RealNetworks just launched a news aggregation site powered by syndicated content. The new RealTime site, toolbar, and screensaver provide a customized news reading experience complete with feed discovery, recommendations, and the ability to interact with subscriptions online or on the desktop. The new software will be promoted and bundled with RealPlayer, a desktop application with millions of installed users. Website visitors can customize their feed subscriptions using a cookie store or create an account to persist the data to the desktop or across multiple machines. Feed search and discoverability is powered by Feedster. The site is running Apache Coyote,…
Category Archives: Feed aggregators
NewsGator syncs Windows RSS platform into its cloud
NewsGator just released NewsGator Desktop Sync in beta. The Windows application sits in your desktop tray and keeps your feeds, folders, and item read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform. NewsGator Online may be viewed in a web browser or synchronized to your mobile phone, Mac, Windows Media Center, or other applications hooked into NewsGator Online. NewsGator Desktop sync connects Windows PCs running the Windows RSS Platform present in Internet 7 and above. Synchronization is like a personal teleporter for your feed data, breaking up your data into many tiny bits capable of being reassembled wherever…
Authenticated and private feeds
Some syndication feeds are not meant to be displayed for the world to see. Our everyday lives contain private and confidential data we wouldn’t want anyone else to see, and especially not search. There are a few options for trying to keep things private in your feed aggregator but the implementations require proper coding and privacy from all implementors. Examples of private feeds intended for 1:1 communication include bank balances, e-mail notifications, project status, and the latest bids on that big contract. Data in the wrong hands could be dangerous, and many companies will stay away from the feed syndication…
Expressing threads and comments in feeds
A feed entry is not a silo, but often connected to other entries in the feed world. In this post you will learn how to express relationships between data using RSS, Atom, and common namespaces. Comment count Reading a feed entry can sometimes evoke action in the form of commentary. Readers often become writers, leaving comments attached to a post or article. Popular technology news site Slashdot has had an active commenting community for years, and created a namespaced element to express the total number of comments associated with a specific item. <slash:comments>42</slash:comments> The above example uses the slash module…
Feed syndication beyond blog updates
Many people in the technology world view the world of RSS, RDF, and Atom as a way of outputting blog content and reading the latest information in a feed aggregator. While that simplified view is true, the full world of feed syndication is a bit more complex. Syndication feeds are extremely popular expressions of structured XML. The popularity of content production and consumption using feeds has resulted in widespread deployment of parsers able to turn something simple such as a title, publication date, and a body of text into an easily displayed message, communicating recent updates and atomic changes in…
Yahoo! Mail enters public beta
The new Yahoo! Mail has entered public beta, incorporating many features from Oddpost into a new PHP front-end. The new Yahoo! Mail features a two-pane interface for reading feeds in one scrollable page. Yahoo! Mail product manager Ethan Diamond told Richard MacManus “the [feed reading] feature is kinda in stealth mode; we are not drawing much attention to it.” Yahoo! Mail will auto-subscribe users to “the most popular feeds across the Yahoo! network”, adding a few feeds to Yahoo! Mail’s user base of over 250 million users. The Yahoo! Mail feed view is built on-top of the My Yahoo! feed…
Microsoft Max feed aggregator
Microsoft just released a new desktop feed aggregator, codename Max. Max features news displayed in a newspaper layout and two-pane interface, a bit different approach than many other aggregators on the market. MSN Filter is built-in, helping you follow the hottest news in lifestyle, music, TV, sports, technology, and movies. You can share your favorite feed items with the Filter community to help influence the recommended reading of others. Microsoft Max is available for Windows XP SP2 and above (including Media Center). It takes advantage of some of the latest hardware and software, including .NET Framework 3.0 RC1 and…
Six Apart acquires Rojo Networks
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 Enterprise 1.4 adds desktop client sync
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….
Rewriting Digg feeds using Atom 1.0
Digg currently uses RSS 2.0 as a lightweight API, adding their own namespaced elements to explain Digg-specific values within the XML. The current Digg feed reinvents some elements (digg:category???) I feel could be better marked up with existing standards and namespaces. I’ll use Digg’s data in this post to show how some complex data and relationships can be expressed using Atom 1.0. Current Digg Technology feedSample Rewritten Digg Technology feed in Atom 1.0 Simplifying drives adoption It’s important to express your data inside pre-defined elements and attributes when possible for easy parsing by the many feed libraries used by…