DeWitt Clinton: My recommendation to application developers today is to use Atom 1.0, not RSS, as the basis for your content syndication. DeWitt is the lead engineer at Amazon’s A9 search engine. He took a pretty detailed look at RSS 2.0 and Atom as part of A9’s syndication efforts (including OpenSearch) and shared some of his thoughts today on his blog. He appreciates the detailed implementation of the Atom Syndication Format allowing more lossless expression of data between content publisher and parser….
Category Archives: Feed aggregators
Atom 1.0 now default option
About a year ago I said I would switch my blog’s Atom output from 0.3 to 1.0 once Bloglines, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator supported the new format. Bloglines now supports Atom 1.0, so I just flipped my Atom feed over from 0.3 to 1.0. Everything should transition smoothly….
RSS days in Washington state
The state of Washington has declared today and tomorrow RSS days throughout the state. The declaration is in recognition of big companies, startups, and governments within Washington taking advantage of new technologies such as RSS to change the technology sector….
IE7 RSS adds mark all read, refresh at will
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…
Four million Netvibes users
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…
You down with A.P.P.?
Lately when talking about the Atom Publishing Protocol I can’t help but think of O.P.P. from Naughty By Nature. I don’t remember how it first got in my head, but now that it’s there I feel the need to share this brain worm. You down with A.P.P.? Yeah, you know me. A.P.P. how can I explain it I’ll take you frame by frame it To have y’all jumpin’ shall we singin’ it A is for Atom P is for Publishing scratchin’ letters The last P…well…that’s not that simple Geeky protocols meet early 90s rap music. Army with harmony….
Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard
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…
URL shortcuts for feed syndication specs
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….
Mark Fletcher leaves Bloglines
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 Blog Search launches
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…