisco. The top post introduces weblogs and the topics they cover, encouraging people to read more weblogs for the latest news about their community and the topics they care about. The bottom post talks about comments by radio host Rush Limbaugh against homosexuals. Someone came by and added their own Xanga blog URL to the post about Limbaugh, possibly as a way to supplement the existing 88…

Scuttle: open source social bookmarking

I use open source project Scuttle to manage my bookmarks on my server with full control over all my information. Scuttle is GPL licensed and uses PHP and MySQL to create a multiuser environment for storing bookmarks for public or private consumption. Anyone is welcome to join my social bookmarking tool on NiallKennedy.com. The API is a del.icio.us clone and open for import and export of your bookmarks if you try it out but don’t like it. Tags: socialtagging, tagging…

Yahoo! buys del.icio.us

Yahoo! has bought social bookmarking site del.icio.us for an undisclosed amount. Joshua Schachter posted an announcement to the del.icio.us blog and mentions Yahoo!’s ability to help del.icio.us scale and keep pace with it’s growing user base and site usage. Jeremy Zawodny welcomed the del.icio.us team on the Yahoo! Search blog and notes Yahoo! properties My Web and Flickr are natural matches for Joshua and del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is based in New York and received its first round of funding in April 2005 from a variety of investors including Amazon.com. The site now has about 300,000 registered users and 10 million…

Google Christmas treat

Google has decorated its advertising sidebar with a strip of peppermint candy cane for certain holiday searchers. Try a search for Christmas, peppermint, or candy cane to see the modified search results page. Tags: easteregg…

About.com switches from MT to WordPress

Matt Mullenweg just posted the news that About.com is switching all of its sites from Movable Type to WordPress. About.com is owned by The New York Times and has the largest public-facing blog installation of any company I know. Pretty big news for WordPress as they add another big name media site to their list….

Submit site feeds to Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search allows any user to submit a list of pages for submission in Yahoo!’s search index. You may submit site feeds to Yahoo! formatted as RSS 0.9, 1.0, or 2.0, Atom 0.3, or a text file with one URL per line. You can automate the process if you would like with just a few simple steps. Start with the base URL of http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request?pass=1&class=1. Parameters pass and class are required. Add a url parameter, setting the value to the URL-encoded location of your feed. Example: http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Ffeed.xml Submit via HTTP post. Sending a ping to blo.gs might eventually accomplish the same…

Cingular HSDPA 3G data network

Cingular just announced 3G data access throughout the entire San Francisco Bay Area and 14 other metropolitan areas across the country. The new network uses HSDPA technology that currently supports average connection speed of 400-700Kbps but can technically support up to 10Mbps. Cellular data networks allow you to be online in more places than you can find a public WiFi hotspot. You can even use it in your car or on the train to get some work done while commuting. These new cards support seamless handoff between cell towers and downgraded non-3G data connections. It’s nice to know that…

Kanoodle cookie bounty

Advertising network Kanoodle will now pay webmasters for planting a cookie on a visitor’s computer without ever showing an advertisement. Sites placing a cookie classifying a user’s browsing habits into one of 7,500 contextual ad categories. Publishers in the program will be paid 5% of the revenue earned when an advertisement served on the Kanoodle network is triggered by a cookie generated on the publisher’s site. Kanoodle advertisements are an integrated option for TypePad Pro users. Bloggers could profit from distributing cookies on their own personal weblogs for later monetization on a TypePad Pro site with advertising or other blogs…

Rich RSS beyond text

I just posted the latest episode of Om and Niall PodSesssions to our podcast site. This week Om and I talk about the possibilities of RSS beyond text and blogs as content such as photos, music, movies, and more are delivered using RSS and other syndication formats. I have been playing around with some of the new broadband RSS services on my TiVo and thinking about new methods of content delivery to the home. Broadband access has been sold as an instant-on service available anytime you wish to interact and retrieve information. I believe the next wave of services will…

Syndicate Conference San Francisco

I am a panelist for Searching the Syndisphere at next week’s Syndicate conference in San Francisco. The panel will discuss different approaches to indexing and surfacing syndicated content, business models, emerging trends, and other topics chosen by the moderator. If you would like to attend the two day conference you can save 30% using a discount priority code of SPKDEC. A two day pass is $836.50 and a one day pass is $437.50 with the discount code applied. Tags: atom, rss, syndicatesf, syndication…

Eric Schmidt’s rules of management

Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Berkeley professor Hal Varian wrote an article in the latest issue of Newsweek about Google’s approach to managing the knowledge worker. Google’s extensive perks program is their way of removing things that may get in the way of their employees. Schmidt admits Google’s problems of “techno-arrogance” and “the not invented here syndrome.” The company also needs to adjust to a workforce of varying ages and motivations as it looks towards long-term growth. One of our not-so-secret weapons is our ideas mailing list: a companywide suggestion box where people can post ideas ranging from parking procedures…

Google total information awareness potential

Google is gathering as much information as possible about our online activities in the interest of serving up more targeted ads across more and more locations. Google continues to introduce new services limited only by what can have an advertisement placed alongside the content. Future products might include data gathering and targeting as a primary business goal with the intent of collecting higher advertising revenues elsewhere on the network on a future visit. Yahoo! just announced they will serve advertisements based on surfing behavior. Where does Google stand in its behavioral targeting? Google is already well on its way to…

Odeo Studio released

Odeo just released their online audio recording software called Odeo Studio. Odeo Studio was previously available to a limited group of users. The new version 0.14 is the first public release of the software. Giving people the ability to record content via a web page or telephone takes away a lot of the complexity of podcasting or casual voice message creation. No worries about getting the proper recording software, encoding the audio, uploading to a server. Now all you have to do is hit record on a web page and everything is done for you. Recordings are limited to…

Skype thoughts

Skype updated its Mac client today with some new user interface features, improved call quality, and some additional member information. I like the small touches such as the new blue dock icon and the ability to automatically pause iTunes when you receive a new incoming call. I just realized today that Skype works over local Bonjour networks. The feature has been around for a few months, but none of my coworkers knew about it either. Om points out that many of the Skype 2.0 features were previously available as plugins from third party developers. I have not used any of…

Wharton on Yahoo!

Professors from the Wharton School of Business analyzed Yahoo!’s many business lines in a recent article featured in Knowledge@Wharton. While Microsoft and Google duke it out Yahoo! may remain friendly to both and emerge a winner. Google is known for being good at search, and it is argued that while Yahoo! is certainly in a lot of different areas it is not a product leader. Most of the “Web 2.0” goodness mentioned in the article comes through acquisition of other small companies like Oddpost and Flickr that might be able to shake up a large media company. I think Yahoo!…

Skype 2.0 – video and customizations

Tonight around midnight Skype will release version 2.0 beta of their popular peer-to-peer voice and instant messaging client. Version 2.0 adds client support for video, customizations such as avatars and ringtones, . The new version is currently available for the Windows platform only. The video transmission uses the On2 Truemotion VP7 compression format which is easily throttled for bandwidth differences and was designed with video conferencing and dropped packets in mind. The video format appears to only support the Windows operating system and could constrain any plans to expand Skype with video to other platforms. On2 claims their video…

PodSession on blogs, RSS, and advertising

The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. Om and I sat down at his apartment last week to talk about blogs, RSS, and advertising. Om asked most of the questions, focusing the discussion about how to make the right choices in blogging software and services to become a better blogger. Full show notes are available on the Om and Niall PodSessions site. This week’s podcast is 21 minutes in length and a 9.7 MB download. After the podcast I gave Om’s RSS a makeover including switching his feed to FeedBurner, adding more branding by utilizing more…

Quotes from Oddpost source code

The basic Oddpost JavaScript is broken up between a few JavaScript files including new code from Yahoo! with comments dated throughout the past couple months. Part of the new Yahoo! Mail is a straight drop-in from Oddpost, including some developer fun in the “SubjectOMatique” complete with references to He-Man, The Simpsons, and Zoolander. BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL! Get out of my dreams, get into my car. Up ahead! It’s a DONUT HUT!! When Lawyers Attack Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadu Hold me closer, Tony Danza The Dreaded Executive Spousal Review It’s funny to see old jokes live on even…

Yahoo! Mail RSS

The next version of Yahoo! Mail includes a feed aggregator as a sidebar option. The front-end is based on Oddpost’s blog aggregation technology and the front-end code even includes Oddpost copyright statements and comments. The back-end is the same as My Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Mail feed aggregator supports RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 0.3. The aggregator does not support enclosures such as podcasts. Screenshots and analysis is based on Yahoo Mail 0.3.0 build 176. Yahoo! is the first major webmail provider to integrate a full-post aggregator into the mail client. Millions of Yahoo! Mail users will…