2003 September

The question remains in my mind as to what is truly the easiest method to track RSS feeds. I have tried a few ideas with mixed results. I am interested in hearing how you folks track your feed readership.
Things to include in your responses are:
1) What RSS version are you using?
2) How difficult is this to do?
3) What […]

Direct from Sue: “You can add our feed for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange news to your list (please). We launched it over the summer.” And, as it indicates on her site, “Sue was recognized for her expertise in Windows support by being named a Most Valuable Professional by Microsoft in 1994 and continues to […]

This is probably old news, but I just discovered ‘em the other day: “Our feeds cover pretty much everything that is published on Network World Fusion (with the exception of forum postings; we’re still working on that): Breaking news, reviews, opinion columns, Weblogs and original-content newsletters. The feeds are in RSS 1.0 format and each […]

Via Library Stuff: “We have general and specific medical and health channels covering the latest news, diseases and conditions, procedures and tests, medications, and our MedTerms medical word of the day channel. By subscribing to a channel, you can have important headlines delivered to your Web site or desktop on health and medical topics of […]

Via the Globe and Mail: “This system could be bad news for the many Canadian businesses that currently rely on e-newsletters to assist in customer relationship management, generate ad revenue, and, perhaps most important, deliver on-line content. National retailers, consumer packaged goods companies, private businesses and news providers are thoroughly immersed in e-mail initiatives. In […]

“If your pages are static, you’re not sunk as long as you have access to some form of CGI to run server-side code. I’ve created an example Perl script, grabrss.pl, that runs as a CGI that will transform an RSS feed into an HTML bullet list. As an alternative to using XSLT, grabrss uses only […]

“RSS News feeds are the newest way to download and read news stories on a variety of subjects, from all over the internet. Handheld Headlines/RSS for Palm OS allows you to download these news feeds, either via a HotSync or using a direct internet connection on your Palm Power Handheld, and then read them later! […]

Lately I have been going off about toolbars in one fashion or another. Yesterday I mentioned one that allowed it’s user to subscribe to feeds without any real effort on their part.
Today I am featuring a toolbar that acts as a news ticker that uses RSS feeds to display it’s headlines directly from your browser. […]

Steve Outing from Editor and Publisher did a nice piece on RSS vs. email publishing. He explorers what each offers the reader. Steve also includes a great round up of aggregation solutions that allow anyone to use RSS headache free.

Here’s another data syndication format that aims to compete with (read: replace) RSS. Via Morbus Iff: “I would like to propose, nay, admonish, that the name of the format and spec should be Atom, that the current naming vote should be killed, and we should move on to grander things without the auspices of ‘what’s […]

I have heard quite a bit of talk about using the RSS: and Feed: standard to make subscribing to feeds a LOT easier. According to RSSExplorer News, this has been taken up a notch. RSSExplorer is now offering the ability to have this option.
RSSExplorer is a toolbar for Internet Explorer that gives you the […]

Via Steve Gillmor: “RSS is all about keeping attention. It’s not the fleeting attention of a headline, or an ad, or a slogan. It’s the process of maintaining consciousness, establishing and retaining a connection, a thread, an idea–morphing the flow of information through context into progress. It’s akin to the couch potato effect that drives […]

What’s in a name? Via Daniel Neeley: “RSS being the buzzword everyone is yapping about and Feed the verb that gives it life. It’s only natural that ‘RSS Feed’ should be the official phrase to go by.”

This is an idea worth exploring, as it may help RSS n00bz further understand the format’s significance. Via Russell Beattie: “What I’m talking about is putting an XSL Stylesheet header in your RSS documents so that when a browser like Moz or IE6 sees it, it’ll render the XML instead of dumping raw tags in […]

Via Sean Voisen: “Any weblog worth it’s salt publishes an RSS feed - it’s just a standard, accepted affair. And you’re labeled as an outcast if you don’t do it. Besides, it boosts readership. The problem is that sometimes this readership is difficult to guage. RSS takes your data, your content, your writing and separates […]

Via Stephen Downes: “[Here] is a list of feeds available through Edu_RSS. Yes, I know, it’s a bit unordered, but a neatly categorized portal will follow. Feeds are available in any flavour of RSS, as well as Javascript for web pages and SOAP for Web Services.”

Old news is sometimes good news. Via Editor and Publisher: “As with other Net technologies, there isn’t yet an obvious business model here. ‘I think it’s better to have people read your content than not,’ Abrams said. ‘It’s a challenge monetizing it.’ The Monitor is now exploring the idea of placing ads in RSS.”

Content publishers are tired of dealing with the frustrations of e-mail delivery. Via Sean Bonner: “I’m thinking of killing off the old yahoo groups list and just setting up an RSS feed for that kind of thing. Is there anyone who’s on my list who won’t sign up for RSS?”

Earlier today, I was ICQ’ed a link to “Why Blogs Won’t Replace Ezines.” True to Internet Marketing form, the author was required to use centered catchphrases interspersed with a call-to-action that seemed to go nowhere in a long-winded fashion. After presenting a half-assed argument against the move from e-mail to RSS, this so-called doctor shares […]

Via Greg Reinacker (author of NewsGator): “This seems like a reasonable idea to me…with the obvious benefit that a user could just click on the link, and the aggregator could add a subscription to the feed. As opposed to the situation today, where if the user clicks on a feed link, they’ll see (at best) […]