RSS Blog & RSS News

Google Files Patent for Contextual RSS Ads 07/30/2005

According to the Google Patent Filing: Incorporating targeted ads into information in a syndicated, e.g., RSS, presentation format in an automated manner is described. Syndicated material e.g., corresponding to a news feed, search results or web logs, are combined with the output of an automated ad server. An automated ad server is used to provide keyword or content based targeted ads. The ads are incorporated directly into a syndicated feed, e.g., with individual ads becoming items within a particular channel of the feed. The resulting syndicated feed including targeted ads is supplied to the end user, e.g., as a set of search results or as a requested web log. Embedding of targeted ads into syndicated feeds and/or user response to the embedded ads is be tracked in an automated manner for billing. The automated targeting and insertion process allows ads to be kept current and timely while the original feed may be considerably older.

Its Official - America Online Teams up with Feedster for Personalized ''My AOL'' RSS Feeds Search on the New AOL.com(R) Web Portal 07/29/2005

America Online, Inc., today announced the initial beta release of My AOL, a new personalized home page on the AOL.com(R) Web portal (www.aol.com). The new AOL.com portal provides users with the flexibility to access and use the portal based on their specific needs and interests. In addition to a centralized page that provides a view of AOL.com's entire suite of features and its new Video Hub experience, the portal also provides a personal "My AOL" page for consumers who want fast access to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for updates of news and content they care about. AOL has teamed up with Feedster(TM), a leading RSS search engine, to provide the capability for My AOL users to search and subscribe to publisher-specific and topic-based feeds that relate to their interests. Drawing from sources across the Web, the new My AOL will provide users with up-to-the minute articles and information on the subjects that matter most to the user and presents this content in a simple, streamlined and organized format. "By enabling consumers to create their own personal home page on AOL.com to manage all of their sources of online information in one central location, My AOL provides a convenient solution for a usually time-consuming ritual: visiting multiple Web sites and blogs multiple times each day to catch up on news," said Kerry Parkins, Director, Audience Products, America Online. "By leveraging leading technology from Feedster, AOL is able to provide an easy and fully personalized way for people to discover new RSS feeds and create their own virtually real-time information journal." With the tremendous volume of information available on the Web and the constant rate at which it changes, My AOL utilizes the best technology available to simplify the process of gathering and organizing important news feeds so that they will be quickly and easily available to the user. Feedster's proprietary technology platform crawls the Web continuously fetching updated posts and RSS feeds. This enables delivery of a fresh index of information from millions of sources more frequently than traditional search engines. As a result, Feedster has the largest index of RSS feeds. It leads the market today with a rapidly growing searchable index of over 11 million RSS feeds and hundreds of millions of XML documents.

Rumor on ThreadWatch - Feedster to Power My AOL! 07/28/2005

According to Threadwatch Susan Mernit, who's generally a pretty reliable source for this kind of thing, says she's heard that Feedster are about to announce their agreement with AOL to provide MyAOL with RSS Search and Feeds.

Google Online RSS Reader: Worst Than Having Nothing At All 07/27/2005

Rok Hrastnik goes after Google's poor implementation of RSS. Google just added RSS subscription/reading features to its personalized Google homepage. The news comes from Micropersuasion. My first feeling was that this is excellent, another stone towards getting RSS in to mainstream. But looking at how Google implemented these RSS features, I wonder if it weren't better for them to wait another month or so to bring us at least a usable online RSS aggregator. First of all, finding the "Subscribe to RSS Feature" is an art by itself, since Google decided to hide the subscribe feature under a "Create a Section" link. Why can't we just abide by some standards to make things easier on users? Second, all that Google's RSS functionality allows you to do is subscribe to feeds, which are then placed on your homepage as headlines, with the ability to select the number of headlines displayed, but no ability to see the descriptions or even full-text content. If this is how Google plans to contend on the RSS market, they might as well not do it at all. The very least I would expect from them are feed filtering and merging capabilities. More from Rok

MSN RSS Search Feeds? 07/26/2005

According to ThreadWatch there is speculation that MSN may announce RSS Search today. Are you curious what MSN has been up to? Check your server logs for IP addresses 207.68.146.41 and 207.68.146.47 to see the initial probe and 207.68.146.53 for the deeper revisit.

Property RSS - Real Estate Classified Ad and Real Estate News Article RSS Aggregator 07/25/2005

RSS drives potential clients to your listing and articles that have specifically registered for unique real estate RSS feeds such as yours. If a person is looking for all property RSS feeds in a certain price point in a specific postal code and you will be publishing a property listing RSS tomorrow with their criteria, then tomorrow when you publish your feed, they will receive your feed instantly. And they will be linked directly to your web site and not anybody elses. Its your potential customer afterall. More on Property RSS  if you need to create real estate feeds use FeedForAll

FeedShake - RSS Feed Merging and Filtering 07/25/2005

FeedShake looks like it might have some promise. Feedshake tool helps you to generate new feeds by merging, sorting and filtering existing online RSS feeds. This service doesn't require any subscription nor e-mail adress.

Summit on Blogging and Democracy in the Commonwealth 07/25/2005

Political Blogging and Election Law  Date: Saturday, August 27, 2005 Location: Doubletree Hotel, Charlottesville, VA Mission: 1) To promote commonwealth over partisanship among political bloggers in Virginia. 2) To explore efforts to regulate political blogging.

FeedForAll Scores An Award - Best Internet Communication Software 2005 07/22/2005

FeedForAll competed for the coveted prize against big name nominee's Skype by Skype Technologies S.A, Trillian by Cerulean Studios and AliveChat 3 by WebsiteAlive. FeedForAll emerged as the overall winner collecting the largest number of votes in the Internet Communication category. Additional Details - FeedForAll Walks Away a Winner

RSS Reader Review 07/22/2005

Randy at KbCafe does a nice job reviewing the popular RSS readers available on the market. Check out the RSS Reader Review

Pheedo Shares Some Impressive Generic Statistics 07/22/2005

Pheedo Shares Some Impressive Aggregate Feed Statistics: Tuesday is the most active day in RSS; Saturday least active. - Our initial observations of the data point to Tuesday being the most active day for viewership, feed retrieval and click-throughs. - Click through rate (CTR) differs by over 70 percent from Tuesday, the most active day for RSS, to Saturday, the least active. Feed retrieval (when a user’s feed reader fetches the RSS feed) is a bit more consistent with a 47 percent swing between the two days. - The second best day for all of the aforementioned metrics is Wednesday, showing an average 22 percent differential from Tuesday. The “morning scanners” view most content; late night readers click through more. - CTR fluctuates from 7 to 11 percent depending on the hour of the day that users are consuming the content. It is interesting to note that CTR peaks in the late night daypart hours and late in the afternoon during the daytime daypart hours. Complete Aggregate Stats

PopPhoto.com RSS Feeds 07/22/2005

PopPhoto is now offering RSS feeds for use in news reader programs. PopPhoto has product specific feeds as well as a "How to Feed".

Mark Cuban Launching BlogScour 07/22/2005

So the man who resurrected the Dallas Mavericks and took on Donald Trump in the reality TV game said he will soon relaunch his IceRocket search engine as BlogScour. Similar to Technorati or PubSub, Cuban’s BlogScour will search for the latest postings across the so-called blogosphere and return a list of results. The revised IceRocket is expected to be unique among the other search engines in that every search entry has a thumbnail of the home page of the listing.”

Which Feeds Matter? 07/21/2005

Whether you’re talking about the size of the web or the size of the blogosphere, the whole notion of size can be misleading. People create and abandon new sites, pages and blogs faster than they abandon South Beach diets. Add in duplicates, spam and other assorted junk, and you have a hard time measuring what’s real, let alone what’s relevant. The more important question is: which feeds matter? Bloglines can add some unique perspective to this question, because we know which sites are compelling enough to attract at least one subscriber, among those that offer feeds. Of course, not every site has a feed or even needs a feed. But among those that do, Bloglines members are choosing to track some and not others. Complete Article and Graphs

Predictions for the Future of RSS 07/20/2005

Blogs vaulted RSS into the limelight but are unlikely to be the force that sustains RSS as a communication medium. The biggest opportunities for RSS are not in the blogosphere but as a corporate communication channel. Even now, businesses that were initially reluctantly evaluating RSS are beginning to realize the power and benefit of the RSS information avenue. The inherent capacity for consumers to select the content they wish to receive will be the driving mechanism for keeping advertisements to a minimum and content quality consistent. Complete Article

RSS Goes Corporate 07/20/2005

Enterprises Take Note Until the last year, RSS was nearly impenetrable for all but the earliest of adopters, due to the complexity of reader setup, the narrow assortment of available feeds, and disputes over standards. Though NewsGator has one of the most popular reader packages, it’s all relative. Pew said in February that just 5 percent of U.S. Internet users used RSS aggregators, while Jupiter put the number at 12 percent in March. However, MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Google, Amazon, and AOL are integrating RSS into their portals, and all major browsers will have an aggregator embedded when Microsoft comes out with the new version of Internet Explorer. Various estimates put the number of active feeds at slightly over 5 million. Complete Article

Future of RSS Looks Rosy 07/19/2005

Up to now, RSS has been a free technology. Subscriptions to feeds are free and so is much of the software used to collect and read the feeds. However, that doesn't mean there isn't money to be made from the technology down the road -- at least that's the feeling of the founders of RSS Investors. Complete Article

Upcoming Forrester boot camp on blogging, RSS, viral marketing, etc. 07/19/2005

Social Marketing: Tapping Into The Power Of Connected Customers Overview: New technologies like blogs, social networking, and RSS are changing the media and marketing landscape. This Boot Camp will not only introduce these new tools, it will also move you quickly into being an active participant in social media and marketing. You'll go home with a better understanding of how to use social marketing — and more importantly, a workable plan for what to do today. Marketers will learn when it is appropriate to use these tools, how to overcome internal resistance to deployment, and how to measure the results. Additional Details

Washingtonpost.com RSS Feeds Carry Ads 07/18/2005

Washingtonpost.com is one of the first major news site to begin integrating advertising into its RSS feeds, in what is a sign of more direct competition between mainstream news organizations, search engines and blogs for new media dollars.

30% of Consumer Magazine Websites Already Offer RSS 07/13/2005

The International Federation of the Periodical Press group just revealed the results of their consumer media study, which show that 30% of all consumer media sites are already providing their content via RSS. Complete Article

Google AdSense for RSS Out of Beta 07/13/2005

Google has opened up its contextual Adsense ads for RSS feeds to any web site owner. There's one catch, however. You must have more than 100 feed subscribers to sign up.

Yahoo RSS Search Test Skims the Web 07/12/2005

Whether intentionally or not, Yahoo briefly showcased some of its RSS search plans on Friday when Webloggers discovered and then posted screen shots of a Yahoo site for finding syndication feeds. Yahoo Inc. executives previously have hinted at a possible search engine for blogs and feeds, but this week's sighting indicates that Yahoo is getting closer to releasing at least a test version of RSS search, search experts say. Complete Article

Longer RSS Ads Catch More Clicks 07/09/2005

Charles M. Smith, president and COO for Pheedo, told the Times that advertisers currently pay 50 cents to $1.75 per click for Pheedo ads, which Pheedo and the publisher of the content in the feed share. In tests of various RSS ads, he says, longer, 500-word ads work better than the 100-word ads of search marketing fame. Complete Article

Camera Phones, Blogs and RSS Told of the Horror 07/08/2005

Londoners conveyed the horror of the recent train bombings to the world using camera phones, blogs and RSS. The technological advancements have given a very personal view of the recent terrorist attacks. Some of the most intimate images of yesterday's bomb blasts in London came from cell phones equipped with cameras and video recorders, demonstrating how a technology originally marketed as entertainment has come to play a significant role in up-to-the-minute news. Thoughts are with Londoners...

FeedTime 07/08/2005

FeedTime is a new RSS feed directory. You need to register in order to submit your feed. Once registered you can navigate the site and submit feeds to appropriate categories.

OPML 07/07/2005

OPML 1.0 Specification This document describes a format for storing outlines in XML 1.0 called Outline Processor Markup Language or OPML. Essentially you can import or export groups of feeds with OPML

New Podcasting Directory for Podcast Feeds 07/06/2005

Podcasting Station is a new categorized directory of podcasts. The new site at http://www.podcasting-station.com/ makes it easy for individuals or businesses curious about podcasts, to find the latest podcast feeds in a single convenient and easy to navigate location. Similar podcasts are grouped under general topic headings. Each topic contains podcast titles and descriptions. A search feature allows web surfers to search for podcasts using keywords and phrases. The flexible search options gives web surfers the ability to search for specific podcasts of interest. Information contained in the Podcasting Station directory covers a huge range of audio content, from humor and news to foreign language instruction and sports interviews. The intention of Podcasting Station is to provide a convenient resource that unites the podcasting community making it easy for consumers and industry professionals to locate podcasts and information that they are seeking. Industry professionals and consumers can visit http://www.podcasting-station.com/ to browse a large directory of podcasts, indexed and categorized for easy access. Podcasters are encouraged to add their podcast feeds to the database. All listings are currently free of charge and, the information is freely available to consumers and related industries.

TextAloud and Synthesized Podcasting 07/05/2005

We have recently begun playing around with NextUp's TextAloud software. The software allows you to paste or type in text, and the text can then be saved as an MP3 or wave file. This means that you can take existing content and turn it into an audio podcast in seconds! To demonstrate I've created a small podcast feed containing a few of the RSS articles in the RSS Article Directory. Eventually all of the articles will be available via podcast. The created podcast uses a synthesized voice, but the quality is really quite good. Check out the new RSS Podcast.

Really Simple Syndication = Really Serious Money 07/01/2005

Jim Moore and John Palfrey have launched RSS Investors with $100m of capital. It is the first VC fund with a focus on Real Simple Syndication, (RSS), the syndication technology at the heart of media technologies such as blogging and corporate news communication. Complete Article

FeedBurner Just Gets It 07/01/2005

I have to say as a company FeedBurner gets it. If I was looking for a place to invest it would be them. In the past my reservation about the FeedBurner services were that you were essentially tied into them and you basically had to give away any PR associated with the URL as they hosted the feed files. In the last two weeks, two of FeedBurner's announcements have shown me how in tune FeedBurner is with its audience. FeedBurner has implemented a "transparency service" that alleviates the issues that arise if you want to host your own feed. In addition they have setup redirect's for users who leave their service. Hats off to these guys for understanding user concerns.

Unusual Use for RSS 07/01/2005

Stolenboats.org.uk have released an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to allow easier access to the latest marine theft information. The RSS feeds allow you to stay up to date with the latest news and thefts shown on the Stolen Boats website.

- RSS Specification Feed created by FeedForAll