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…
Category Archives: Feed aggregators
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…
Sony PSP adds RSS support
Sony’s PSP gaming device now supports RSS feeds. The RSS Channel is presented to users above the web browsing option in version 2.6 or above of Sony’s PSP system software. Users can add feeds by clicking on a link to an advertised feed in their web browser. The mobile RSS aggregator is specially designed for downloading podcasts in MP3 or AAC format. The channel list and streaming media is saved on Memory Stick Duo media. Only the RSS 2.0 syndication format is currently supported. Sony has a special page for developers documenting their aggregator’s handling of RSS. Russell Beattie…
Microsoft announces Simple Sharing Extensions
Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML this morning. Ray explains on his weblog the need to synchronize data such as contacts, calendaring, and read status on a wide range of devices across multiple profiles such as personal, family, and professional. The new namespace is the first extension of OPML I know of. Ray mentions there “nothing to announce right now in terms of which [Microsoft] products will support the spec, when, and for what purpose, but people are experimenting with it and are intrigued.” The acronym “SSE” makes me think of Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions processor…
FeedBurner State of RSS report
FeedBurner just published a report on the current state of RSS and Atom syndication formats across a variety of publisher types with varying goals. The graphic above helps illustrate the difference between feed search and blog search. While the two used to be almost one and the same, blog search focuses on just blogs and podcasts and not commercial publishers, web services, watchlists, and other peer-produced content. I think the report was a bit light on monetizing subscribers, so I hope FeedBurner addresses advertising in syndication feeds as its next market report topic. Tags: atom, rss…
W3C Feed Validator
The W3C now has a feed validator based on the open source software feedvalidator. I like the support for direct input as well as its close proximity to the HTML markup validator. They also have an open SOAP 1.2 API for validation via a web service. Tags: atom, rss…
Outlook 12 RSS support in latest beta
The latest version of Office, 12.0.3111.1010, has hit the peer-to-peer networks and developer Alexander Gorlach has posted his first impressions and detailed screenshots of the subscription and reading interface. Microsoft throttles the feed update rate and respects the TTL element. Users can override this update limit which could be pretty scary as RSS updates are currently integrated with the standard send/receive function along with e-mail and most e-mail is checked every 5 minutes or so. Outlook 12 also supports the ability to download all enclosures for a subscription, regardless of the file type. Enclosures can deliver some nasty payloads to…
Windows Vista will require well-formed XML feeds
The Windows Vista team just announced that the next version of Windows will not process any web feeds that are not well-formed XML. I think it is a good move and saves a lot of development headaches. Feed publishers should periodically check their feeds using tools such as Feed Validator to discover any potential problems and evaluate some of problems revealed by warning messages. Errors in your feed might result in your message not being delivered to your readers. Tags: atom, RSS, windowsvista…
VeriSign acquires Moreover
Moreover Technologies has been acquired by VeriSign for between $25 million and $30 million. The acquisition is VeriSign’s second announced move in the blogging space in the past week having previously acquired Weblogs.com. Moreover founders David Galbraith and Nick Denton confirmed the deal on their own personal blogs. Rafat Ali reports Google came in with a higher bid a little too late. Moreover currently powers sites such as My MSN feed modules, and Microsoft has to be questioning its relationship with Moreover if it was not already. It’s interesting to hear Google attempted to make a play for the company…
Vote for the Internet Explorer 7 feed icon
The Microsoft Internet Explorer team is soliciting feedback for the icon used to represent the presence of a feed in a web page viewed in Internet Explorer 7. I personally like option 4. The suggested icon is very similar to Firefox Live Bookmarks icon and shows the transmission of content from one point to many possible receivers. Tags: IE7…