I thought this was pretty cool. But I was expecting Microsoft to be the first to introduce this feature. Immedi.at gives you a bookmarklet which you click on when the website you want has a auto-discoverable RSS feed (or click on the bookmarklet when you are on the actual feed url). But I find it inconvenient that Immedi.at doesn’t save my IM settings so I have to re-enter them every time I want to bookmark a new feed for IM alerts.
immedi.at helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. immedi.at works with all major IM carriers including MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ.
A friend and IM-collaborator, Eric Thom of RSSapplied.com, needs an RSS consultant and blogger immediately.
RSS Applied has been focused on the business opportunities presented by RSS and Weblogs for years, and we’re ready to bring another person onboard. This position will involve intense daily research focused on the latest RSS technology news, business blogging strategies, corporate communications, podcasting applications, as well as blog design and navigation.
All inquires should be addressed to manage@rssapplied.com
This is a really nice script that displays photos from any Flickr.com RSS feed on your website.
RSS-feed.org is a beta site that lets you create a publicly accessible webpage that shows news from all your favourite news sources — as long as they have an RSS feed. Right now RSS-feed.org doesn’t allow you to add just any feed (only the ones they’ve selected), but the existence of this service only highlights that people want to have a say in how they have news displayed to them. RSS may be hot, but it’s not how everyone wants to consume news. A significant portion of people just don’t want to use a feed reader for whatever reason and Web 2.0 engineers need to take notice.
This week, I made Macgregator, a webpage that aggregates news in Mac-related topics that I’m interested in. Although I judiciously use an RSS feed reader, I don’t want to constantly consume Mac news. Although I’ve been using a Mac for over a decade, I’m just not that interested in the latest and the greatest in everything Mac. I sporadically read Mac stuff from a few sources and I needed a way that lets me do it conveniently without having to bombard me with reminders of that I’m missing out. I want to consume some news when I want and if I want to — not when some robot tells me to. For me, that’s why sites like RSS-feed.org will have a place in the future.
Feed-mail.com is an interesting, if quite unusable concept. It’s email sent via RSS feeds. You subscribe to your Feed-mail feed and you get emails that are sent to that feed. Less spam, more secure. But the sender has to login to his Feed-mail account in order to send a message. And there’s no SMTP service either so you’re locked into Feed-mail’s interface. And one thing that irked me was that my password was inscribed into the feed’s url in plain. Major security risk. And I reckon Feed-mail also has the same security problem as receiving Gmail via Bloglines or any public RSS aggregator — you have to ensure that your feed has privacy settings. Feed-mail is still in beta so things might improve on usability.
Newsgator has just released their API. Developers will have access to the following types of services:
Now I can understand the usefulness of releasing the API for middleware like Feedburner’s API, but I don’t understand the benefit for developers or end users of releasing the API for a client application. The only party I see benefiting from this directly is Newsgator itself.
To understand why I think Feedblitz.com is so great, you need to know a bit of history. Both Feedblitz and Bloglet.com are services for bloggers to offer email subscriptions to their blog posts. Bloglet has the distinction of being the oldest blog-to-email service — it goes so far back that when it started, RSS wasn’t invented yet and it catered exclusive for the Blogger.com crowd. But Bloglet development stalled years ago. Till this day, it doesn’t have email address validation of subscribers and subscription admins don’t have any control over their subscriber base. You can’t delete badly-typed email addresses and you can’t export your subscriber list. Bloglet subscription admins are basically trapped with Bloglet.
Which is where Feedblitz comes in. Feedblitz gives me the chance to finally dump Bloglet and move all my subscribers out to a service that does have email validation and gives me some control over the subscription feed. You can tell Feedblitz to login to Bloglet and grab all the information out of your account, including the list of all the subscribers. I just managed to rescue all my Bloglet subscribers! Given the size of the userbase of Bloglet, I don’t know why no one had thought to do this before. It’s long overdue.
So I am now offering blog-to-email subscriptions again — but this time using Feedblitz’s email form:
Randy has published a list of the most popular feeds that are being subscribed to via his RSS-to-email service. I chuckled when I saw that an RSS blog (Randy’s) is one of the top ten for email subscription. Apart from that rather obvious observation, I can’t contribute much else, except that I noticed significant numbers were subscribed to Chinese-only blogs. This got me to thinking: how many of the popular online RSS feed readers support multi-language interfaces? Bloglines.com is one. Yahoo and MSN of course do (they’ve supported Chinese interfaces long before they had RSS feed readers). But Newsgator.com, Pluck.com and Rojo.com do not.
I’m subscribed to Godaddy.com’s RSS feeds for their domain auctions. Great stuff. I just learned that Portugal.com is up for sale for USD4.5million. And on the other hand the owner of Michaeljacksonisdead.com wants USD175,000 for that. I’m going to keep these RSS feeds subscribed just for their amusement value. As an added bonus, I learned from the sale of thechokinggame.com (USD$500) of a strange new trend that American kids are getting into - choking each other to see who passes out first.
I like myprogs.net because it introduces me to new softwares for OSX. But unlike other software directories, this one comes with recommendations. I get to see what other people are using and have enjoyed so much that they tell me about them. Sometimes, in the descriptions, I even find out why they liked the software. I’m subscribed to the RSS feed for OSX.
As news has spread very rapidly over the past day, Google News has added RSS feeds to their offering. And as has been observed, their RSS package has a good way of handling duplicate stories as related links. So here’s what I’ve been waiting for since I released the ScrappyGoo Google News RSS scraper. ScrappyGoo will still be maintained indefinitely because thousands of feeds have been generated from it so far and while I’m sure many of the users will start using the official feeds, a large percentage of the ScrappyGoo feeds will still continue to be used. The resources being used by ScrappyGoo is quite manageable.
UPDATE: Searchenginejournal makes the interesting point that Google will probably insert RSS ads into their Google News feeds. I’d forgotten about that. ScrappyGoo will always remain ad-free. So I’m definitely keeping it around and waiting for the surge in traffic when Google starts adding ads to theirs.
Nothing else to say about GooRSS. It does the job it advertises. And it will probably take over from Ben Hammersley’s Google to RSS script because it has an input interface instead of making you construct the link.
Two new wishlist sites have come about recently. TheThingsIWant.com and MetaWishlist.com. Unlike Amazon.com’s wishlist, these are not site specific and you can list items you find on any shopping website. Both of them work very similarly. You can share your wishlist publicly or privately both on the website and in RSS feeds. Both of them supply bookmarklets for easy updating of your list. TheThingsIWant.com supports user-added tags, but neither service has a recommendations engine like Amazon.com does. But I’ll bet they’re both looking into it.
Here’s an undocumented feature of Feedburner’s summary burner. Basically the summary burner “strips hyperlinks, truncates content, adds teaser message to each feed item”. In an ironic twist (since Feedburner inserts Google Adsense ads into approved feeds), I found that the summary burner also removes Google Adsense ads.
Here’s the Feedburner summarised feed I made of the RSS Weblog from Weblogs Inc. Normally the original feed from the RSS Weblog has Google Ads inserted into every entry. Not with the Feedburner one. They’re gone. Then again so are the hyperlinks. If you dislike those ugly ads more than not getting the feed with links, this is the way to go.
UPDATE: Dick Costolo of Feedburner writes in the comments that one of the TOS policies of Feedburner is that you must burn only your own feed. I scanned over the TOS and I’m not sure but I didn’t see that. If it isn’t there, maybe they’ll clarify that now.
I was re-reading the transcript for the Google Adsense webinar again. One thing that struck me was that the conventional thinking from Adsense is that return visitors suffer from “ad-blindness”. When they’re so used to the layout of a blog, they don’t click on the ads. The ones who do click on ads are more likely to be first time visitors, driven from search engines or inbound links.
One of the main arguments for truncated RSS feeds is that excerpted feeds drive traffic to your blog, assuming the visitors will click on your ads. But these visitors, according to Google Adsense, won’t do that. In fact, they probably lower your adclick ratio when they drive up your adviews without clicking on the ads.
So if your main goal is to drive traffic to your blog for the purpose of monetizing your blog, truncating your feeds for your loyal readers isn’t going to help. It’s going to hinder. On the other hand, having full posts in your feeds might increase your likeability to your loyal readers.
I’ve decided I don’t need traffic as much as I need loyal readers. So from today onward, I’m going to stop the practice of truncating my feed. But I will offer a truncated feed on my site to give readers a choice depending on what suits their reading habits better — skimming excerpts or remote reading from their feed reader.
(Ironically, for the very reason of ad-blindness, Adsense in RSS feeds doesn’t make sense either. The layout of the content and ads in feed readers is so standardised that people will just find it easier to ignore the ads.)
I think the whole point behind converting a feed to a PDF file is to be able to print it out for reading in hard copy. But the PDF output generated by this free online tool looks so plain. I think the next step for RSS2PDF.com is to allow some customisation of the output — for example, changing of the font or the font size at the very least as well as choices of layouts.
Mary Hodder of Napsterization.org has produced an analysis of five popular blog content search services (Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse, Pubsub). She examines what each of them searches, how they search, what sort of links they count and how long they keep those links counted. It gives us some idea of why the results from each of the search engines differs so greatly from the others. For example, Bloglines keeps all data on inbound links from Day One whereas Technorati keeps link data as long as it is on the front page of a blog, so their link count is much lower but much fresher.
Hodder has put her research into a table on a PDF file for easy reference. I’m sure many people will be using her table to produce more insights into the way each of these search engines work. I hope she’ll include Icerocket.com in that table when it becomes more popular.
Feeddigest is finally released and it has all the features I’d been waiting for. It’s like RSSmix and Bloglines in one. You can combine feeds and there’s an interface where I can see and control all my mixes. There’s even a built-in online feed reader. When the statistics feature comes into play, Feedburner will have a competitor.
London’s bombed again. For news of the latest London bombing, I still have the Crisis Feed from two weeks ago ready. It has all the latest news from news sources around the world and from bloggers via Technorati and Flickr.
Simone Carletti of RSS World has done a very nice thing and is maintaining an Italian translated copy of the wiki article Things you can do with RSS. He’ll be keeping it up-to-date as new additions to the wiki are added. Thanks, Simone!