RSS Blog & RSS News

FEC Won't Regulate Online Politics 03/29/2006

Regulators brought Internet political advertising under the nation's campaign finance law Monday but declared that all other political activity on the Internet would be untethered by federal rules.

Kremlin Has Feeds! 03/27/2006

The Kremlin has RSS feeds available. The President of Russia’s official website offers RSS channels for the majority of the most frequently updated content sections News, Presidential Speeches and Addresses, Press Releases and more.

Feed Validator and Alternatives 03/27/2006

There is a post on Dive Into the Mark that discusses the results being put up from one of the more popular feed validation tools. This is an issue we've discussed a lot lately and there are other feed validation alternatives.

Political Results via RSS? 03/23/2006

CQPolitics.com introduced Illinois Election Results via RSS!

EBay and Amazon Push RSS 03/23/2006

EBay and Amazon.com this week announced extensions to their content syndication capabilities, the latest example of e-commerce players using this popular technology to facilitate the flow of product information to potential buyers in order to help spur sales. EBay now lets its Web-site visitors create content-syndication feeds for searches they conduct on its online marketplace, the company said this week. When shoppers use the eBay search engine, they now get the option of adding the query to their favorite content syndication aggregator as an RSS feed.

Free RSS Tools 03/22/2006

These have been around awhile but are worth mentioning again: RSS2HTML - a free website for displaying RSS feeds as HTML website. If you prefer you can download the free rss2html.php script to use on your server. Free RSS Button Generator - create custom buttons that coordinate with the color and theme of your website. Make RSS Feeds - step by step tutorial to hand create RSS feeds that follow specifications. RSS PDF - the Business Case for RSS downloadable educational pdf from Rok Hrastnik, contains lots of information.

RSS and Social Bookmarking 03/20/2006

Delicious is a social bookmarking system, that is notable, not only for its unusual web address http://del.icio.us, but for its unusual approach to content building that is becoming increasingly popular. In order to ease the burden of producing consistent stream of fresh content, publishers are turning to users to build, categorize and qualify content. While this is said to be part of the web 2.0 phenomenon, publishers realize the value of collaboration. Social bookmarking allows users to qualify content. With Delicious, each "bookmark" of a specific webpage is seen as a vote of confidence. The more people who bookmark a specific webpage, the more credible the webpage is viewed. In addition to bookmarking a webpage, users "tag" the webpage. The tags are simply single word keywords that relate to the contents of the webpage. The tagging associates keywords with the webpage's content, making it easier to categorize and classify the content of the webpage. If everyone bookmarking a page uses similar keyword tags, the webpage will be classified as a credible resource in a specific category. RSS and Social Bookmarking

Car Inventory Via RSS Feed 03/20/2006

In an effort to better serve automobile shoppers on the Internet, Cherry Hill Triplex  has made available from their website RSS feeds for current new and used vehicle inventory. "By offering RSS feeds we're giving the Internet car shopper an opportunity to keep an eye on our inventory every day without having to come to our site and actually perform a search for a specific vehicle." Said Dave Damiani, Internet Manager for Cherry Hill Triplex.

RSS Scripts Directory 03/15/2006

A new RSS Scripts Directory has been launched. The RSS Scripts Directory contains helpful scripts for managing, manipulating and converting RSS feeds. The intent of the the RSS Scripts Directory is to help users fully realize the potential and functionality of the RSS specification. NotePage's FeedForAll division has developed a collection of tools to assist publishers interested in syndication. Current scripts contained in the directory include RSS Cache, FutureRSS, and RSSmesh. The RSS Cache script module expedites the retrieval and conversion of RSS feeds into html web pages. The FutureRSS script enables webmasters to prepare content for their RSS feeds in advance, and have it automatically appear at the desired date and time. The RSSmesh script allows for multiple RSS feeds to be merged into a single RSS feed. All of the scripts dynamically manipulate the RSS feeds, so all management occurs in realtime.

NewsGator Aquires Mobile RSS Readers 03/15/2006

NewsGator Technologies, Inc., has acquired the Windows Mobile reader (formerly called SmartRead) and SmartFeed, a mobile podcatching application. Kevin Cawley, creator of the products, has joined the NewsGator team to oversee the company's mobile product development.

John Palfrey Raises Great Issues Related to RSS Copyright Concerns 03/14/2006

John Palfrey has acknowledged the issues that surround RSS and feed syndication with regards to copyrights. He proposes a concept for a Creative Commons like license. What is not clear is whether it would require a namespace declaration or if the copyright tag would be expanded to cover permissions. Looks like a great starting point. The copyright debate has raged on and discussions addressing the concerns are a definite step in the right direction.

FeedValidator Broken? 03/13/2006

Ok, well its not really broken, but its posting errors based on the new draft of the RSS Board's specification rather than the Harvard Law Spec. "item should contain a guid element" The Harvard Spec recommends GUID in the comments section of the specification, but "recommends" is very different than "should", and it is causing problems for feed generation tools. The suggested solution, check the version of RSS used in the feed and base the validation on the RSS version, this can be done by analyzing either the version tag or the docs tag. An alternative solution, optionally allow the person submitting the feed to select whether they wish to validate against the Harvard Spec or the RSS Board spec. Changing the validator based on a draft spec, isn't doing anyone any favors and is causing the makers of feed creation tools support headaches.

Microsoft Offers Users RSS News Feeds on Windows Marketplace 03/10/2006

As a benefit to the millions of Windows users accessing the Windows Marketplace the site recently announced the availability of RSS as an ideal way for users to stay updated about new product releases, updates, and the latest technology and product announcements from leading Windows Community sites. With more users becoming aware of RSS through blogging, RSS is rapidly becoming the method of choice for receiving news. Windows Marketplace RSS feeds can easily be added to a user's home page portal on MyMSN, Live.com, MyYahoo, other favorite RSS aggregators or news readers, and is also supported in many browsers. You can download one of two free preferred news readers (Active Web Reader or Pluck) which come pre-configured with all 19 Windows Marketplace RSS feeds, allowing users to immediately stay informed about new product offerings from hundreds of companies and over 103,000 products. Or, you can add them to your favorite news reader. Over 97% of the products listed on the Windows Marketplace hail from leading software and hardware vendors, other than Microsoft, whose products make the Windows ecosystem such a rich environment for Windows users.

New RSSmesh Script 03/06/2006

RSSmesh is a PHP script that enables webmasters to merge the contents of multiple RSS feeds into a single feed. The RSSmesh script can be used with any RSS 2.0 feed, and allows webmasters to select the number of items they want to include from each source RSS feed. Advanced caching technology is also built in, caching both the source and destination feeds, resulting in reduced bandwith usage and  increased download speeds.

RSS Board Support for Common Feed Icon 03/06/2006

Rogers Cadenhead has posted a motion to support "the" common feed icon. Just curious how does this relate to the RSS Board charter? How does it relate to their "roadmap"? The common feed icon, is fairly new and not the standard "orange" flag that has graced many feeds and podcasts for years. Why endorse this specific movement over any others? Because big companies like Microsoft do? Personally I found the icon trivial, its like the animated mailbox with the flag going up to indicate an email address on a website, the icon will evolve over time as the web and mailbox have. If the board is going to clarify spec they should do it, the charter has nothing to do with endorsing an icon or endorsing a specific validator over another. What will happen when they endorse one reader over another or one creation tool over another...

FeedBurner Statistics Updated 03/06/2006

FeedBurner, has updated its statistics service to provide even more detailed metrics about feed subscriptions. The upgrade to FeedBurner’s StandardStats and TotalStats services includes the ability to track downloads of podcasts and videocasts and to identify where content is being syndicated beyond a feed’s subscriber base. The upgrade adds significant functionality for publishers using both FeedBurner’s free StandardStats service and its premium, Pro package called TotalStats. More Info

OPML v2 Draft Specification Posted 03/06/2006

Dave Winer has posted a draft specification for OPML v2. Comments are invited for 60 days there is a working group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/opml2-review// to discuss changes.

ScoopGO RSS Search 03/06/2006

According to the ScoopGo website: Many people often search for news when they search the internet. But most search engines do not update their database every day. So they bring you old news. There is a solution: you can use Google News, or use search engines that search RSS feeds. But: there are currenly over 21 million weblogs, and over 10 million websites publishing rss feeds and news. No wonder you don't always get the results you want. ScoopGO! lets you search through the feeds of websites you choose by creating personal search engines: 'Scoops'. You only get realtime results from sources you believe are worth following. No more spam, no more old news. I'm not sure how it is different from Ego Searches...

Monetizing RSS Feeds 03/01/2006

Publishers are evaluating options and determining how they can profit from RSS feeds. The two obvious contenders that publishers are considering to profit from their RSS feeds are: subscription RSS feeds and RSS feed advertisements. Subscriptions. Subscription feeds are designed so that subscription fees are charged for unique quality content. Publisher include teaser copy in the RSS feed and readers have to purchase a subscription to see the content in its entirety. The New York Times was the first to introduce the subscription model. Initially the NY Times faced some resentment from users who had become accustom to free RSS based content, but ultimately consumers realize that businesses must achieve profits in order to continue. Monetizing RSS Feeds

Commentary on RSS Specification 03/01/2006

Commentary - I've been reading Dave Winer's commentary and I have to agree. Giving companies with commercial interest, influence over the specification gives them not only an unfair advantage but will further create marketplace confusion over the specification. I'll reiterate what I said the last thing the industry needs is another splintered specification.

- RSS Specification Feed created by FeedForAll