Thursday May 05
15 things you can do with RSS (it was supposed to be 10, but I got carried away)
Basically, you can perform any task with RSS that requires search or information retrieval from a server. Automatically and repeatedly. Here are my favourites (please let me know if there are better services and I'll update). I use this list to convince people to start using an RSS feed reader. There's more to RSS than just weblog syndication and news aggregation.
UPDATE: I've decided to allow people to use my Google News Feed Scraper which I call ScrappyGoo. So I guess this is number 16. I've been using it to generate personalised feeds to search for news on Google News. If you promise not to get me into trouble with Google's lawyers. That means you can read the feeds in your feed reader, but don't syndicate the feeds on your website. Alternatively, you can search Yahoo News and get personalised Yahoo News RSS feeds too.
Get the news as it happens from multiple news sources
An RSS feed reader is an aggregator of numerous feeds from news sources (and nearly every major paper and TV news network has RSS feeds today). But now there are even feeds that aggregate other feeds. The new RSSmix.com lets you combine all the news source RSS feeds into one single feed so you get news as it happens.
Collect your email from all your email accounts in your RSS reader
Easily done with mailbucket.org. And each Gmail account has an RSS feed too. Or if you're a user of Mailinator.com, then you'll be glad there's a similar service called dodgeit.com but with RSS feeds.
Track Fedex packages
Ben Hammersley says Just add your tracking number to the end of a special RSS feed address.
Get notified of bargains at Ebay
RSSauction.com lets you specify the type of product, its description and even the price range in their customised Ebay feeds.
Get stock updates
There have been various paid services and limited unpaid ticker services around. Tim Bray made a customisable feed. Yahoo is introducing its own RSS ticker service.
Get the weather reports
Weather Underground has the weather of every city and town in the world. And each of them now has an RSS feed. Alternatively, there is RSSweather.com.
Find out what people are saying about you, your company or your product online
Services like technorati.com and pubsub.com offer something that's popularly called persistent search delivery. You type in a search term such as your name and or your company name or product name and they will return the newest indexed references to you in a customised RSS feed. Both services scan blogs. If you want persistent search delivery from a broader range of sites, you have Googlealert.com.
Get music, radio programs and TV clips
Now you have podcasts and directories like podcastalley.com that also serve the latest podcasts in several RSS feeds. And increasingly, like Comedy Central's Daily Show, broadcasters are finding it effective to promote and deliver their shows in RSS. Videobloggers now have a community website called Mcfeedia.com that adds tags to video blog RSS feeds.
Stay updated on someone's schedule
RSScalendar.com lets someone input new events and meetings on their schedule for free. And if you pick up the RSS feed for that schedule, you're always up-to-date on what's going on in that person's day.
Get cinema schedule updates
Quietly getting popular, a movement led by small local cinemas like City Cinema, rather than big cinema networks. But the bigger cinemas are delivering updates via email and these can be converted into feeds by mailbucket.org.
Read your favourite comics
Many daily and weekly comic authors publish online and have an RSS feed. Dilbert of course has one. Best way to locate the feed is to type in the name of the comic into either Feedster.com or Bloglines.com (both are great RSS feed directories). And even if your favourite comic doesn't have a feed on its website, a good comic will have someone somewhere creating an unofficial scraped feed. Comicalert.com has a large updated list of both official and unofficial RSS feed list of hundreds of comics.
Find out what other people surfing
I don't mean spyware. A lot of people use online bookmarks which they make public. Places like del.icio.us, feedmarker.com, furl.net and the new wists.com are online bookmark services that create RSS feeds for each user.
Automatically backup your weblog posts
If your RSS feed is being picked up by an online feed reader service like Bloglines.com, they will store all your entries on their server. Unfortunately, they don't have an export feature. But at least all your entries (if you have full entries in your RSS feed) are safe and dated.
Get software updates
Popular software downloads sites like Download.com and versiontracker.com let you keep up with all new releases via RSS. So you can also be alerted when your favourite softwares have a new version or when there are better releases.
Get the latest bittorrent files and ahem, p*rn
As they say, if its worth something, it's worth more illegal. Bittorrent directory Torrentspy.com was the first to have an RSS feed that lets its users know what has just been uploaded. And the online p*rn industry, being always on the cutting edge of online business, was probably the first to take to blog CMSes and use them to generate traffic through RSS feeds. I'll refrain from linking to one here, but it just takes a Google search to find several.
Comments
Very good list! Tipp no. 1 has the wrong URL: not “rssmixer.com” but http://www.rssmix.com/
with the same flavor :
http://inlogicalbearer.blogspot.com/2005/04/rss-causing-decline-of-mailing-lists.html
16: get deals: Skimper.com
You can get traffic conditions too via:
http://maps.yahoo.com/traffic.rss?csz=95472&mag=5&minsev=1
Just change the area code, magnification and minimum severity to fit your needs.
You can get up-to-the-minute police and fire events too:
http://www.incidentlog.com/incidentlog.rss
And you can SPAM del.icio.us.
Great post ! First time here and I’ll be back.
You can automatically download legal Video Remixes posted up as bittorrents from http://www.vjtorrents.com/wp-rss2.php
Klir Technologies ( http://www.klir.com/ ) supports RSS for their platform. I use it to keep track of my daily reports on devices in the system.
Ping Back来自：RSS摘要 http://www.donews.net/sayonly/archive/2005/05/03/361752.aspx
Latest virus and hoax alerts from Sophos (requires -free- registration): http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/infofeed/rss_index.html
… and for all those sites without RSS, there’s http://www.wotzwot.com/rssxl.php
All you need is a very basic HTML literacy to specify what chuncks of the Web Page to track, and Wotzwot will track changes there and send them to you by RSS.
Good list. *Bookmarked*
Great list keep up the great stuff!!!
Great to see another Google News to RSS scraper. Now why don’t Google do this themselves and save us the trouble? How old is Google news now? And how long have we been asking for it?
Great post for sure! [ bookmarker ]
If you don’t want to trust third parties with your passwords, or want to keep everything internal to your network, you can do number 2 with my tool IMAP2RSS.php.
I know, I know, shameless plug.. :)
Hot mate… love it.
There’s Watchcow.net which is an Amazon price tracker. And xanadb.com hosts a javascript that creates an RSs feed of your amazon wishlist. Now, if only Amazon would take advantage of these two things and start creating personalised marketing like how Syndicateiq proposes they do.
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