Jarrett House North: RSS

Wikipedia edits and the perils of community clashes

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:00:17 GMT

I read Dave Winer’s post about Wikipedia edits with some interest, particularly the part about his edits to the RSS topic, a topic which has been politicized in the past. He writes:

Then I decided to look at the RSS page to see if it linked to the RSS 2.0 spec. It didn't, so I added a link. I haven't been back to see if that has been reverted.

It surprised me that the RSS page wouldn’t link to the spec, so I went and checked it out. Sure enough, I saw Dave’s edit linking the spec into the article, and then someone else taking his edit out.

Curious as to why someone would make the change, I looked at the article and found that there actually was a pointer to an RSS 2.0 spec. But where Dave was pointing to the Berkman spec page, the Specifications section links to the RSS Board spec page.

The point that grabbed me first, of course, is that the RSS Board is making transparent some minor edits that have happened to the spec over time (I wouldn’t have told you that there had been eight revisions of the RSS 2.0 spec). But the other point that caught my interest is the nature of Dave’s change that was reverted. Dave put an external link into the body of a Wikipedia entry. Most Wikipedia entries I’ve seen put external links in a subsection at the end of an article. Two very different philosophies of linking. Dave’s is bloglike, where the external link adds immediate context; Wikipedia’s is ... well, weird. I’m not sure why one would separate out that content, except to say that “This is information that is to be treated differently from the main article.” But, Wikipedia being Wikipedia, one doesn’t have to guess at the intentions of the site. There is a general External links policy and a Manual of Style for links. The main thrust appears to be that only external links that function as sources of article information (i.e. footnotes) appear within the article, while other links appear in a ghetto.

Obvious? No. Does it make sense that Wikipedia has evolved this way? Maybe. What it reminds me more than anything else is that Wikipedia is a group of individuals that have evolved collective guidelines and practices for managing a common resource, that they are in fact a community with different practices and standards than the blogging community. I think the blogging way is right and the false objectivity of Wikipedia is going to be problematic over time. But that’s not the direction Wikipedia has gone and I suppose we should respect that.

RSS-I: how much would you pay?

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 03:46:50 GMT

It’s not every day that you hear about a new business plan, without a company around it.

Anyone want to work on RSS-I with me?

RSS for plasma?

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:40:52 GMT

I’m looking forward to seeing Dave Winer’s next trick. The clues (the space above his couch, an RSS feed with medium to high resolution images) suggest that he’s preparing a new application that reformats the image content of RSS for widescreen displays—with the original application being news images. Am I close, Dave?

I’d happily get on board this train if I’m right and if it’s easy to get working—and doesn’t require a Windows Media PC.

In which it is discovered that I am an idiot, albeit a funky one.

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 20:10:38 GMT

Color me careless, but slightly funkier: the RSS feed on the new Funky16Corners web site is, in fact, set up as a podcast, with proper enclosures and everything. You may want to subscribe if you have a yen for funk that tastes so good it like to make your tongue beat your brains out, as my pan-Southern uncle would say. (Well, not about funk, but anyway.)

Best track so far on today’s Funky16Corners Radio: “I’m Mr. Big Stuff (Big Deal),” the “answer” record to Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff” (of Burger King commercial fame).

Aside: Apple embrace of RSS continues

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:04:50 GMT

With the new photocasting capability of the just announced iPhoto update from Apple, which uses RSS as a medium for photo subscriptions, Apple has turned a corner, and so has RSS. I think the day of the monolithic aggregator may be coming to an end. The direction is now toward contextual RSS: feeds of information showing up in applications where they make the most sense. There is no question that iTunes provides a superior experience for subscribing to podcasts--with clear, built-in controls for managing playback and machinery in the form of smart playlists for organizing content.

The other side: Apple is now clearly committed to using RSS as a sharing technology across the Internet, and providing innovative new user experiences for RSS usage. Today's announcement is in some ways a bigger deal than the iTunes podcasting support. There Apple was hopping on a phenomenon that someone else had created. Today it's using RSS and the podcasting phenomenon to enrich the sharing experience for its customers.

There's just one sour note--the out-of-box ability to publish an RSS feed of your own photos from iPhoto requires a paid .Mac subscription. But the same has always been true for the out-of-box ability to publish your own photos to the Web, and it hasn't stopped innovative developers from creating plugins to allow publishing to arbitrary destinations. And the content that gets published to .Mac is just plain RSS. While I'll be interested to see what extensions got plopped on this time, this is still really positive.

Update: Even more positive, since you can use iMovie to create video podcasts.

Communion, gay pride, and loaves and fishes

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:33:42 GMT

The Old South sermons podcast feed turned up what may be my favorite sermon in recent memory, Jennifer Mills-Knutsen’s account of discovering the meaning of the Communion sacrament in the middle of the San Francisco Gay Pride parade. Complete with a “loaves and fishes” miracle.

Really.

Listen to this sermon. It’s short (about 12 minutes), and it might really mean something to you too.

God(casting) Part II: Old South sermons

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:31:28 GMT

Following up on the Godcasting meme, my church, Old South in Boston, has started making MP3s of sermons available for download. No RSS feed—the website has no back end publishing system aside from an overworked webmaster—but the content is there.

In fact, I went ahead and scratch-built an RSS file for the content using FeedForAll, so subscribe away: XML. If/when the file moves off this server to Old South’s, I’ll post a standard RSS redirect there instead.

Update: As of 4 pm on Monday afternoon, there’s a big ol’ XML link on the Sermons page. My feed now redirects to the official one. Cheers to Evan, the Old South webmaster, for acting so quickly.

Note to Bloglines users

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 19:17:48 GMT

I have griped in the past about the dangers of lock-in, but never figured I would be directly impacted myself. A few weeks ago, my RSS feed started having problems in Bloglines. I’m not sure what caused the problems, but I suspect the Added Values plug-in, which redirected permalinks and may have redirected my RSS feed, is to blame.

At any rate, my feed stopped updating in Bloglines. Now here’s where it gets fun. I contacted Bloglines about the problem, and they said they fixed something with the feed and that it should now work. Unfortunately, it didn’t. So Craig pinged them. This time, Bloglines deleted the non-responsive version of the feed, and said that re-subscribing should fix the problem. Now the number of people subscribing to my feed in Bloglines—or at least the “working version” of my feed—has gone from 41 to 4. At the same time, my average daily traffic has dropped substantially. I think there are a bunch of people who only saw my content through Bloglines and who aren’t coming to the site to check in.

If this were an RSS issue, I might be able to do something to correct it at my end. But since it’s a Bloglines issue, I have no way to notify any of the subscribers of the problem—except to post it here and hope that someone comes across it. Please re-add me to your subscriptions if you want to continue to get information from this site!

Godcasting: podcasting for churches

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 05:45:21 GMT

New York Times: Missed church? Download it to your iPod. A logical, and perhaps lower-cost, extension of the radio services long used to connect churches with their stay-at-home members, this description of various podcasting churches is ringing a few bells for me.

I have long bemoaned the lack of a strong principled moral opposition to conservative politics in the US, and have thought that the liberal church might provide some of the material to arm that opposition, if only it would speak up. Originally I thought the answer was religious bloggers, such as the Real Live Preacher, coming from a church dedicated to principles of equality before God. I am now imagining the church that I attend, syndicated to the blogosphere, serving a similar function for a similarly scattered flock that KEXP serves for the indie-rock faithful. I also had a discussion with my sister, who is entering her third year at Union PSCE, about technology education for theology students. Maybe this article will provide some inspiration...

(Technology note: Godcast.org, which is serving as an aggregator for a series of religion-themed podcasts, runs on Radio Userland.)

Apple creates Syndication-dev mailing list

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 16:33:47 GMT

bbum's weblog-o-mat: Apple creates Syndication-dev mailing list. This is a surprisingly clueful move given the degree of crap people are having to go through to get their podcast feeds on the iTunes directory. Hopefully now that Apple will be talking we’ll see some changes in that area.

KEXP: podcasting is love

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:54:39 GMT

I have to confess: I may be the most unhip tech blogger out there. Reason: I never really understood the podcasting thing. Maybe it’s because my current platform doesn’t support podcast creation (I’m still on an older release of Manila); maybe it’s because I don’t really have the hard drive space to subscribe to a lot of podcasts. But I’m hooked now. Why? KEXP’s new podcast of Northwest bands, which they released last week and which had me grooving all the way into the office this morning.

KEXP’s internet radio stream has been good listening for many years, but it doesn’t go with you in the car. Hearing John Richards’s voice first thing in the morning, listening to northwest indie music while negotiating traffic—it’s almost like being back in Kirkland.

Big ups to John and the station. I’m looking forward to trying out the station’s other podcast too.

This, incidentally, is the flip side of my gripe last month about the iTunes Podcasting Directory. Yes, there are commercial interests there, and yes, they’re going to get heavy promotion. But that’s because they have money, and because otherwise no one would listen to them. As I told a guy from Highland Capital Partners last fall, RSS (and by extension podcasting) is about creating a new delivery mechanism. The thing that’s cool is that it’s one that plays by the rules of the web, not radio or TV. So while the big guys can come in and play in the space, they won’t silence the cool innovative voices that are out there—including both individuals and indie radio stations.

Atom 1.0

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 15:18:59 GMT

Tim Bray: Atom 1.0. “It’s cooked and ready to serve.” Congrats to the Atom team. Now that the spec has reached 1.0, I look forward to seeing how Atom does things that RSS can’t do—with or without extensions—and how Atom does the core job of syndication better than RSS does. Along those lines, I’ll be reviewing Tim’s comparison article, just as these folks did.

Other reactions: Brent Simmons, Technorati cosmos.

Genetic markers for "lame site"

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 13 May 2005 21:12:03 GMT

Scoble: No RSS Feed? It’s a genetic marker for “lame site.” Good description of something I talked about here a while ago: offering RSS is part of entering a social contract with a potential reader that says I plan to update this content, and I care about influential readers and respect their time.

Altering my RSS workflow with BlogLines

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 18:57:49 GMT

Since moving back to the East Coast, I had the luxury of managing a single-location infrastructure. All my mail, calendar, blog management, and most importantly my RSS subscriptions were in the same place: on my laptop. Now that I’ve started work, I’ve discovered some cool ways to manage the RSS part of the workflow from multiple locations.

The key is Bloglines, the online feedreading service that I knew about but had never used prior to this week. I populated Bloglines with a set of important work related feeds (a very short list, compared to my list of 200+ subscriptions). Then I used a new feature in NetNewsWire to add my BlogLines feeds to my reading list, deleting the equivalent versions from my regular subscriptions.

Now, if I read a news item in CNet from home via BlogLines, it’s not downloaded when I open NetNewsWire at home, or vice versa. This enables the best of both worlds: I get to read a subset of my feeds through a lightweight, low impact web interface, and don’t have to manage already-read content through my fuller-featured reader.

The only concern I have about the feature is following up on the items later to blog them. I don’t do very much blogging from work—at least not until I get my formal product management blog ramped up—and there’s no convenient way to keep track of items for later blogging that is preserved from BlogLines to NetNewsWire. My interim solution is to email URLs to myself; not elegant, but effective. (I can also mark memorable items as “keep new,” but since the new setting gets reset when I view the item through Bloglines that’s a less ambiguous way of keeping an item available than flagging it.)

UVA gets RSS

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 15:52:40 GMT

Mr. Jefferson’s University is entering the RSS age. I found a blurb on the University of Virginia web site about UVA To Go, a suite of services for news management that includes a streamlined mobile device web site at http://www.uvatogo.net/ (as well as a Pocket PC Screen Theme) and an RSS feed of news releases. The service is still in beta, so no orange and white icons can be found on the main page, but they’re looking for feedback, so get out there and let them know how you feel about the school striding boldly into the 21st century.

Managing aggregator overlap

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 18:14:25 GMT

Brent Simmons talks about the issues with feed items that are about the same thing showing up in an RSS aggregator. I’m reposting the comment I made on his post here because I think managing the relationships between items is an important feature for RSS aggregators:

The ability to group feed items together based on what they link to is the only feature I miss in NNW from Dare Obasanjo’s RSS Bandit. It's important for three reasons:
It saves time. Some of the other comments cover this point [specifically, by grouping items that are about the same thing, you can read them all at once or just mark them all as read. Otherwise, you keep finding posts about the same thing all the way down your list of items.]
It helps me follow conversations. Think of it as a client side version of Technorati--limited, of course, to the feeds I subscribe to.
It aids in triangulation. I want to be able to quickly scan all the opinions of a new announcement, or quickly see the full original post that an item linked to so I can form my own opinion.
Maybe it’s not grouping, but some sort of optional “related items” UI that could show you items that link to the same things that are linked from the item you’re reading.

Drowning in the sea of RSS

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 16:54:23 GMT

43 Folders: Custom feed refreshing in NetNewsWire. Many thanks to Merlin Mann for this commonsense advice about managing the timesink that NetNewsWire can become—particularly when you’re trying to manage 343 feeds. With his advice as a starting point, I set the default refresh rate to every four hours, and changed the custom refresh property on the few feeds that I want to see more often than that. Now I no longer feel like I’m always drowning under a pile of unread items.

Relationship marketing in a liquid exchange

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 22:22:06 GMT

Universal Hub - The online Boston community.: What's the Point?. The Point, in Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston, is the first bar in Boston, and the first bar I know of period, with an RSS feed. Granted, it’s an RSS feed with links that don’t work unless you hit the most recent item, but hey, they’re trying.

And I could use a beer. We had another few inches of snow last night, and I found two broken shear bolts on the axle of our snowblower this morning (translation: it stopped clearing the driveway).

Subscribe to what I’m listening to

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:35:09 GMT

Craig asked for an RSS feed for his iTunes so he could share what he was listening to. Turns out that’s a feature of Audioscrobbler, the community app for sharing your playlists. With a simple plug-in for iTunes for Windows or the Mac, you can upload everything you’ve listened to, and your friends can subscribe to the content in RSS (1.0).

Frinstance, here’s my Audioscrobbler feed. The only problem: what do you do with the information once you have it? Here Audioscrobbler is missing an opportunity. An automatic “buy on iTunes” or link to a tune excerpt, where available, might be pretty damn cool—and might make some money.

Newsburst day 2

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 17:22:21 GMT

Got a very nice comment from John Roberts at CNet on the last post, responding to a few points I made about NewsSource and pointing out an important omission. First, the easy one: import OPML is in the “Add Source” tab of the application, and it supports importing from a local file or a public URL. Which is cool. My 347 subscriptions got imported—even preserving my groups!—though there were a few time-outs, which manifested as 404s, along the way. The latter is perhaps unsurprising given the number of sources I asked NewsSource to handle. (I fed it my full OPML list.)

Second, and more importantly, I did what I often do, which is to fail to pause and reflect on how cool NewsSource is before I start making grand points about what it says about the marketplace. It speaks extraordinary things about CNet that they are making this investment, and preserves their place both as early proponents of linking out and as innovators in syndication. (They were among the first “big media” guys to get RSS.) It also says good things about them that they are setting the bar for other news sites in this way, saying, “You want transparency and the news from a dozen different perspectives? Here it is. Go get it.” Bravos.

Other RSS stuff

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 05:57:59 GMT

More goodies from the aggregator list that never ends:

VentureBlog: RSS - Really Something Special? The article calls out four models, which it calls browsers, plumbing, media, and business, in an analogy to the early days of the Web. I’m not sure I’d break it down the same way. But my “enablement” is a combination of “browsers” and “plumbing”, and my “content discovery” is their plumbing and media.
The Shifted Librarian: I Knew RSS When It Was Just *this* Tall. Jenny talks about the NewsGator roadmap and the possibilities it opens up for libraries and enterprises.
Lockergnome: Tracking RSS Feed Subscribers (Development). Highlights the emerging use of unique URLs to create trackable RSS feeds. I believe Newsburst is using this system.

RSS business value: content portal

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 05:42:48 GMT

With last week’s launch of branded online RSS aggregators from CNet (Newsburst.com), it looks like everything old is new again when it comes to RSS. Remember the first application for XML content syndication? Yeah, Newsburst looks a lot like My Netscape. Only there are about 3 million times more potential news sources now than there were then.

John Roberts, the developer at CNet who was responsible for the portal, notes that it does OPML import-export. Which is good—if you don’t believe in being locked in (*). But it points to an issue with the RSS content portal business model.

In 1999, there were no alternatives for content aggregation—it was My Netscape or the highway. It’s 2005 now. If an aggregator (web based or traditional client) doesn’t work for you, you can take your subscription list with you and move on.

And if you’re banking on RSS to provide your users with a daily reason to come back to your site, and banking on saving a lot of money by not having to develop the content yourself… better think about banking some money to keep adding features to your aggregator. Because as you start falling behind your users’ other options, they’ll take their subscription lists and go.

It’s not a subscriber lock-in model. So where’s the incentive for a news site to add it? Simply put, it may be that you have to because everyone else will (see Steve Rubel on Dave Winer’s assertion that RSS and the news business is tightly bound). This is, maybe, the natural outgrowth of the increasing sense that all news is biased, and customers are increasingly going to demand to see all sides of the story—as well as declare that you show your own biases. Triangulation.

Update: So has anyone figured out how to import OPML into NewsBurst? I was really looking forward to putting 347 sources into it and seeing how well it held up…

RSS business model: value added content distribution

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:55:57 GMT

A few months ago, I had lunch with a senior associate at Highland Capital Partners. He asked me what I thought the business model was in RSS and other XML-based syndication technologies. I was able to come up with a few off the cuff, most revolving around the fact that RSS is a new information distribution channel, and one that, like email and the Web, opens up new definitions of what information is and how you receive it.

The proof of that business model came in the last week, with new aggregator products from Consenda and the apparent acquisition of Bloglines by Ask.com.

Consenda’s NewsPoint appears to offer newspapers a chance to grab a piece of the RSS ads market. By providing the newspaper’s readers with an easy to use newsreader that already subscribes to the newspaper’s RSS feeds, including the classified feeds, Consenda gives the readers access to the RSS value proposition, and gives the newspaper a flanking defense against services like Craigslist which threaten to disembowel their classified ads business. The success of the model, of course, will lie in whether Consenda is successful enough in adding additional value to the basic RSS aggregator offering and lowering the barrier to entry enough to convince people to keep using their aggregator.

The Bloglines/AskJeeves story is more interesting. Here the value add of Bloglines over just spidering web content appears to be their existing structured database of blog content—at least according to Mary Hodder at Napsterization. The value add that Bloglines brings to the table comes from the fact that it’s a centralized service with a database driven by the users’ preferences. Bloglines’ Top Blogs and Most Popular Blog Links (both of which the new Ask Jeeves blog links to) are made possible by the centralization of this service, and serve as a filtering mechanism for the Bloglines users. So you could argue that the main business function that Bloglines serves is a kind of automated editorial function—where editorial means content selection and promotion, though in this case the mechanisms that govern the content selection are entirely user driven.

So this gives two RSS business models so far:

Enablement: Build a better/easier/faster aggregator and the world will beat a path to your door. This is the traditional Microsoft model—it’s a platform play. This is also the space in which NetNewsWire, RSS Bandit, Radio Userland, etc. are currently operating.
Content discovery: Add value by reducing noise and bringing interesting content out of the blogosphere for the reader. This is the business model that is shown through the Bloglines functions I mentioned above.

There are more value propositions to be had from RSS, of course; enough that I’ll spend some more time this week blogging them.

Driving on old pavement being ripped up

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:07:18 GMT

Lockergnome's RSS Resource: If RSS is broken, why does PodCasting work?. A very good question, in my opinion, and one I’ve been asking ever since the RSS-is-broken meme crescendoed into the Atom (née Echo, née PIE) movement.

The answer: RSS isn’t broken. It may be clumsy for stating certain kinds of relationships, but it’s not broken. The guys doing Atom are spending time ripping up pavement that, in many cases, hasn’t even fully been driven on yet. I love what’s happened with enclosures and Podcasting. That’s the sort of innovation that XML syndication needs, user experience and business models; not “innovation” in how the underlying content is expressed. Where RSS is broken, in terms of how users experience it, it’s not something that can be fixed by changing the tagset, but must be addressed at the application level and the paradigm level. (For an example of the latter, look at the drag and drop subscription innovations showcased by NetNewsWire, or the built-in RSS reader in Firefox.)

Virginia Recognized for RSS Services

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 16:47:25 GMT

RSS in Government: Virginia Recognized for RSS Services. My home state won an award for its embrace of RSS on the Commonwealth’s official web site, with about 34 feeds (plus more on the way). The RSS 0.91 feeds appear to be auto-generated by the CMS system behind the site and have a few quirks—for one, the XML button on each page isn’t linked to the feed, so dragging it into an aggregator doesn’t work. But they’re making the effort, and in the spirit of truly locally useful content, there isn’t a single feed I’ve found yet that I would want to subscribe to from my current position out of state. :)

Sony Music gets RSS

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 17:50:40 GMT

LockerGnome: Sony Music now has RSS. Following the trail blazed by SubPop, Sony has posted twelve artist info feeds and one tour feed. Sadly none of the bands are ones that I’m interested in, though I suspect Oliver Willis will be subscribing to the Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé feeds.

Like SubPop, the feeds are RSS 1.0 format, though they don’t validate, throwing errors on the content type (text/html rather than application/rss+xml or application/rdf+xml) and not being well-formed XML.

2004: The year of RSS in government?

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 19:16:27 GMT

Scripting News: US Department of State supports RSS 2.0. Four feeds available, including highlights, briefing transcripts, press releases, and remarks. Judging from the content, they’re for the terminally wonky only—but they’re there.

Bing!: Sub Pop goes RSS

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 02:23:57 GMT

Seattle label Sub Pop, home to the Postal Service, Low, Wolf Eyes, Sebadoh, the Shins, Damien Jurado, Iron and Wine, and other great bands with impeccable indie cred, has gone RSS, offering RSS 1.0 feeds for the following content:

All downloads (including music, videos, and other goodies)
All news
Tour dates for all bands
Localized tour dates (I'm currently subscribed to the Massachusetts feed, there are others available on the main RSS page)
Individual band feeds

This is a brilliant and as far as I know unprecedented move—I don’t know of any other label that is doing this in a consistent way like this. Bravo, Sub Pop.

Except… because the downloads/media feed is RSS 1.0 and not 2.0, it doesn’t appear to work with iPodder. This is unfortunate; I’d love to subscribe to that feed in iPodder and have all the latest Sub Pop releases automatically hit my iPod. Ah well, hopefully this will be cleaned up soon. Until then, this is a pretty good way to keep on top of what’s happening across the label or with your favorite band.

NY Times reactivates Dining and Wine feed

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 11:11:10 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote an impassioned e-mail to the feedback contact for the Dining and Wine section of the New York Times online, requesting they reactivate the RSS feed for the section that had gone dormant when they started providing their own feeds. Yesterday I noticed the feed was active again, and today I found it listed as “new” on their main RSS page.

Am I responsible for getting the feed reactivated? I doubt it. But it gave me a good feeling to know that I let them know how much I appreciated the feed.

Incidentally, it looks like the Times has also added an RSS feed for the Olympics.

More Microsoft RSS: Education

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 20:06:21 GMT

New RSS feed at Microsoft.com: Education (from our Education vertical site). This feed is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s aimed at students and teachers rather than developers or IT professionals. Second, it’s an entirely separate effort from our automatic component-based RSS feeds; the education site team decided on their own that this would make a big difference to their customers, so they went ahead and did it. Bravo, guys. Now the only thing missing is the orange-on-white badge...

Update 7/21: The editor of the site, John Spilker, also has a personal blog where he announced this new feed. Be sure to stop by.

RSS in the New York Times

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 19:35:59 GMT

New York Times Circuits: Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information. The article positions RSS as a time-saver for getting targeted news and information, touches on the technology at a high level, recommends a few tools (Dogpile Search Tool, NewsDesk, and NewsGator). No mention of Dave Winer, Atom, or any of the other techie stuff around RSS. But they do recommend Adam Curry’s blog!

Bill Gates: blogging and RSS "very interesting phenomenon"

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 20 May 2004 19:58:57 GMT

Microsoft Watch published notes on a speech Bill Gates (my überboss) gave to the Microsoft CEO Summit. In the speech, which was webcast externally, he talked about technology empowering individual users, and highlighted weblogs and RSS:

Gates called blogging and the RSS Web content syndication service a “very interesting phenomenon.” He suggested that by using RSS as notification system, customers can “get the information you want when you want it.”

Sounds like a positioning statement to me.

Time has RSS

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 18 May 2004 20:44:41 GMT

Time.com now publishes RSS feeds. Special interest items include the feeds for Election 2004, Joe Klein’s columns, and custom feeds for most viewed and most emailed stories. Not sure how often the feed for Top Rated TIME Covers will change, though.

As seen on Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion.

Why RSS is succeeding where CDF failed

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 18 May 2004 17:39:36 GMT

I’m the first to say that this meme of “RSS in 2004 equals push in 1996” is full of crap. However, a recent (last month. I’m a little behind, OK?) post from Don Box points out some funny prior art in the form of CDF, Channel Definition Format, an XML based syndication format with a <Channel> element containing a bunch of <item> elements. CDF was Microsoft’s response to the “push” bubble, which featured such wonderful business models as PointCast (remember them? screensavers with headlines, clogging your network in real time! and it’s free!).

Do you remember CDF? Only Internet Explorer (which does something with the format, though I’m not clear what) and Don (and Mark Pilgrim) do. So why is RSS succeeding where CDF failed, in spite of infights, name calling, confusing branding, incompatible version forks, and big hairy egos? ITWorld doesn’t know, and Wired’s best guess is that it survives despite itself because it’s useful.

I think that RSS succeeds where push and Pointcast (and CDF) failed because the value proposition is even stronger than it was seven years ago. The rise of weblogs means that there is a ton of interesting stuff out there that’s impossible to read if one only relies on the browser and bookmarks. The rest of the content of the web has gotten smarter, too, and most of the major publishers have automated back end systems that can easily put out information in other formats than Web-ready HTML. The Web is much more XML friendly than it was in 1997; every current operating system and browser groks XML at least at a fundamental level.

Finally, RSS isn’t owned by a big company. To the extent that it has owners, they are all the content authors, aggregator developers, and readers who have invested time and energy in making it work for them. That’s a community.

Ha! The magic power of the Kinja is about to reveal itself

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 07 May 2004 17:30:50 GMT

I’ve been using Kinja on and off for the last few weeks, ever since I made a Kinja digest for both Hooblogs (see here) and Sloanblogs (see here). The digests were an afterthought, inspired by the press that Kinja was getting, but now (to my surprise) they’re the most useful features of both lists.

What’s cool about Kinja is that it’s lightweight, loads quickly, provides an attractive UI, is intelligent about providing excerpts of the item descriptions, and provides a “read anywhere” view of your set of sites. Radio, which was the first aggregator I ever used, provided an attractive UI but wasn’t especially lightweight (particularly in its Mac OS 9 incarnation) and provided full descriptions of the items in each feed. It’s funny how much I like the abridged description feature, in fact, since my own feed provides full text descriptions and since I normally hate having to click through to get the full story. But Kinja’s apparently simple algorithm of grabbing the first two or three sentences of the description if it’s above a pre-set length is remarkably effective. It’s also made me more conscious about not burying the lead of my posts; in short, it’s improved my writing.

Measuring RSS gets its own page

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 06 May 2004 15:39:23 GMT

I combined all my posts from last year about measuring RSS usage and the spread of blog content into one page and gave them a permanent home. I think the points are still relevant today.

The RSS feed of everything imaginable

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 14:59:24 GMT

The Shifted Librarian points to RSS feeds from Archive.org. Probably best known as the home of the Wayback Machine, which lets you see web sites as they were during selected points in time in the past, the Archive also houses lots of amazing content, including digital versions of the Prelinger archive, old software, and lots and lots of music.

The RSS feed of their master collection is fascinating. Live performances by Soul Coughing, Gary Jules, Howie Day, From Good Homes, and others are listed right now, and I’m guessing there’s some fascinating other stuff if you dig deeper below the last fifty items.

Amazon.com RSS. Damn.

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 03:24:28 GMT

I think Amazon has had limited RSS support before, but this is something else. About a hundred custom RSS feeds by category. That takes me to 200 feeds… (As seen on Scripting News, among others…)

Apple RSS feeds

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 02:59:45 GMT

Apple has pulled together all its available RSS feeds in one place (including some simple stock iTunes feeds) at www.apple.com/rss/. Thanks to Scripting News for the tip.

Feed similarity: the Also Subscribe To feature

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:40:18 GMT

I started to write yesterday about this but decided to wait until something happened. I’m glad I did because the end result was much cooler than I described.

While I was chatting with Dave at the end of his Microsoft talk, two folks came up and asked if there were a way to cut through some of the noise of the RSS ocean based on recommendations. The young woman described it as “people who subscribe to feed X also subscribed to feed y.” Dave first told them that the SDK was open to anyone to code against, then got out his cell phone, called Andrew Grumet, and gave the phone over to Shira who described the idea to him.

I had to leave at that point so I didn’t know how it would turn out. But yesterday Andrew had the first version of Similar Feeds up and running, and Dave pointed to it last night. Here’s my similarity list.

(Incidentally, thanks to all for the comments and pointers over the last couple of days. It’s been helpful hearing other peoples’ perspectives. Shouts out to Tom Harper (subscribed) and Korby Parnell (subscribed).)

Thoughts on Dave’s talk today

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 05:21:42 GMT

Finally, my driving-home impressions of Dave’s talk today:

It was interesting seeing how tightly tuned the Microsoft crowd was to issues of blogging platforms (e.g. SharePoint vs. LiveJournal vs. other platforms) and less to the social impact of blogging, both inside the organization and on society as a whole, which seemed to me to be rather more along the lines of Dave’s point. At one point with all the SharePoint questions, I wondered if the product team had been on the "to" line of the invitation.
Really interesting message about blogging both positive and negative messages about your organization (in the context of the Channel Dean incident).
Dave’s point about the 2004 election is right on. There’s a sense among a lot of people, even folks who aren’t normally political, that this is our chance to take hold of the reins of this country again and bring it back away from paranoia and extremism and back to the values that we were created in. And a lot of the empowerment stems from learning in the blogosphere that we aren’t alone. Of course it doesn’t end in the blogosphere. People have to get out and vote.
Which brings me to my next observation: I think that we still haven’t hashed out the difference between the blogosphere’s role in affecting “influentials” (whether in the technical or political world) and effecting real change. It’s hard to get a bunch of engineers via weblogs and wikis to agree on adopting technological formats; harder still to convince someone to vote for a candidate on the web, particularly when they don’t necessarily read your weblog. (Remember, I have many readers; 20, in fact (or 21, as I just got contacted by another today!).)
But if Dave Winer reads your blog and tells five hundred or a thousand people? Or Glenn Reynolds? And some of those people are law professors, or media folks, or ministers, or what have you, and they tell 10 others…
One thing is for sure: this model of the blogosphere as people talking to influencers and invisible channels of influence sure puts my thoughts about measuring the reach of the blogosphere in perspective, which is to say in the circular file. Technorati and its peer tools can tell you what bloggers are talking about, but not about whether their readers are paying attention and doing anything about it.
Interesting thoughts from Dave about Microsoft publishing the worst people have to say about it on the PressPass site. Must remember to suggest that to the editor. Seriously, though, it’s not out of the realm of the feasible to suggest that Duncan Mackenzie’s Visual Basic blog (which appears on the MSDN Visual Basic dev center) might discuss some of the issues that VB 6 developers are having migrating to .NET head on.
Dave says that knowledge sharing via weblogs at Harvard is going slowly. Should that have been a surprise? Maybe not. I think the biggest takeaway from the speech today was that change is hard, particularly in organizations.

Dave part 4: Q&A

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 00:10:15 GMT

Questions?

Difference from a departmental home page? It's not different. The two are converging. The technology and user interface are now boxed up in the concept "weblog."

Sounds a lot like the Sharepoint vision? Dave says, how's that doing? We have two competing visions, one coming from one company--I don't know that about it. Does it use open standards? (Some discussion about the question.) Questioner: I think you're saying publishing is less interesting than sharing information. Is it about standards? Dave: No, not really, I don't like the standards word very much. It's about open formats. If I'm using Sharepoint--and here I assume there's no problem with Sharepoint, I accept it does most everything you'd want to do. I wonder if I had a problem with one thing Sharepoint did, and I asked the Sharepoint team to fix it and they didn't, then where do I go?

I think competition is good. And I think that Microsoft doesn't necessary see it this way. I remember back in 1999, when Steve Ballmer and I were in a conference together, I said, "I hope when this is all over that Netscape survives. I think it would be good for you." And he said, "That's not the way we do things." And I think if Netscape had survived--and it did a pretty good job of imploding on itself--it would have been stronger and stronger, and there would have been other companies that would have chased it. And there would have been more choices, and things would have gotten better.

Where are we today? There haven't been new releases of MSIE in a few years, and there are few bug fixes and barely enough security patches. But we're increasingly doing business on the Internet. And we're devoting almost no resources to fixing IE which is the majority browser.

Q: Are blogs working at Harvard? If not, why not? Is it a technology problem or a social problem? It's a social problem. Or maybe it's not a problem, maybe the premise was wrong. As you go down the hierarchy the interest in blogging goes up. And vice versa, because the people higher up have their "blog," it's called their referreed journal. It's definitely not about the technology. It's social issues, and changes like these take time.

You see the same issue at Microsoft. There are a lot of really interesting bloggers here with very little executive oversite, which I think is great.

Q: Let me paint a Sharepoint scenario for you. The first version goes up as specs, and then people revise the specs and upload and so on and so forth, and you have a big tree. How would you do that with blogs? Dave: It doesn't sound like very blog like. But maybe you could use a blog to do most recent changes or something.

Q: RSS sounds like it's great for people who care about freshness. What about people who want the most authoritative content? Dave: Well, I think there are three ways of managing and finding information--chronology, which is blogs, search, and taxonomy, which it sounds like it might be Sharepoint. Q: So do I use RSS to find information about the presidential campaigns? Dave: The verb with RSS is to subscribe. You want search. Q: But how do you know which feeds to trust? Dave: It's not always about trust. Sometimes it's entertainment. Subscription is the highest form of praise. It's much stickier, it's much harder to shake someone once you've subscribed. Sometimes your job is to assimilate all these sources and make up your own mind.

Q: You talked about the team blog at Dean not putting up the finishing third. Why was this surprising? Don't organizations have egos and want to protect themselves? A: It was the smartest thing to do. He said, "We finished third." It was from the campaign. Reporters were circling, and he just put it out there. But until that point, the blog hadn't made an investment in presenting a balanced perspective. This was my problem with the Dean campaign. I went to the campaign blog trying to get information to convince me, and they were just giving information to people who had already made up their mind. Q: It's hard to do that... Dave: But maybe it's about putting all your conflicts of interest out there so that people understand your tone. Q: There's a part of corporate culture that says "Bad news travels fastest"--internal to Microsoft. Dave: Maybe you should consider turning that outside. Maybe if we had a presidential candidate who would put the bad news first he might win. Because if you tune into presidential campaigns you hear candidates say "I believe in more jobs. I'm the environmental candidate." And reporters aren't asking serious questions that anyone wants answered. That's not communication. The candidates are just trying to get their soundbites out there. It's seriously dysfunctional.

Q: Where do you see blogging going as more stuff gets digital? A: Well, I'm a text guy. And I use PhotoShop, I use about three commands. Q: What about voice? A: A year ago I would have said sure. But now I've used it and I'm not sure. I work at the Berkman Center with Chris Lydon--having dinner with him and his voice is like having dinner with NPR--and he did a series of interviews with pioneers of blogging. Serious, interesting stuff. But I wouldn't call that a blog. Q: It's oral history. A: Yeah, and I'm not saying that because it's not a blog it's not good. When I tried to quantify what I meant by a blog, I said "it has an editorial voice." Q: But what about voice interfaces, would that lower the barrier to entry? A: I think they're pretty widespread already. Q: But if we have hundreds of millions of customers how do we reach them with blogs? How do we get our customers educated about them? How do we get them interested? A: (Solve their problems?) That's a pretty heavy trip to lay on a humble piece of software. Word processing didn't have that trip and it did just fine, growing slowly and steadily. But there's a way that blogs can influence people--influence percolates in slow and steady ways through our culture. How many reporters are there covering the campaign? A busload for each candidate, Kerry probably has two. How many bloggers are there? A couple million? How can the reporters keep up with that?

Q: [A clarification that Sharepoint can do news items and RSS--it's not incompatible with blogging.]

Q: We used to say that the Internet would do away with mass media. Now I hear the same things about blogs. A: Look at it this way. Blogs are the promise from 1994, 1995, 1996. It's not about us vs. mass media. Blogging was happening all during that time slowly and steadily, and when the bubble burst, blogs kept going. Q: But the promise was that the web would allow us to communicate mano a mano, and now it's gone to a portal and consumer model. A: I agree, and maybe we need to get more mature as bloggers to allow this to happen.

Q: What about enabling private communication and authentication, so that only certain people can read private posts? A: I think you better go to LiveJournal for that. It's a unique feature and it's pretty cool. But blogging is publishing and the root of publishing is "public." And why is LiveJournal not a blog?

Q: What about group blogs? Do you see a need for group blogs? A: No, and I'm a radical about that, a lot of people disagree with me. First of all, there are a lot of ways of combining blogs. I can subscribe to you and you and you and create a group blog. Why did I need you to do it for me? One of the pragmatic problems about group blogs is where should I post? If I have one blog, I post it there. But if I have two, do I push it to both places? And I think that's confusing as a reader. Which one do I read?

Q: What about blogging in other formats--mobile devices, etc.? A: That's just like the question about audio and voice. I don't think I could display a blog on this device and I know I couldn't write one on it. Maybe it could be done but I'm not an expert.

Q: I subscribe to 200 feeds and I know some people subscribe to 1000 feeds. I can't see subscribing to many more than those. I'm afraid I'm missing information. A: I don't see that as a problem--I think that 1000 feeds is ridiculous. How are there those many feeds worth reading? I think it's a quality problem, not a human scale problem. Q: But what about the issue of people only reading blogs in their own circle? How do you avoid myopia? A: I know what you mean--like the warbloggers. I learned about them from the WSJ, and they were talking about them like there were no other types of blogs. But how do you get around that? Maybe you don't. But maybe you get systematic about it, you find people who bridge camps, and you send email to Glenn Reynolds, and if you don't do it too often he points to you. And maybe this isn't such a bad thing. There are theories out there that because the top three blogs get so many readers, it will be just like TV. But if there are these little galaxies of bloggers, that's not going to happen. In the monoculture, only the best get to perform. But in galaxies of blogs, everyone gets to sing. Storytelling is part of human nature. In the blog world, we get to tell stories too. And they laugh at us and say how trivial we are. And I think you just have to get past that.

Q: You said LiveJournal isn't really a blog. I use LiveJournal, and... A: Did I say that? I think that's the conventional wisdom. Let me reverse that--did I hurt your feelings? Q: But doesn't the public-private facilitate back and forth between friends? A: It is what it is. I don't think you need comments--I turned mine off because if I didn't all my comments would be all flames. Is it the unedited voice of a person? That's the important thing. Blogs allow you to play in the same space as the big boys.

Q: What's the difference between blogs and discussion boards? A: Huge difference. On discussion boards, everyone has an equal voice (after the thread starts). And the thing about that is, anyone can flame it out at will. It's funny because I promote the democratic nature of a blog. And blogs aren't democratic at all. On my blog what I say goes. It's a publication. It's a part of the writing process. When I was on Wired, I got flames for a gender article. And in the next column I wrote about being flamed, and I got mails from journalists saying, "Go look at the letter page of Newsweek and Time and newspapers." And they were full of flames. So it can be important. But if it affects your writing, maybe you're better turning off comments and not caring whether people read what you write and just jumping out the airplane without a parachute.

Q: You said blogs are unedited and some people have really badly written blogs. Is there something that can be done to help that? A: You have to learn to write. But on the flip side if I see really polished writing I know there's no soul there at all.

Q: Do you see a reputation model in blogs based on the actual person rather than their quality of posting? A: It happens. John Perry Barlow started blogging a month ago. He's what I call a "natural born blogger."

Q: You said you were going to ask the IE team for some features. What did you ask them? A: Two, reading and writing. I asked for help with the act of subscribing. Right now this is a messy place, it depends on the tool and the aggregator. And there have been attempts to come up with solutions based on standards and they haven't worked well. It's a conundrum. Why can't we teach the browser to subscribe and delegate that action to any other piece of software? That would be fine. On the editing side, if I want to create a new blog post, and I'm looking at something in the browser and I want to blog it that could be dramatically improved. For instance the text editor. It's based on a technology called "Trident" and it's better than a standard text box but it could be much better. And then the top ten problems. I'm in the middle of a blog post, and I want to check my email, and I click on mail and lose my blog post. We all learned to deal with this, but this problem could be solved. Another one is the Google toolbar with the Blogger button on it. Blogger came up with a widely supported API, but the button goes straight to Blogger.

Q: Do you have an example of a blog that doesn't necessarily look like one? I'm thinking about library sites that pump out tips, news, etc. A: It's hard to think about things like that that don't look like a blog. Reverse chronology, permalinks, date and time stamps. Do you have an example? I've seen things like that behind firewalls, but not out in public.

Q: You talked about how blogging is lowering the threshold for influence. How would you recommend that Microsoft treat these new influentials? A: Great question. Treat them like you would the press. Expect high standards. Maybe we don't expect high things from the press, but expect the truth, unfiltered voices, don't expect empty cynicism. This is an opportunity to treat information flow as a new thing. But first of all be respectful. I've seen this bug before. The Dean campaign made a big deal in the middle of the campaign of having bloggers on the bus, but it turned out they were all Dean supporters. And you wouldn't tolerate that from the press. It would have been a smart thing to have bloggers who were Republicans on the bus too. It would have helped with the integrity and the triangulation of the truth.

Dave part 3: Bloggers in organizations as information routers

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 22:52:07 GMT

I came to Harvard a few months after a conference where they said, "The dot-com thing is over. What do we do with the Internet?" And they decided to share information across the schools using weblog technology. And that's how I got the job.
Think about it this way: In every workgroup, there's one person who sends emails saying, "Here, you've got to check this page out." In a sense, that person should be running the blog for the workgroup. Instead of emails, you get a trail that can be searched, checked by date, added to a taxonomy. When a new person comes on they don't start from scratch. It also facilitates information sharing. While not everyone in the organization will be interested in this and subscribe to everyone else's feed, if one person in a workgroup does this, that one person could act as an information router. Will everyone do this? No. But couldn't we do better at moving information around organizations.
This is where the excitement is: using this flow, using open standards, a low tech approach. And I think Microsoft could do well here.

Dave, part II: "Voter Support Systems"

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 22:47:27 GMT

I should mention that this is my paraphrasing of Dave live. I can't type verbatim that fast, and I'm posting real time rather than recording and returning later.

It doesn't have to be president, in fact it was least likely that it would be a president. Because it mean confronting the power of television head on. And I think it's pretty clear that the television channels decided that Dean wasn't going to be president. But they don't have that power at the state and local level. And someone is going to decide to do that. And that's going to be my next quest, to go and find that person. And help them use weblogs, Meetup, and all that stuff. And I think we could do that in 2004.

I think that 2004 could be the most exciting campaign I've ever seen. Not in the horse race sense, but in the sense that we're all involved in shaping the future of the nation.

And I think putting this all together, we're getting to something that I call (all developers need terms) a "Voter Support System." Because voters have no support, and they make lousy decisions.

Dave Winer at Microsoft: RSS, politics, and journalism

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 22:41:58 GMT

I got in late. Dave is on stage now talking about evolution of RSS as a format:

...aggregators both on web in channels and reverse chronological order. We now have "thousands and thousands" of feeds, both big pubs and small publishers. And through this same interface you get both. And you can get triangulation.

Which leads into the next part of the story. It's a short drive to New Hampshire; it's retail politics. And we made a conscious decision to go. And the difference between us covering the story as amateurs and professionals is that professionals remove themselves from the story, and we don't. And I think it's more honest to tell about how you got there. And people joke about blogs about people's cats, but I don't mind that. Because it tells you where they're coming from and you can figure out their point of view. And places like the New York Times claim they're coming at it from objectivity, and from my experience that's not necesarily true, they bring their viewpoint.

And a lot of us were Dean supporters. And though Jim Moore had a role as Director of Internet and something, and the campaign had bloggers and a campaign blog, I don't think the Dean campaign ever accepted the Internet in that they didn't bring what they saw (not the truth, because we know that's complex, but just what they saw) to their coverage. And it came down to me being at campaign hq, the night of the scream, and Dean said, "We finished third." And I tried to put it in the RSS feed--not the campaign blog, but the feed for all news about the campaign. And I couldn't do it.

I can understand that, because it's like taking bad news about Microsoft and putting it on the PR page at Microsoft.com. But maybe you should do that, because maybe the right thing is not what you want the customer to hear but what an educated customer would want to know. And if the Dean campaign had done that, then while the networks were playing the scream over and over, readers could have gone to one channel where there was a real honest perspective.

Closer to automatic feed updating

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 24 Jan 2004 18:35:40 GMT

Unanticipated side effect of feeds.scripting.com: my subscription list went from 124 feeds to 164 in about two weeks. (And the number of folks subscribing to my feeds went from 10 to 20. Thanks, all!)

I finally got around to replacing my feed list, which I had previously done as a static upload, with a link to a location on my site. I haven’t been able to get it to render in the opmlBlogroll macro for some reason (I keep getting [Macro error: Could not open the url, "http://www.jarretthousenorth.com/annex/MySubscriptions.opml", because it could not be converted to an outline.]), but we’ll get there eventually.

And I’ve figured a way that I can automatically update the file, despite the fact that I can’t automate exporting OPML from NetNewsWire with AppleScript. More on that once I implement it.

Most Unique Subscription Lists

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 14:52:40 GMT

Andrew Grumet: Most Unique Subscribers. Brilliant hack of the Share Your OPML SDK over at feeds.scripting.com. The basic concept, as invented by Chuck Welch in a comment on Andrew’s blog: add the number of users subscribed to each feed in your subscriber list and divide by the number of feeds in your list.

My number is 46.27 (based on the list published on the site; I need to upload a new list, since I now have 161 feeds in NetNewsWire (up 40 from when this started two weeks ago). If Dave’s new tool has done anything, it’s turned me into an RSS fiend.

One note: the more customizable feeds like the iTunes Music Store’s offerings become available, the higher everyone’s uniqueness number will rise.

RSS on the desktop

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 16:48:35 GMT

Some developments in some software I’m pre-alpha-testing make me wonder: where are the scripts to translate data on your desktop to RSS? On a Windows machine, I would want the security log as an RSS feed for sure. On an OS X machine, some of the system event logs. On both, my mail client.

I’d start hacking my own, but I haven’t seen good base classes in AppleScript to produce RSS. Maybe it’s time to learn Python...

Hello to my 10 subscribers

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 16:06:12 GMT

Dave has been steadily rolling out new features in his OPML aggregation site, feeds.scripting.com, including:

Customizable coffee mug icons to allow you to do a one-click subscribe to feeds in the aggregator of your choice. (I used the template feed://[[xmlUrl]] to allow one click subscriptions for NetNewsWire.)
Other people’s feeds: Who are the blogerati reading? (Note to Scoble: d00d, 626 feeds and no love for me?) For disclosure, here’s my list, though it’s about a week old. Which reminds me...
...I need to start publishing my OPML file on my site, so that feeds. can get the updates as I make them. This comes from a new feature: if you upload your OPML as a URL rather than a file, feeds polls the file periodically for changes.
Who subscribes to my feed: This is probably the killer app for the site. Though inclusion is voluntary and incomplete, you get a picture of the readers who see everything you write through RSS. In my case, that would be the ten readers I alluded to in the title. (Hi, folks.)

If you’re not already participating in this community, and you use an aggregator, go, go, join. It’s getting cooler every day.

RSS luv

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 05 Jan 2004 05:57:08 GMT

Two quickies and then I must sleep:

RSS feed (scraped) for news updates from the Mars Rover landing. Subscribed, as Dave would say.
I’m looking at the new feed: URL proposal. While I understand the technical arguments that a lot of folks are making—that this should be a MIME type, not a URL type, since the feeds are still fetched by HTTP, I can’t argue with the end result. One click subscriptions are the one feature I really missed after I migrated from reading RSS in Radio to other aggregators, and now it looks like there’s an emerging cross client consensus on how to make the feature work everywhere—for instance, in NetNewsWire. Right on.