basement.org \ Feed Syndication

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Posted by richz at 9:21 AM

What I Need…

Know what I need? I need some way to cherry pick the 20 or so Boing Boing posts actually worth reading out of my 634 unread.

I wish I could just click a button and remove the pressure. I like Boing Boing, but I don’t like Boing Boing enough to wade through 634 posts. Then again, it would have never reached that number had I liked them more.

Hmmm, maybe I don’t like Boing Boing after all. Unsubscribe?

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Posted by richz at 8:58 PM

Enterprise RSS : What The Hell Went Wrong?

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web is declaring: R.I.P. Enterprise RSS. In essence, he proclaims that the big players that sought to bring the power of RSS to enterprises have floundered. In a fit of frustration, he declares:

We love RSS and this makes us really sad. If much of the rest of the world wants to ignore this technology, though, it's their loss. It's our bread and butter. Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity.

He points to three companies that had their sights on enterprise RSS and never really took off: Attensa, Newsgator, and Knownow (Knownow's web presence doesn't even exist anymore). Anyone that's tracked basement.org's posts on feed syndication would attest to my own enthusiasm about how RSS was going to change the world. Since 2004, I've been patiently predicting (or rooting for, depending on your viewpoint) that RSS would tip and change the way we gather and digest information.

So what went wrong?

Well, there are a few things that happened and a few things that didn't happen. First off, RSS should have never been viewed as a panacea for anything in the first place. RSS is an information delivery mechanism. If your valued information isn't available, RSS alone will never bear fruit. If you're not listening to your inventory deplete or listening to your sales data slide (or rise) or listening to the progress of your latest product effort, RSS has nothing to report. Nobody really spoke to a simple, low-overhead way to tap into the latent information sources in business that would otherwise languish unnoticed. RSS is a great way to inform, but if your sources aren't there, it isn't going to seem very useful.

Another reason RSS went nowhere in the enterprise is because nobody bothered to sell a true value propositon around RSS. This particular gripe isn't just about RSS but about the bullshit surrounding "enterprise solutions" in the first place. Just because RSS, feed syndication and blogging are the technology du jour, that's no reason to assume rampant success. Of all the offerings out there, nobody bothered to really break through the techspeak and put forward a really useful solution that business customers could understand. Do people really want to blog in their respective companies? Is RSS usage data really valued by an enterprise? What are we really selling here?

All of this speaks to how RSS somehow went from being a means to an end. When this happens - when you're implementing web services or XSL or BPEL for no good reason other than because eWeek and a keynote in some circle-jerk tech conference tells you to...when that happens, you're done for.

RSS is compelling because it provides a simple, powerful, platform-agnostic way to deliver intelligence from disparate information sources. It attacks the chronic addiction to go after information ("get me that report!") and has (or had, depending on your level of enthusiasm) the capacity to bubble up key information for consumption. The business climate is more ominous today. As businesses look at the world more cautiously and as they fear making uninformed or less informed decisions, the value of pushing the right knowledge out to decision makers couldn't be more compelling. But alas, nobody's built the bridge between this need and the power of RSS.

RSS enterprise has languished on the launching pad because nobody bothered to connect its power to real value in a business context. It's a failed story that never made it past the early adopters and technology advocates. I don't think its dead. We just need a retelling of the story...but this time around, it needs to make sense.

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Posted by richz at 9:32 AM

Panic At The Feed Reader

You've gotta love this. Nick Bradbury, the man behind venerable FeedDemon feed reader, has added a curiously interesting feature: the Panic Button. In short, it essentially relieves RSS addicts of that overwhelming feeling of never being able to catch up to all those old feeds. I like it:

 

Still, it doesn't completely quell that nagging feeling of missing - forever - that Great Blog Post that you should have never missed. Or does it?

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Posted by richz at 11:29 AM

Improving The RSS Reading Experience

Last week, I blogged about how the RSS reading experience in feed readers is lacking because we're deprived of the full visual experience of actually being at a web destination. In a feed reader, we get just the filtered content without the look and feel of the source.

So I got to thinkin', since Google Reader (or any feed reader for that matter), knows what I've read and I what I haven't, and knows the title & description of the feed entries, it could easily dice up the DOM of the originating site and inject the titles and descriptions coming in off the feed into the original page.

Below is a concept screenshot. Notice it's the usual Google Reader trimmings but the actual content view is swapped out with Brand Spanking New's actual look and feel. Note also that the three "read" entries are collapsed and slightly faded below the unread entry:

 

 

There are other issues that arise out of this approach (e.g. single entry-per-page blogs) but I'd be very curious to experience something like this - a sort of hybrid web browsing/feed reading experience.

An alternative approach would be to look for some sort of codified hinting to feed readers of what to do with their content - something like a referenced CSS embedded in the feed XML. It would be important to constrain what can be done - things like colors, fonts, better logo handling, but not much more. A feed reader could then spice itself up slightly as we navigate from source to source.

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Posted by richz at 2:40 PM

If The Web Is TV, Then RSS Is Radio

One of the snazziest new destinations on the Web is A Brief Message. It "features design opinions expressed in short form—200 words or less." What's neat about it is that each brief essay is accompanied with some nice illustration.

Here's a snapshot of a recent post:

Notice how nicely the visual aesthetic of the article lends itself to the entire reading experience. Now let's take a look at the same article in Google Reader:

It's not exactly the same effect. Yes, the words are there, but the piece has been gutted of its personality.

Let's look at another example, Cameron Moll's beautifully designed Authentic Boredom:

Here's Authentic Boredom seen through the lens of Google Reader (list view):

Again, Google Reader (as would any feed reader) has stripped an otherwise attractive, stylish blog of all its...style.

Be Careful What We Wish For

This isn't a jab at feed readers. I'm as guilty as anyone for subscribing to countless feeds and gulping down tons of information in a highly efficient manner. All that increased "bandwidth" comes at a price. If we rely on feed readers to consume information from the web, we no longer actually see the web. We just "hear" the raw data, triple-filtered and stripped of any intended style, character, personality or meaning beyond the words.

If the real Web is rich and colorful and visual, RSS consumption is anything but. It's just the data, just as old radio was the words without the pictures. An occasional image will seep through in the feed itself, but that hardly captures the aesthetic of the originating site. I recall when FeedDemon (a great Windows desktop feed reader) started pulling in the site's favicon (that little icon that shows up in your browser's URL box). That little icon did a whole lot by giving the slightest bit of context to where I was in my sea of subscribed feeds.

Can We Have It Both Ways?

Is it possible for us to gain the efficiency of RSS reading while still enjoying the web in all its glorious Technicolor? I'm not ready to give up my 300 feeds at 200 MPH. In short, I want it both ways. When I "visit" a feed I want to feel like I'm really visiting. I want the style and mood of the original site to frame the content.

I'd answer the above question: yes, I think we can have it both ways. In an upcoming post, I'll outline a potential approach to marrying the high-volume/high speed experience of feed reading with the visual appeal and sense of "destination" that comes with visiting a web site.

Stay tuned!

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Posted by richz at 2:11 PM

The Boy Who Cried RSS

Take a quick glance at this snapshot of my Google Reader feed list. It's my "Shopping Deals" folder. If you look closely you'll notice I've all but abandoned reading all the other sites except one: Slickdeals. All the other shopping sites have over 100+ unread entries (Lord knows what the number really is). I'm really tempted to just unsubscribe from them altogether.

I'm gonna take a stab at an unwritten rule for RSS and information syndication:

The perceived importance and value of entries to readers is inversely proportional to the frequency of entries on any given day.

In other words, the more you post, the less I'm gonna care about any given post. I've only got a small, finite amount of "attention capital" to spend. I'd rather see bigger, more valuable posts than "penny posts."

Slickdeals still matters to me because implicit in the spareness of their postings (it's about 2-3 per day) is a care and selectiveness in deciding if something should go up at all. The other shopping sites spit out 30-40 entries a day. I tried keeping up but eventually gave up. Truth is, their posts were just one big blur. I'm sure there were some gems in there, but how am I supposed to know that? They've left the task of valuing their information to me, the reader. Big mistake.

Traditional blogs are really no different. I find myself valuing a blog far more if the author is careful about his or her topics and puts some real thought into them before posting. Contrast that with the mega-blogs Gizmodo and Engadget. They average about 50-80 posts per day. The result? Nothing is important. That's not a blog. That's a news wire service. The editorial duties have been left up to me.

Information is literally gushing out these days. We swim and paddle through it and are constantly searching for something worthwhile. What I appreciate about Slickdeals and sites like is that they still understand that their value lies not just the content of what they deliver but also the discretion they exercise in deciding what to publish at all.

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Posted by richz at 11:22 AM

NY Times River Rolls Again

Chris, one of the wily lead designers here at Arc90, just couldn't stand to live without the NY Times news river that was put to rest a few weeks ago (I recently blogged about it). He's gone ahead and tweaked Arc90's very own river reader to handle a whole bunch of articles from the NY Times. Chris has all the details over at the Arc90 blog.

If you're a Treo, Blackberry or any rich mobilemoib device user, the river style is great, and Arc90's RSS-to-river maker does a great job of readying your favorite news sources for mobile browsing.

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Posted by richz at 11:24 AM

The Purpose Of Bottlenecks

In my first year of law school, there was a massive amount of reading to digest. It was nearly impossible to get through it all. Freshman year in law school is notorious for overloading you with work. It's some sort of "weeding out of the weak" thing.

The only way I felt better, or had some sense of security, was when I photocopied what I thought to be "relevant research" for my work. I'd spend all this time and money copying everything - as if the act of making photocopies somehow transmitted the information directly into my brain. Alas, I only managed to read a fraction of what I copied. These piles would lay around and I was never able to get to them. It's the same thing with RSS feeds. My "Tech News" folder in FeedDemon has 2987 unread entries. 2987! And that's just one folder! Scary.

With the Internet and the proliferation of information on the Internet the bandwidth around the "data channel" that connects the world's information to us has increased exponentially. Articles. Music. Video. It's way more than we can handle. This isn't about whether these feeds matter to me or not. They all do - otherwise I wouldn't have subscribed to them. I want them all.

There's just one problem: I have a finite amount of time per day to digest them. While I continue to subscribe to new feeds (as I continued to make photocopies in law school) I refused to come to terms with the fact that I simply can't digest them all. And so, I consciously (or sub-consciously) impose a filter. I go to certain feeds first. I selectively ignore certain others. I rely on social mechanisms implemented in sites like Digg and Techmeme. Finally, I have friends who point me to links that I may have missed.

The above shouldn't be construed as deeming RSS or feed reader technology as a failure. It isn't. Whereas without RSS my ability to digest capped at around 10-20 news sources a day, with a feed reader, it goes up to between 70-100 in my case. 300-400 feeds? Don't kid yourself. Unless it's your job to sift through them, things are going to fall through the cracks.

So now people are asking how we can go to the next level. How do we increase our bandwidth so we can take in more stuff? Well, before tackling that question, I'd ask if we we really need to take in more stuff at all. Much of the information out there isn't all that great. The stuff that is great naturally bubbles up through viral communication. Sites like Digg & Techmeme cover that end of things.

So do we really need to be tapped into that many information sources? I think a dialog around that question is worthwhile. All these channels may well condition us to only tolerate small bits of information and put a small amount of thought behind them. "Narrow and deep" is giving way to "broad and shallow." Come to think of it - everything is small bites these days. Single paragraph blog entries. Two minute videos. $.99 songs on iTunes. All this extra data doesn't isn't really extra. While there's more out there, our capacities to take it in really haven't changed. It just feels like more because we keep dicing it all into smaller and smaller pieces.

So to start the new year, I'm going to try to read more entire books. Listen to entire albums. Watch full-length films. While everyone else tries to figure out how to add more lanes to the RSS highway, I'm going to take the city streets and enjoy the drive...for now. ;)

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Posted by richz at 2:06 PM

Feed Rivers Have Run Dry?

I was hitting the NY Times River that Dave Winer had put up and stumbled on this:

Over the years I've tried out lots of ideas, some work, others work a little, and some -- not at all. The ones that work are worth keeping, the ones that don't, they take care of themselves. But the ones in the middle can linger for years, not doing much for anyone, and costing both dollars and hassles to keep going.

Recently I've decided to start turning off the ones that sort-of work, the goal being to reduce the monetary and karmic cost of maintaining an online presence. This is one of the sites I've decided to retire.

A little philosophy. In order to get somewhere, you have to try lots of ideas, and most of them aren't huge successes. But, imho, it's good to try -- it's also good to know when it didn't work.

That kinda sucks. I really enjoyed the NY Times and BBC rivers on my Treo 650 and PSP (yes, they worked great on PSP). It's odd that Dave hasn't directly addressed the end of the rivers on his site (the BBC river is gone too).

I really liked the concept behind rivers and there are other sites that are buying into it. There's a Digg river and a Techmeme river.

I'm sort of bought into rivers as a great way to catch up on feeds - especially on portable devices that don't have the luxury of a full screen and keyboard. At Arc90, we even took a stab at creating a generic feed-to-river tool that can turn any RSS feed into a river view (replete with mobile-friendly links to full articles).

RSS continues to be a bastard child out there. I'm a big fan but have resigned to the fact that it just hasn't found that application to bring it to the masses. HTML was a truly game-changing invention, but it needed Mosaic browser to show its power to the world. RSS hasn't found that killer app yet.

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Posted by richz at 9:55 AM

Another Attempt To Invent RSS: Google Reader Refreshes

Anyone who follows this blog knows of my belief in the power of RSS and feed syndication. RSS is a great antidote to the information overload crisis we all suffer from today. Yet, as I've mentioned before, RSS has failed to break out of the tech savvy niche it enjoys today. Ask your uncle or teenage cousin what RSS is and they'll most likely respond with a stare.

RSS is a data invention. It is a ludicrously simple technology. It's one of those technologies that, once explained, garners a response like "Um. Ok. So?" As we look at HTML and how the web works today, it looks ridiculously obvious in hindsight. HTML, like RSS, is also a data invention. It's a way to connect assets on a network. So why did HTML explode into the mainstream consciousness and RSS continues to languish?

I think there are couple of reasons for this. First, RSS has no killer app today. HTML would have suffered the same fate if not for the web browser. The web browser is one of those rare zero-training applications that leveraged just about everything we already know about personal computers without caking on all sorts of new switches and levers to learn it. RSS doesn't have that today. While there are a slew of desktop and web-based tools for RSS, all that stuff just makes it all the more confusing. In effect, HTML was "invented" and introduced to the world with the web browser.

The other challenge RSS has today that HTML avoided is that all-important first step. Everyone remembers their first browsing experience. From the first click, you're in motion and accelarating. Web pages, by their very nature, connect to one another. RSS, on the other hand, relies on all sorts of orange boxes, icons and "Add to this..." and "Add to that..." buttons. It is a proverbial mess.

Walk through the thought process of someone who clicks on an "Add to Rojo..." link. First, what the hell is a "Rojo"? After clicking, they end up...somewhere. Somewhere new and strange and utterly unexplainable. The curious may dig a bit. But most will just move on with a lingering "hmm, that was weird" thought in their minds.

The Google Reader team (bless their hearts for trying) is taking another crack at it with a new refresh of Google Reader. There's even a great little video explanation of what RSS is. The new Reader looks pretty cool and feels pretty intuitive, but I'm afraid the leap is still a tough one. The grass may well be greener on this side, but the fence is still pretty high.

So who will save RSS? It may well be MIcrosoft. With IE7, which, whether we like it or not, everyone is getting, RSS subscription and management will be baked into the browsing experience. We'll just have to see if this tips it or not.

And so, people are still trying to "invent" RSS. We'll just have to wait and see.

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Posted by richz at 2:04 PM

Ride On Those RSS Rivers

Dave Winer has been trumpeting the virtues of mobile rivers for a bit now, and at Arc90, we have to agree - they make a lot of sense. In a nutshell, mobile rivers are simple, rolling headlines with brief blurbs - idea for checking out what's happening on your Treo or Blackberry or any other mobile device with a browser.

There are already mobile rivers for the New York Times, BBC and Digg and they work nicely on mobile devices. The guys at Arc90 have created a generic river generator so now you can take virtually any RSS feed and make it readable on mobile devices. Just append river.arc90.com with ?rss=yourFeedURL and you're good to go. The Arc90 lab has much more on this. It even converts the clicked-thru articles for mobile reading (via either Google or Skweezer).

So get on that river of news. It's a fun ride. And all you bloggers out there, it's now easy as pie to add a "Mobile View" link to your blogs. Slick.

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Posted by richz at 10:50 AM

"What's RSS Again?"

Dead2.0 gives us a painful reminder of how the masses still have no clue what RSS is, or more importantly, why we should even care.

He asks his mom what RSS is and her response is just classic. I'm not sure what we need to do to plant that seed and really spread the love about why RSS is great.

Or is it great? And do people really need it? Or...wait. Wrong mindset.

RSS never got the killer application to bring it to the masses. HTML was a brilliant invention but it needed to be packaged up and introduced to the world - thus hiding its complexity. Mosaic and early Netscape did that. RSS doesn't have a Mosaic. When the Web exploded, Netscape was the Web. It wasn't about markup language. In fact, I'm sure most ordinary users, even today, don't care much for the concepts behind how the Web works.

The same goes for RSS. There are many great tools out there - both client applications and web-based, but none have been able to produce the "A-hah!" followed by the "Wow" yet. Can it happen? Will it happen? Who knows...

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Posted by richz at 2:13 PM

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 Is Out

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 is out. The primary focus appears to be the RSS reader (though I'm sure many other bugs were fixed). The RSS changes are summarized at Microsoft's Team RSS blog.

According to the blog, the RSS functionality is "feature complete." I've mentioned this before. This may finally be the application that thrusts RSS into mainstream use. While there are other more full-featured installable apps out there (FeedDemon being the best of the bunch), we can't underestimate the power of not having to install anything for a huge portion of the user population. I'm still not entirely convinced that it'll catch fire like it should. The "real need" isn't that clearly visible just yet.

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Posted by richz at 9:52 AM

Google Reader Gets A Facelift

Google Reader has gotten a more-than-subtle facelift. Some worthwhile changes I think. For web-based feed readers, I think Feedlounge takes the cake (mmmm, cake).

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Posted by richz at 2:34 PM

Nielsen Norman Group : RSS No Match For Email Newsletters

According to new research from the Nielsen Norman Group, RSS isfar less effective at keeping people's attention (and thus garnering business) from users than email newsletters.

This isn't very surprising. It's pretty widely known that RSS adoption by the masses has been slow going, but this study adds a new wrinkle: even those that use RSS spend very little time on those headlines. The study goes on to note that people have become very proficient in handling/sifting through email. Some observations:

• I'm not sure it's fair to compare RSS to email just yet. I can't imagine very many people are subscribing to ecommerce newsletters via RSS these days. The work habits around RSS as business marketing aren't fully baked...yet.
• A critical shortcoming of just about every RSS reader or aggregator is that all content looks the same. Why do I still visit CNN and techmeme on the web? Because the visual layout of the sites provide me with some context and cognitive guidance. Feed readers don't. After all, all feeds are not created equal.
• RSS is supposed to be a great push technology. But let's be realistic. Nothing gets in our faces better than email. We will iinevitably go to our Inboxes. It will take much broader and deeper adoption before RSS comes near the attention level of email.
• Related to the last point, we are so committed to email that we're rewiring ourselves to handle and manage SPAM better. So while RSS comes to us free of noise and junk, we're sticking by email...for now.

RSS is and continues to be the darling of technophiles who enjoy digesting large amounts of content. But we shouldn't delude ourselves. Email is at a whole other level of the Technology Collective Consciousness. It will take a lot more before RSS gets there. It's an incredibly promising technology but some tweaks are needed both in terms of how the technology is implemented and how we educate people about it.

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Posted by richz at 9:12 AM

Google Reader Mobile

Google Reader is now available for mobile phones. It's a stripped down version of the web version for easier viewing/navigation on smaller devices. The Google Reader Blog has more.

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Posted by richz at 2:08 PM

Blogging From Microsoft Word 2007

Microsoft Office team member Joe Friend lets loose that Microsoft Word 2007 will have built-in blogging capabilities.

This is generally a good thing for both casual publishing to your own blog, and even more importantly, within an enterprise context. This is that weird place between documents and emails that can really redefine how people communicate.

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Posted by richz at 9:29 AM

Share Your OPML

Winer's at it again. The freak that brought us web services and RSS has been going on and on about OPML for awhile now. It's essentially an XML standard for outlines but it's primary role these days is that of ad hoc standard for representing reading lists for RSS feeds. I'm a fan myself and see a lot of possibilties for it.

As part of his master plan, Winer has put out Share Your OPML. It's a site where you can upload and compare OPML reading lists with others. It's pretty cool. TechCrunch has more details on it. I like the idea of seeing the reading lists of other users - especially those that the site suggests are similar to yours. My only gripe is that I'd love to see the feeds that I don't have in my list that a user of like interests may have. Right now, it just ranks the users by similarity but I have to comb through their lists to see if there's anything worth subscribing to.

My other gripe is on the interface itself. Winer's been pretty adamant about sticking to the orange XML as the visual representation of an RSS feed. Unfortunately, it's also the visual representation of an OPML file:

Now I may be splitting hairs (or not), but that's kind of silly. Yeh, they're all XML, but I think it's clearly worthwhile to distinguish the two. The only way to infer that it's OPML is that it's at the bottom and it's slightly larger. It's going to be hard enough explaining to people what OPML is and why it's valuable.

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Posted by richz at 10:46 AM

Alertbear RSS Reader

Alertbear is a "river of news" (whatever the hell that means) feed reader. It displays updates off your taskbar as they come in.

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Posted by richz at 9:47 AM

NY Times On RSS & eCommerce

Good article on how RSS is helping retailers reach customers.

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Posted by richz at 9:53 AM

Old School RSS Hardware Box Thingy

Sophonix' Foxboard is a single-chip Linux box that displays RSS headlines in big, fat, green LCD glory. Soooo retro.

Here she is. Sexy no? :

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Posted by richz at 8:20 AM

FeedBlendr

FeedBlendr allows you to enter the URLs to any RDF, RSS or Atom (XML) feeds you'd like and blend them into a single feed. We won't hold the missing "e" against them. (Thanks for nothing Flickr).

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Posted by richz at 5:13 PM

RSS Everywhere

Anyone that follows this blog knows that RSS isn’t all about headlines and blogs. In a couple of posts (Taking RSS Beyond Headlines Part 1 and Part 2), I outlined all sorts of cool things you can do with RSS.It’s a deceptively powerful technology. One of the great things about RSS is that the information comes to us (sort of). We have to do less work to find out if our favorite information sources have something new to offer.

In this article, I will outline the various ways we can be tapped on the shoulder when something new comes in via RSS.

• PDA’s. A natural use of RSS is to sync up your sources and go. PDA’s are a great way to catch up on your feeds. Here are some RSS feed readers for PDA’s:
• Windows PocketPC. There are a host of applications for reading RSS on Pocket PC’s:
• PocketRSS
• Newsbreak
• Egress
• PocketFeed
• pRSSreader
• Sunrise XP. My person favorite for reading RSS is an application called Sunrise XP. It’s far less user friendly than others but very powerful. It’s a Windows desktop application that syncs with Plucker-compatible readers for both Pocket PC and Palm OS. It’s main selling point: it not only grabs feeds but the links on the web as well and saves them offline. That’s great for reading feeds and articles when not connected to the Internet (which is often).
• Mobile Phones. For phones and messaging devices with some horsepower, there are a few ways to go: 
• Blackberry. Just in case you’re not staring into your Blackberry enough these days, there’s FreeNews for Blackberries and Nokia phones. Or maybe you can convince your IT guy to push specific feeds to your device.
• Palm Treo. QuickNews is a feed reader specifically designed for Treos.
• Strip Down Code For Mobile Reading. Phonifier strips out unnecessary markup for portable device reading. Skweezer is a similar service.
• J2ME Devices. For the lucky few with J2ME devices, the fine folks at FeedBurner have a Mobile Feed Reader for you.
• Sony Playstation Portable. The PSP, as of firmware 2.6, supports RSS feed reading. Engadget has a more homegrown tutorial for getting feeds on your device.
• Email. Getting feeds via email sort of defeats the whole purpose of RSS, but to each his own. RSSFWD will send feeds to your Inbox (because, you know, there isn’t enough clutter there already).
• SMS. You can pretend you’ve got a lot of friends by wiring RSS feeds to your mobile phone. Get SMS alerts all day long with FeedBeep. NextBlast provides a similar service. It looks like both charge money.
• Instant Messaging. Both MSN & Yahoo offer alerts services that allow you to receive feed alerts via both SMS and through their instant messaging programs.
• Apple iPod. Look like a hipster while staying informed. Engadget comes through again with an RSS to iPod tutorial.
• PDF. If you’re all about touching and feeling your information on paper, RSS2PDF will take care of converting any feed to an Adobe PDF download.
• Wristwatch(?). Yes. If you’re really looking to impress the ladies. There are accessories out there that will allow you to read RSS on your wrist. Very sexy.

There are two other services that should be distinguished as above and beyond the usual out there. One is Bloglines’ Moblie. It’s a dead simple version of the popular web-based feed reader. It lays out very nicely on a wide range of devices. Simple = nice.

Another service already mentioned but worth mentioning again is Yahoo Alerts. This service allows you to tie together any feed with an instant message, email or SMS – effectively rendering a good number of the services already mentioned obsolete. It’s nice interface also puts it ahead of MSN in my opinion.

So there you have it folks. now get out there and start tracking those feeds everywhere.

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Technorati Favorites

There's some buzz today around the debut of Technorati Favorites. In short, you can track your favorite bloggers on one page (up to 50). You can also share your favorites page with others. It even allows OPML import.

Which of course leads me to ask the question: is this a feed reader? Well, it's a way to track my favorite blogs (or any feeds I guess) in one place. My subscribed feeds are essentially my "favorites." So yeh, it sort of is a feed reader. The sharing aspect is a nice twist.

On a related note, credit should go to the Technorati team for turning things around. I remember not too long ago, people were railing into them pretty harshly for various reasons. It looks like they've overcome their issues. I visit it pretty regularly.

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Posted by richz at 2:34 PM

RSS + P2P = FeedTree

FeedTree mixes in some peer-to-peer lovin' to accelerate (and alleiviate) the task of feed syncing and feed entry retrieval. I haven't played with it yet but it looks promising. It works with your existing feed reader software. Slashdot already has a discussion on it.

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Posted by richz at 9:36 AM

Track Local Events with Eventful

I'm sorry this one didn't get into the RSS uses list from a couple of days ago because this is damn cool.

Eventful allows you to track events like concerts, shows and gatherings in a particular area for a particular period of time and subscribe to it. For example, here's a listing (and corresponding RSS feed) of music events in New York City for the upcoming week. Very, very cool. I'm not sure where there event data comes from, but it found some obscure events in New York City. I'm a fan of Pollstar and always wished I could track my favorite artists via RSS but they don't make such a service available (wake up Pollstar). This is the next best thing.

Taking it a step further, Podhop wires together Eventful events with MP3 podcasts of artists. So you can listen to artists that are coming to your town before they get there. They also provide RSS feeds.

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Posted by richz at 9:14 AM

FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 2 Released

I know I bitch a lot about the deficiencies of feed readers these days, but FeedDemon is still the best one out there in my opinion. Nick Bradbury just released FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 2.

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Posted by richz at 9:00 AM

Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part Two

The first article on Taking RSS Beyond Headlines was very popular (mainly due to it's proliferation on Digg and the resulting "Digg Effect.") It's great to see this kind of interest and curiosity around RSS. Of course, latching a "Part One" on the end of the last article put an enormous amount of pressure to take a stab at a "Part Two."

And so, without further delay, let's take RSS beyond headlines, again...

• Track Job Openings. You can easily keep tabs on openings for particular positions in particular locales with Indeed's simple job searching site. Or try Hotjob's feeds through their service (any search can be delivered as a feed).
• Log Referring Links To Your Site. Here's a cool one for blogs. Track who's visiting your site via Referrer Madness. Simply drop one line of code in your pages and track the link provided. No account required.
• Be A Knowledgable Citizen. Stay on top of important government news and information with FirstGov's RSS feeds.
• Recipe Syndication! Track 4 and 5 star recipes or subscribe to the recipes of your favorite chef's with Big Oven's RSS feeds.
• Get Your City's Latest Traffic. Traffic.com delivers RSS feeds of traffic information for most major U.S. cities.
• Track Movie Openings & Reviews. Find out about theatrical and DVD releases as they happen (as well as reviews and upcoming releases) with Movies.com's feed list.
• Keep Tabs On Medical Information. Hubmed.org delivers Pubmed (a service of the National Library of Medicine) search results in RSS.
• Stay On Top Of Virus & Security Threats. Sophos (feeds), Trend Micro (feeds) and Viruslist.com (feeds) all provide feeds to stay on top of viruses and other security threats.
• Download TV Shows. This is a bit more involved than just subscribing. RSS & Bittorrent make a nice match. Here's a quick tutorial on how to subscribe to your favorite TV shows.
• Bring Humor Into Your Life. Yes, RSS can deliver joy (maybe) into your life with a joke a day. Joke feeds are provided by Yahooligans and Comedy Central.
• Pull In Those Video Snippets. Our ever-shortening attention spans are loving those 1-2 minute video clips flying around. Youtube provides RSS feeds of all their major categories. del.icio.us also has a popular videos feed.
• Sticky Notes + RSS. Webnote (warning: the yellow on this site is downright painful) allows you to keep notes and subscribe to a feed that delivers them.
• Track Ebay. For person that just can't stop buying porcelain puppies, you can track ebay auctions via RSSAuctions.com and feedback.net.

Credit goes to some of the commenters on the last article for a few of the tips here. In all of this insanity, let's not forget that we can still use RSS to track newspapers, magazines and blogs (heh). In a future post, I'd like to list out possible uses of RSS that I'd like to use but don't exist yet (or at least that I don't know about). Hopefully, the creative use of RSS will continue to grow. I think these last two articles are just the tip of the iceberg. Until then, happy feedreading.

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Posted by richz at 8:53 AM

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 As RSS Reader : Some Thoughts

I downloaded IE7 Beta 2 a couple of days ago and it looks to be a pretty solid release (frankly, the memory leaks in Firefox are testing my loyalty). What I'd like to focus on in this post are the RSS capabilities in IE7.

As a feed reader, IE7 is pretty bare-bones. Even though it does go a step further than Firefox in terms of RSS support, it's still falls way short of the full-featured capabilities of other RSS clients (like FeedDemon). With all that said, you cannot discount Internet Explorer as a feed reader for a few reasons:

• The feed subscription experience is badly broken today. Rather than deliver a pile of jumbled XML, IE7 provides a far friendlier representation of the feed with some explanation on what exactly to do with it. Mind you, there's still going to be confusion, but this is a huge step in the right direction. Let's face it, the bridge to RSS is the Web and the perceived leap from web pages to feeds needs to be more elegant. This is a good start.


• Under the hood, IE7 isn't just casually gathering feeds. If I'm not mistaken, it ships with Microsoft's planned, underlying feed API. This is a lower level set of feed managment services that not only IE but any feed reader can take advantage of. Of course, you can avoid them altogether (just as every feed reader does today on Windows), but this may prove to be a critical front that Microsoft is establishing.


• Which leads to my next point: synchronization of feeds - lists, read/unread states, new entries, etc. - is going to be a critical. Wherever I am, I want the "state of my feeds" to be the same. As far as I know, only Newsgator does that today (and does it pretty well). A feed API is nice, but a feed API that syncs to an external repository is much nicer. Newsgator should get the lipstick out and pretty itself up. It's a nice fit.
• The reader itself, which displays feeds in some sort of generic XSL-styled newspaper, is pretty weak. It doesn't show items read/unread. It also doesn't give a lot of flexibility in terms of layout, priority, etc. We're still stuck in the list-on-the-left, entries-on-the-right paradigm a la email clients (which in my opinion, falls sort for RSS). Let's also keep in mind that this is a beta release (whatever that means these days).

Overall, the RSS "leap" for many (and there are many that don't know of RSS) gets a lot more fluid with IE7. In my opinion, that's the biggest advancement of all. All those "XML"'s and feed icons are cryptic enough. It's good to see an approach that addresses this shortcoming.

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Posted by richz at 9:10 AM

Create RSS Feeds Out Of Thin Air

Ok maybe not thin air, but InstantRSS will create feeds from web pages that have been tagged up with their special tags. It's pretty handy.

They've gone ahead and done this with Google search results. GooRSS delivers Google results via RSS. Also very handy...at least until Google sends over the Cease & Desist to shut them down.

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Posted by richz at 7:52 AM

All Feeds Are Not Created Equal

When a feed has something new to say, almost all RSS readers do just about the same thing: they bold out the feed channel and display the number of new entries available for reading. Some take it up a notch and display a nice little notifier if there are new things to read (FeedDemon comes to mind, and Bloglines has one you can download). That helps as well. But that’s not enough. The truth is different feeds mean different things to me. The hallowed promise of RSS was to help us deal with information overload. As RSS becomes more and more popular (and as my subscription list grows), I often feel like I'm running in place, sifting through mounds of potentially interesting information to get to the stuff that matters to me most. For RSS to scale, I think some things need to change.

When something new comes in over a feed, I sort of liken it today to a knock on the door. I’m going about my business and suddenly I get tapped that there’s something new to read. Excellent. It’s a hell of a lot better than proactively hopping from site to site to see if anything is up. That worked well…for awhile. Today, the analogy acts out a bit differently. Every 15 or 30 minutes, my feedreader goes out and checks my 250 or so feeds. And what happens? Forty people come knocking at my door…all at once. That’s not so bad, except that different people mean different things to me. Some matter more to me than others. Some rarely come knocking, but when they do, it’s almost always worth hearing. Some show up all the time, overwhelming me with visits. I don’t want to turn them away, but I’d like to give others a chance as well.

All feedreaders today use the same, generic door knocker to let me know something’s new. I’m still left with the work of contending with tons of information. Sifting. Sorting. Flagging. Tagging. “I’ll get to it later.” It feels a hell of a lot like email. In many ways, the success of feed syndication has sort of pushed the experience back to square one.

And it’s only going to get worse. Today, we deal with information sources that are primarily of two species: blogs and institutional news sources (like magazines and newspapers). Eventually, new types of sources will arrive that are very different in nature to what we subscribe to today. Imagine a feed that notified me when inventory crossed a critical threshold. I don’t want that guy waiting at my doorstop with 30 other feeds that have something to say. The nature of that source is different, and as such, the method of notification needs to change.

Even today, some feeds matter way more to me then others. I’m still forced to seek them out, and as my reading list grows, it's getting harder to do so. All feeds are not created equal. And as such, users should be empowered with the ability to amplify certain feeds over others. This is less about finding the stuff that matters to me and more about - in the spirit of RSS - getting the stuff that matters to come to me first.

The crowd around my front door is pouring out into the street. I’d hate to have to turn some of them away.

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Posted by richz at 2:57 PM

Taking 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.

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Posted by richz at 12:27 PM

FeedLounge Launches...And Has The Nerve To Ask For Money

Here’s an idea: put out a service and, starting from Day 1, charge money for it. Not very Web 2.0. Nor is it very Google-like. I’ve rambled on in the past about how all this free stuff with cute names and friendly candy-like colors has to give somehow – whether by ads or by asking people to pony up some cash.

A new web-based feed reader called FeedLounge just debuted (it’s been in beta for awhile) and they’re asking for…*gasp*…money! $5 a month to be exact. Hey, good for them. I’d be glad to pay $5/mo. if a particular service kicks ass and keeps ads out of my face.

The vice is tightening folks. Yahoo is feeling it. Google will eventually feel it (unless they just use all their cash to buy traditional revenue generators). And of course, the little guys and their financial backers (if they have any) will feel it.

So good luck to the FeedLounge team. My only gripe is they don’t even have a trial period. There’s some sort of “three hour tour” but I don’t even understand it. Hey, if it’s that good guys, let people get a taste of it.

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Posted by richz at 3:46 PM

Find Bloggers With OpinMind

One of the things I fear is getting “stuck” with the same select group of voices that I pay attention. I enjoy discovering a blog I should’ve had in my list previously.

Opinmind is an interesting tool that let’s you search for bloggers by topic. It lists out both positive and negative commentary about a given topic. Pretty cool.

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Yahoo! Feed/Blog Alert

Yahoo! continues to lead the way among the big boys on RSS. Via Yahoo! Alerts, now you can get notified via email, mobile and IM when a particular feed gets updated.

I haven’t tried this yet and I’m not sure how often it pings you (or intervals, etc.). It’s cool stuff nonetheless. RSS outside the web. Nice.

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Posted by richz at 10:48 AM

Taking RSS Beyond Headlines

I'm a huge fan of RSS and it's potential. I think it's simplicity belies its real power. I also think it's simplicity is a big reason why people haven't thought about it more broadly as a mechanism for proactive information delivery. I think there's a lot more to it than headlines and blog entries.

So to combat the narrow perception of RSS that exist today, I'm going to blog a series of entries called Taking RSS Beyond Headlines where I'll give examples of how RSS can be used in potentially useful ways beyond news syndication.

Check back soon or subscribe to basement.org's feed for more.

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Posted by richz at 10:31 AM

Blogger Web Comments Extension

A lesser-known Firefox extension put out by Google a few weeks ago is the Blogger Web Comments for Firefox. I installed it a few weeks ago and I've got to say, I really enjoy using it.

It works like this: when you're on any web page, a small icon in the status bar spins around and tells you if other bloggers have commented about the page you're looking it. If they have, it presents an in-line summary of the entries right there on the page in the bottom-right corner. Nice stuff.

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Posted by richz at 8:54 AM

Feedicons.com

Now that the IE team has decided to play nice and simply adopt the Firefox icon for RSS, Matt Brett has decided to take matters into his own hands and make sure we don't screw it up this time. He's put out Feedicons.com, a site dedicated not to RSS, but just the icon that's supposed to represent RSS. Matt's been kind enough to provide the icon in just about every format imaginable (including EPS). I've gotta say, the icon has grown on me. It's a hell of a lot better than the army of buttons you sometimes see on sites ("Add to My Yahoo", "Add to Newsgator", etc...).

Now all we have to do is fix what happens once someone clicks it.

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Posted by richz at 9:10 PM

The RSS Investors Fund Starts Investing

The hooligans that call themselves the RSS Investors have thrown done some cash to get involved with Attensa. It's their first investment in an RSS play. Attensa has an Outlook plug-in that enables it for RSS. It's free (for now) and it's pretty slick. Newsgator is the leader in this space (for now).

From where I'm sitting, Attensa's client looks like just another client-side play among many, many plays out there riding the RSS wave. There are tons of applications (many of which are very good and free) for consuming and organizing feeds. They have plans for some Enteprise-ish stuff, though it's not very clear. As for the investment side of things, you have to be skeptical of an investment fund that is technology-centered rather than solution-centered. RSS is a potentially paradigm-shifting technology that is capable of reinventing how we work and communicate. It's already been invented. The real hurdle is bringing this technology to the masses. Think: ubiquity of email.

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Posted by richz at 11:04 AM

Google Is Absolutely Terrified Of RSS

The ReadWriteWeb is pondering why Google has been out of sync with the whole RSS trend. Yahoo and Microsoft seem to have embraced the technology as a sort of pseudo-transit system for the web. Sort of like what XML was supposed to be.

So why hasn't Google joined the party yet? I'll tell you why: RSS has the ability to upend how and more importantly where we get information. The "where" part of the equation terrifies Google. While their initiatives are popping up all over the place, their bread and butter is those gosh-darned ads that are on...gasp...web pages. Web pages that you need to go and visit.

I am an avid RSS fan. I'm pulling in over 200 feeds and I can digest an incredible amount of information without going anywhere. Pure, distilled information without ads and without clutter.

Yeh, ads are starting to find their way into RSS, but Google ain't dumb. They've got a good thing going here. Google wants you searching and visiting web pages. And yeh, I guess RSS feeds can lead you back to web pages (that's what the major publishers are counting on), but Google isn't going to rely on the whims of people to lead them back to their pages. This post you're reading right now will be delivered in its entirety via RSS.

So yeh, Google will play with RSS. They sort of have to. They're going to look silly if they don't. Or I guess they can keep pushing that whole ATOM thing...

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Posted by richz at 9:40 AM

Yahoo Goes Balistic on RSS

Yahoo continues to show everyone else how it's done with RSS. Beyond lighting up just about every news source and search results with RSS feeds, they've gone ahead and added RSS to their Yahoo Mail beta. But wait. There's more. They're lighting up their Yahoo Alerts (which you can get via SMS, instant message or email) with RSS. News.com has an article on all this. Very, very cool.

Yahoo is ahead of everyone else in its efforts to make the technology of RSS disappear and really just give people the benefits. When you're leveraging RSS and don't even know it (by using My Yahoo, you're effectively aggregating news sources), then you're already ahead in the game.

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Posted by richz at 11:45 AM

RSS & PDA's

The choices for viewing feesd on PDA's has been pretty narrow to date. It's too bad really, since RSS and PDA's are a great marriage for syncing up and catching up to content. Here's a nice little summary of the options out there.

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Posted by richz at 11:55 AM

Yahoo! Debutes RSS Advertising

The inevitable has happened - Yahoo!, who's just been awesome with their RSS initiatives - has debuted advertising for RSS feeds.

I understand why, but...blech.

Can we "opt out" of such things? Maybe we can get Nick Bradbury to add "Filter Feeds" feature to FeedDemon? Would that be wrong? Is it wrong to ask? Too many questions...

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Posted by richz at 1:27 PM

Blogjet

I’d like to plug a great little Windows platform blogging tool called Blogjet. It’s a simple, word processing-style application that allows you to publish and manage posts. It’s a bit on the pricey side at $39.95, but worth the money if you’re a serious blogger.

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Posted by richz at 2:57 PM

RSS = Absence of Expression

A while back, I remember some discussion arose about how feed readers and RSS sort of render visual design obsolete. The reason is obvious: If you're tracking blogs and news sources through a feed reader of some sort, it's only pulling the content. The only hint of distinctiveness is the optional header graphic offered up by the RSS 2.0 spec.

Over time, I've become increasingly reliant on my feed reader. My feed reader of choice is Newsgator's excellent FeedDemon. FeedDemon allows for a whole slew of ways to view and scan feeds. Newspapers, Outlook-style headers, and the like. It's all offered up to optimize your feed scanning abilities. Way back when, Scoble even noted that the absence of presentation is actually a benefit to feed reading (i.e. All headlines look exactly the same).

While this all may be true, I'm finding that this sort of "direct input" way of getting information is feeling increasingly sterile and disconnected. Like it or not, we are not machines that only process data. The layout, color and style of a site is not only created for usability and readabilty, but to evoke a certain mood or emotion. After all, these "sources" of information are often people with a desire to get something about themselves across beyond just pure information.

We talk about RSS today in the context of boosting productivity and increasing the exposure of sites. I'm the first to extol the virtues of RSS. But I think something is lost in the leap to pure information consumption. It's a bit ironic that with the elevation of the individual publisher as a new voice on the Internet comes a stripping of their own personal style and expression.

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Posted by richz at 4:44 PM

Bloggers to Forbes Magazine: Please Don't Blog

So the blogosphere is all up in arms today about a Forbes magazine article that likens the blog community to a rabid, bloodthirsty mob (or something). It's definitely the hot topic today.

Stepping back a bit, I get the sense that the blogging world can't take some of it's own medicine. Forbes magazine essentially...blogged. It presented a highly subjective, almost personal perspective on a topic. It's an opinion piece. And love it or hate it, some of it's points are valid.

Implicit in bloggers railing on Forbes is the notion that Forbes and other "traditional" publications are to be held to a higher standard. This of course puts blogs at a lower standard, relatively speaking. If that's the case, then the last voice I want to hear about the validity of the Forbes article is us.

Maybe Forbes was just feeling left out. Maybe they wanted in on this party. What better way to do it than to dangle some bait. It looks like we bit.

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Posted by richz at 12:29 PM

Flock Pre-Release Now Available

So Flock was unleashed to the masses a couple of days ago in the form of a pre-release of sorts. For the unfamiliar, Flock is built atop the popular Firefox browser engine. It adds a slew of new “Web 2.0” features to the typical set of browser features we’ve become accustomed to.  You can find out about it’s features here.

Flock is arguably the darling of the whole Web 2.0 trend. If I’m not mistaken, they’ve gotten $2MM in funding already and are creating a fair amount of buzz out there.

After installing it yesterday and playing around for a bit, the first impression I got was that this thing was just one big patch job of feature add-ons that have little to do with one another. It integrates with delicious and Flickr (sort of). It has a feed reader (sort of). It has a clipping tool where you can cut & paste images and text snippets. In the end, it felt more like an disparate collection of Firefox plug-ins stitched together along with a new chrome skin (which looks real cool actually). Stepping back a bit, what was this thing trying to achieve? After a couple of hours, I uninstalled it.

I think what’s even more interesting than the Flock product itself is all the noise around it. I’m just not seeing how all this stuff really amounts to much value for the rest of the world – i.e. beyond the community that is enraptured in all things 2.0 these days. Even more fascinating is the fact that Flock garnered serious venture money. I’m no business guy, but how exactly does this thing end up making money (other than a buyout)?

Generally speaking, I don’t get it. If someone can help me see the light here, I’m all ears.

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Posted by richz at 1:16 PM

Step 1 Of RSS Is Broken

Searchenginewatch confirms what many of us have suspected: the awareness of RSS is still quite low among the general population of Internet users. While the article confirms that usage among the technically savvy is obviously higher, the rest of the world either doesn’t know what RSS is, or is using it without even knowing it (i.e. adding channels to their portal pages).

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Despite it’s inherent power, the RSS experience is badly broken. The first baby step towards the power of feed syndication is subscribing to a feed – and for the majority of Internet users, it leads to nowhere.

Before we even consider the problem with subscribing to feeds today, it’s worth noting that even the visual indicator of a feed being available is confusing. Dave Winer has tirelessly defended the consistent use of that orange XML box. Dave is hoping that by sticking to an agreed-upon standard, people will eventually “get it.” Not so. There are two problems with that button. First, how in the world is a layman supposed to connect “XML” with feed syndication? It’s a bit silly that Dave has decided to commit to a button that, strictly interpreted, is itself misleading.

The second problem, and it’s a far bigger one, is that the XML button, like most buttons that look actionable, should do something. Ideally, it should do something useful, or at the very least help the user along towards something useful. Today, in the great majority of cases, it just leads to a blob of junk in the user’s browser. If we step back and consider RSS in the context of a use case, the very first interaction step is badly broken.

In all fairness, this isn’t the fault of RSS. Most up-and-coming technologies are introduced to the masses by a tangible product that is quickly usable. Netscape’s Navigator simplified the web for millions years ago. RSS today doesn’t have that product to “carry” users through to a point where they can more easily realize the value of RSS.

And so, we’re left with a collection of web-based readers, client-side installable readers, and some other stuff in between (e.g. Outlook-integrated feed readers & browser plug-ins). The steps necessary are simply too difficult and cumbersome for most to even bother.

I’d venture to say that the only companies positioned to really turn RSS into a fluid experience that travels from the Internet and onto your desktop are the operating system folks, namely Apple & Microsoft. From alerts, to pings, to rolling headlines in a sidebar and whatnot, they are in the best position to create a more seamless, clicking/dragging experience for RSS.

I’ll be posting again about some of the other challenges for RSS (Steps 2 and 3 anyone?), but for now, I think Step 1 is a doosie. Until we make life a bit easier for the rest of the world, RSS will remain a tech toy and not much more.

 

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Posted by richz at 8:38 AM

Two New Feed Readers

The feed readers just keep on coming. There are two worth mentioning. Orangoo is a new, web-based feed-reader that shows a fair amount of that AJAX goodness. It’s actually pretty good, though you can’t import by OPML (not yet at least).

On the client side, there’s Curio Studio’s GreatNews for the Windows platform. This looks like the younger brother of FeedDemon, with newspapers, Bloglines syncing, and such. It’s not as feature-rich as FeedDemon, but it looks like a competent start.

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Yahoo News Includes Blog Entries In Results

Yahoo just keeps on churning. They’ve added blog entries as a sidebar alongside mainstream news article results in Yahoo News. Very, very cool. The Yahoo Search Blog talks about it.

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Posted by richz at 7:15 PM

Google Reader Is Out

Google Reader was released to public beta today. It’s their answer to web-based feed readers.

My experience so far has not been very good. I’m not sure I’m an edge case (I don’t think I am) but it threw up all over my FeedDemon exported OPML file. Not fun.

Generally, it looks ok. The interface has some nice elements to it, but overall I’m not very impressed. I wish someone would break out of the email-style left-side item list, right-side content paradigm for displaying feeds. You can’t digest that much very quickly. I also don’t like how it mapped all my feed groups to labels. I’ll be sticking with FeedDemon for now.

On a more subjective note, I have to say I’m getting tired of Google’s Fisher Price candy colors style. You’ve got to wonder if they can maintain that style forever as they keep adding applications and destinations.

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Posted by richz at 9:45 AM

The RSS Toolbox

As RSS becomes more and more popular, we’re starting to see all kinds of tools to do all kinds of things to help you manage, publish and promote RSS feeds. Here’s a summary:

• Ping-o-matic. This service boils down all the most popular RSS notification services (Yahoo!, Bloglines, etc.) into a single ping.
• Feedshot. Submit your feed to the top search engines for indexing.
• FeedDigest. Digest (mix) feeds into a single feed and output in Javascript, PHP or HTML.
• Feedburner. Track usage and statistics of your feed.
• Feed Validator. Validate your RSS or ATOM feeds for well-formed-ness.
• Blogstreet. Has an RSS generator and an RSS-to-mobile converter.
• RSSCache.com. Cache your RSS feeds to reduce bandwidth usage.

I’m sure there are other tools out there. If I’m missing any, feel free to add in the comments.

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Posted by richz at 12:15 PM

Microsoft's RSS Attack

Microsoft is going head-on into RSS support with it’s future product road map. Scoble lists out the initiatives. This makes a lot of sense in a lot of places - especially at the operating system level. If you’re a smaller RSS play (or even slightly bigger – like Newsgator), you’ve got to be a bit worried (or excited?).

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Posted by richz at 6:03 PM

Start.com Updated

So, what’s the slickest (and constantly getting slicker) web-based feed reader/personal portal/start page thingy? In my moderately humble opinion it’s Microsoft’s mad experiment: Start.com.

I just imported my 200+ feed OPML in about two seconds and started dragging, expanding and rearranging my front page with my feeds of choice. You can add columns, increase/decrease headlines, even save searches that you want to keep around and maintain. Side by side with Google’s & Yahoo’s personalized portal pages, this bad boy destroys them.

I’ve still got my own gripes with it, and more importantly, with this woefully outdated style of displaying information (portals are soooo 1999). Regardless, you can’t help but be impressed with the speed and quality at which Start.com has evolved. Hats off to that team (all three of them).

 

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Posted by richz at 9:08 AM

Yahoo! Weather Via RSS

Yahoo continues to lead the pack in RSS. Yahoo Weather feeds are now available.

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Posted by richz at 9:19 AM

FeedDemon 1.6 Beta 3 Released

Newsgator has put out the third beta of FeedDemon 1.6. FeedDemon is my feed reader of choice. With this release, we’re starting to see the syncing capabilities start to shine. I can finally see the same set of feed groups and feeds on Newsgator Online as on my client feed reader. It took some poking around (like unsyncing and syncing again) to get there, but it’s happening.

Now if only Newsgator would clean up Newsgator Online. It’s a pretty bad interface The Newsgator Manager and it’s “locations” are downright mind-numbing.

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Posted by richz at 5:07 PM

RSS: Beyond Headlines & Blogs

The new Google Desktop has been catching some flak in the blogosphere (man I hate that word) for being less than stellar. I posted my impressions yesterday. It’s all a little less innovative and a little more copycat than what we’ve come to expect from Google. Putting the general impressions aside, I’d like to focus on a feature Google included in Desktop that, I believe, is a hint of where RSS can really go.

In Google Desktop, it’s called Web Clips. In short, it’s a rolling list of headlines that are gleaned from web pages that you’ve visited that are also serving RSS feeds. So for example, if I visit Kottke.org, it sniffs out the RSS feeds he’s also made available and goes ahead and adds them to my Web Clips mix. After a few hours of browsing around the Web, I glance over to the Web Clips and notice a mixture of headlines from the various sites I’ve visited.

So what’s good and bad about this?

The Good

• It’s nice to not have to subscribe to feeds. Rather than chasing around orange XML’s or cutting and pasting feed URL’s into a feed aggregator, the feed content simply starts showing up.
• The whole sense of “dealing with feeds elsewhere” is sort of mitigated. I don’t need Feed Reader X to explore my feed subscriptions. They’re part of my desktop line of sight.
• It requires zero understanding of what RSS is, how it works and why we should even think about it. From an interaction design perspective, this is the pinnacle of good design: unobtrusiveness.

The Bad

• The rolling queue of headlines can only handle so much, so quickly. Even if you stretch out the widget in the side bar, you’ll see maybe five, eight, ten headlines at a time?
• Who said I want headlines from every web site I visit? I may have checked into a site for a few seconds. Mind you, there may be some logic around what criteria allows a feed to make it into Web Clips, but after using it for a bit, it seems pretty arbitrary.
• While the side bar generally gets you a bit warm and fuzzy when you first install it, the shine wears off very quickly and it just feels in the way. Do I want to see pertinent headlines? Sure. Do I want it in my face all day long on my desktop? No.
• One of the great things about RSS is that it nicely buckets content based on feeds and how we organize and categorize them. This single, generic list feels like email.

With all that said, I think Web Clips hints us towards what RSS is really capable of: delivering key bits of information to us in an unobtrusive way with very little effort on our part. In a business context, this has enormous potential. Imagine headlines coming to you when:

• An assembly part order has moved along a key point in a supply chain.
• A document requiring approval by various parties moves along steps in a workflow.
• Inventory stock reaches a pre-set threshold (either too low or too high).
• Hours are exceeded (or near exceeded) in a consulting effort.
• Outstanding invoices haven’t been paid for 30 days.

Today, all of the above require business participants to go get information. They may get it by sending emails or asking others. We try to use technology the help us do this by installing applications, but we often still have to go get it from an insulated application (whether web or otherwise).

RSS provides the transit system for delineating and delivering key information to users without requiring any proactive action on their part. It’s a tap on the shoulder. In today’s application of RSS, we get tapped on the shoulder because someone has something curious or interesting to say. It’s use is casual and mostly relegated to blogs and news sources.

It’s real power, in my opinion, is when the tap on the shoulder is followed by critical information. It is the inverse of your “check on this…” and “check on that…” task list. Once you’ve let it be known that you’re listening in, RSS will let you know when important events happen. For me, this is where it gets exciting for RSS: the realm of communicating critical information. RSS has the untapped capacity to redefine how groups of people communicate around centralized goals.

There are other barriers to talk about before RSS can get there. Google has (sort of) attempted addressing one of them – usability and ease of use. Others include security and it’s limitations as an XML payload, but these all can be solved. RSS is generating an enormous amount of attention these days. It’s really a matter of where all this energy (and money) that RSS is attracting is applied.

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Posted by richz at 5:43 PM

RSS 3 Draft Released (Lite Version)

Well, now we don’t have to worry about finding some fun weekend reading. A draft of the RSS 3 specification (the “Lite” version) was posted today.  John Avidan (the keeper of the spec) blogs about it.

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Is RSS What XML Was Supposed To Be?

As I watch the whole RSS explosion unfold, I can’t help but wonder if RSS will materialize into a more popular information payload mechanism than XML.  It’s simple, and more importantly, it’s definition is far more narrow than XML.

We all know XML can do a lot of different things – transform information, represent remote procedure calls, etc. – but over time, RSS is going to become far more than just a way to get news feeds.

Take a look at how Yahoo decided to handle their REST-based maps API. It’s based on extension of RSS called GeoRSS. So how does it work? You simply pass in an RSS 2.0 file enriched with some geographical information (zip codes, latitude and longitude, etc.) and Yahoo hands back a nicely plotted map.

So why did Yahoo use RSS here?  Well, I’m sure the team at Yahoo want people to understand and adopt their services as quickly as possible. What better way to do that than to leverage a popular and widely-understood standard. The alternative would have been to create their own home-grown XML format. This would leave developers with the unenviable task of wading through documentation, studying schemas, etc.

Of course, RSS isn’t for everything. Some payloads are simply too complex for it. Nevertheless, it’s becoming clear that one of the strengths of XML, it’s incredible versatility, is also one of its drawbacks. RSS isn’t as versatile but because it is narrowly defined, the learning curve is far less steep.

You can find a whole slew of creative uses of RSS (via extensions) at the RSS Extensions Wiki.

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Posted by richz at 10:44 AM

The Importance of Metaphors

It’s really exciting to watch some of the trends that are materializing on the Web. Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr are popularizing tagging and collaborative categorization (also known as folksonomies). RSS is starting to really take hold as well. It’s popularity continues to grow and is now attracting venture money to help bring it to businesses and to the masses.

With all that said, I think these technologies, while compelling, have a ways to go before they graduate to the levels of email and chatting. For these trends to break out of the domain of the technically curious and savvy and into the rest of the world, the experiences around these technologies need to feel right and natural.

I was chatting with a friend yesterday. He was telling me about his dad jumping onto Gmail, Google’s popular email service. From the looks of things, his dad is your typical computer user in his 50’s or 60’s. He was explaining how he took the time to label all his messages under categories that made sense to him. Once he was done, was dumbfounded to find out that all his messages were still in his Inbox. “If I did all this work to move them, why are they still there? And now why are they in two places?”

I think there’s a critical lesson to be learned here. One of the ways interaction designers are able to introduce complex or abstract concepts to less technically savvy users is through the use of metaphors. Metaphors allow designers to leverage an assumed prerequisite understanding of how things in the real world work: Folders. Trash cans. Envelopes Pieces of paper.

Today, we go to great lengths to lean on what people already understand about the real world. We all know full well that email systems don’t actually have inboxes and outboxes. Yet we introducing them to users by correlating them with their real world siblings. The result is less “figuring out” on the user’s part. You move a document from Folder A to Folder B. Simple enough.

The challenge for interaction designers is to think creatively about (a) what can we leverage from the real world that will make these new technologies easier to digest and understand and (b) how to apply these metaphors effectively.

RSS is an amazing new technology that most people simply don’t bother with. The RSS experience today is so badly disjointed and confusing that it’s nowhere near capable of breaching the “AOL” type of experience that so many are accustomed to. Orange icons that lead to gibberish in your browser; confusion over what we should call RSS; the requirement to go download a client before you can even leverage it. This is all assuming that people want to even embark on this joy ride.

One of the biggest challenges for RSS is even explaining what it is. Look at the BBC’s attempt at explaining RSS. Bless their hearts, they’re really going the extra mile here. Now put yourself into the curious, yet ignorant user’s head. You figure “Ok, let me see what this is about…” You end up on an essay about the virtues and inner-workings of RSS. The most likely outcome: you’ll do a quick scan and move on without reading.

What needs to happen here is, rather than sitting the user down and educating them (i.e. asking the user to come to the technology), we must think creatively about how we can cheat the user into adopting it. How can we camouflage a powerful technology like RSS such that users will correlate to some other understanding and just say “Oh, cool. That makes sense. I’ll try it out.”

The same goes for tagging. Folders are an incredibly powerful, effective metaphor of a very basic real world concept: things can contain other things. Tagging, which is no doubt powerful and has advantages over folders, is quite a bit different. To understand tagging, we have to effectively “unlearn” the well-engrained metaphor of “folders.” My friend’s dad, in his own head, perceived the actual moving of physical papers (emails) to physical folders (the labels). The fact that they remained in his Inbox confounded him.

It’s interesting to hear all the debate going on in reaction to Microsoft calling RSS feeds “Web Feeds” in their upcoming Internet Explorer 7. Dave Winer (the creator of RSS) railed into them pretty hard about it. Microsoft responded to his criticisms and defended their decision to name RSS feeds “Web Feeds.” The debate was over what would confuse users. RSS. XML. Feeds. Web Feeds. I’ve got news for everyone, we’ve got much bigger fish to fry than what we name this stuff.

The real challenge for RSS and other up and coming technologies is how to best package it such that it doesn’t feel like a new technology at all. Instead, it should feel and work like something familiar. The more familiar it feels, the less cognitive friction the user is exposed to. Metaphors are an essential weapon in creating that familiarity.

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Posted by richz at 8:48 PM

Yahoo Adds Photos To News RSS Feeds

As far as I’m concerned, Yahoo! is schooling everyone else on where you can take RSS. They’ve added a media module to their RSS news feeds that enriches their entries with photos and descriptions. Very nice.

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Posted by richz at 5:57 PM

MSN Spaces Upgraded With...Umm..Powertoys

I have to be blunt, I really hated MSN Spaces when it came out. It just all seemed a bit too…err…packaged and glossy. With Movable Type, Wordpress and their ilk, an attractive, almost minimalistic sensibility influenced blog design. Then MSN Spaces came along and it looked like some weird leftover from the dot.com era (think Geocities and Homestead).

But I digress. This ain’t about how much MSN Spaces looks like Times Square. It’s about a slew of new features that cater to the advanced users (like yourself). They’re called PowerToys (which means “features” to you and me) and you can learn about them in this Infoworld article, or by visiting Mike Torres’ Spaces blog.

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Posted by richz at 11:24 AM

Dave Winer On BigCo's & RSS

Dave Winer, the grandpappy of RSS, lays the smackdown on big companies like Microsoft and Google for fudging around with feed syndication for no good reason.

I tend to agree. ATOM is looking more and more like little more than a distraction, yet Google just won’t let the little bastard go.

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Finally! Google News Available In RSS

It’s about damn time. Google News is now finally available in RSS.

They’ve made both their top categories and news results based on searches available in feeds. Feeds come in both RSS 2.0 and Atom flavors.

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Posted by richz at 10:00 PM

Not So Simple Syndication

Fast Company’s blog, FC Now, recently posted an entry that makes a good point about RSS: for most users, it’s an awful experience that is often explained with a bunch of techie terms nobody’s ever heard of (or cares to learn).

I don’t think there’s any single problem, but actually a collection of issues that are going to continue to prohibit RSS from reaching mass-consumption status. I’ll be posting lengthier posts (articles?) on these various issues over the next week or so.

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Posted by richz at 7:34 PM

RSS Features in IE7

The RSS Team at Microsoft provides a glimpse into the RSS features in IE7. In a nutshell (so far at least) it’s autodiscovery (a feature that Firefox currently has) and a more readable view of a web feed (vs. the ugly XML displayed today) with some controls.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft is calling the feeds “web feeds.” I’ve always hated the name RSS but you have to wonder if this is too little too late and that it will only result in confusion for novice users.

 

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Posted by richz at 5:50 PM

Blog Neighborhoods

I’m always looking around for new blogs to track and I noticed something as I was flipping through a bunch today. Bloggers – especially the technically inclined – sort of create their own neighborhoods where they track and contribute to one another’s blogs.

This is sort of logical if you think about it in terms of technologies that are often the subject of discussion. Microsoft folks are going to talk about .Net, XAML and the like; Macromedia folks are going to blog about Flash, Coldfusion and Flex; and the list goes on. Then

While it makes a lot of sense, I think it’s unfortunate that ideas – many of which are platform or technology neutral – never leave these blogging neighborhoods. Many technologies today like XML, RSS, ReST and others have little to do with platform.

For example, I track Dare Obasanjo’s blog. Dare is an XML guru at Microsoft and his writings about RSS, ReST and XML in general are always intelligent, well-thought out and often insightful. Here’s an example:  Misunderstanding REST: A look at the Bloglines, del.icio.us and Flickr APIs.

My point here (and yes, there’s a point to this post) is that, as readers and contributers, we shouldn’t be afraid to venture out into other blogging neighborhoods. There’s lots of good stuff out there.

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Posted by richz at 7:37 PM

FeedDemon 1.6 Beta 2 Released

I’m starting to feel like I’m part of the newswire for FeedDemon releases. Then again, it is my feed reader of choice (and I’ve messed with a bunch of them – in my opinion, it’s the best).

FeedDemon 1.6 Beta 2 is out. You can also find the release notes here. I’ve got to say, syncing the state of my RSS world with NewsGator is damn cool.

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Posted by richz at 2:46 PM

Bulletin: FeedDemon 1.6 Beta Released; Still Feels Like Outlook

My feed reader of choice – Bradsoft’s (now Newsgator’s) FeedDemon – has gone to beta yet again. This time, the big feature is syncing with Newsgator’s web services so your stuff stays in sync wherever you log in. The beta is only available for registered users.

I’ve installed it on my end. It’s a slick little tool. For me, the real story with feed syndication interfaces is how best to present large amounts of information in an easily digestable way. I think the great majority of feed reader interfaces, in both web and client applications, miss the point about where we’re trying to go with RSS.

In short, RSS is not email. If I see one more damn layout that is based on the email client interface design pattern, I’m going to barf. The layout of folders on the left, entries in the midddle, full entry on the right (a la Outlook) simply falls short for RSS. In an upcoming post, I’m going to throw around some ideas of how we can approach the information/interaction design of feeds more effectively. I think Nick is onto something with how his “newspapers” (essentially XSL templates for viewing feeds) allow users to lay out feeds.

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Posted by richz at 2:03 PM

Yahoo Testing RSS Search

The freaks at Feedster better watch their backs. Yahoo is testing an RSS search capability. It's down right now but Steve Rubel grabbed a screenshot while the gettin' was good.

Eventually, I think general search and RSS search will converge, such that the distinction will be blurred. You can already see hints of this at Google. Results will show blog entries posted very recently. I’m not even sure if siloing it out as a separate capability is worthwhile.

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Posted by richz at 3:40 PM

Shades of Traits : Microsoft & RSS

Today, Microsoft announced broad support for RSS at both the browser (IE7) and operating system (Longhorn) level. This is very exciting stuff for anyone that cares about feed syndication. Few players can take a technology and pull it into mainstream use. Microsoft is one of them.

There are many angles to what Microsoft is planning for RSS. You can read about them here and here and here. This section in the official press release particularly caught my eye:

It allows publishers to embed useful information about the list itself. For example, an online retailer can supply additional information about each item in a list such as price, sales rank, average customer rating and type of merchandise. The extensions enable richer flexibility and capability for sorting and ordering. This enables users to sort their friends' wish lists by sales rank or popularity.

About seven months ago, I drafted up an RSS extension called RSS Traits. From the Purpose section of the spec:

The real power of Traits is realized on the consuming end. Equipped clients and applications can provide filtering, sorting and presentation enhancements that are driven by the Traits data provided for in the feed.

I’m intrigued that we (“we” being Microsoft and I) came up with what is effectively the same idea to expand the power of RSS. I’ve never spoken to anyone from Microsoft. Then again, I’ve blogged about this a few times, so maybe they read it (or maybe not). Either way, I’m pretty excited to see what they come up with.

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Posted by richz at 10:27 AM

RIA's On Wikipedia

The term “Rich Internet Application” (RIA) has graduated to the wonderful world of Wikipedia. There’s mention of the various techniques to make stuff Rich – Javascript, Flash. There’s even a plug for the new kid on the block – Backbase.

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Posted by richz at 9:38 AM

User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline

Peter Merholz : User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline

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Posted by richz at 11:10 AM

Rich Experiences & Branding

Since Google Maps debuted, the attention and praise Google has achieved is impressive. The praise is not unwarranted. Maps is a very impressive web application. It makes Yahoo! and Mapquest look like…web sites.

And so, discussions have bounced around the Internet about why Maps is so darn good. The general sentiment is that it’s so easy to use. Kottke put it best. Leaps in user experience are, in fact, innovation. By bridging the chasm between machines and people, people react to it – almost emotionally at times. There’s a sense of connectedness to the product that goes beyond just basic use.

Under the hood, Maps is using some very impressive technology. It’s safe to say that only a handful of companies can reproduce what Google has done with Maps. I would even argue that the overall usability with Google Maps isn’t that great. I can’t print out directions. The Back button has gone to hell. There are other issues as well. Once I got past the “ooh ahh” phase of playing around with it, I went back to Yahoo! for driving directions.

Nevertheless, people are very impressed. Simply put, no other web mapping site feels this way. It is responsive and easy to digest. And so, perception shifts. Google’s brand is enhanced. Regardless of whether Mapquest or Yahoo! more accurately nail the use cases that drive this kind of software, the damage is done. This merging of whiz-bang technology (zooming and dragging maps, satellite imagery, etc.) and decent usability results in a benefit to Google that goes beyond just making users happy. You can’t underestimate the impact a “toy” like this has on the perception of the Google brand.

And so, for interface designers, as well as the shops that are focused on creating richer interfaces, you can thank Google for another bullet on your brochures: enhance your brand perception with better user experiences.

Good stuff.

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Posted by richz at 1:11 PM

Ajax Usability Guidelines

Baekdal.com has taken a good first stab at laying down usability guidelines for Ajax use.

There are obviously no obvious hard and fast rules as to when to use (or not use) Ajax, but this is a good start. My favorite is the last recommendation: don’t overuse it.

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Posted by richz at 10:15 AM

Onfolio 2.0 Preview Release

The studs at Onfolio have taken another stab at feed reader glory with Onfolio 2.0 Preview Release. I’ve got to say, this thing is really starting to come together. Onfolio is one of a few in-browser feed readers out there and this time around, they’ve really nailed the value of a three-pane feeds > feed entries > newspaper browser view. It snaps into both Internet Explorer and Firefox, as well as a “Deskbar”-style application that sits on your desktop. I’m liking it.

Only one snag: when I was refreshing my feeds in Firefox, the whole browser (and all instances of it) came to screeching halt. As I’ve mentioned before, FeedDemon’s speed has really spoiled me. I’ve tried many feed readers and I don’t think any are as fast as Demon.

In other news, I still can’t get C|Net’s Newsburst to import my OPML feed.

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Posted by richz at 1:32 PM

Yet Another Feed Reader

The number of feed aggregators out there is starting to get crazy. C|Net (oddly) has decided to chime in with Newsburst.

I tried to get it going by importing my OPML file that I dumped out of FeedDemon. After trying to upload, the thing froze up on me. Mind you, my OPML has over 150 feeds in it, but so what. We’ll give C|Net a little time to get the kinks out before we publicly lynch them.

While you’re at it, check out Lektora, another new feed reader tool that lives in your browser (IE & Firefox supported). I didn’t play with this one much. It’s similar to Pluck’s and Onfolio’s interfaces.

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Posted by richz at 7:15 PM

Ask Jeeves Acquires Bloglines

I could’ve sworn that Yahoo! or Google were gonna be the suitors for Bloglines. Turns

out Ask Jeeves (that weird search engine with the butler) is acquiring Bloglines./p>

I’m a bit surprised Bloglines didn’t hold out a bit longer. I don’t think feed readers/blog popularity has peaked at all.

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Posted by richz at 9:45 AM

Filtering Noise in RSS

There's some talk going around about how annoying it is to subscribe to feeds that muddle together different types of content into one feed.

The gripes are completely valid. As feeds become richer, the one-dimensional nature of RSS starts to buckle. We need a better way to quickly and easily apply characteristics to items within a single feed.

Well, there is a better way (is this starting to sound like an infomercial?).

About a month ago, I drafted an RSS 2.0 module called RSS Traits that provides a simple way of applying traits to feeds and thus enabling clients to provide filtering and sorting capabilties.

Of course, drafting a spec is one thing. Getting people to actually commit the time and effort to implement it is another. In this case, it may be even tougher than your typical specification because it requuires cooperation by both content providers and the developers of feed readers/aggregators.

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CSS + RSS = Niiiice

I need to be kicked in the you-know-what's for not knowing this 12 months ago.

It turns out you can reference a style sheet from within the XML of an RSS feed. This way, if users hit your feed from within a browser, they'll see a prettied-up version of the feed rather than the ugliness that is XML.

Pete Freitag takes care of the ugly details.

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Posted by richz at 7:42 PM

RSS vs, Design

There's been some discussion flying around about how the rising popularity of RSS is slowly rendering design irrelevent. Michael Efford blogs about it. He noticed that his stats showed
more people were pulling his RSS feeds than visiting his site.

This really leads into an interesting discussion about where the value of RSS really lies. While an obvious benefit is the separation of information from presentation, it isn't the primary driver for RSS. I think RSS is catching on because:

1. You can ping many sources at once and gather a lot of data without visiting each site individually and wondering if it's been updated or not, and


2. Because only raw data is sent, your consuming client (e.g. a feed reader) can present that data in a consistent way - thus allowing you to scan large amounts of information without dealing with the clutter of layouts and graphics. A feed entry is a feed entry regardless of where it came from.

I think these two factors really drive RSS' popularity. As to the impact on design: there is no doubt that window of opportuntiy is far narrower with RSS. It has to be in order for its value to remain.

Nevertheless, I think a lot can be done to enhance or "color" feeds so that this scanning capability isn't lost while allowing the style and flavor of the feed source to come through. We see this a bit in the ability to add a channel logo/graphic to your feed and the ability of some feed readers to pull favicons off of servers (e.g. FeedDemon and Bloglines).

Beyond aesthetics, I think more can be done to not only enhance the visual appeal of RSS feeds but to allow them to become even more useful. The RSS traits module is an attempt to enrich and enhance feeds so that clients can not only show more but do more as well.

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Posted by richz at 2:15 PM

Slashdotters Lament Over RSS & Ads

Slashdot (the "Original Blog"TM) has a posting on ads in RSS feeds.

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Posted by richz at 10:18 AM

RSS 1.1

Apparently, RDF Site Summary and RSS 2.0 went off, got married and had kids: the RSS 1.1 Specification was just recently released.

It's an attempt to maintain the benefits of RDF without sacrificing the ease-of-use of RSS 2.0.

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Posted by richz at 3:37 PM

RSS Traits Module

I've been a big fan of RSS for a pretty long time now. Though its been relegated to news syndication (mostly), I've always been intrigued with its ability to push content towards the user. That capabiilty is, in my opinion, what is so profoundly powerful about RSS. A user need not go snooping around various websites to see if anything's changed. Instead, the information meets them halfway (so to speak).

While this is great for keeping up with your favorite news sites and blogs, I think RSS can prove to be an immensely powerful platform for delivering data to richer applications. As it exists today, the typical feed is comprised of headlines, links and sometimes blurbs. It's effectively one-dimensional (that one dimenson is the channel).

RSS Traits is an RSS 2.0 module that attempts to introduce a simple way to enrich RSS feed elements so that consuming clients can, in effect, present a richer view of the arriving data beyond just a list of headlines.

The inspiration for RSS Traits came from some of the more creative uses of RSS that I noticed trickling onto the Internet. Ben Hammersly has done some great work that shows how you can creatively use RSS to get different types of data into a news feed.

From a product design perspective, I was intrigued by the simplicity of RSS but noticed that there was still something lacking once the client received that feed. Sure, if it's just a bunch of headlines, all a client has to do is display them. However, if the data coming in is more than just headlines and descriptions, it's hard to really gather the differentiating characteristics of each feed by just staring at the headlines.

Here's the Fark.com RSS Feed. Notice how each entry title has a category in brackets before the headline. Fark happens to have a handful of categories they use to categorize their headlines. Many of today's blogs have categories associated with them. Unfortunately, this isn't a very elegant way to tag each entry by category. More importantly, the client can't do much of anything with it.

RSS Traits allows you to add a lightweight taxonomy - right inside the RSS payload - that allows you establish any number of characteristics that can then be assigned to the entries within that feed. Feed readers and aggregators can then adjust their interfaces accordingly to accomodate the additional characteristics you've added to your feed.

RSS Traits is primarily driven by the notion that data can be more easily digested if it contains metadata around it that can then be distilled into visual cues. The RSS Traits specificaiton provides for the ability to associate colors and icons to particular entries (though this is not required).

The examples section of the RSS Traits specification illustrates some potentially useful implemmentations.

One final point: the goals of RSS traits can be achieved by simply creating a namespace and enriching RSS feeds in that manner. Nevertheless, drafting namespaces for some of the more basic uses is overkill. RSS Traits is a simple, and easily-understood alternative. Furthermore, because the taxonomies are inside the payload, consuming clients can effectively "morph" themselves to accomodate the information being delivered.

I'd be very interested in any feedback regarding this module. Feel free to comment here or email me.

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Posted by richz at 10:57 AM

Six Apart To Acquire Livejournal

It's official (I guess), Six Apart will be acquiring LiveJournal. Google bought Blogger way back when. I guess that about covers in terms of consolidation. Is anyone else still out there?

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Posted by richz at 10:01 AM

RSS : A Different Beast

The posting below on Onfolio, Pluck and other in-browser feed readers raises an interesting point about RSS and how people use it.

If we step back a second and think about the various types of use cases that utilize RSS, you see a pretty clear pattern emerge.

One of the great advantages of RSS is that it allows you to glean over large amounts of information without actually visiting entire web sites and determining if anything new is up or worth reading. A nicely organized feed list provides a nice birds-eye view of the world of content you'd like to follow.

It gets interesting when we think about whether we're going to dive deeper and deeper into the content. Generically, there appears to be five levels of altitude (if you will) in RSS:

1. List of Channel Groups.
2. An Individual Channel Group.
3. A Channel and its Headlines.
4. A Channel and its headlines and blurbs/descriptions.
5. A Channel's Website.

If you consider the above, each requires a greater level of commitment and time to digest. For example, I have about eight channel groups that I use to organize my feeds. Admittedly, I focus on four or five groups on a regular basis. The rest I may visit on occasion or less often.

Among the ones I do visit, there are certain feeds within those groups that I'm a fan of or who's content I really value. If they have anything new to say, I want to know about it. This isn't the case with all the feeds, just some. Nevertheless, even the ones I care less about I'd still like to quickly scan the headlines to see if something catches my eye.

All of this leads to a direct correlation between how much I value a particular channel/feed and how willing I am to tolerate digesting additional details. If it's a cherished feed, I don't mind diving into the third or fourth level.

Feed readers out today are applying the Microsoft Outlook paradigm and I think this is flawed. Email is a different beast than RSS. My Inbox is one-dimensional compared to the varied world of sources that provide me with feeds. Each source is - in its own way - its own Inbox, with varying levels of importance, interest and context.

So what's the best way to address this? Flexibiilty. Make it easy for me to glean over a collection of feeds and their entries. FeedDemon speaks to some of this by providing some openness with style sheets for newspapers and the like. This is a great first step, but the novice user isn't going there. I've got all sorts of ideas about how an interface can better handle RSS, but describing it in prose isn't very worthwhile.

RSS applications are brand new and I think the reflex reaction is to lean on conventions that people use and understand today. This works...sometimes. In time, I think the applications that handle RSS will evolve along with the technology itself.

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Posted by richz at 10:47 AM

In-Browser Feed Readers

A very special breed of RSS readers out there are the rare few that fit snugly inside (yes inside) your web browser. There are clear advantages to having your feed reader inside your browser. The main benefit is that if a link is worthy of a click, you're already there. You're not dealing with the leap to another application or the usually half-featured browser controls inside the feed reader itself.

Two products seem to stand out in this category: Pluck and Onfolio 2.0 (currently in beta). Both seem to do the trick nicely. Onfolio has a wealth of other features that center around snipping and collecting information from around the web. Pluck is more focused on feed reading/management. Both are relatively polished and fairly useful. Both are free (for now). Onfolio scores bonus points for integrating with both IE and Firefox.

My big gripe with both readers is that if you've got a lot of feeds, it still isn't especially easy to sift through all those entries that quickly. They've both chosen to adopt the Outlook paradigm of folders on the left, then headlines blurbs, then the full view. This works for email. I don't really like it for RSS.

The task of making it easy and simple to scan through many channels without feeling overloaded is really a challenge for the designers and builders of feed readers today. Very few have gotten it right in my opinion.

For me, FeedDemon still runs the show. I've tweaked one of the newspaper stylesheets so I can get a thorough scan of a lot of information very quickly. It's also visibly faster than the other products (not sure why).

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RSS 101

For the philistines that remain clueless about the wonders of RSS, CNet breaks it down all nice.

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Posted by richz at 2:35 PM

Business Week: The Business of Blogging

Business Week chimes in about blogging's growing pains as it evolves from niche hobby to another vehicle for advertising on the Web.

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Posted by richz at 11:39 AM

Builder.com article on RSS

Builder.com has published a decent commentary on the double-edged sword that is RSS.

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Posted by richz at 8:34 PM

Does everyone want to blog?

Now that blogging has semi-officially exploded into mainstream consciousness, I think it's important to ask whether it will evolve into something as ubiquitous as email or if they hype will just settle down.

Looking back, I would point out to all the noise around personal home pages. AOL, Lycos and other players (Homestead comes to mind) scrambled to create this "communities." Lo and behold, people actually built home pages and then...nothing. The home pages got old and stale. People dipped their toes into this silliness and simply got bored with it. It simply wasn't compelling.

I think the key ingredient that blogs possess is the ease with which you can "speak to the world" without going into some hoaky html editing tool. You simply blurt out a posting (or a picture, or whatever) and the world can see it. So I guess blogs have had more legs than static home pages because it is more like a conversation than a single statement.

Then again, the verdict is still out. In two years, will the Internet be littered with a bunch of half-hearted attempts at blogging because people gave it a try and simply got bored? Personally, I enjoy reading blogs far more than posting to them. Posting sometimes feels burdensome. I remember reading somewhere that Kottke of Kottke.org felt pressure to keep things going. That would honestly suck. Only time will tell how much fuel this critter's got. It'll be interesting to watch.

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Posted by richz at 11:15 PM

Here Comes Santa...I Mean Microsoft

Microsoft officially threw its hat into the blogging ring with MSN Spaces. It's a blog. It's a photo album. It's a list-maker thingy. There's a lot to this. Dare Obasanjo (Microsoft XML evangelist guy) breaks it down nicely.

My take on all this? It was bound to happen. It's pretty feature-rich, which means that some of the features may prove to be useless. It also pretty much requires Internet Explorer to experience the full richness of the app (some cool tricks going on here). Another annoyance is the requirement for ActiveX controls for certain functionality (e.g. photo uploading).

The verdict is still out as to whether the masses really want this. I don't think blogging as a hobby (or mild obsession) has a universal appeal. We'll just have to see.

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Word of the Year Is...

...drumroll please...'Blog.'

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Posted by richz at 12:39 AM

RSS Ads - Here They Come

Are they days of purity for RSS winding down? I suppose it's an inevitable consequence of ever-increasing popularity. Overture has begun testing RSS ads. Google may soon follow.

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Posted by richz at 2:58 PM

RSS Mixes

A relatively commonplace feature in RSS aggregators is the ability to group your feeds under a common "Channel Group." This allows you to create topic areas of interest and just dump feeds into those groups. For example, I've got "News", "Design" and "Opinions" channel groups as well as others.

I currently use FeedDemon as my preferred RSS client and one of the features I like most is the ability to scan a "Group Newspaper." This allows me to get a nice birds-eye view of all the new entries in a particular group without jumping from feed to feed. Very cool.

All this euphoria triggered an idea: allow me to share and publish a single "mixed feed" that takes all of the contributing feeds and "mixes" them together. There are actually a couple of sites out there that do these along particular areas of interest. Full As A Goog comes to mind for Macromedia-centric blogs. There you'll find five or so feeds that are really just blends of various contributing feeds. Rather than adding 25 feeds on Flash technology, I simply add that one Full As A Goog feed and I'm done.

I think this could easily be described as part of a basic RSS module that extended the RSS spec. The contributing feeds could actually be listed in-line within the RSS payload. The current RSS 2.0 spec could pretty easily accomodate some of the other requirements of a mixed feed (e.g. specifying the source for a particular item).

When I have some time, I'm going to take a stab at drafting a module specification for RSS mixed feeds.

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Posted by richz at 9:01 AM

List of RSS Clients/Apps

I was trolling around for a decent list of the RSS apps that are floating around out there (there are literally hundreds). I stumbled on this neat little listing on the Google Directory.

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Posted by richz at 10:50 AM

RSS Readers/Aggregators

Being an RSS junkie, I've toyed around with a good number of applications for reading/aggregating the feeds I like to follow. After many rounds of installing/uninstalling, I think Bradsoft's FeedDemon is the best of the bunch. I can't speak for other OS platforms (Mac, Linux, etc.) but FeedDemon has the most thorough feature set for management of feeds.

My only gripe with client applications like FeedDemon is that my settings (which feeds I've read; which feeds I've subscribed too) are held on one client. FeedDemon recently added Bloglines and Newsgator support, but it just isn't their yet. My only option these days is to sync up the configuration files between my laptop, desktop, etc.

Another dandy little RSS reader worth mentioning is Pluck. Pluck scores points for nicely integrating with Internet Explorer. Only snag there is that I've been using Firefox for weeks now.

The recent release of Firefox has a feature called Live Bookmarks that allow you to essentially add RSS feeds to your bookmarks. As the entries come in through the feed, they're added to your Live Bookmarks. It's a nice start, but still falls short if you're a power RSS user. For me, FeedDemon runs the show for feed management.

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Posted by richz at 12:12 PM

Yahoo!'s RSS Attack

Yahoo! is really starting to fold RSS into their strategy. Many have known that Yahoo! makes available much of its news content in RSS.

Now you can syndicate your news searches and add just about any feed to your My Yahoo! page).

I'm sure there's more to come. But are Yahoo!'s motives purely altruistic. Come now, they are a business after all. Ads in RSS feeds coming soon.

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Posted by richz at 7:12 PM

Newsgator Online Now Free

I revisited Newsgator's website yesterday and noticed that their online service is now free.

It's a pretty good alternative to Bloglines. The interface is a bit confusing (especially the folder management stuff). One cool feature is that it allows OPML import of your feeds. Neato.

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