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Something about RSS [RSS news and comments]

RSS blog with information, news, comments, software and articles.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

My MSN & RSS Support:

According to the news MSN is ready to expand RSS support with My MSN. They will add an RSS aggregator, developed in partnership with Moreover Technologies.

This was the informational part of the news and now the comments. In my mind is clear that MSN saw Yahoo success with My Yahoo which include an online RSS reader (aggregation). Yahoo links to add RSS feeds to their pages are everywhere and are very popular. MSN couldn't afford to avoid this technology, but the issue is that they implemented it only after other people proved it. The same, I think, will happen with adding RSS reader capabilities to IE (Mozilla Firefox and Opera already proved it).

One thing I don't like with My MSN is that nothing is displayed until you login. Looks like an email collector page where nothing is available until you give him email address. Here, of course is not the case, but My Yahoo solution where you already have some content you can customize is much better.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

RSSlib v1.04:

We posted a new version of RSSlib with a new parameter: display_channel_name .
Default value is true. When setting this value to false channel name & link is not displayed.

RSSlib are freeware PHP and ASP scripts to display RSS feeds on websites with two methods: rss2html (producing HTML) & rss2js (producing JavaScript). They are simple but powerfull, and customizable.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Atom2RSS smart quotes:

We had some problems with encoding some characters with Atom2RSS service, especially dealing with (smart) quotes, but not only. Now, we are doing some conversions:

& #x2019; ( ’ ) + & #x2018; ( ‘ ) => '
& #x201D; ( ” ) + & #x201C; ( “ ) => "
& #x2013 + & #x2022; => -

Maybe is not the best solution, but hopefully this will solve problems.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

RSS on consumer electronics:

According to a BusinessWire PR soon we could have RSS on consumer electronics as DVD Players & Set-Top Boxes, via NewsGator:

"NewsGator Technologies, the leading RSS software platform provider, today announced support for the upcoming DivX Connected Certification Program from DivXNetworks, Inc. Through the program, users will be able to easily access RSS news and information feeds from the popular NewsGator Online service on their televisions through low-cost, connected consumer electronics (CE) devices such as DVD players and set-top boxes."

Maybe in future we'll see RSS in many other devices not only on our computers or PDAs.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

RSS2WAP.com reloaded:

We've just moved this free service to convert RSS to WML available on WAP devices on a new server. Old one was the slowest server possible and it worth something better. Also, code was converted from ASP to PHP. See it online at http://www.RSS2WAP.com . For any problems please let us know.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Yahoo Media RSS:

Do you think that Podcasting is single solution to deal with media attachments to RSS feeds? Yahoo just announced their solution: Media RSS.

Yahoo said: <<"Media RSS" is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilties of RSS 2.0. RSS enclosures are already being used to syndicate audio files and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, as well as provide additional metadata with the media. Media RSS enables content publishers and bloggers to syndicate multimedia content such as TV and video clips, movies, images, and audio.>>

Read Media RSS FAQ at http://tools.search.yahoo.com/mrss/mrss.html or Media RSS specifications at http://tools.search.yahoo.com/mrss/ .

They say that this solution will work best for new Yahoo! Video Search engine.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Podcasting:

We've just updated our RSS directory to support podcasting. To read more about what this mean see this new article.

More and more feeds offers podcasts or enclosures, usually as audio MP3 or video MPEG attachments. So, we simply couldn't ignore them. For all new added feeds in our directory you can specify if supports podcasting or not. Or you can search our RSS directory only for podcast feeds. Now there are only a few but soon we'll have much more.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Yahoo & RSS ads:

Big news today: Overture tests RSS ads. It won't be long till we'll see RSS advertising from big players. Maybe Yahoo with Overture will be next, after Kanoodle.com. It's not a surprise that such a move come from Yahoo, because they are pushing more intensely RSS format. There are links to MyYahoo RSS reader everywhere. Plus they have news search that return RSS feeds (something that Google doesn't have).
Will be interesting to watch Google's next move, whether they will have ads for Atom or RSS, or maybe both.
Definitely, RSS advertising could be too big to be ignored, so, I'm pretty sure we'll see soon other official announcements.

Monday, November 15, 2004

RSS for mobiles:

Really Simple Mobile Surfing, by Carlo Longino
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101226

<< MocoNews thinks AOL might be up to something like this, based on a job posting for a development position there in "Wireless RSS". It says AOL is looking for somebody to build a Java/Brew RSS reader that "would allow users to browse for their most popular feeds as well as receive notifications on feed updates on their wireless devices. Features such as locality specific feeds (e.g. automatically get a feed of all theaters near your current location, with what movies are running) could also be integrated".>>

On the other hand, RSS for mobile surfing is already available at http://www.RSS2WAP.com which converts for free RSS feeds into WML, available on WAP devices. Try it and you might like it.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

RSS spam - part 2:

RSS as site map.
There are many sites, maybe only with only a few static web pages (HTML), that have RSS feeds as site maps. This means that each page has an entry with a link and a small description. Actually, RSS is exactly this way, but what happen when those links won't change because the site is just a regular 5 pages static site? I think RSS is best used for new content as news or weblog entries, not for static, non-changeable sites. There are even RSS feeds having all links point only the site front page (not even links to different pages).
How often users expect your RSS feed to be changed is another story, but having always the same RSS feed is not what users expect. Also, you might think that your site will be available with RSS readers, having a static RSS feed, but this is not how RSS feeds are working. I those cases I guess users will unsubscribe automatically from your feed because it's always the same, simply not interesting.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

RSS spam - part 1

I'll start a series of posts about RSS spam, as we see it with RSS feeds added in our RSS directory. Today topic: tooooo long feeds.

I won't you give you examples because this will be free advertising for those spam feeds. But, at 2RSS.com we are considering as RSS spam all feeds way too long. These include too many items or/and too many items with very long descriptions. There were RSS feeds with more than 100kb. Any decent RSS feeds should have a limited number of feeds, not hundreds, or not a couple of months old entries or everything they published. I don't see users interested in loading in their RSS Reader hundreds of RSS entries, every time they read that feed. There are not written rules how big a RSS feed should be, but keeping it decent is advisable.

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

2RSS Reader and profiles

We changed the name of our online RSS reader to "2RSS Reader" and updated it. This is just another free online RSS reader available at /news , fully integrated with our RSS directory.

For each RSS feed displayed in our directory there is a direct link to 2RSS Reader. Also, users can create free profiles with their RSS feeds list and use it in 2RSS Reader. All RSS feeds have a link to be added to a profile, and of course, you can delete any feed from you profile. Everything is managed online, so you don't have to install anything in order to read any feed.

Users even can display on their site RSS feed list saved in their profile (see 'Copy & paste in your page' from 'My RSS' page). Or they can request adding their own feed in other people profile, with a simple link. See this: /feeds.php?add=4539
This last feature link is automatically created when you add 'My RSS' link in your profile and this feed exists in our directory.

If you have questions please ask in http://forum.2rss.com . Thanks.

Saturday, November 06, 2004

RSS Enclosure

More and more people are discussing about next step in RSS: enclosures. These are 'attachments' to RSS feed items or ATOM entries with media files (mp3, mpeg, etc.). InternetNews.com published yesterday an article about this: The RSS Enclosure Exposure.
But more details you can find at http://www.crocodile.org/lord/RSSenclosures.pdf .
With these enclosures we'll see maybe RSS strange places like p2p programs, media presentations or who knows where. What's next? RSS scripting?

Friday, November 05, 2004

RSS directory or RSS search engine?

Lately, I saw a few feed search engines having ten of thousands, hundred of thousands or even a million feeds. And I'm pretty sure soon will be even more search engines with more and more feeds. That's very good.
Our site has only a little more than 8.000 feeds but has a major difference: it's a RSS directory. All our feeds are organized in categories and are manually approved. This means that many of them don't pass the exam and are not approved. In a separate posting I'll talk more about this 'exam' and RSS spam (there are many things to say about RSS spam, so stay tuned).
How is different a RSS directory than a RSS search engine? Search engines are 'blind', harvesting everything that has feed format (RSS / Atom). Instead, in a RSS directory human decision is very important.
I made today a test searching 'Bush' at http://www.feedster.com/feedfinder.php . On the first page there was a French weblog with a single post in June 2004, of course, about Bush. Is it RSS? Yes. Is it about Bush? Yes. But, how relevant is a RSS feed with one post a few months ago? This is an example of 'blind' search where irrelevant or spammed posts are not eliminated.
So, my suggestion when you are looking for good RSS feeds is to not forget RSS directories.

Saturday, October 16, 2004

RSS 2.0 script:

We've just updated RSS 2.0 free script docs to generate RSS feeds for 2 more CMS: PostNuke & PHPWebSite. Using this script you can add RSS feeds for any website, simply providing SQL command and a few other parameters (db username, password, etc.).
Read more at /software.php?page=rss20docs
Thanks Craig Williams.

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