2004 September

A few months ago, I decided to finally dip my toes into the murky waters of RSS. To describe it as an ocean of opportunities is an understatement. The problem was finding a desktop application to create the feeds. It should be simple enough, right? Wrong. Most of the options out there were too complex, […]

Want to have contextually relevant books promotions inside your RSS news feeds which pay you back a commission everytime someone buys one of those books from Amazon?
Want to decide when and where to show those relevant promotions?
Want to select from other Amazon stores?

If you go to Feedster’s More page, you can find these feed URLs:

MP3 Enclosures
All Enclosures
Video Enclosures
Picture Enclosures
Calendar Event Enclosures
Bit Torrent Enclosures

If you have an enclosure-enabled feed reader, you can tell it to download enclosures in feeds automatically. If you really want to get fancy, you can use a program like Azureus to scan the […]

WebNews.TV is the unique program that pronounces feeds and comments them with funny animation movies.
This program download the latest news from RSS news feeds and Web sites and then shows them in TV like screen. Funny characters (by default - penguin) entertain you while you are reading and listening news headlines. For each news […]

NewsPiper is a RSS / Web news reader and news ticker in one environment. This program scans your favorites news sites (like cnn.com, foxnews.com, etc.) or RSS news feeds, retrieve news headlines and shows them in a special always-on-top bar (News Bar) placed at the top of your desktop.
For each shown headline you can open […]

Looks like Technorati had a colo fire that caused problems and headaches for all involved. Though the service was down for the weekend, it should be back Monday. Here’s a brief explanation of what happened as told by David Sifry, the CEO:
At about 9:30PM PST Friday, there was an electrical fire on the power […]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how MSDN had stopped providing full text feeds. After an outcry from the blogosphere, changes were made and people seem to be happy. The underlying problem, however, is still there.
Jon Galloway has a good summary of what happened and what needs to be done.
After a lot […]

For those of you who subscribe to NewsGator Online Services, you now have access to more premium content.
From the press release:
Greg Reinacker, President and Founder of NewsGator, said, “This agreement marks another step in our effort to provide the best content available in the market to our customers. Subscribers to NewsGator Online Services can […]

A beta version of NetNewsWire 2 has been released by Ranchero Software. I had been a NetNewsWire user for a long time (until I was forced to switch to a PC for work) and loved it. The new version looks even better, making me wish I could go back to OS X. […]

The Weblogs, Inc. Network has undergone some dramatic changes recently. I remember not too long ago when WIN had only a handful of blogs. Now they seem to be adding one or two blogs a week!
Some of the changes include a site-wide redesign, the addition of at least four new blogs (like I […]

What would you think if I told you that at Ziff-Davis they are still not very sure of what RSS really is?
I know that if you are a competent techno-publisher you rightly expect the big guys to be somewhat slow at getting the real knack for new technologies a bit late in the game, but […]

The newsmaster is an individual capable of personally crafting RSS-based specialized information channels by utilizing technologies that allow hir to select, aggregate, filter, exclude and identify quality news, information, content, tools and resources from the whole universe of content, news and information available on the Internet.
Newsmastering is the ability of a human being to […]

1) In your experience, what are the best marketing and business uses for RSS? Could you perhaps give us some practical examples?
2) What are the greatest benefits of using RSS as a content delivery vehicle?
3) The number one problem RSS publishers are facing is the lack of knowledge about RSS.
4) What in your mind […]

After Opera, Mozilla is the second major browser-maker to offer an integrated RSS newsreader/aggregator both in its Firefox browser and inside its e-mail client Thunderbird.

I take the weather to my feedreader with RSSweather. It can now also be done with WeatherClicks.

Innovative, cutting-edge prototype of what RSS may have in store for the independent publishers and would-be newsmasters among you.

Looks like Netflix is finally joining the RSS movement. Netflix recently announced RSS support for their service.
The feeds you would expect are there, including Top 100, New Releases, and Top 25 by Genre. In addition, you can also create a feed of your account subscriptions. For example, here is Dave Winer’s Netflix […]

Omea Reader is a tool which combines an RSS/ATOM feed reader, a newsgroup reader and a Web bookmark manager in a single easy to use interface. Omea Reader includes the full range of information management features of Omea Pro, including fast searching, views and categories, flags, annotations and much more. Omea Reader can be extended […]

egoClip is an RSS / Atom aggregator that can prioritize your feeds based on usage. It does this locally (no data is sent over the Internet) and without any manual ranking.
egoClip uses the standard three pane interface for reading and working with feeds. Here is a list of the features in the program:

-Supports […]

Recently, the MSDN blog section stopped providing full text in its feeds. On one hand, I am disappointed. I have found the MSDN feeds to be a great resource. Now it will be a hassle to read each article I find interesting in the browser.
On the other hand, I can understand the […]