Feed exclusion using categories

Many current and future feed publishers create content targeted at individuals for personal use and are not meant for widespread consumption. You may have a customized feed from Netflix, FeedBurner, or WordPress.com to track your movie queue, subscriber count, or blog stats respectively. Some feeds offer privacy through obfuscated URLs and others are just a one-time token exchange at the time of subscription. Given the current merged back-ends of online search aggregators with search and other methods of open discovery, how can a feed publisher opt-out of a public index?

One solution using existing element sets may be to overload the category element in RSS and Atom 1.0. Using the domain/scheme attribute it is possible to indicate the type of data communicated at either a feed or individual item level.

  • <category domain=”http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html”>noindex</category>
  • <category term=”noindex” scheme=”http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html” />

The domain and scheme attribute values communicate “categorization” according to the Atom and RSS 2.0 specifications and this use case seems within that specified use. Multiple values can be specified using multiple category elements.

A subscription agent could also check the domain’s robots.txt and the meta robots value of the feed’s alternate HTML for a more complete picture. Some aggregators take the position that since a feed is requested by a user and not a spider it should not need to check these extra locations. Adding robot exclusion to the feed itself seems like the most reliable way to operate.

What do you think?

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Overheard in a San Francisco cafe

I am at Ritual Roasters this morning in San Francisco’s Mission district. This city is so geeky it’s not uncommon to see WordPress and TypePad screens on people’s laptops as they bask in free WiFi. Today is completely different.

Suicide Girls

A man in bright striped pants, a t-shirt with a stretched neck line, and a modified sport coat is chatting up girls he thinks would be perfect for Suicide Girls. I have no idea if he actually works for the company or if this is some sort of new geek pickup line, but it’s hilarious to listen to. Especially with Johnny Cash playing in the background.

“It’s a blogging site for people with awesome tattoos and piercings. You’d be perfect!”

“Total new-age media where you get to run your own business and create a name for yourself.”

Blogging hasn’t really made it big until pimped out strangers start using blogging networks as a pick-up line.

And now back to our regularly scheduled geekery…

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Site redesign complete!

The new hotness

I’ve been a bit quiet over the past week while making some changes under the hood of this website. This morning I unveiled a new site design I hope will convey a more professional look and experience for everyone viewing my pages in a web browser.

I wanted to add more visual structure to each post to match what I try to accomplish in my markup. I wanted to help visitors discover new sections of the site and click around a bit to learn more. I also wanted to improve the friendliness of search and commenting.

I worked with Mike Rundle of Business Logs to turn some of these ideas into a visual reality. Mike and I share interests in exposing more quality content created by passionate individuals. We both like to think of the browsing experience across multiple devices from a home media center all the way down to a mobile handset.

I hope you like the new design! I still have a few tweaks and cosmetic finishes to apply but so far I am liking the new hotness.

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SF Tech Sessions

Companies should not have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to present their product to a technical and knowledgeable audience. Everyone is burned out on big conferences, big ticket prices, and we want to create more interesting in-depth experiences. I am proud to announce SF Tech Sessions, a new free monthly event that will highlight the latest technologies, products, and companies live and in-person in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Every month a small crowd of journalists, bloggers, small business owners, and other interested individuals will gather to learn about a new industry from a small group of companies that are changing the game. The event series will feature products right before they launch, giving attendees and inside exclusive into these new companies. You might walk away with a great idea for a blog post, magazine article, new purchase, or a new way of thinking about some projects you’ve been working on. It’s interactive, hands-on, and stimulating.

First Event: Groupware

The first Tech Session will feature three groupware products that are launching in the next three months: Joyent, Microsoft Office Live (unconfirmed),, Kerio and Zimbra. The crowd will decide who has the most compelling product for their target market. The event will take place the evening of Thursday, February 23, at CNET’s headquarters in San Francisco. More details about the groupware event are available on the SF Tech Sessions blog.

Each month we’ll hear from a different industry and be introduced to new products and ways of thinking. Hope you’ll join in.

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VoIP, not just for cheap calls

The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week Om and I talk about VoIP and the new applications with seamless integration of new voice technologies.

A recent study by In-Stat found 73% of all VoIP subscribers have migrated to VoIP without making a conscious decision to adopt the new technology. On Sunday my dad asked me about Vonage, and the various boxes he saw advertised with the services in the Sunday newspaper inserts. To him, Vonage was just another long distance provider and happened to have cheap rates to call Ireland. He had no clue what he was supposed to do with the Linksys box pictured in the ad. My mom also mentioned a bunch of parents are using “voice chat” to talk to their sons and daughters serving in Iraq. The lower costs and the integrated connectivity to endpoints across the world is driving adoption in my small sample of the suburban household. Big changes are underway in how we connect to each other using some of the same technologies that power the Internet, so Om and I decided to have a chat about what’s changing and what’s coming.

This week’s podsession is titled VoIP, not just for cheap calls, is 22 minutes long and a 10 MB download.

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Google Toolbar button Movable Type template

Want to create your own Google Toolbar custom button? If you use Movable Type just copy and paste this template code into a new template ending with “xml“.

Users can view your Atom feed from the toolbar, search your blog from the Google search box, or select text on the web page and click your blog button to find out what you have written about that topic. Your icon will be the Movable Type wrench unless you change it.

Once you have generated the file, just add a special link to your blog to let your readers add your button to their Google Toolbar install.

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url= + [your file location]

Google Toolbar API

Google Toolbar version 4 allows developers to create custom buttons using a custom XML descriptor and extended functionality using RDF, RSS, and Atom feeds. The Google toolbar button API can be used to display the latest entry titles from a feed, execute a keyword or URL search, or continuously communicate data at a glance. I created custom buttons for this blog and Technorati.

Slashdot feed Google Toolbar view

The Google Toolbar can now serve as a feed reader for any feed with a custom Google Toolbar icon. You can even specify in your button file a different icon you would like to display when new items are found.

You can associate your button with a feed containing timely data such as the current temperature, number of new mail messages, or your server’s load status. You subscribe to a feed associated with the button and the feed will deliver updated icons and data presented via a tooltip. If you want to view more information you can simply click the button for a full web page.

There’s search too! You can pass into the toolbar button the text entered in the search box, selected text on the page, or the current URL. You may specify locale-specific settings to send users to a different site depending on their language preference or location.

If you have Google Toolbar 4 installed you can install one of my custom toolbar buttons.

  1. Niall Kennedy’s Weblog Google Toolbar button. View my latest entries, search my weblog, or access my weblog homepage with just one click.
  2. Technorati Google Toolbar button. Search Technorati from Google Toolbar. Includes locale-specific targeting to limit results to your Google-configured language or take you to a Technorati Japan results page if you prefer Japanese.

Each file has an update URL so you can stay up-to-date as I add new features to the button as they are available.

Google Bookmarks

Google bookmarks

Google just introduced version 4 of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer including support for centralized bookmark tagging and notation from multiple computers. The new feature allows any toolbar user with a Google account to store bookmarks within their Google search history for synchronization and editing. Google bookmarks can also be added and edited via a web interface.

Google bookmark web edit

You can add a new Google bookmark anywhere on the web when logged in by passing Google a few URL-encoded values.

http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark

title
the title of the bookmark
bkmk
the bookmark URL
labels
comma separated labels or tags
annotation
A note or description about the bookmark
s
22 character user token

To edit a bookmark just resubmit the original URL with the new values. You should receive a response including a Google star graphic star graphic if you are successful.

It should be possible for third-party applications to use Google’s bookmark storage system once you obtain the appropriate token.

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MSN Spaces upgrade: more photos, more locations, and search

Microsoft just announced major upgrades to MSN Spaces.

Highlights

The new MSN Spaces search appears to be a scoped MSN Search query with a new Spaces search UI based on the RSS feeds on the search result page. Adding “site:spaces.msn.com” to your MSN Search currently yields better results.

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