Blogging company Six Apart has acquired online feed aggregator Rojo Networks. Rojo technologies will be integrated with the Vox blogging tool allowing users to browse updated content and create more blog posts. Rojo co-founder Kevin Burton confirmed the news on his blog this morning. A press release from Six Apart names former Rojo CEO Chris Alden as executive vice president and general manager of Movable Type and former CTO Aaron Emigh as executive vice president and general manager of core technologies. Chris Alden is the fifth general manager of Movable Type in the last year. The press release is…
NewsGator released version 1.4.1 of its enterprise feed management server yesterday afternoon. Users of the new version can now use NewsGator desktop clients FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, or Inbox to interact with their feeds. Much better than a corporate intranet page in my opinion, but it's good to give people choices. The new version also has better support for detecting and highlighting enclosures, placing files into special folders such as "My Podcasts." Hopefully new products and updates to enterprise feed readers will create a new market of viewers for the blogosphere, connecting a larger population with automated news delivery….
The developer preview of OS X 10.5 "Leopard" includes an integrated feed syndication platform with Bonjour integration according to a message board posting from a WWDC attendee. The software was distributed to all conference attendees and should be available on your favorite file-sharing network shortly. A new framework is included for publishing and subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds, including complete RSS parsing and generation. Local feeds can be shared over Bonjour zero-configuration sharing and discovery. The new framework would provide an easy interface for Mac developers to include feed syndication features inside their products and share user data across…
I am leaving Microsoft to start my own company. My last day at Microsoft is next Friday, August 18. It's uncertain whether Microsoft will continue the feed platform work I started, but it's some good stuff so I hope they do. RSS is the internet's answer to the notification scenarios we've discussed and worked on for some time, and is filling a role as "the UNIX pipe of the internet" as people use it to connect data and systems in unanticipated ways. I joined Microsoft in April excited to change the world and build an Internet-scale feed platform to power…
The Wall Street Journal launched a new personalized homepage with Dow Jones content modules as well as customized content from any RSS feed. The new site uses Yahoo! UI Widgets extensively, the first time I have seen the libraries on a high-profile site. My WSJ does not seem to currently support Atom 1.0 feeds….
Brad Feld blogged yesterday about a new FeedBurner effort to place ads on more feeds through the creation of aggregated feed networks. A single curator selects a few feed URLs to create a mega feed for a topic or musing. FeedBurner sells targeted ads inside of the aggregated feed and its various forms of syndication — HTML, RSS/Atom, JavaScript widget, etc. — on a CPM basis. Who other than FeedBurner gets paid for these ad impressions? It seems like another attempt to mine the seemingly free gold laying on the riverbed named user-generated content. The idea isn't much different than…
Robert Auger and Caleb Sima of security firm SPI Dymanics gave a 50-minute security briefing on RSS and Atom feed vulnerabilities at yesterday's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Their talk, Zero Day Subscriptions: Using RSS and Atom feeds As Attack Delivery Systems, detailed how many blogging systems and feed aggregators do not block against malicious code insertion by third parties and often run at elevated permission levels on a user's machine, exposing an entire operating system to a potential scripting attack. I wasn't there, but News.com summarizes some of the topics covered in the talk. Auger listed Bloglines, RSS…
Mihai from the Google Reader team just posted some interesting data about observed namespaces across all feeds tracked in their system. The namespace data provides information not only about popular ways of expressing data, but also gives insight into blog software market share within a sample such as Google Reader subscriptions. Dublin Core as the top namespace is not too surprising. What jumps out is the number of feeds using the default configuration on a variety of platforms, giving a glance into market share. Blogger – 12% FeedBurner – 4% Windows Live Spaces – 4% LiveJournal – 2.5% Technorati and…
I've been working on an online feed syndication platform at Microsoft since late-April, and now the project finally has a blog. I decided to start the conversation by discussing some of the key concepts and ideas behind the project, and some of its planned features. The first post focuses on synchronization, sharing, and portability. Is it possible to develop a product or platform in the open? Partially. I won't disclose what's shipping when, or what product will be first up for integration, but I can be open about our approach to some common problems and expose some integration points for…
Feed statistics and advertising company FeedBurner has acquired web page tracker Blogbeat for an undisclosed sum. Blogbeat is located in Raleigh-Durham, giving FeedBurner a presence on the east (web stats), center (hq), and west (bizdev) in the U.S.. Blogbeat tracks visitors to a web page using a JavaScript placed on each site page. FeedBurner is able to provide similar tracking through its FeedFlare service but had not yet built a front-end allowing publishers to view the data. The acquisition of Blogbeat will allow FeedBurner to offer publishers a more complete view of their site, posts, and subscriptions by tracking…
Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 is now available and includes some new feed reading features for users who like to browse their feed items in the browser. The new beta includes a refresh all option, mark all feed items read, and a few other final tweaks on the path to ship. Sometimes it's not fun to obey the machine and its update schedule. Advanced information hungry readers can now update all feeds at once, grabbing the latest content before disconnecting from the Internet or to be absolutely sure you're caught up on all your feeds. You can now mark a…
French personal homepage company Netvibes has amassed over 4 million users in its first 9 months of operation according to founder and CEO Tariq Krim. Tariq mentions the user numbers about two minutes into a video interview with CNET News.com. The site picked up over 15,000 visitors in its first week of operation. Close to half of Netvibes' users are in the United States. Netvibes users can configure their homepage without logging in so it's unclear if the 4 million users are non-expired cookied users or actual user accounts. Either way, keep the user numbers in mind when looking at…
I'll be looking at World Cup schedules every day for the next month, but a few people at Microsoft put together a small application named Soccer Scoreboard to track your favorite team, group, and results from your Windows desktop. It even has a RSS aggregator built-in so you can follow along with the latest news about Rooney's foot or whatever you're into. Game times are displayed in your local time and the application is localized to close to 20 languages. Here's a short list of soccer feeds from around the world if you'd like to add them to Soccer Scoreboard…
Want an easy way to jump to the specifications of your favorite web feed technologies? Me too! I created a few URL shortcuts to eliminate the need for bookmarks and provide a new and memorable way to introduce people to specs and standards. Add a subdomain before FeedSpecs.com and you just might find what you're looking for. atom.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the Atom Syndication Format IETF spec. rdf.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the RSS 1.0 spec. rss.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the RSS 2.0 spec. gdata.FeedSpecs.com redirects to Google's gData spec. itunes.FeedSpecs.com redirects to the Apple podcasting spec mediarss.FeedSpecs.com redirects to Yahoo's Media RSS spec….
Another day, another startup opportunity. Mark Fletcher has left Ask and is undoubtedly working on his next startup. Mark's company, Bloglines, was acquired by Ask 16 months ago in February 2005. Officially Mark is leaving to "spend time with family." In reality he is working on his next startup, assisting entrepreneurs in the valley, and perhaps investing some angel money as well. Tags: bloglines…
Ask.com unveiled its blogs and feeds search offering tonight using index data captured from Bloglines subscriptions. Users can search for feeds (good for subscription suggestions) or individual posts sorted by relevance, recency, or popularity and scoped anywhere from the last hour to the first time a user added the feed to Bloglines. The new offering is most similar to Yahoo's feed search based on the My Yahoo! feed index. Ask's relevance search is based on the ExpertRank algorithm and a few other pieces of proprietary secret sauce. Most recent is a reverse chronological sort for the search term. Popularity…
FeedShow is an online RSS aggregator from France hoping to create a business around splitting advertising money with feed publishers. A publisher may opt-in to the advertising system and display up to two contextual advertisements alongside their feed. FeedShow receives a 50% split of the advertising revenues from publishers participating in the program. FeedShow created a new RSS namespace allowing feed publishers to define their ad provider, account number, and additional provider data such as an AdSense channel. While ads alongside e-mail created new businesses and accounts for a large percentage of private e-mail usage today, feed publishers seem…
Google Reader Mobile is now available on your mobile phone. The pages are served using XHTML 1.0 for mobile, including access keys for each list item. The mobile reader is a good blend of what you would like to configure on your desktop but still access on a more limited input device such as a mobile phone. The mobile interface is purposefully barebones but utilizes features made possible by the full desktop experience such as browsing tagged posts….
Mark Fletcher spoke about his experience starting ONElist and Bloglines at this month's SDForum Startup SIG in Palo Alto. Mark has given a similar presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and at Startup School, but if you are not in California you might have missed his advice for starting your own company while moonlighting and being super-cheap. Mark's last corporate job was with set-top box maker Diba which was eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems in July 1997. He started working on a new company, ONElist, on the side, funded by a $5,000 bonus check for its first six…
Video publishers using Brightcove will soon be able to reach over 400,000 broadband-enabled TiVo boxes as early as next month. Videobloggers using Brightcove can expose their content to TiVo users and collect some additional advertising revenue. Internet TV is easily mixed with content major networks. Users will watch content unaware if it took place from 2-2:30 p.m. or if it was an enclosure in a feed. Very cool. Tags: brightcovetivo…
The latest nightly builds of Firefox 2.0 (Bon Echo) include new XML parsers and feed tools for an improved sbuscription experience. The new feed processor provides a more user-friendly display of a a feed and passes the appropriate subscription data to other desktop applications, online aggregators, or Firefox's own Live Bookmarks feature. The new feed handling contains three specific parts, as outlined by product lead Ben Goodger last week in an e-mail to the Camino developers list. A feed sniffer to determine if the loaded content contains a feed, regardless of the MIME type returned by the publisher's servers….
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…
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…
Nokia plans to release a podcast client for its latest smartphone lineup in early July. The application takes advantage of 3G cellular data networks and/or nearby WiFi hotspots to deliver new audio content to your phone right after it's published. Users can search for podcasts but it's not clear who is providing the directory and search content for Nokia. Tags: nokiaseries60…
Ben Goodger just blogged about feed discovery in Firefox 2.0. He was able to use the same feed sniffing techniques as Internet Explorer 7, making the feed world a bit simpler for both users and publishers. Tags: firefoxie7…
