Category Archives: Feed aggregators

FeedShow and RemoteAds

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

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 presentation at Startup SIG

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…

Brightcove adds videoblogs to TIVo

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…

Firefox 2.0 adds new feed handling

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….

NewsGator error blanks out feed content

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…

Appcasting for application updates

Appcasting is a way to add automatic updates to your applications using RSS 2.0 with enclosures. Mac apps TextMate, SubEthaEdit, and iStumbler already use appcasts for updates and frameworks such as Sparkle help you easily add updates for your own Cocoa app. Application developers can describe their application and the changes present in each update. You can add CSS and images to make the update screen pretty, and Sparkle lets you specify a web page to retrieve if you would like to keep the size of your RSS file small. Developers code the location of the appropriate RSS feed directly…

Helio on Top feed reader

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 Series 60 podcatcher

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…