Development

The topics of newsmastering, newsradars and of integrating personal media aggregators into instruments of personal publishing, conversation or even political discourse have yet to be fully picked up by those people who could best benefit from them, though interesting things are already starting to happen all around them.

One of the great things about RSS is that it’s easily extendable through the use of “namespaces” - simply new custom elements or tags that work with the existing RSS specification - allowing developers to create their own additions to the RSS format.

Since yesterday, companies using SalesForce.com, one of the most popular CRM solutions on the market, can now integrate their SalesForce.com account with Spanning Salesforce 2.0, a free tool that allows them to subscribe to information from their Salesforce.com account via RSS.

Here’s an interesting RSS implementation … Developers can now create customized Yahoo! Maps by sending various location data to Yahoo via RSS.

Following all the hype concerning Microsoft’s ”adoption” of RSS, some voices stand out and start discussing the security issues this poses. Here are just some selected comments …

In this final part of the RSS metrics interview series Stuart Watson of Syndicate IQ and I take a closer look at what specific RSS metrics mean, advanced metrics systems, the RSS metrics space and using RSS for SEO.

It’s quite evident that RSS enclosures are a security threat, especially if RSS aggregator developers don’t start automatically (by default) blocking certain types of content item ”attachements”. If they don’t, RSS could easily be used to ”infest” trusting people with harmful executable files.

Since we’re talking about practical “everyday” RSS uses, here’s another breakthrough, this time from Bloglines …
Starting today, people can track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world’s largest parcel shipping companies-FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service-within their Bloglines MyFeeds page. Package tracking in Bloglines encompasses international shipments, in English. […]

Yakov Shafranovich has written a great article at XML.com about tracking packages with RSS.
“Now imagine if you were buying things from eBay, or doing your holiday shopping at Amazon: you might be expecting multiple or urgent packages, and I can bet that most of us will be tracking them pretty often, just like those favorite […]

RSS feed customization could become one of the hot RSS topics in the near future, but right now there are just too few companies doing it … and too few providers offering RSS feed customization solutions.

Not long ago, one of the key arguments against using RSS for marketing purposes was the supposed inability to reliably track RSS feed subscribers. But, as many “next-generation” RSS solutions have now proved, that is no longer the case.

Nothing like telling your customers that you can offer them something ‘royalty free’. While most things in life these days don’t seem to be able to offer this sort of thing, it is nice to see something RSS related like osGator served right up for us without any ‘extra excuses’. osGator is designed to offer […]

Andre Torrez has released a product called TKPal. TKPal allows you to protect web pages and grant access to them using the TypeKey service and PayPal.
Currently, TKPal is still in beta and works only with PHP. Andre says in his post “I wouldn’t implement this on your server yet.” Obviously, TKPal is not […]

Would you be interested in supporting an open access directory of RSS news feeds that explicitly carry a Creative Commons or a Public Domain license?
That would mean that you could be sure, well ahead of using them for syndication, re-mixing or re-publication of any kind, that the content in those feeds explicitly permitted re-use […]

The newsmaster task is one of systematically refining the techniques and tools that can provide the most effective way to aggregate RSS-based content from multiple sources (e.g.: Web, news, blogosphere) and then managing this content to filter, pick and select only those items that are rich and truly relevant to the topic covered.
While a trained […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

Peter Rukavina, who lives in Prince Edward Island, Canada, was tired of forgetting what books were due when at his local library. So he wrote a program in Perl to scrape his library’s web site and generate an RSS feed he could subscribe to.
Although this example will only work with the system that Peter’s […]

Brian Alvey writes up a “wish list” for RSS. Brian says “I love RSS. I couldn’t keep up with the embarrassingly small percentage of WIN sites I read if I didn’t have FeedDemon, but there are a few things I wish RSS and feed readers could do.”
Among the items that I found interesting was […]