I discovered (via iPhone Atlas) a new web app that lets you specify any well-formed RSS feed, which it converts to an iPhone-formatted and friendly list of headlines - sliding animations and all. My site's feed can be seen by clicking here.

You can just click on over and add your feed. It takes seconds. This geeral idea could translate into some pretty cool blog themes if someone wanted to tackle it.

Something appears to have changed today with Google reader. I was looking at the screen and something felt, well, different. But I couldn't place it. Then I realized - the "Labs" label seems to be gone. Wow, that was quiet. And there I thought it has already moved up and out.

     

And it looks like the Google Reader blog explains it. Well, kind of explains it. No more "Labs." Nice job.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/09/breaking-up-isnt-hard-to-do.html

I use Google reader almost exclusively now. To be honest, it took more than a year to grow on me, and only when I got to a point where I wanted to be able to access it from anywhere did it really get interesting.

There's no point in droning on and on about this one - Scott Hanselman is 100% correct when he proclaims:

"I say this: IE7 and Office 2007 not supporting Basic or Digest Authentication out of the box for accessing secure feeds will negatively affect adoption of RSS more than any other failing of the spec since its inception. It will slow adoption down at every level; it will make it harder for Financial Institutions to justify it and it will flummox internal Enterprises who don't have completely NTLM/AD infrastructure."

He discusses this in the context of using RSS to securely retrieve feeds for banking data, for example. Sure, there are many points to ponder regarding the retrieval and storage of likely sensitive information, but in the end this is something that will be needed, and would be useful now for many uses.

Do you think this functionality is important? Scott does and so do I. Read his post, Accessing Private and Authenticated Feeds - Why it's important, and say something - in the comments here on this blog, on Scott's blog, on the IE Blog, on your blog.

All the virtual world's a-buzz with commentary and conversation (ironically, since a lot of the commentary is out of the reach of the service for now) about coComment, a coolio and not-yet-fully-released "Web-2.0" online service that let's you track comments make on blogs everywhere. Or at least it will at some point - only a few blogging platforms are supported right now (and the software this weblog runs on, dasBlog, is unfortunately not one of them), so it's very much hit and miss as to whether or not you can use it, but the promise of an interesting future is certainly there.

I'm using coComment now, and it's pretty cool. You can sign up at the site (look for the "Get Notified" section on the home page), and they're trying to get new invitations sent out as soon as they can.The coComment web site is well designed and the core feature/functionality is a sharp idea. I will say that it's a bit clunky in terms of how the actual user commenting experience works. You have to think about it too much, which is not so good... It puts an extra graphical "button" with your name onto the page that you have to click first, before you click the actual comment submission button. The new button falls to the right of the submit button, so it's a lot like being forced to read right to left and it just doesn't look very clickable - It's just counterintuitive.

Brian Benzinger wrote a little GreaseMonkey script that automates the sign-in for FireFox users - It's very nice and you can get it on this page. Otherwise you have to use a "bookmarklet link" to activate the service on any given comment page - another layer of abstraction that would be nice to avoid somehow.

But hey, it is pre-v1.0, so... Anyhow, it would be especially nice if the authors and some creative blog software creators made it even more usable.

It does solve a few problems, mainly being able to find your conversations in the blogosph -- uh, on blogs. Two other things it does is, 1) it allows you to embed a little bit of code in your blog template to display comments that you've made on other blogs, and 2) it allows you to subscribe to a RSS or ATOM feed with all your tracked comments in one place. Adoption will depend on how many blog software authors get into the mix and how many blogs the coComment people decide to try to tackle themselves, I suppose.

Note that, while it's a great start, the real test will be whether everyone will sign up - since that appears to be a requirement in order to actually track everything that might matter. Is there not a better way to do this? Does the RSS comment capability/spec not go far enough?

From their site:

Coming soon..

For advanced bloggers who would like to more fully integrate coComment features in their own blog, coComment will offer:

The ability to add elements of the coComment service to blogs based on non-standard blogging platforms in order to ease the usage of coComment for commenters (automated capture).

The ability to customize the appearance (eg colors, fonts, etc.) of coComment elements, in order to better suit your tastes and needs.

Microsoft's CTO, Ray Ozzie, posted earlier today about his views on SSE, of the Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS and OPML that Microsoft recently published as an open draft specification (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike model). Ozzie knows a lot about sharing information - He created Lotus Notes and was the founder of Groove, a terrific and innovative collaboration platform that Microsoft acquired not that long ago.

He describes the problem with sharing and combining loosely-coupled information.

"As an industry, we have simply not designed our calendaring and directory software and services for this 'mesh' model. The websites, services and servers we build seem to all want to be the 'owner' and 'publisher'; it's really inconsistent with the model that made email so successful, and the loosely-coupled nature of the web."

So he's talking about how to extend RSS and OPML to allow synchronization.

"There are many great item synchronization mechanisms out there (and at Microsoft), but we decided we’d never get short term network effects among products if we selected something complicated – even if it were powerful. What we really longed for was 'the RSS of synchronization' ... something simple that would catch on very quickly."

Note that this is not the same stuff that's gluing RSS into the core of Vista and whatnot - rather it's a simple way to mesh, communicate and synchronize information from multiple sources in XML. It's nifty, simple and smart. I think I've got my mind wrapped around it now. Very cool. Geeks, read on:

• The SSE draft spec is here
• A SSE FAQ page is here

Yahoo! and Ipsos Insight just published a study that shows there are more than six times as many unaware RSS users as there are people who know they're using it. These are some numbers that are worth thinking about.

In the report, "RSS - Crossing into the Mainstream," here's what we find out:

• 12% of users are aware of RSS.
• 4% of users have knowingly used RSS.
• There's some interesting information hidden in the demographics of different RSS users (aware, unaware, podcast consumers, etc.).
• One figure that stands WAY out: Of "unaware" RSS users, 72% get their RSS through My Yahoo! and 41% through My MSN.
• "Aware" RSS users subscribe to an average of 6.6 feeds each. Ummmm, more proof that I'm an addict I guess???
• and lots more...

It's clear that when you have an app that by its very nature makes it easy to consume RSS content, it no longer matters to the end user that RSS is the delivery vehicle. Many of the people benefiting from RSS don't even know what RSS is. All that matters to those kinds of people is the content. And believe it or not, we're not all uber-geeks.

So, it's a very good thing^(TM) that IE7, Safari, Firefox and even the new versions of the operating systems we all use will support RSS natively (or already do). And with more browsers right around the corner, the line between app and content is getting blurrier all the time.

Read the full 12-page report here, or the one-page brief synopsis here (both links are PDF docs).

Got SharePoint? Over at The Dean's Office, Dustin Miller lists a long - and exciting in a geeky way - list of what's coming up in the next version of SharePoint - which is due for release in late 2006 as part of the next version of the Office system.

HUGE improvements coming, and v2 to v3 will be an upgrade, not a migration. Phew! Check out the list.

A good Channel 9 video showing/discussing SharePoint v.next is here.

• RSS on all SharePoint lists - and access to the feeds respect the SharePoint security model
• RSS feeds are per-list and per-site (aggregated)
• Support is for RSS 2.0
• Out of the box blogs AND wikis! (and you get RSS feeds for those, too)
• Lots of search improvements and enhancements
• Outlook 12 will have an aggregator, IE7 also has one
• WSS v.next runs on ASP.NET 2.0, so ASP.NET v2 web parts are SharePoint web parts
• Version history in all SharePoint lists - with line-by-line diffs! Nice!
• Take documents off-line and bring them back
• Workflow built in - see a Channel 9 video about that here
• Document management significantly built out
• Email enabled discussion boards - send email to a SharePoint alias and it shows up in the discussion list! Nice - great internal option to things like Yahoo groups. You can also sync emails, tasks and other stuff to a SharePoint site from the Outlook UI.

It's going to be a big year for Microsoft's Office and Office Servers. Huge, really.

MSN Search has opened up the ability to search for/in RSS using the "feed:" operator. Cool stuff.

That probably explains the previous MSNBot behavior. Ah, it does, according to the MSN Search Blog over at MSDN.

My favorite RSS aggregator, FeedDemon, has just had an update pushed out in beta form. Existing registered users of FeedDemon can run the beta (warts and all) now.

And there's a whole slew of add/changes/fixes in this beta release from v1.5, all of which can be read on the release notes page.

The announcement from Nick is here. A download link is on that page.

New in this beta release is greatly enhanced synchronization with NewsGator. In a matter of seconds I got my NewsGator account hooked up to FeedDemon and was on my way.

Also, you can update all your feeds - across your subscription folders -at once. Nice!

And it looks great, too. "Surfer" is definitely my new newspaper style. I can group and sort inside the newspaper, and can choose whether I want to view full, short or no descriptions. Very slick.

Great job Nick!

What is WeatherBug? As a piece of software, it puts the weather on your desktop. It’s live, updating every two seconds. NOAA doesn’t do this – they update every 15 minutes at best. As a company and a bunch of people, here is how they describe themselves:

“WeatherBug is the ultimate geek-ified company. We are about creating cool and fun technology, teaching children, and saving lives.”

RSS weather feeds accessible by ZIP code will be available in July – that will be cool. They will also be shipping WeatherBug for the Mac.

Controversy – because what would a good conference be without it? Lots of discussion here at Gnomedex about the presentation in which this company is being highlighted. About how WeatherBug used to have spy/adware, but that was a long time ago, and now it doesn’t – Seriously. It doesn’t. Also, the fact that I am writing about their product at all (actually I am mostly interested in the 2–second differentiator) is exactly what some people are complaining about here, because Steve Rubel (according to some of the crowd) used this presentation as a vehicle to do PR for one of his clients. So what. Decent example of PR, short time to fill, interesting info.

Whatever. Heh. I still like the every-two-second data update thing. That’s sweet.

Microsoft’s announcement yesterday about support for RSS built into Longhorn has been followed up with the posting of the actual specification.

Overview

The Simple List Extensions are designed as extensions to existing feed formats to make exposing ordered lists of items easier and more accessible to users.

The term “list,” as used in this document describes an ordered collection of items with similar properties. For example, a photo album may be described as a “list of photos.”

And it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, which is cool.

An email list I am subscribed to had a quick thread that pointed to a conversation about FeedDemon and the fact that a user didn't want to use IE as the default embedded browser inside of FeedDemon. That's fine, but the problem is that someone suggested he actually abandon his favorite RSS reader (meaning FeedDemon) and try another one.

The recommendation was (in my opinion) premature. Why? Because FeedDemon can in fact use the Mozilla engine as it's embedded web browser, and you can find out how here.

And by the way - if there's something you wish was in FeedDemon for the future, Nick listens. Go to the FeedDemon forums and just ask.

There are plenty of opinions about placing ads in RSS and ATOM feeds, but regardless of the opinions, AdSense users can now apply to get AdSense for Feeds, which will allow them to place small ads in their RSS feeds.

• Information is here.
• Application is here.

I'll likely set it up to see how it works (I am kinda curious), and time will tell whether or not I'll want to keep it. Probably keep. We'll see.

Audible.com - an great audio book/publication service that I have been using for about a year - has published a whole set of RSS feeds so you can subscribe to find out easily what new content is published, including both free and pay-for selections:

This Week's Best Sellers (Top 50)
This Week's New Audiobooks and Programs
New Free Audio Programs
Under $10 Audio Programs
New York Times Best Sellers
BusinessWeek Best Sellers
Publishers Weekly Best Sellers
Best Sellers in Arts & Entertainment
Best Sellers in AudibleOriginals
Best Sellers in Biographies and Memoirs
Best Sellers in Business
Best Sellers in Classics
Best Sellers in Comedy
Best Sellers in Drama and Poetry
Best Sellers in Fiction
Best Sellers in Foreign Language
Best Sellers in Great Talkers
Best Sellers in History
Best Sellers in Information Age
Best Sellers in Kids
Best Sellers in Mystery
Best Sellers in Non-fiction
Best Sellers in Science
Best Sellers in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Best Sellers in Self Development
Best Sellers in Speeches and Lectures
Best Sellers in Spirituality
Best Sellers in Sports
Best Sellers in Travel and Adventure

And perhaps the coolest thing on the page? I scrolled down and noticed the question "Where can I find more information about RSS?" and the first resource listed is the RSS Quickstart Guide from Lockergnome.com - nice.

Jan Tielens posted the other day about their newly released "U2U RSS Feeds for SharePoint 2003," which is another tool for creating RSS feeds from SharePoint lists, but with some improvements:

• Aggregation of items stored in multiple lists on multiple sites
  You can create an RSS feed that contains information coming from more than one lists (or document libraries), that are potentially on different sites.
• Customizable layout of RSS items
  For each list that you aggregate in an RSS Feed you can specify how the items in the RSS feed should look like. You can do that by using some sort of formulas, referring to fields coming from the SharePoint lists.
• Non-intrusive installation
  The installation of the RSS Feeds tool doesn’t change a thing about your SharePoint installation, the IT-Pro guys will be happy! The tool is completely separated from the SharePoint sites and doesn’t require you to add metadata or web parts to SharePoint.
• SharePoint Authorization
  Are you afraid of exposing sensitive data? Well you don’t have to, our tool uses the SharePoint security model, so if a user doesn’t have access to the SharePoint list he or she can’t retrieve information from the RSS feed. Anonymous access to RSS feeds is also supported (if your SharePoint site is available for anonymous users of course).
• GUI Administration
  The administration of the tool (creating feeds, item layouts, …) is completely done by using a nice graphical user interface.

Software: http://www.u2u.net/software.aspx

Quick video tutorial: http://www.u2u.be/downloads/tools/U2URSSFeeds.wmv

Where would I be without FeedDemon? Between it and Outlook, most of my "content" is organized, filed and (quite intentionally) segregated into workable chunks-o-stuff.

And now FeedDemon version 1.5 is out! From the web site:

This new version offers a ton of new features, but here are the highlights:

• Powerful podcasting tools to automatically download audio files and copy them to your iPod or other media player (that's right - FeedDemon supports media players other than the iPod!)
• Integration with Bloglines and NewsGator Online Services
• Flickr and del.icio.us search channels
• Per-channel newspaper styles
• Improved popup-blocking under XP SP2
• Support for favicons throughout the user interface
• Numerous performance improvements

See the announcement on Nick Bradbury's weblog - He's the quite excellent author of FeedDemon.

I was wide awake at about 4am today, looking around for a fast way to get live syndicated content (need it to always be up-to-date) from a weblog’s RSS feed to the home page of a web site I am maintaining for non-profit organization. Cops on Top has climbers in Africa this week for a memorial mountain climbing expedition to Kilimanjaro, and they are sending electronic communications from the field via email and phone calls. The messages can show up on the weblog in real time, without anyone else’s intervention. So, I wanted to be able to show the latest weblog posts on the org’s home page.

I did a quick Google for what I needed, and came up with a gem of a tool: Feed2JS.

What Feed2JS does is to provide an interface where you can specify the URI to a RSS feed, click a few boxes and buttons on a web page to specify your options, and generate a Javascript output that you can stick straight into your web page, ready to go and immediately syndicating content from the specified feed. In addition, there’s a stylesheet generator on the site that lets you customize the look and feel of the feed as it’s displayed on your web page.

You can even download the original PHP scripts (which are provided under an open source license) and run Feed2JS on your own server, which could speed up the feed-to-web proxy function if you have scalability concerns due to very large volume, or if you want to modify the RSS cache to update more frequently than every 60 minutes. That is the default cache time for feeds being gathered and serviced by the Feed2JS system. At any rate, download your own copy and run it yourself, and you get complete control.

The results are quite good. Sure, the end user has to have jscript/Javascript enabled on the client, but that works for this purpose, so I am happy. Recommended.

Another slightly less-elegant (but quite useful) method using server-side ASP is called RSS in ASP. It works, as well.

Robert Scoble opened the session on Overload - or as he coined it in the opening conversation, "Information Pressure." He deals with 950+ RSS feeds that he has subscribed to, and so he's a good person to have guide the discussion on this topic.

What a great session.

There are already 4.5 million blogs out there. Overload is inevitable for many. Everyone has limits. They're different for each of us.

For my part, I have to manage my RSS feeds regularly. I am subscribed to more than 500 in total. I move them, reclassify them, and occasionally (but rarely) even unsubscribe to ones that have not met my needs or expectations, and I also have a section in my RSS reader for those feeds I want to keep track of, but which I don't put in my higher-priority list. They are my general dumping ground categories, if you will - good enough to watch now and then when I have time, but not part of my daily chores.

But then there are my high-priority feeds, and there are a couple hundred of those. I deal with my primary RSS feeds daily - usually several times a day. I get critical information I need for my work delivered to me in RSS throughout the day. It's reliable, fast and goes with me. It just works. It's lightweight. I can use it the way I want.

But that is exactly what makes it easy to get overloaded. Make something that really, really works, and people like me with use the hell out of it, sometimes to the point of making it less usable.

Scoble asks an excellent question - What about people who read only say 20 feeds? Why not more? One good answer: "If I save 20 minutes not reading feeds, that's 20 minutes I can spend looking at a sunset." Or maybe a sunrise. How true.

Which makes me think - maybe we could convince Nick Bradbury (who is the author of FeedDemon) to consider providing a way to see what feeds I have not read in a given period of time, those that have not posted in x days or weeks, those that are no longer there, and report that info to me and then let me act on it. Also let me report on the opposite - what feeds are really really active? I'd want to be able to move any of them, mark them, delete them, or a combination of the above. Kind of a little clean-up wizard. Hmmmm... Is this what attention.xml does?

Robert makes what seems like it should be an obvious suggestion, but is a good one to hear: Write better headlines. Tell me what it's about. A head line of "GAHHHH!" does nothing for me when what the article is about is something like "I had a really frustrating day at work today." Or something like that.

Or maybe attention.xml should do this, as one person suggested: "Here's the list of people I don't pay attention to anymore."

A tangent topic of "what do you use your blog for" came up (and for some reason Robert said my name when he showed the crowd his feed aggregator - thanks for the plug, heh). Interesting topic. Blogs are used for all sorts of things: Personal memory catalogs, culture development and coming together of people with similar interests, espousing opinion, publishing fact, conversing and replacing letter writing, you name it.

And thanks to Robert for asking for people at the conference to stand at the mic who had not spoken yet. Nice job guiding and maintaining the focus of the conversation without controlling the session too much. I like it when I hear Robert say, "That's for all of you to decide, right?" and "What else would you like to talk about?" (photo by Doc Searls)

Brainstorming ideas on overload:

• Social networking worked into bloglines - show me recommendations based on who I read, ability to browse the network of content.
• Eric Rice says - with these ideas, are we risking going away from that peer-to-peer distributed model, away from the model we were trying to reject?
• What goes on between the time when an idea has an idea and when I read it - content producer can filter, linkers can filter when they describe and link, governments in same places might filter, services can filter, and the end user can filter content. How do we find information unfiltered without overload? Can it be done?
• A certain Zen acceptance that there might be something you won't see - don't give in to the pressure to give in to the anal-retentive obsession to read and see everything.
• Thought that the major overlaid is not the number of blogs, but the comments, which ones are by smart comments, which are on topic, which are tolls, etc.
• Podcasts control the browser. (Note: This is an idea I have already given to a team I am working with, but MP3 won't do it. Windows Media will, but that's not open).
• There's a problem in the room and in the blogosphere in general with blogaholism. It's causing a lot of problems, solve it like a medical condition? (hmmm)

By the way, it's hard to say enough time how much Doug Kaye and ITConversations rule. I can't be there, but I can be there. Nice - thanks.

I have had the privilege of helping test Doppler, a Windows program that allows podcast aggregation as well as windows media aggregation (audio or video). Good stuff. If you have not checked it out and you're a podcast consumer, you need to go get it now. And there's even more features to come soon!

People who read this blog regularly probably know I use FeedDemon, a terrific software creation of the infamous and very cool Nick Bradbury, as my RSS aggregator. I was excited to see that Nick is programming RSS enclosure support into FeedDemon - Awesome! Hey Nick - linky linky????

Carl Franklin wrote some thoughtful commentary about a weblog post by Scott Hanselman on the subject of podcasting. Then Dave Winer commented on Carl's post. Rory follows up with a far-reaching examination of the arguments.

Updates:

• Todd Maffin has some great practical things to say about making podcasting work (found via Scoble)
• and Scott Hanselman has since responded to the commentary himself.

It's an interesting conversation, and one well worth having.

I have been listening to podcasts for weeks now, and to MP3 audio shows since before the term "podcast" was coined. I still don't really like the term, but anyhow... Airplanes are a place I find them most useful - but they have not completely replaced my drive-time commute, which totals about 2 hours a day, because the content quality just isn't there for me yet, with a couple of notable exceptions. I do get a certain amount of enjoyment from podcasts - from some of them, anyhow. Mostly by people you probably never heard of. I really don't have a need or desire to listen to "experts" in go on and on and on and on and on and on about how podcasting just changed the world. A medium that talks about itself feels a lot like MLM. It can't last forever. You wanna talk about the technology your using, make it useful for me - make the time I spend listening to you really, truly worthwhile. It's the content people, CONTENT!

Another thing, about the concept that podcasting will replace/kill radio as we know it - I am not convinced on that one yet. I don't have to think about my radio. It's always there and just turns on and works. No sync, no charging, no programming - just on and off. Therefore I use it. More work than that and it loses some of its utility. They said TV would replace radio. It didn't. In fact, it just made radio bigger. We shouldn't be trying to kill something - we should be trying to create something new. There is a difference.

And regardless of what Dave says, or whether he was involved in creating PowerPoint, and despite a number of other inflammatory things I could pull from his comment on Carl's post and react to, but wont... Scott is most definitely *not* an opponent of technological progress, so use of the term "Luddite" is - well - misplaced at best and flat out mean at worst.

One thing's for sure: It's not at all a useful label in this case. I could use certain blanket terms to describe Dave's words and actions in a variety of situations, and while they may be accurate in terms of one or two things he has said or done in the past, they would not really describe him in whole. It would be wrong of me to call names, so I won't. I wish Dave wouldn't. It takes away from the conversation, and Scott is one person I listen to with great regard for making very complicated things work in the real world.

I don't think Scott was implying (as Dave seems to state) that podcasting was a replacement for PowerPoint. He was using PowerPoint as a metaphor, to show how both technologies - in his opinion - tend to fail to meet their own goals, for man of the same reasons.

Scott originally said, about Podcasting:

 - Clever, yes.
 - Interesting, yes.
 - A new kind of media? Maybe.
 - Useful? Not to me.

Then he points out that using XML to point to multi-megabyte files is contradictory to certain vocal arguments made in the community of late. That's another valid point.

He also correctly points out that the the medium does not lend itself to skimming, browsing or efficient dissemination of multiple pieces of information.

I agree with that position. The people who are making the most noise about this new stuff are people who seem to have plenty of time to record podcasts and to listen to all the regulars. It's a technology that will - by it's very nature - limit the number of people we can listen to and communicate with. It also tends to be a lot more one-way than blogging. Podcasting is not blogging, it's not radio, it's not even broadcasting in reality. But it is cool, and it does have potential. Where it goes we don't know - Rarely does an experiment turn out just the way the founding fathers intended, you know.

Scott has a good point. Carl has a good counterpoint. Dave kind of missed the point but hurled a good insult (good only if you're the one doing the hurling, anyhow). Rory did a great job of taking a good, long step back and covering the bases.

All are very smart guys with great ideas and technological innovation in their pasts.

Pointing out the problems with a technology does not make one a Luddite. Telling people to wait and see before they speak actually just delays technological progress. Hmmmm... Deeelaaayyyys techhhnoloooogicalll progrrressss.... Yeahhh.....

Open, informed, honest discussions are good. Names and insults don't help.

So that's all nice, and yeah discussion is important. But what about podcasting?

What Rory said:

"Just walk away with this: Podcasting is serious Power to the People technology, and we should be excited about that."

Most importantly (I think), here is my pre-emptive thought: Keep the conversation open. Let people comment openly - good, bad or otherwise - and use the information to do things better, and to shape this experiment into something great. If someone counters your position, listen to them. No one person or group owns it. Everyone owns it. Some will innovate, but all should lead. Don't ruin a good thing with politics and personalities.