I just signed up for the free account and this service looks amazing. Surprised I did not know about it sooner. I have some ideas on using this creatively.
Latest Updates: rss RSS
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Email Marketing and Email List Manager | MailChimp ★
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Simple .tel REST API ★
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RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized – O’Reilly Radar ★
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Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure. This article looks at available efforts in that space and suggests some principles to guide its development.
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Subscribing To RSS Cloud Feeds Via .TEL Domains – Educer
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A Good Day for RSS and the Open Web
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Today, rssCloud was enabled on millions of WordPress.com blogs. And now aggregators and pingable hubs will follow to add support. This is perfect because now their is no risk that rssCloud will be ignored and forgotten except for a select group of adopters. I knew that Dave Winer would carry this project and forge it ahead. I’m glad that it won’t be overshadowed by the other cool protocol backed by Google (PubSubHubBub). Likewise, I want other protocols to get proper attention and adoption moving forward (OpenMicroBlogging, Fethr/Gossip etc.).
No wars here. It’s all good. If the Open Web benefits, then everyone wins. Well, except for those who want to control the Massive Rapid Data moving in the cloud. That is to say… they won’t benefit unless they choose to benefit. And they can and they should. And they will?
I’m glad that i’ve supported rssCloud since earlier this summer (http://nudg.es) when Dave Winer started to reboot the concept, especially after PubSubHubBub came about. It inspired me to take a close historical look at the origins of RSS and related technologies. I’ve used RSS since it’s inception and more so back in 2004 when I helped to launch ourmedia.org which had deep emphasis on RSS for video and audio blogs and making use of the enclosure element (podcasting). We early adopted the new Media RSS spec that was lead by Yahoo to provide more enhanced feeds. And the videoblogging movement really latched onto the concept of RSS and I was at the heart of those pioneering days. So RSS is very familiar and very awesome. I love it.
In the past year+ I have been very interested in the topic of Scaling Twitter. It was the result of Twitter’s technical problems that Open MicroBlogging became a focus of technologists/developers/students. An OpenMicroBlogging protocol was introduced and a twitter clone built on that protocol was launched (identi.ca/status.net). Other proposed protocols and ideas started sprouting as students and professionals weighed in.
Point being… The incredible growth of Twitter put much needed focus back on balancing data control. By that I mean…. Not putting all our eggs in one basket. Not having centralized services at the heart of the web. Not getting drunk on the hype of these new social net brands and their features. Getting back to basics, and back to our blogs. Dusting off some old tech and upgrading the de-centralized web. Speeding up RSS with rssCloud is an important step in this direction.
It’s great that we have our Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. But the Open Web needs to evolve too and cannot be mostly dismissed by a small group of Tech Giants who re-invent the wheel, disgard standards and limit their open data policies. Their services are ours to leverage, not to sell our souls to. Obviously, this speaks more to content creators than it does to those who are primarily content consumers. But it benefits everyone. Because at any point, someone can decide to become a more serious content creator, setup a website and a blog and off you go. To have a strong and stable Open Web to go to that competes and coexists with any proprietary offerings with terms & conditions is critical.
So what’s so important about The Real-Time Web? That’s another blog post. But the quick reply is… If you like getting Email in timely manner, then you will like The Real-Time Web.
Here are some of today’s blog posts on the news of rssCloud + WordPress.com integration:
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/09/07/teaseTeaseTease.html
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/09/07/anyWordpressBlogCanBeCloud.html
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/rss-in-the-clouds/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wordpress_just_made_millions_of_blogs_real-time_wi.php
http://blog.lazyfeed.com/2009/09/lazyfeed-will-integrate-rsscloud-and.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/wordpress-enables-rsscloud-in-post-feeds/
http://mashable.com/2009/09/07/rsscloud/
Oh and maybe you’de be curious to know how I found out about todays news?
I actually had hopped into the FIRST rssCLoud enabled aggregator/publisher that was not properly mentioned in any of the above posts
The service I speak of is at http://MyStatusCloud.com and is being developed by Jeremy Felt (@jeremyfelt). His blog is at http://www.educer.org/2009/09/07/its-all-happening/.
He has been in 5th gear playing around with the concept of rssCloud and I think he has done a great job implementing it. Take a look and try it out yourself! -
RSS has no Fail Whale (Scripting News)
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RSS, Twitter, People, Power And The Negligent Tech Bloggers
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Further comments in response to this and other recent posts:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/09/rss-isnt-dead-just-ask-executives.php#comments
Their are a few ways to frame and respond to the tabloid-like headline “RSS is Dead”.
One is to directly compare RSS with Twitter. This is a mistake unless you clearly point out that what you are actually comparing is Reader/Aggregator software, the differences between a centralized and de-centralized messaging/headline/link sharing system and the mechanisms of efficient delivery of this data to subscribers or general content consumers.
The more accurate approach is to compare software that consumes content…. whether that be content from social networks like Twitter or Facebook or from Blogs and Websites or even for media like video and audio (poscasts). RSS is NOT software. Google Reader is. My Twitter stream is NOT software. Tweetie is. Whether a desktop application or a website wrapper… a UI for managing data/content and how efficient that software… which methods it uses…. is the real debate. Push/Streaming and Pull/Polling and App2App Notification protocols are at the heart of the issue.
One of the benefits of a centralized system like twitter is its built-in ability to provide more immediacy to users once new content is posted and available in their stream. The storage, delivery and notification system is cohesive. Obviously, the synaptics of the platform are going to be more coalescent and efficient in data handling. Though the Open Web (which includes search engines like google and bing) will better compete now that an entity like twitter has brought this issue of massive rapid micro-messaging (and link sharing) to the forefront.
You also have an enormous amount of people participating, doing the work of an army of ants…. propagating headlines, links and short messages. Mixed in with that you have your soundbyte culture and truly authentic interesting conversations.
The blogosphere also is involved in this activity with trackbacks/pingbacks/comments/blogrolls/bookmarks and of course the blog posts themselves that can contain several links within the article. In a way, links are the currency of the web. But the difference is the barrier to entry. Even though setting up a blog is easy today, it’s also about the avoiding… the void. joining a built-in community of people, for many, is more fun than being the lone blogger out there on the wild web. So, several blogging services have focused on this to make it more appealing. And their is a bit of momentum returning to blogging. But still, everyday people DO like the AOLesque Facebook and the Twitter phenomena snuck up on everyone as a cultural realization that bursts of messages are useful, easy and fun.
Twitter started out as a mostly mobile-centric app for self-status updates but has evolved into emulating RSS headline and links, albeit the proper headlines are too often replaced with useless comments. Not to mention the link itself is almost always hidden by a short url so you go in blind. That and a total lack of associated metadata… In a way it becomes the Poor Man’s RSS. But it’s faster. You give up some signal, and you get fast noise. If you are well trained, lucky, bored or just OCD about info consumption…. then you can pick out the gems. How often does it truly matter to a normal user if they hear about something before others? It’s a rare situation. And if it’s your business to know the news and monitor the pulse of the internet, then you you likely have a formula that crosses many tools, services and methods to help you achieve an advantage for “breaking stories”. More power to you.
If you were to compare just the data alone, RSS is no worse as it provides headlines and links… and can be better because it also provides rich metadata and even the entire contents of a content item. RSS is data/content. Twitter is data/content bundled with a social wrapper controlled by a single company. It should be getting more clear now why you cannot simply compare the two without more in depth analysis and explanation… We can do without the glossy tabloid style headlines. We have enough of that everywhere else. It would be great if tech can stay clear of such antics and worry less about page views and tech gossip and grow up.
The de-centralized open web syndication can and will keep up with the speed of twitter because the underlying tech does not care whether data is from a twitter stream (which generates RSS itself) or if that data is in a blog or if that data only exists as an RSS document. It DOES NOT MATTER. Most Twitter clients pull in content by polling the twitter API. That is not different than Email or RSS Readers. But its not efficient. So Push Email and Push RSS/Atom and Push anything else is preferred from a technical perspective and exciting from a users perspective. Excitement does not equate to a need. But it’s an advancement, one that was accelerated due to the popularity of Twitter and it’s delivery speed. And advancements in consumer tech are good.
Yes, real-time data is not new. But the notion to have this effect for anyone on the Internet is powerful. But Twitter alone is not the story. Twitter was a spark to shift focus on consumer services that can offer massive rapid content sharing. It’s wrong for Twitter to think that they can always be at the core of this future. They can be part of it… maybe a large part… but the Open Web will balance this and that is where RSS/Atom comes back into focus. And that should matter more to some tech writers who gloss over the big picture and use trite headlines and concepts to lead into a rash article. But hey, they open the door for others to clean the mess by blogging more in-depth perspectives.
So as we soon see more demonstrations of faster RSS…. at least as fast as you’de expect your Email to arrive… The uniquity that Twitter held will continue to dissipate. It will be just another big social network. People may tire of it. People may evolve as most of this becomes normal and ask themselves – why am i using this service when i can do the same thing on my own website or via email or some other cooler service that has better features etc etc. That’s right. Features. At some point, Twitter will need to care about features to stay relavent because everything else is quickly becoming normalized. Choosing between Twitter and Facebook will seem strange. Especially as the content is cross-posted, which is another issue that is ongoing.
It’s also good to keep in mind other emerging technologies like Google Wave and how that may impact our connected digital culture.
I have not been too impressed with Wave so far but I admittedly have not give it a fair chance yet. I see its potential.And since I have mentioned Email a few times here…. It’s also good to think about the future of email. We already have Push Email on mobile devices which in and of itself is as fast as a centralized Twitter. But email is de-centralized. So what happens when we put together Mailing Lists with Push Email? I think we’ll find out
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Fever° Red hot. Well read.
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I saw this a few months ago and it was just mentioned in the BadHairDay Podcast. Thinking of purchasing.
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RSS isn’t Dead… My comment
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RSS isn’t Dead Just Ask Executives – ReadWriteEnterprise.
I don’t know if those who have proclaimed that RSS is… you know.. the D word… actually believe it to the core or if they just wanted to push buttons with tongue in cheek.
Or if they just irresponsibly use “RSS” as an umbrella term for labeling the opposition to the more, faster, smarter, better hype that is going on related to real-time web/push-button web etc. It’s like so many other things where people feel the need to have a black&white issue to pound on. The notion that something must fall for something else to rise.
Childish, really.Here are some perspectives…
Many people were not ready for adding RSS Readers to live along-side with their “Email”. With the exception of joining mailing lists, a typical person does nto concern themselves with the idea of subscribing in order to get content. And despite the ease in which this subscribing process is done (auto-discovery, orange buttons, copy/paste a url, pre-populating feeds, one-click subscribe options in the software etc etc), these few extra steps and the fact that their is another interface for managing an “inbox” deterred many from full adopting content syndication via RSS. Email software that incorporated an RSS Reader (ie. Apple’s mail.app) helps but it’s still added complexity.
Many people just find it simpler to rely on a few webpages (which prob use RSS).But RSS is more than this idea of Reader software.
RSS made it easy to let one website add content from another website. So it’s usefulness was not solely for consumption by individual users but also to spread content across the web.
RSS is used by search engines for improved content discovery and therefor, improved SEO. The new breed of search engines heavily use RSS feeds to parse rich multimedia content and output to a users search results. That was some of the motivation behind new namespaces such as “Media RSS” driven by Yahoo! in 2004. And anyone adept in Search Engine Optimization knows that submitting a Media RSS feed to search engines is a standard and crucial step. After all, it’s well-formed machine-readable content.
Media RSS also bleeds into the world of audio and video syndication/agregation (commonly referred to as podcasting). Take a look at the data inside my blip.tv RSS feed: http://sull.blip.tv/rss
That’s some rich metadata.
Does twitter offer that? No and it was never intended to. But twitter will evolve and its feasible that it will eventually resemble RSS more as it becomes realized that metadata and machine-readable formats are fundamental requirements that add value.
RSS is also commonly used to run multimedia presentation software such as Flash audio and video players. Adobe’s own AMP (Adobe Media Player) uses RSS and other XML flavors to load playlists, social connections, advertising, branding and UI elements. Their are other examples of RSS being in the mix for these types of uses as well.
RSS is often used as part of web application APIs. One service can make use of another service’s RSS feed and include the content and important links or widgets into it’s interface. These web service mashups thrive and are part of the web culture today. RSS is not the only format used but it is a common and simple format to allow for easy cross-domain content sharing.
RSS is also used for alerts, notifications, data backups, filesharing and short messaging.
RSS is so pervasive that many people don’t see it or know its part of whatever it is that they are looking at. And that’s the way it should be for most people.
So where is the failure, exactly? Mostly, you could blame software for aggregating RSS feeds. It was setup to mimic email. That made sense since you did not want to create an nusual experience for people to consume this content. The email experience is the most common of all. But that also allows for the vulnerability of feeling overwhelmed with “unread items” and managing all the content. So, more “view modes” are important…. especially the “river of news” mode that let’s you casually skim headlines. There are other designs that work too. Inevitably, a user has unique preferences and they should be allowed to easily create those view modes that work for them.
Google Reader has evolved a lot this year. Though I still think it’s a clunky bloated confusing experience… it is at least more interesting to me. I can see it continuing to evolve to the point where it becomes more inline as a direct competitor to Facebook. But they need a new UI or like I said, multiple view modes.
Even with Google Reader’s shortcomings and attributing those to the whole RSS is …. you know… the D word…. it’s foolish, it’s rhetoric. it’s getting drunk on the real-time buzz which is like… the new drug of choice.
So enough of this. If their is a concern about the image of RSS (very few of us geeks would really care), then just post intelligent articles mentioning RSS where applicable so people learn an understand it more. I don’t think we need to grab hold of the drama headlining of this is dead that is dead this is the future and that is old news etc etc.
Stuff like RSS is not Fashion. It’s cold hard tech.
This debate is a fabrication based on personalities who happen to have reach and some could argue… influence.Once a Faster RSS is demonstrated (rssCloud, pubsubhubbub etc), everthing else will be moot, anyway.
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Is River of News enough? (Scripting News)
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Is River of News enough? (Scripting News).
My comment:
I always like to refer to the concepts of “Stock and Flow”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_and_flow
A while back, i wrote some code for a so-called “lifestream” which was a buzzword at the time.
It ended up becoming more Digg-like.But the point is, the river (flow) should be a standard view mode. I agree with that.
What I also think is applicable is letting users who are tapping into that flow to add to their pool (stock).
The pool is just your saved items. The saved items can be labeled like:* will read later
* recommended +1Anything not saved or recommended is obviosuly going to tend to drop off the radar. No need to tag a negative.
Naturally, you apply some simple collective algorithms and you can bubble up the most saved and/or recommended items.
I think that each time you, in essence, bookmark an item (url) you also ping a hub so that the data can be collected and used via an open API so other apps can build off of that data. That is basically what is happening on Twitter. But a de-centralized approach is more interesting to me.So yeah… Rivers, Pools and Bubbles.
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Fragmented Flat File RSS Construction
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A month ago I thought I was being clever in how I was generating RSS feeds for my email centric rssCloud experiment called “nudges”. Simply, every post creates a static xml file that is an item element and which becomes a part of an RSS feed. I immediately enjoyed this simple approach to generating RSS. It was lightweight, easy to code and added flexibility while remaining sturdy and not prone to full data corruption by a single point of failure (a single file). Additionally, I had in mind ways to distribute the data to other feeds that could attach the item to itself across networks. Since the focus is on short micro-messages, this approach seemed to make sense to me and one of my rules as a developer is to not add sql database dependencies until it actually becomes logical to do so. Often, that means you can have fully functioning applications that do not need or use databases beyond a file system with static flat files.
I had then googled to see what else took similar approaches to generating RSS or other XML. I came across one little script that a student had written. Found some references regarding XSL that had similar methodologies. But overall barely anything. Until just now which is the spark for this blog post.
In my research on the commentAPI namespace and how I might want to re-purpose that for rssCloud @replies, I was hanging around bitworking.org. I’ve been there before and I have been familiar with commentAPI of course (it is silently pervasive) but what struck me was Joe Gregorio’s experiments with commentAPI which seem to be in line with what I want to do with rssCloud…. but also I was taken back by his blogging platform called RESTlog which is what bitworking.org runs on. This is what it sais in regards to RSS construction:
How does the server side work?
Items are stored in individual files with their name being their ID number. They are stored as xml files. Specifically they are stored as ‘item’ elements from RSS 2.0.Why? Well first note that this file is conveniently formatted so that it can be easily placed inside an RSS file directly as an item which will speed up the rebuilding of the index.rss file each time an item is modified. Also having each item in its own file makes the system more robust, if one of the files becomes corrupt I have lost as most one item not all of them. I ran into this problem when working on Pamphlet, my as yet unpublished weblogging tool. The items in Pamphlet are kept in monthly archives which has the weakness of potentially losing a whole months worth of posts if a single file gets corrupted. Luckily I keep good backups.
The HTML main page ‘index.html’ and the RSS file ‘index.rss’ are served up statically. That is, they are static files that are only updated by the server side script when items are added or changed. Each item has it’s own permalink and that permalink is served up dynamically through the RESTLog.cgi script, but this only uses a crude string substitution templating mechanism.
This work occurred back in 2001/2002. Here is the RESTLog Spec
Now I can discount this for being antiquated methods that have no place in today’s space. But that is never smart or accurate. In fact, the more I look back, the more I feel that we are not nec in a clean and clear time for technology and innovation. We see a lot of end results that appear innovative or mass adoption of services that in return make us assume that their is innovation… but I feel like their is a lot of bloat and black magic out there. It’s not nec a bad thing as it relates to a learning and experimentation phase on the Interwebs. Messes are inevitable. Meanwhile, their is a strong fortitude to push semantics and standards to the forefront of the most important and influential discourse happening today. A balance is needed between cool results and solid practices.
So back to this little gem. Well, Joe Gregorio is today celebrating 2 years at Google, Inc. So it’s safe to assume that a solid mind was behind RESTLog. And for now, i’ll take the idea of Fragmented Flat File RSS Construction and move forward with it
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What’s in the next release of River2 (Scripting News)
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Look forward to using Dave Winer’s River2 RSS Aggregator.
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RSS related malware… Infostealer.Banco…
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RSS related malware… Infostealer.Bancos – Downloader.Sninfs – botnet – http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/twittering-botnets