2004 October

This excellent report from Morgan Stanley’s analysts Mary Meeker, Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald is an absolute must-read for anyone involved with building or maintaining a profitable and forward-looking online publishing business.
The three research analysts at MS have done an absolutely excellent job at understanding, evaluating, questioning, synthesizing and anticipating much of what is to […]

Project DU Reader, is a good, free RSS newsreader and it offers me an ideal opportunity to analyze in a little more depth:
a) where developers should look in building the next generation of these tools
b) what are the routes to getting deep, viral traction and
c) some ideas for applying innovative new monetization approaches […]

Something I’ve been pushing to get for some time has been RSS feeds for WMPlugins.com - the source for add-ons for Windows Media Player 10. I’m happy to give a little early announcement :). Now if you’re running a Player/Digital Media enthusiast site, you can easily add a small HTML file that displays […]

GekoTribe has a great article on using RSS to optimize your site for search engines.
On the other side of the equation, importing feeds from other sites or even other parts of your own site and displaying them on your webpages can improve your search engine positioning by automatically keeping your website full of fresh, relevant […]

A new UK-based provider of RSS [Rich Site Syndication] ’scraping’ facilities, has just unveiled to the public a new web service that empowers it’s users to be able to provide their own RSS feeds, with no prior programming knowledge or familiarity with RSS or XML.
RSS solves varying amounts of problems webmasters commonly face, such as […]

SharedRSS.com is a service that allows you to “share” an RSS feed with others. From the site:
Over the past year or two, business websites have begun to adopt RSS technology to distribute newsletters that used to be delivered by email (ever more prone to disruption from SPAM filters), scientists have begun exchanging breaking research […]

Adam Kalsey had a crazy idea and turned it into reality.
I’m not sure exactly how, but at Gnomedex a goofy idea was floated. We were talking about weird RSS feeds and I mentioned a spam feed. It’s just goofy enough to be clever, and now it’s a reality. You can subscribe to a feed of […]

Greg Scher has a summary of some nice additions to the social bookmark service del.icio.us.
I just couldn’t pass this up. I was perusing the Del.icio.us full RSS feed which is a running list of all postings on Del.icio.us. Anyway, I was just perusing this list. which by the way generates a few thousand […]

Erwin Van Hunen has been a busy guy this past week or so. He’s been spending long hours working on Doppler, an enhanced client for subscribing to Podcasts for Windows users.
You can download the RC1 version now, and soon you’ll be able to download a new version, which I have had the privilege of testing […]

David Galbraith says “I’ve heard three people refer to the ‘RSS space’ at Web 2.0. This is dangerous hype.”
He goes on to say that the real value that may come from RSS is in the ping servers, like Technorati, Weblogs.com, and ping-o-matic, to name a few.

From the product site:
Omea Reader is an easy to use, all-in-one RSS/ATOM feed reader, newsgroup reader, and web bookmark manager. But what really makes it unique is the level of information organization and management features including lightning-fast searches, flexible filing, contextual access, and extensibility.

RSS is becoming more and more mainstream. I wonder how Google, with their support for Atom, will react? In the end though, only the geeks care about Atom vs RSS. I like how Yahoo! uses the term “content feeds” on its public site. Even though the underlying technology is RSS, the […]

Chris has a great set of tips on RSS at CNET.
Think about your favorite search engine for a second. Can it deliver a link to an article or a posting that hit the Web minutes ago? It should, and if it doesn’t, might I suggest finding a new favorite?
RSS is an easy way for sites […]

David has been busy adding new features to BlogMatrix Jäger. He recently added the “Universal Search Parser” to provide ephemeral searching (short-lived searches on existing content). There are plans to add persistent searches in the future (the ability to scan for new content via keywords). From the site:

Universal Searching
BlogMatrix Jäger 1.6 is […]

For the past few days, our Amazon RSS feeds were acting wonky. After reviewing the extensive Web Services literature, I decided to hand it off to someone far more capable: Tom Pohl. He’s saved my digital bacon more than once, and so I’ll be giving him half of this quarter’s revenues derived from those Amazon […]

A few minutes ago, I received this message from the kind folks from the D2Soft Technologies Team. Instead of sending me a personalized note, however, they made the mistake of employing a spammish marketing tactic. Sorry, but I just can’t recommend ‘em now.
“We have seen that you offer a RSS feed on your site ‘Lockergnome’s […]

A while back I mentioned that I had been looking for and found an RSS aggregator (newsreader):
“For about a week now I’ve been hunting for a good RSS aggregator. I really didn’t want a Web-based RSS aggregator because they are usually a pain to manage. I looked hard and heavy and found SharpReader. It’s phenomenal. […]

A few days ago, I logged into my Gmail account and noticed an Atom logo underneath the labels section. It was early in the morning and I had just arrived at work, so I thought to myself “cool, I’ll have to check that out tonight.” When I got home and sat down to […]

Bloglines recently announced web services and an API for developers to interface with their service.
At the time of the announcement, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and BlogBot were listed as applications that planned to make use of the web services.
From the press release:
Bloglines Web Services address a key issue facing the growing RSS market by reducing the bandwidth […]

CNET now has a great tutorial for learning about RSS. It includes a news section, glossary, product reviews, and a video tutorial.
The tutorial is short (about four pages), and clearly describes why RSS is important and how you can use it to improve your productivity. Here is a short excerpt:
Finding it hard to stay […]