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Syndicate Conference San Francisco

I am a panelist for Searching the Syndisphere at next week’s Syndicate conference in San Francisco. The panel will discuss different approaches to indexing and surfacing syndicated content, business models, emerging trends, and other topics chosen by the moderator. If you would like to attend the two day conference you can save 30% using a discount priority code of SPKDEC. A two day pass is $836.50 and a one day pass is $437.50 with the discount code applied. Tags: atom, rss, syndicatesf, syndication…

PodSession on blogs, RSS, and advertising

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…

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…

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…

Google Reader

Google just released their web-based feed reader named Google Reader. Users can login using their Google account and track web feeds in a two-column layout with a default sort of “relevance.” Google is not currently pulling from its archive of past blog entries and only displays the items currently present in the feed. The first column displays a list of subscribed feeds and switches to a list of posts when you click an item. Posts are displayed in the sidebar drawer using title and publication date only. The complete entry display contains the entry title, author, publication date, link, and…

Yahoo! RSS awareness whitepaper

Yahoo! conducted a study of Internet users in August in an attempt to quantify the ubiquity of RSS among Internet users. Yahoo! released a whitepaper covering some of their findings after surveying over 4000 Internet users in August. Findings Only 12% of those surveyed were aware of RSS, and only 4% have knowingly used RSS. 27% of respondents had interacted with RSS content in personalized start pages such as My Yahoo! but did not realize they were using RSS. The average RSS user subscribed to 6.6 feeds and spend an average of 4.1 hours per week reading those feeds. Only…

Interview with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons of NewsGator

I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons to talk about the NewsGator and its recent acquisition of Ranchero Software. I spent about 30 minutes with Greg and Brent talking about how they decided to work together, how NetNewsWire contributes to NewsGator’s product strategy and revenue goals, and what changes we can expect from both sides in the near future. I asked a few questions Greg and Brent had never discussed and there are definitely a few details yet to be worked out. We also talked about Nick Bradbury and NewsGator’s acquisition of Bradbury…

NewsGator purchases NetNewsWire

NewsGator Technologies has a new page on their site about the acquisition of NetNewsWire. Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, will be joining the NewsGator team as a product architect according to a release on the NewsGator site. Om Malik scooped the news last night. The phrasing of the announcement is around NetNewsWire only. I presume NewsGator has acquired all of Ranchero software, including products such as editing software MarsEdit, and not just NetNewsWire. NewsGator Technologies now produces software in C#, ASP.net, Delphi, and Objective C. Lack of a unified codebase and the company’s reliance on one engineer per…

NewsFire blocks RSS ads

I noticed something new and interesting in the NewsFire release notes today: NewsFire now blocks advertisements from Google and FeedBurner. NewsFire is the first aggregator I know of to block advertisements in the default installation and not a custom user-supplied CSS stylesheet. I tested the new feature with Brad Feld’s feed and Engadget’s feed and both display advertisements in the source but not when displayed in NewsFire. I cannot find any way to enable advertisements at the application or feed level. Is NewsFire the first of what may be many aggregators to block advertisements in feeds? Will products tout this…

Firefox feed styling

I downloaded the nightly build of Firefox this morning and noticed a new default styling for feeds. Firefox is currently displaying headlines only but it looks like you may be able to adjust that preference through the hovering preference and information box on the right-hand side. A checkbox appears next to items with a link currently in your browser history. Deer Park is the name of Firefox binaries while in alpha development stage. Tags: firefox, deerpark…

Microsoft RSS search using Start.com

Microsoft announced a new version of Start.com yesterday that includes news and feed search. You can view the new Start.com and search for yourself. Search results are displayed in a JavaScript window and each search category’s results are displayed using asynchronous JavaScript. You can subscribe to the feed of any result in the RSS search results. I still don’t like the branding of feed search as “RSS search” but I do still ask for a Kleenex even if it’s a Puffs and my parents call a vacuum cleaner a Hoover even if it’s a Dyson. Tags: microsoft, feedsearch, rss…

Bloglines feed statistics

Ask Jeeves just released some statistics about the size of their database and subscribed users. 1,121,655 feeds with at least one subscriber Slashdot is the most popular feed with 37,400 active subscribers. Bloglines indexes almost 600 million articles (items/entries). Bloglines adds over 2 million new articles to its index daily. My blog has a RSS feed for every post, category, month, as well as custom keyword searches and a feed for the last 15 blog entries. That’s thousands of feeds without even mentioning my Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 feeds. I am definitely not conservative in what I produce and…

NewsGator purchases Bradbury Software

NewsGator Technologies has purchased Bradbury Software in a cash and stock deal. Bradbury Software is develops FeedDemon, a feed aggregator, and TopStyle, a website editor, for the Windows operating system. Nick Bradbury lives in Franklin, Tennessee and is the sole developer and runs his entire business from the top floor of his house. Nick develops in Delphi. I used FeedDemon from its first beta until I moved to Mac last May. NewsGator develops free feed aggregators for Windows Media Center, and online as well as a paid aggregator for Microsoft Outlook. NewsGator is currently developing an enterprise server (“Dino”) for…

FeedBurner introduces paid statistics package

FeedBurner announced Total Stats PRO, its premium statistics package, offering per-item statistics and referrer reports among other features. The new service is an up-sell from the company’s standard statistics offering starting at $5 a month. I do not use FeedBurner but I signed up for a trial account so I could review their new features. FeedBurner tracks the each item through the use of a web bug. The web bug is the URL of the feed with a parameter of g with a numeric value equal to what I am guessing is the post identifier in the FeedBurner database. Example:…

NetNewsWire beta adds tag subscriptions

Ranchero Software just released a new beta version of NetNewsWire. The new beta includes a new special subscription type for tags.

Ranchero Software interview on DrunkenBlog

DrunkenBlog posted a lengthy interview with Brent and Sheila Simmons of Ranchero Software. The conversation focuses on what it is like to run a small software business and what about Mac software makes Brent love to write clever applications.

Chameleon Bloglines extension

Joshua Taylor created a Bloglines extension to track attention metadata within the Bloglines newsreader.

NewsGator platform roadmap

Greg Reinacker just announced some big new products from NewsGator. NewsGator will now make a play behind the firewall with a product loosely named NewsGator Enterprise Server. NewsGator Enterprise Software will integrate with Exchange and Active Directory and interact with Outlook Web Access, Blackberry, and Exchange ActiveSync without needing to install NewsGator Outlook Edition on desktop computers across the organization. Greg also announced a white label version of NewsGator Online and there will be many APIs on the way for NewsGator Online. The feedback loop taking place on Greg’s blog is very interesting. Greg is actively engaging his community and…

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