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Posted by Richard Ziade on January 23, 2006, 02:57PMTaking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One
Before I dig into some of the more obscure uses of RSS (in a future post), I figured I'd list out all sorts of creative ways RSS can be used beyond news headlines and blogs. Here goes:
- Track Specific News Headlines. You can keep track of news on particular topics by subscribing to specific news search results. Here’s a constantly updated news search on the Seattle Seahawks via Google. Here’s another by Yahoo! that tracks the headlines coming in on the U.S. Supreme Court. To subscribe, just do your search and find the RSS feed link.
- Find Shopping Deals. Another cool use of RSS is the ability to get entries when a shopping deal or coupon comes along. Slickdeals (feed), Ben’s Bargains (feed) and MoreStuff4Less (feed) are just a few of the feeds out there.
- Track Packages. Nobody enjoys visiting a site and punching in a tracking number just to get shipment status on a package. Simpletracking.com allows you to create a custom feed that gets updated as your package moves along its route. UPS, Fedex, USPS & DHL are supported.
- Create a Calendar Feed. This is a cool way to share events with others. RSSCalendar.com allows you to create an account, add events and meetngs, and then share a feed for others to consume. They can use a standard feed reader or the RSSCalendar.com site to keep track.
- TV Listings Via RSS. Track programming on your favorite TV channels via Bootleg RSS.
- Track Weather. Get weather updates via RSSWeather. Here’s the weather in New York City as of this posting.
- Keep Up With Specific Emails Via RSS. Mailbucket will pump any emails into a feed that you forward to slurp@mailbucket.org. Just create an Outlook rule against whatever (e.g. emails from particular senders) and get the sent out to a feed once they come in. Just keep in mind that such feeds are unencrypted and can be consumed by others.
- Get Some General Knowledge On A Regular Basis. Not that you need it, but you can enrich your mind and impress people at cocktail parties by subscribing to daily feeds that send along a Word Of The Day (via Wordsmith.org), Quote of the Day (via Brainy Quote), or how about a bit of wisdom with a daily fortune cookie?
- Follow Your Favorite Comics. Tapestry Comics keeps track of a whole bunch of RSS feeds including Dilbert and Peanuts.
- Sports Team RSS Feeds. Follow the goings-on of your favorite sports team. Yahoo! delivers feeds for professional baseball, football, hockey and basketball.
- Deliver Your Contacts Via RSS. If you need to keep track of your contacts on different machines or want to share your contacts with friends, RSSContact.com allows you to create a feed and upload your contact information to do just that.
- Get Notified On Travel Deals. Looking to pounce on a good deal to a particular destination? Get notified on deals to particular cities. Travelocity let’s you build your own custom feed for tracking. Orbitz tracks a whole bunch of feeds to a many cities.
There’s still other stuff out there. These are just a few of the ways RSS can do more than news headlines. Just about all of the above are compatible with your favorite news reader or portal site (like My Yahoo!, Google’s personalized page or Netvibes). Enjoy!
Update: A follow-up, second article on taking RSS beyond headlines has been published here.
Comments
I'd also like to see
1. My bank account on RSS
2. My Bills paid list on RSS, offered my one bill paying company
3. My car needs a webserver and RSS, so I can fetch a running list of all problems it might have. ( Gas levels, oil change needed )
As for shopping for deals, dealnews.com is an awesome site for that.
I also like having quotes to read everyday, and have found that http://www.quotationspage.com/mqotd.html has some good ones.
Posted by: dude101 at January 23, 2006 9:25 PMA much more versatile calendar program w/ RSS support is http://www.localendar.com
Posted by: Mark Higgins at January 23, 2006 9:30 PM
Another use is to organise lists. http://questsin.net is a list expander that supports RSS and RSL.
For RSS feeds of fares from your city, and including a fare monitoring Firefox extension, google earth overlay, google map overlay, and yahoo widget - please visit http://search.farecompare.com
Posted by: Graeme Wallace at January 23, 2006 10:07 PMFor those Firefox users new to RSS, http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html explains in great detail how to add feeds in a simple way to Firefox.
It also explains how site owners with an RSS feed can make that little orange feed icon appear in Firefox.
Posted by: John Bokma at January 23, 2006 10:59 PMI also dig the Nifty News and Decent Deals feed for tech gear sales:
http://www.niftyness.com/nndd/rss_nndd.xml
These are great suggestions. I posted something similar about using RSS to capitalize on Craigslist feeds. You can read about it here. I look forward to part two of your list.
Posted by: Noah at January 24, 2006 12:42 AMhttp://www.sportspyder.com/ has great sports feeds for every team in MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA and college hoops
Posted by: Dallas at January 24, 2006 12:48 AMhttp://capetown.blogsome.com has a feed to keep up with latest attractions, reviews and events from Cape Town, South Africa. BTW, I don't agree on the banking and bills rss, since it's still unsecure. Does anyone know of secure RSS? Maybe call it SRSS? ;-)
Posted by: Diesel at January 24, 2006 1:06 AMgreat article. I think you should've used the term "XML feeds" because all the points in your article are relevant to Atom as well.
I'd like to see my bank account on RSS! That would be great.
Posted by: kris at January 24, 2006 1:39 AMHow about getting new music in a genre that you like - http://www.tunecast.co.uk/music.aspx
Posted by: mark at January 24, 2006 1:45 AMWebnote is also a nice one. Anything you want to note down presented as a feed.
Posted by: Lax at January 24, 2006 4:59 AM@Diesel: you can protect feeds by username/password-combination and send it over https. So if you have the right infrastructure, it should be quite secure.
However only a few readers support both security-features (usr/pwd-https), f.i. RSSBandit and RSSOwl, which are both freeware and open source.
Eventful.com has hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds for events, and lets you create ongoing searches and subscribe to them as RSS or iCalendar as well.
Posted by: Brian at January 24, 2006 10:47 AMFor shopping deals Discount Watcher, might fit in better with your list as it is an automated service that finds the latest discounts and spits it out in 1000's of different RSS feeds.
Posted by: David Rubin at January 24, 2006 1:19 PMI'd like to see my bank supply exchange rates, as soon as they change, via Rss.
Posted by: Marcel at January 24, 2006 2:07 PMYou can also use Mozdex.com search as RSS to incorporate search results as you see fit.
Posted by: byron at January 24, 2006 4:11 PMAnd RSS is good for advertising.
Posted by: Bill Flitter at January 24, 2006 5:33 PMI really love the morestuff4less rss feed!
Posted by: miscblogger at January 24, 2006 5:40 PMHey how about Topic Clouds That are pulled from multiple RSS feeds and rolled into 1 Navigational Topic Cloud. This is a really neat way to organize content from multiple rss feeds. This based on Tags from multiple RSS feeds.
Here are 2 examples of this technology in use. Each Topic Cloud is pulling information from 6 RSS feeds.
http://blog.podblaze.com/topics
http://blog.leveragedpromotion.com/topics
Cheers.
Rodney Rumford
How about ringtones via rss! Wicked Ringtones offer ringtone charts via RSS feed. They even have a widget lol
Posted by: Danny at January 25, 2006 8:03 AMTracking Yahoo Finance groups is just another possible use of RSS.
Posted by: Alexander at January 25, 2006 9:22 AMI love the RSS feed from our BasecampHQ project management system. It's a brilliant way to stay informed of movements and activities on our all of our projects. I can't take getting emails and this is a perfect solution and keeps me tied to the progress of our projects.
Posted by: James Clark at January 26, 2006 4:13 AMFor comics, comicalert.com is a service that lets you sign up for a list of comics, and it creates a feed for your account. Lots more are available there than through tapestry; there are only three or four I read regularly that don't have their own official feed AND aren't in comicalert.
Posted by: Sandy at January 26, 2006 11:28 AMRSS feeds in retail will be quite common by the end of 2006. It's so much less intrusive than email, and has better delivery percentages. That's a hard thing to ignore.
Posted by: Ed Kohler at January 26, 2006 5:02 PMWe at iPCTV.net are about to build computers with a selection of aggregators into the consumer iPCTVs .. along with tutorials onusing RSS feeds.
Posted by: Buck at January 26, 2006 5:05 PMgreat tips! thnx :)
Posted by: mark at January 26, 2006 7:58 PMAnother thought would be to use something like Feed43 to let you "watch" google or technorati search results - so the search could be repeated every day and if a new page appeared in (say) the top 20, it could be included in the feed.
Posted by: Paul Dundon at January 28, 2006 6:05 PMThis is a great list - going to link it from our blog! In a lot of ways this is exactly what we're talking about with a gadget we are building designed to treat RSS less like news and more like an alerts/heads-up-display mechanism.
We call it 'Touchstone' and it is designed as an all purpose heads-up-display for applications you care about that generate RSS - not just news!
I'd love to hear what you think Rich - you can find us at www.touchstonegadget.com
Ebay categories and search filters via RSS at http://www.feedbay.net
Posted by: Mark at January 29, 2006 12:38 PMRe feedbay - I get xml parsing error with the custom feed
XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://rss.feedbay.net/getsearch.php?q=chair&in=0&max=10&cid=2984
Line Number 4, Column 62:
Make a great idea even better if you could include a COUNTRY option for us non US people.
Posted by: Stephen at February 1, 2006 11:44 PMGreat ideas and comments. Will hope this gets expanded soon. :)
Posted by: Chris Charlton at February 5, 2006 2:17 PMis it possible to get the time in different timezones in the world in RSS?
Posted by: Shimshon at February 19, 2006 3:48 AMCheck out http://www.kabraworld.com
Posted by: kabraworld at May 9, 2006 6:45 PMFor placing all the RSS into a single page http://feedraider.com is brilliant
Posted by: Nakke at October 10, 2006 2:10 PMFor a list of the best RSS feeds in the following categories: Hacks, Tweaks and Life Tips, Internet Buzz, Web 2.0, New Sites, Blogging Tips, Tech News, Internet Marketing, Affiliates News and Webmaster Tools, check out this list: http://www.6initiative.com/my-favorite-rss-feeds-aggregated-to-one-feed-for-every-category/
Posted by: six at October 21, 2006 9:48 AMthis is a really great tip thanks a lot
Posted by: Free Ps3 at January 7, 2007 5:08 PMAwesome article, this will definitely out me price my costs in the future
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Posted by: janet doyle at January 13, 2007 5:36 PMRSS feeds in retail will be quite common by the end of 2007. It's so much less intrusive than email, and has better delivery percentages. That's a hard thing to ignore.
Posted by: janet edwards at January 14, 2007 4:27 AMreally great tips! thnx :)
Posted by: Vauxhall car insurance at January 15, 2007 3:36 PMyeh i agree these tips are amazing
Posted by: day job killer ebook at February 6, 2007 2:30 PMLook at all the posibilities of this "factory" of widgets RSS "beon" presents you:
http://factory.beon4u.com/factory.aspx
It´s great, isn´t it?
Posted by: alhaurin at February 28, 2007 2:54 PMI have the same problem as Philip. The extension worked for two days, after that it will clear the window and not display anything. I tried to uninstall mozilla, delete the profile and extensions and reinstall, but no luck :(
Posted by: software reviews at March 12, 2007 10:55 AMi also have the same problem as philip
Posted by: free playstation 3 at April 26, 2007 8:11 AMThis is a great list - going to link it from our blog! In a lot of ways this is exactly what we're talking about with a gadget we are building designed to treat RSS less like news and more like an alerts/heads-up-display mechanism.
We call it 'Touchstone' and it is designed as an all purpose heads-up-display for applications you care about that generate RSS - not just news
RSS is just starting to take off. I wonder when they can be streamed to cell phones.
Posted by: Edwin Climaco at June 18, 2007 2:42 AMFind Shopping Deals. Another cool use of RSS is the ability to get entries when a shopping deal or coupon comes along.
Check it out: http://www.daddyodeals.com/phpBB/rss.php?f=1
Posted by: Daddyodeals at June 21, 2007 11:36 AMThank you for your informative article! I'm waiting more. Thanks again.
Posted by: free ipod at June 24, 2007 5:19 AMThanks for the nice and useful tips!
Posted by: butlimous at August 22, 2007 6:14 PMLax mentioned about Webnote. I like it too.
Posted by: free iphone at September 18, 2007 5:57 PMI also have the same problem as phillip, is there a fix?
Posted by: Free iPod Touch at November 16, 2007 7:52 PMCan phillips problem be addressed, I'm still having that problem :(
Posted by: Free Playstation 3 at December 8, 2007 12:46 PMCartoons!
Updated every 2 days or so.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/PastExpiryCartoon
nice tips with RSS.
Posted by: azul at February 8, 2008 4:16 AMNice tips! Btw, also checkout Feedity ( http://www.feedity.com ). It's a neat simple online service for creating custom RSS feeds from virtually any webpage. Chao :)
Posted by: Jimbog12 at March 3, 2008 8:16 AMIt seems that many people are mystified by what RSS feeds are and what to do with them. good read though
Posted by: gamermediadownload at April 17, 2008 3:30 PMbetter late than never...........these tips are great.
Posted by: Parallel Path at May 17, 2008 1:00 AMHere is a web service that provides RSS results for Google Search
http://www.ecubicle.net/gsearch_rss.asmx
Since the returned XML is RSS 2.0 compliant, the web service can also be called in a feed reader like this:
You need to change the searchPage, gQuery and numOfResults querystring parameters to your choice. gQuery parameter accepts all standard Google Search Operators.
Posted by: Rafay Bin Ali at January 9, 2009 6:31 PMThe plugin stops working after a few days any work around?
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Posted by: rfv at April 4, 2009 5:07 AMI don't have the same problem as philip but I would like to. :-(
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And, finally, track any specific part of any web page via http://feed43.com
:)
Posted by: Igor at January 23, 2006 5:05 PM