Dave Winer relaunches Share Your OPML

Two years ago Dave Winer created feeds.scripting.com to help people share lists of feeds and discover other members of the community with similar interests. Winer just relaunched the site at a new URL, share.opml.org, to connect a new community and raise awareness of the OPML file format. The new site was based on Manila and the new site is built on top of WordPress.

The Share Your OPML site collects lists of feed subscription URLs from its members and presents lists of most popular feeds, individual feed subscribers, and a peek into the lists of other members with similar reading tastes.

The new site launch comes less than a week after Dave reached a settlement with former contractor Rogers Cadenhead over previous plans to relaunch the same features. Hopefully the site is here to stay and isn’t just a political move.

I always liked the Share Your OPML pages. The public exposure of browsable feed lists introduced me to many new sources of information. Robert Scoble started subscribing to as many feeds as he could find just to be on top of the list, spawning a link blog and a Bloggercon session as people started to wonder if anyone could really keep up with 1300+ feeds.

I’d like to see lots more features on the new site. Members should be able to subscribe to all of someone else’s feeds at once, cloning their reading list. The server should continually poll hosted files for the latest subscription list updates from personal servers as well as large aggregators such as Bloglines or NewsGator. I’d also like to see the unique feeds of someone with a reading list like mine. I might find one or two new sources of information.

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NewsGator error blanks out feed content

NewsGator snapshot

Another weekend, another NewsGator news item of fun. This morning the NewsGator servers decided to replace the content of feed items with the item’s link. It’s more than a bit annoying and reminds us how updates from the cloud can go wrong and you are trusting your content will be delivered by the proxy in a timely and accurate manner.

Did the proxy parse the feed correctly? Does the central database have the latest items available for its subscribers? Did it change the content in any way? Did the client software change its refresh rate to lower the burden on its centralized servers?

If you use a centralized update service such as NewsGator I recommend disconnecting from the central grid at least once a week to see what feed items you might be missing. You might want to check the publisher’s website or try different feed readers for the feeds where the timely delivery of feed items is important to you.

Be sure to add NewsGator’s ping endpoint to your list up updates with each new post for better reliability in NewsGator, FeedDemon, and NetNewsWire.

Yes, I realize this post might be viewed as anti-competitive given that I work on Microsoft’s online feed platform but when I sit down on a Sunday morning to read the news from my favorite bloggers I expect the system to just work. For the last two Sundays the cloud has failed me.

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PodLeaders podcast interview

I few weeks ago Tom Raftery interviewed me over Skype as part of his weekly PodLeaders podcast. We chatted about Technorati, Macs, Microsoft, podcasting, and many more topics I’ve been meaning to blog about.

Tom is a fellow Irishman and some of my answers are aimed at a European audience. I’ve briefly answered the questions from the podcast below. You can listen to the entire interview for my full responses to questions from Tom and his listeners.

I recorded the interview from my home at 8 a.m. after a brief cup of tea, so hopefully it all makes sense.

Can you tell us first off about your background? – 0:36
I’ve been in vertical search for about 7 years and blogging even longer. I’ve worked in shopping search, institutional investment search, small business search, and most recently in blog search.
Are PriceGrabber.com and NexTag a bit like Froogle? – 0:57
I’ve never been too impressed with Froogle, and neither has the market. Froogle is about #7 or #8 in the space and PriceGrabber and NexTag are somewhere in the top 5. Kelkoo still dominates in Europe and might be the most familiar shopping comparison site for Tom’s listeners.
How did the Om and Niall PodSessions podcast come about? – 1:46
Om and I would often chat about telcom and the changing Web. We both like being exposed to new ideas, and our conversations were so interesting I wanted to share them with the world. I interviewed Om a few times about VoIP, broadband, and some other topics he likes to cover on his blog, and eventually we decided to create a brand out of it and podcast weekly. He used to call it “lazy blogging” but I think he’s come around to podcasting as a unique medium.
It is interesting how you don’t always see eye to eye – 2:58
That’s what makes it good! We report, you decide…
You recently left Technorati and joined the guys in Microsoft. Does that feel a bit like going over to the Dark side? – 3:43

I think we view companies with large market share as “the dark side” due to their ability to move a market and throw their weight around a bit in not so great ways. Microsoft did some pretty stupid and anticompetitive things I don’t agree with in the late 90s such as threatening businesses such as OEMs not marching to the Microsoft desired beat.

The Windows Live initiative is a chance to rethink how average Internet users interact with online data and that’s an exciting opportunity to me.

When are you starting with Microsoft? – 5:42
I started on Monday, April 24, a few days after my interview with Tom.
Will it mean you having to move from San Francisco to Seattle? – 5:57
No, I’ll continue to live in San Francisco. I like being at the center of activity in the tech world here in the Bay Area and I’m introduced to new ideas all the time. I’m working in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley offices right now but hope to have an office in San Francisco in the near future.
How does Live.com differentiate itself from Google’s start page and MyYahoo? – 7:00
Live.com contains gadgets similar to what you might find on the Google personalized homepage for weather, stock quotes, RSS feeds, or whatever you want. Microsoft gadgets can run not only on your browser home page, but also inside the Windows Vista sidebar. In the future you could run the same gadgets inside a toolbar or on your laptop’s external screen.
You are a Mac user. How will Windows Live work with a Mac, I mean OneCare won’t work with a Mac, will it? – 10:31
Windows Live is a broad brand name but the websites and services should work with Macs and Firefox/Safari. OneCare, Messenger, and toolbar
Is there a business model around Windows Live that you are aware of? – 12:08
Advertising. Microsoft calls their new advertising platform AdCenter and it will deliver targeted ads across all the new websites. An online version of OneCare might have safety-related ads such as Volvo on the same page.
There are rumours emerging about Windows Live offering truckloads of disk space. Do you know anything about that? – 13:47
Yeah, I think it will happen. I blogged about some of the possibilities, and “truckloads” is all relative. We’ll keep wanting more and more space as more media becomes available as digital downloads or ripping technology improves.
What will you be bringing to Microsoft and what would you like to change in their attitude towards RSS/Atom – 16:23
I think about feed syndication technologies all the time. I geek out about the future but don’t forget about many of the potential users out there who would love the benefits of technologies we enjoy if only we could make the technologies easy enough to use. Microsoft has a few hundred million online users and I think they will enjoy reading feeds as part of their daily lives.
What do you think of RSS/Atom/ and other “standards?” Do you think there should be one standard to unite them all? – 18:14

Ah, politics! From a feed reader perspective we’re going to have to parse and make sense of popular formats of publication. If China decides to invent their own XML syndication format tomorrow because existing methods were not invented in China we’d still support reading the data.

I don’t think there will be “one format to unite them all” anytime soon. I think Atom, as an IETF standard, will be the preferred standard of governments swapping data such as Europe’s interoperable delivery programs. RSS 2.0 has been in the wild for about three years now and has a large and proven deployment.

How will that affect Microsoft’s extension of RSS? – 21:09
Microsoft introduced some XML namespaces regarding ordering lists (simple list extensions) and synchronizing data between devices (simple sharing extensions). Both proposals have Creative Commons licenses and, based the conversations I’ve had with Ray Ozzie, are intended as first drafts and idea-starters.
If you had some advice for some aspiring bloggers who wanted to improve the technical sophistication of their blog, what would it be? – 21:43
I get technical sometimes, but I also enjoy explaining complex things to new audiences. If you’re going to be technical I suggest picking a specific topic area and diving deep into it over and over again. Use that topic as an example of technology applications, helping people understand its uses.
As I understand it, you are going in to do some major work on RSS. If that’s true then is this for IE7? Or is this part of a longer term strategy regarding RSS inside MSFT apps? – 23:30
The Windows RSS platform is a part of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP 2 and above, including Windows Vista. I’m working on an online platform connecting online and desktop services with common feed syndication tools and technologies. I live online, and IE7 is on the desktop.
Did he have an inkling of an offer from Microsoft before he quit Technorati? If not, I find it interesting that he had enough confidence in his own “brand,” as represented by his blog, to feel he could make that leap into the unknown. – 24:39
The position at Microsoft did not exist when I announced I was leaving Technorati. I left Technorati with a few opportunities in motion, including my own startup. Leaving Technorati was a bit of a leap into the unknown, but I knew the job market was strong enough and was not worried too much.
Bif wants to know how you think the U.S. will do in the World Cup? – 31:30
It’s going to be difficult to keep morale high playing Czech Republic (ranked #2) and Italy (ranked #14) in your first two games. There will be so many Czech and Italian fans in the stands it will feel like a home game for both squads. The U.S. has a strong squad with some good depth, and we have a lot more players in Europe with good weekly competition than we had during the last World Cup. If Ireland almost beat Brazil last year, anything is possible.
How do you keep up with information management? What tools do you use? – 33:51
I try out new feed readers all the time but I mostly use NewsFire and NetNewsWire on my Mac and FeedDemon on my PC.
Will you have to give up the Mac working for MS? Or will you use Bootcamp? – 35:40
I use Windows at work to take advantage of Outlook, Exchange, and intranet sites that work best in Internet Explorer. I still use my MacBook Pro all the time. I bought my first PowerBook so I could have a different work and home computing experience. Coming home to a Mac doesn’t make me feel like I am doing more work. It’s fun.

Thanks Tom!

Appcasting for application updates

Appcasting is a way to add automatic updates to your applications using RSS 2.0 with enclosures. Mac apps TextMate, SubEthaEdit, and iStumbler already use appcasts for updates and frameworks such as Sparkle help you easily add updates for your own Cocoa app.

Sample Sparkle update screen

Application developers can describe their application and the changes present in each update. You can add CSS and images to make the update screen pretty, and Sparkle lets you specify a web page to retrieve if you would like to keep the size of your RSS file small.

Developers code the location of the appropriate RSS feed directly into the app, creating a trusted link between the application and a location on the web. Sparkle supports DSA signatures for more trusted downloads and updates.

The appcast system looks pretty cool and developers should be able to easily add automatic updates described in RSS.

PodSession: Startup School

Want to found a startup! First you should go to school and learn a few things. Last Saturday’s Startup School at Stanford brought together about 600 people from across the country and in some cases the world to learn what it takes to take a business from zero to profit without going broke. Om and I both attended and talked about the event and the current environment for new startups in this week’s PodSession.

The event was organized by Y Combinator, a venture firm focused on seed funding for geeky projects. Students in the Y Combinator program can try startup life for three months with some seed funding and see if their ideas and execution are good enough for the next round of funding and clients. I interpret the venture firm’s goals as “drop out of college and flip your company to Yahoo!” based on partner Paul Graham’s past essays.

The day featured half-hour speeches from successful founders, industry observations from Om Malik and Tim O’Reilly, and advertisements from lawyers, venture capitalists. Google had a 30-minute recruiting pitch complete with multiple slides on their benefits package and some press release highlights.

Paul Graham’s lessons for startups speech is available on his site. I learned more about Flickr’s early marketing from Caterina, including fanatical involvement in message boards, making introductions within the community based on profile data, and rewarding people for their viral marketing efforts. Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us talked about building projects in your spare time and waiting for things to take off before leaving your well-paying job. Om talked about companies and products that caused “behavior change” such as the iPod or online e-mail and change the way we live our lives.

This week’s PodSession, Startup School, is 24 minutes in length, a 11 MB download.

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Helio on Top feed reader

Helio on Top

Helio just launched, and every phone has a feed reader combined with unlimited data service. The reader is named “Helio on Top,” displaying new messages on the bottom third of your screen as they come in. Selecting the message displays the full article and you can also browse through three items or channels at a time. Helio on Top is graphically very similar to Motorola’s Screen3 reader.

I like the small square images on the left of each alert. Given the tiny screen it’s important for these images to add context but also create a more comporting feeling that the user is not just buried in text.

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New Mac ads poke fun at Windows

Get a Mac

I like the new Get a Mac ads Apple introduced tonight. The messages are simple and conversational with just one or two competitive points each. Less viruses, less restarting, better applications built-in for editing photos and websites, as easy as your iPod, simple connectivity, and a really good value are the themes communicated throughout.

The Get a Mac campaign also promotes podcasting support as a good reason to switch.

Microsoft Research open house tomorrow in Mountain View

Microsoft Research will be demonstrating some of their projects tomorrow afternoon in Mountain View. It’s a total geek science fair, with futuristic ideas such as recording and indexing everything you see and hear throughout the day, auto-classifying blog content, or searching the web based on a cameraphone picture.

The demo room is open from 2-4 p.m. for browsing. I’ll be on the lookout for a tricorder or new textual analysis of blogs.

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Fire up vi to change your search engine

Google is a bit upset to find it is not the default search engine in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser and is starting to talk antitrust. Safari, Firefox, Camino, and Opera all have Google built-in as default and sometimes the only search option.

“The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services,” said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. “We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose.”

Want to change your default search engine on your Mac from Google to Yahoo? Fire up vi, because you’re going to have to dig for it. Mayer said “Google would support unfettered choice” on browsers such as Safari but so far no action or words of openness.

I installed beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7 last week. The first time I visited Google.com there was an arrow pointing to the search box and a message encouraging me to change my default search engine. I switched and it was pretty simple.

I’d like to see Google encourage openness in the applications where it is the only search option. Right now it seems like the company only complains when things aren’t in their favor, yet Yahoo! or emergent search companies can’t even compete as the best search solution for that search box.

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