Ask Jeeves officially purchased Bloglines. Mark Fletcher and his team will move to the Ask Jeeves remote office in Los Gatos where Mark will be GM of Bloglines. Teoma will power Bloglines search. Bloglines will gather and monetize users' attention data for contextual advertising. Bloglines launched 18 months ago in June 2003 Official Announcements Ask Jeeves. "Ask Jeeves plans to leverage these technologies across its search and portal brands, and as of today, Bloglines' Web search capability will be powered by Ask Jeeves' search technology." Ask Jeeves Weblog. "There will be no short-term changes to Bloglines that weren't already…
David Watanabe just released version 1.0 of NewsFire, a minimalist and speedy feed aggregator for Mac OS X. NewsFire is shareware and may be purchased for $20. I still use NetNewsWire but NewsFire has impressed me for many months with its speed and ease of use. Please open the application to AppleScript so I can write some hacks!…
Mary Hodder reports Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines and Mark Fletcher will be a Jeeves employee on Monday. Is this true? Mark Fletcher is presenting a 20-minute case study this Tuesday on RSS syndication, ad splicing, and blogging at the Media Center event. Perhaps the announcement is meant to coincide with the conference and Mark will use this time to talk about the new Bloglines. Update: Bloglines acquisition is official. Supposedly announced on Friday with an embargo of midnight tonight….
Brian Del Vecchio wrote a long entry about about splicing a RSS feed by tag and how aggregator developers can create more tag-aware applications. It is possible within the RSS specification, but most feed authors have overlooked how to properly declare tags within their feeds. Flickr does not include categories with its RSS 2.0 feeds and Del.icio.us feeds use Dublin Core subject to provide space-separated tags. Before the feed aggregators can make your life easier we need to all do a better job as content producers to provide valuable information for our users. RSS 2.0 Each RSS 2.0 feed has…
The world of feed aggregators has been compared to the HTML Internet of 1994 by Scott Rosenberg and others.. We are starting to consume and make sense of this new data, but there are currently no well-defined methods or implementations of selective consumption. If I publish content it is instantly available to feed aggregators and search companies with no restraints on its usage regardless of licensing and robot preferences. If a Major League Baseball launched a weblog for the private, non-commercial use of their audience there is nothing stopping companies from adding or supplementing the content without the consent of…
A new version of the Atom sydication format working draft is online. There are element changes such as a change in the publish date and updated tags, and new category support. The new draft also adds a length attribute to link elements, enabling podcasting and other applications. Format freeze is supposed to happen Monday, January 17….
I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers' contest but I won…
Attention.xml is an open standard to track attention metadata such as what you read and what you would like to learn more about. So far there has been a lot of talk around the idea and what it could mean for synchronization, resource discovery, and social networking. Technorati and Steve Gillmor have talked about the idea but there has been no implementation to show how you could use this open format with existing applications such as web browsers and feed aggregators to make sense out of your daily activity. Until now. I wrote an AppleScript that exports all of your…
Opera released a beta version of its Opera desktop application last week. The new version features improved RSS handling including address bar support similar to Apple's plans for Safari RSS. A user can choose between RSS feeds declared as alternate links of type application/rss+xml. After you subscribe to one or more feeds a Feeds menu appears showing your subscriptions and unread items per feed. The Opera RSS browser treats each RSS item as a mail message, complete with the e-mail address of the item's author. I did not check to see which RSS element is pulled here but I…
Forbes has a brief article about RSS feeds changing the business landscape. Some inaccuracies in the article: "Instead of searching for information, you get RSS to push it to you." RSS is a pull technology, not push. A user requests the data and is sent a response. "Technorati.com is now monitoring more than 5 million RSS-enabled blogs." Technorati claims to watch over 5.2 million weblogs, but Technorati builds its database primarily by parsing HTML. Technorati is not a RSS-based searcher as the article claims….
The next version of Macintosh operating system, 10.4 code named Tiger, defines a default RSS reader at the system level. Preferences in the current early start kit allow a user to define the time between feed updates, the color annotation of a new article, and when to remove stored items. Hopefully this means aggregators will be able to share a common feed storage location. Update: MacNet took down at the request of Apple Legal. The preference pane showed a drop-down boxes to select the default RSS reader, choose an update interval, highlight new items, and the length of time to…
Bloglines is now available in Spanish, Japanese, traditional Chinese, French, German, and Portuguese. Mark should open up the interface and allow users to add their own launguages like Google's interface….
Adam Bosworth gave a keynote presentation at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing in New York yesterday. Lots of good content covering programming languages, information overload, the need for simple technologies to warm people up to a bigger idea, and how the experts will still create the complex technologies while the simple methods coexist. "You want to see the future. Don't look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload. On the difference between RSS 1.0 and 2.0: There was an abortive attempt to impose a rich abstract analytic formality on this…
I want to be able to define in my feed aggregators when a feed or feed group should not be checked for updates. When I attend a conference or I am at work I am focused on groups of feeds. Please only update those groups automatically until after 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. I know audio from Fresh Air will not be available until 4:30 p.m., so there is no use in teasing me at 10 a.m. while I wait for the audio. Similar to ttl each aggregator could use skipHours or skipDays as the default and not let me…
I just downloaded Mozilla Firefox 1.0 RC1 and noticed the new orange icon for Live Bookmarks. It looks like the broadcasting icon in iCal (pictured above)….
I just finished reading the Morgan Stanley report on news syndication from analysts Mary Meeker and Brian Pitz. The report focuses a lot on Yahoo!'s moves into supporting RSS throughout the site, and what Yahoo!'s move to syndication means for publishers. Overall a good paper with busness arguements from a business-oriented source. Some interesting snippets from the 15-page report: While Google's search engine and advertising tools set the pace for new ways of searching information, we believe that Yahoo! may be setting the pace for new ways of serving information. Bold statement, but no other major player has embraced the…
Scott Johnson mentioned this morning Feedster is looking heavily at NYU's Coral distributed content system as a possible solution to RSS bandwidth issues. Coral operates over port 8090 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls. Your domain name server must also be aware of DNAME records. Good idea but it needs some kinks worked out for widespread use. BitTorrent uses ports 6881 to 6889 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls as well. Port usage has not stopped the widespread use of BitTorrent, although BitTorrent users are highly technical. A good conversation topic for tonight's Feedster Developer Dinner at 7…
DrunkenBlog posted an interview with developers of the leading feed aggregators for Mac OS X. Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, David Watanabe of NewsFire, Rory Prior of NewsMac, Erik J. Barzeski of PulpFiction, and Graham Parks of Shrook answered questions about the basics of RSS, the threat of Safari RSS, auto-discovery of feeds, competing feed formats, and the business model for producing RSS feeds. Graham Parks on feed formats: Atom looks to be so much more reliable and usable than any version of RSS. Once v1.0 is published next year, I imagine there will be few new implementations of RSS. Of…
NewsGator Online Edition is now a free feature for basic features: NewsGator Web Edition and subscription synchronization. New features include: Per-post rating system. Rate each post from one to five stars. Feed recommendation for paid subscription levels. E-mail feeds. I signed up for a free NewsGator Web Edition account. The service competes with Bloglines and offers cosmos data similar to Technorati. The press release mentions the ability for users to "add the rating feature seamlessly to their own blog site" but I cannot find the code anywhere….
I have been playing around with Rojo, a new Web-based aggregator from Rojo Networks. Rojo adds social networking features to the feed aggregator space. Define your friends, see what feeds they are subscribed to, and what items of interest they have flagged. They have a strong team with a lot of background in open standards and rich applications. Right now Rojo is available by invitation only and new members can invite 5 other members. I already sent out my invites, but Kevin Burton will set you up if you join #rojo on irc.freenode.net. Rojo currently indexes 700,000 weblogs and makes…
Rojo unveiled its next-generation Web-based feed aggregator to an invitation only list. Chris Alden is excited. Rojo has already indexed over 700,000 feeds, some able to be sorted by topic and popularity. A recommendation engine is built-in. Friends and colleagues can connect to each other within Rojo and flag stories for each other and share what feeds they are reading. Rojo Networks also has some P2P talent in Brad Neuberg and it will be interesting to see how that technology could be utilized given Rojo's Web interface….
As our lists of feeds grow it becomes more difficult to sort through the clutter that greets us as we fire up our news aggregators. The list of publishers of supported feeds continues to grow, as does the appetite for consumption. The next important step in the feed aggregation space will be how you tame the data available within the application. I propose sorting services that would allow developers to offer their own reclassification of a list of feeds or their content. Pass a list of feeds in OPML and a web service will return the same OPML with an…
NewsGator Technologies announced a co-marketing relationship with Six Apart yesterday. NewsGator will resell Movable Type and Six Apart will resell NewsGator for Outlook to its corporate customers. The two companies are also planning joint development work. NewsGator will release a plugin in the next week that lets NewsGator for Outlook users post to Movable Type and TypePad. From the NewsGator press release: NewsGator and Six Apart, the leading provider of weblog publishing software, announced a co-marketing relationship focused on enterprise sales of the two companies' leading technology platforms. NewsGator also announced that it will be releasing new plug-ins and other…
The first public beta of NetNewsWire 2.0 is now available from Ranchero Software. Searching, enclosures, persistence, smart lists, and Rendezvous subscription sharing are the new features I use the most….
RSS feeds from Moreover Technologies will be featured in FeedDemon's default configuration. Although the press release and Nick's entry do not mention any payments, I have to assume this was a paid inclusion. Currently FeedDemon provides preconfigured channel groups to help users get started with an application full of feeds. The first time a user launches FeedDemon he or she is presented with a list of preconfigured Channel Groups to include if they would like. The user can deselect each group if they would like to have no default feeds. The free Moreover feeds include advertising. I spoke with Nick…
