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…
Category Archives: Software
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…
Fox Interactive Media Labs testing widget platform
A small group of of Fox Interactive Media employees are working on a new widget platform called TheSpringBox. TheSpringBox allows users to embed Flash widgets in any webpage and download their favorite widgets to the desktop engine for more frequent use. The new widget engine was developed by FIM Labs just outside Atlanta in Marietta, Georgia. (via Mashable) The existence of another desktop and webpage widget engine isn’t too big of a deal, but this is a platform under development from Fox Interactive Media, home of MySpace and a huge widget economy. Peter Chernin, COO of parent company News…
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…
Adobe introduces online photo and video sharing
Adobe will bundle online photo and video sharing into the latest versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. The Photoshop Showcase site will be powered by Flash of course, and includes support for geotagging photographs (U.S. only), tagging, creating easily shared albums, and sending your photos to a digital picture frame or photo printer. Adobe views a photo, video, or gallery as one “share.” The fist 1,000 shares are free and users can upgrade to 5,000 shares for $3.99 or unlimited shares for $7.99. I have not seen many details released about the Photoshop Showcase product’s online presence, but…
Google personalized recommendations widget
iGoogle users can now add a Google Gadget to their homepage showing recommended searches, pages, and gadgets based on behavior across Google search properties. The new service builds on top of Google’s search history trends data by adding recommended destination pages and new homepage gadgets. The widget was written by “Beverly Y.” in Google’s New York office. I found the recommendations useful with some expected content and a few surprises thrown in as well. “Burning Man” might be geo-targetted since I live in San Francisco, but three RSS recommendations in the top 5 is right on. I was researching…
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…
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant on Microsoft core values
I just found out about two clips from The Office stars Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant about life as a Microsoft employee (thanks Kevin!). The same jokes hold true for most big corporations, but listening to Ricky’s responses to Microsoft’s core values really cracked me up. Ricky Gervais interviewed on Microsoft core values Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant conduct a Microsoft performance review My favorite clip is Ricky’s response to being “open and respectful in all of our dealings.” He recommends firing people with consistently bad ideas and making your good ideas work for you….