The Social Software Weblog

RSS feeds from surprising nonhuman sources: what examples are there?

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-26T01:53:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS

Working on a presentation for a conference where I'm going to talk about RSS and am wondering - what are the coolest examples of nonhuman generation of RSS feeds? I know that technically every search feed, stock report feeds and things like that are generated without the immediate involvement of humans. But some time ago Lisa Williams told me about a buoy at sea that publishes a feed of hourly updates to all kinds of weather conditions. That's from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS). She told me she would like to be able to subscribe to a feed that would tell her when her home's heating oil was running low.

There's got to be more examples out there - anyone care to point to ones you know of? I know there are systems to track package delivery (like FedEx). There have to be some RFID systems that utilize RSS. I know there are quite a number of innovative examples of RSS feeds generated in libraries. Limited traffic reports for particular cities from Yahoo and Traffic.com. Incidentlog.com is a cool use of police reports, mashing up feeds and Google Maps.

Really far out examples of RSS feeds being generated for a useful purpose without substantial human input is what I'm looking for. I really believe there will be a lot of this in the future, but the sooner we can find examples the sooner we can prepare ourselves and others for the idea. Please do post examples in comments if you can think of or find any that I haven't.

To be honest I'd be curious to see peoples' favorite applications of RSS in any context. Anything already listed by Tim Yang or Basement.org excluded.

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CA AG candidate launches RSS to IM notification system

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-25T17:23:00+00:00

Filed under: IM, nptech, RSS

California Attorney General candidate Rocky Delgadillo doesn't just have a long list of endorsements on his side - he's got new web tools going for him as well. Delgadillo's campaign just launched a new service offering for supporters wanting to keep up with the campaign - RSS to IM notification from immedi.at.

The letters RSS don't appear anywhere on the site, in fact there's not a link to subscribe to news from the campaign in a feed reader - but there is a link that allows you to plug in your IM username and get instant notification of new developments that can be passed on to others. Timely updates have an excitement that may be more likely to spread by word of mouth.

Delgadillo's "vision" page begins with the sentence: "As I look around our state today, it's not just crime and violence that threaten our families. It's also the greed and arrogance of corporate power run amok." Sounds interesting enough to me. I wonder how extensively the campaign is using RSS to IM internally.

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If Feedburner dies - we're going to live

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-22T23:11:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS, aggregators

There has been a lot of complaining around the web lately about Feedburner - even Dave Winer is discussing alternatives to Feedburner's controlling the domains of everyone's feeds. People say they are worried that if Feedburner dies or turns evil then all is lost. I do not think that's the case. Number one reason, look at this code:

    Marshall Kirkpatrick
    http://marshallk.com
    Know more, faster. And then share it.
    Mon, 22 May 2006 22:55:20 +0000
    http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5.2

    en

That's the first 5 lines of the code from my personal blog's Feedburner landing page. Our RSS readers all show both the RSS URL from Feedburner feeds and the HTML URL of the sites those feeds originate from. No disconnect there. Look in your OPML file. It's going to be ok.

If we had to, I'll bet someone could write a script that could look over your OPML file, visit the HTML URLs and replace the Feedburner URLs in your file with the standard RSS URLs for WordPress, Blogger, MT, LiveJournal or whatever type of blog each one was. It's going to be ok. Now go enjoy Feedburner's statistics, autopinging, javascript plug-ins following feed items (FeedFlare, with API), plagarism monitoring ("unusual uses"), baked in support for email delivery of feed items and goodness knows what else. Am I wrong about this? That's how it seems to me and I'm usually not a big fan of trusting authority - but really, the RSS freak-out over the last few days has been over the top.

Note: If you're interested in reading a long interview with Feedburner biz dev VP Rick Klau, I did one that's posted here.

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SAP and RSS

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-22T13:25:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, RSS

Charlie Wood at Moonwatcher has an interesting post today about the executive blogs at enterprise super-vendor SAP. Apparently you can't subscribe to RSS feeds of the exec blogs. SAP rep responds and says they are working on it. This is interesting to me for a number of reasons:

RSS is so strong in the consumer space that it is now being demanded in the enterprise space. That's a path that's becoming all the more common in the Web 2.0 world.
Enterprise adoption of a key, if not the key Web 2.0 technology is lagging. I'm always curious about the pace of adoption in various sectors, so I'll be filing this one away.
If you look at the image Charlie posts from the SAP blogs, it reads "Executive Blogs: Please notify me when new blogs are available." That means send me an email notification of new posts, I presume. It amazes me that such a big player wouldn't take the time to figure out that a blog is a series of posts and each post is not called a blog. Jeez, through a couple thousand dollars at a business blog consultant already and make sure you don't look silly when engaging in an established and outspoken community. Maybe I'm wrong here and that really means, send me an email when a new executive starts blogging - but I doubt it.

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FeedPass makes RSS subscription and monetizing other peoples' content easy

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-19T14:29:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS

People around the web have been talking about the RSS support service FeedPass, which as you can see in action here at a FeedPass page for my personal blog, or this NYTimes feed I've wrapped in AdSense and split the revenue from with FeedPass (they get 2/3 of the revenue). The service provides links to subscribe to a feed with a large number of subscription mechanisms, learn more about RSS feeds, tag the feed itself and more. It also provides a preview of recent items and gives you the option to tag those items in a wide variety of social bookmarking systems.

Major, major badness issue: their demo screen-cast shows the feed from Engadget being plugged in! "Monetize your blogroll or links you have to other popular blogs" by adding your Adsense ID. You get more money if you own the feed yourself but you still get bucks for content you don't own! 2/3 page views go to your AdSense ID if you own it, 1/3 if you don't - that means FeedPass has a greater economic incentive for you to plug in feeds you don't own than those you do! Sheesh! Talk about dressing up a pig. Rounded corners and other nice web 2.0 aesthetics sure make wrapping some one else's feed in your Adsense look legit, huh? I can't believe that. They grab the Edgadget logo and everything. I don't see anyone's name on the site, or any contact info but an email address so maybe Mr. Jim Woolley, the Feedpass.com site registrant, is behind it and knows he's dressing up a pig.

So the FeedPass pages only show an excerpt from the first 4 lines of a feed item - I imagine it will be argued that this is fair use. Nonetheless, the words "Copyright 2006 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only." are at the top of the Engadget XML code. And it's just a low thing to do. Unbelievable. I've seen nothing but positive reviews on this so far - how come? I'm not a big copyright freak by any means, but the gall here is amazing. Simple solution really, buddy - just require the claiming proccess.

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RSS publishing sees big investments

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-16T22:36:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS

Jupiter Research has released a study finding that 63 percent of large companies plan to syndicate content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) by the end of 2006 and that 29 percent currently do so. The report says that 48 percent of current RSS publishers are spending $250,000 or more to deploy and manage syndicated content.

The study says this outstrips adoption on the part of readers but that those of us who read feeds are good spenders and thus a key demographic. Are companies betting on IE and Outlook support? All the other benefits of syndication? We shall see. Sounds like good news to me.
Found via RSS Specifications, a funky site without permalinks, comments or trackbacks. Hmmmm...

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Wired Mag adds Feedburner

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-16T14:32:00+00:00

Filed under: companies, RSS

Feedburner made another big announcement today, they are now providing their RSS management, advertising and FeedFlare services for Wired Magazine. As far as I can tell, they are a great example of providing an awesome free service to consumer-level users (bloggers) as a way to gain visibility and a foothold on the enterprise market. Who wouldn't want to keep track of their number of subscribers? For more details on Feedburner, check my recent interview with biz dev VP Rick Klau.

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Examining the roots and growth of Web 2.0

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-15T10:08:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, RSS

Heather Green and Steven Baker's excellent blog at Business Week has two interesting posts available this morning both related to the nature and extent of Web 2.0 tools.

The most recent is an intro to a new Business Week online segment called Web Smart. The series of stories will highlight in text and a podcast a different company "that's using the Web to improve productivity, reach out to the public, rev up marketing, or streamline internal operations." The first Web Smart profile is on Boeing, who apparently uses blogs both internally and externally. Sounds like a great series. Examples of corporate use of new web tools, amongst companies large and small, are very useful for those of us who try to get others turned on to the possibilities. Perhaps Biz Week's series will shed some light on the debate over Steve Gilmor's statement that corporate executives are using RSS to bring them the information they need on their field - other discussion members said he was crazy and that corporate adoption of feed reading is in its infancy. (Discussion in some random recent episode of the otherwise great show Gilmor Gang, where some people say that "strong bloggers don't link" - so what's the point. Grr....)

Speaking of RSS adoption, Heather Green's post on Saturday pointed to a Google Trends graph showing that the term RSS gets searched for on Google more than the word blogs and far more than podcasts. Besides the fact that RSS is also the acronym for one of the largest membership organizations in the world, I was unsurprised when I saw results like this as well. Here's what I left in the comments section of Green's post. Would readers here agree with this assessment?

RSS is the foundation of all other particular Web 2.0 tools: it's what makes podcasts subscribable, enables us to read more than a handful of blogs, search with persistence and get the social out of social bookmarking when we subscribe to the feed for a tag. It's what tells us when there's been a change made to a wiki page of interest. All of those and more are made possible because of RSS, and most instances of each particular tool will make mention of RSS in the description of its use. All the social media are exciting, and the read-write web is a major change from the past, but it's that combined with access to a quantity information increased by orders of magnitude - with almost zero effort required after an initial subscription over broadband - that represents the huge shift that is web 2.0 if you ask me.

Thoughts? To be honest, I do think that RSS is as important as I said above, but in terms of use frequency it's also got the semantic advantage of only having one tense. People will write about and search for blogs, blog and blogging for example - but RSS is a one-term wonder.

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Grazr raising money, taking on a partner

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-10T13:55:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS, OPML, aggregators

Mike Kowalchik's very cool project Grazr, a mini OPML browser and apparently much more soon, has been quietly raising funds and has now partnered with OPML geek Adam Green of Darwinian Web. Here's the Grazr announcement. I think this is great, as there is so much that can be done with this little tool already.

I use Grazr for my blogroll on my personal site, saving huge space with a more interesting, dynamic display of my favorite feeds live. I also add it to the end of interviews I do with people, providing a preview of an OPML file containing their feeds and other related feeds. Mathew Ingram of Toronto's Globe and Mail uses Grazr on his personal blog to preview the writings of participants in this month's conference in Canada about Web 2.0, Mesh. Lots of potential here, and I'm glad to see the project is getting support. Hopefully this won't be another cool tool that dies on the vine.

Here's an example of a Grazr implementation. Click around inside it, the left border will move you up a level.

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Share your OMPL file

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-08T12:07:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS, OPML

Dave Winer launched a neat looking new online community today for people to upload and share their OPML files, or list of RSS feeds they are subscribed to. There's a top 100 list (so far this blog is #70, thanks!) so you can see what other geeks like to read. There appears to be a recommendation engine, feed/file management and goodness knows what else. I think it looks great. Sharing OPML files is something I've been thinking about for awhile. Some times I fantasize about starting a blog just for sharing OPML files of my favorite feeds on a wide variety of topics.

Neat things here: you can see who subscribes to any given RSS feed and how many feeds they are subscribed to. Todd Cochrane is nuts (1000+ feeds), but Danny Ayers is nutser (2000+). There's some folks who know how to not get overwhelmed by feeds.

One word of caution: if you have, say, a puppy kicking fetish and you've subscribed to a search feed for your name plus the words "kicks puppies" (just to check if anyone knows) then you might want to take that feed out of the OPML file you share on Winer's site. Or maybe not, kicking puppies is nothing to be ashamed of - right? Right?

I've made a post off-site on seven ways you can use Share Your OPML.

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Today is RSS appreciation day

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-01T15:58:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS

Per Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion, today has been taken up as RSS appreciation day. Rubel puts together three steps to get started reading feeds. My take on it will be a bit different:

I suggest using Newsgator, it's my favorite and I think that anyone who really can use RSS will use RSS quickly and will want a fully functional feed reader. Some time ago I set up a demonstration account at Newsgator.com that you can log into if you've never seen it before. User name is marshalldemo and password is welcome.
One downside to Newsgator is that it doesn't come with an autodiscover, one-click button you can put on your browser to subscribe to feeds. You can find one, though, at blummy.com - a great little service I always recommend.
I also recommend checking out a couple of tools that enable you to get faster updates from the most important feeds you are interested in: immedi.at and zaptxt.com
I've also got a long introduction to how I typically teach people to read feeds over on my personal blog, as well as a simple demonstration of how you can combine search, rss and rss-to-HTML to create an automated newswire on your site - in this case news about surveys concerning today's pro-immigration strike and boycot.

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Blogdigger RSS adverts seek feedback

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-27T13:39:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS

It's been around awhile, but advertising in RSS feeds is set to expand greatly over the next few months. Feedburner is making a big push. I just found an ad in a Blogdigger feed that I found interesting enough to share here.

I'm subscribed to a Blogdigger search for my name and in the feed a minute ago there was an item that was just an advertisement. It was for OurMedia, which is very cool (even if only marginally functional), and that's contextual to my work in the both the nonprofit and social software sector. It was strange to see a whole item as an ad, it took me a minute to stop looking for my search term in the item. There's a link at the end for feedback on the advertising, which is great! I took some screen caps that you can find along with more thoughts after the jump.

So there's the ad. Not as subtle as I might like, but as long as I know they are coming, they don't come too often and they are as contextual to my search as possible - then go ahead and make your money Blogdigger. For goodness sake, we all have to make a living!

Here's the feedback page:

I love that kind of communication. Go Blogdigger! The one thing that's strange is that clicking any of the above links takes me away from this page! So I'd better have strong opinions about one of these questions and not the others. Oops.

On a related note, if this Monday's episode of For Immediate Release catches your eye because of the discussion of RSS advertising - don't bother. Unlike most of their shows, this one is a real stinker. (Sorry!) For much more informed discussion of RSS advertising and more, check out Rok Hrastnik's MarketingStudies.net

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Castrol Motor Oil promotes podcasts in Feedburner ads

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-21T16:23:00+00:00

Filed under: podcasting, RSS

Heather Green has a short post about Castrol Motor Oil's podcast on car racing and motor oil and the way they promoted it by buying ads in Feedburner's RSS feeds. Someday this kind of thing is going to be old news - but these days it's still exciting. I love it when non-tech organizations make use of new communication technologies. So much for this stuff being meaningful only to coffee-house lurkers with wispy beards and sweaters, huh? I know that's the type I relate to best, and Green must too since she spelled the popular oil company's name 3 different ways in a one paragraph story! :)

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Newsweek implements private label RSS reader

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-13T15:31:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS, aggregators

I have a strong preference for Newsgator over Bloglines so I'm very happy to read about their new partnership with Newsweek. Newsweek readers can now use a free web based RSS reader wrapped in Newsweek branding and pre-seeded with Newsweek feeds. There are a lot of Newsweek feeds to chose from, but they don't overload you at first. It's really a beautiful system, I think it's one of the best examples of old media embracing Web 2.0. Newsweek is acting as a facilitator for personalized news consumption that's as open ended as RSS.

As the press release said:
"Adding RSS aggregation to Newsweek.com brings a new dimension of customization to our site," said Kevin Stuart, audience development manager of Newsweek.com. "The NewsGator Hosted Solution allowed us to customize the offering based on criteria that was important to us, and gives us great flexibility to rapidly augment, modify, or edit the content we make available to our users."

One question I have after looking at the example account is wether readers are able to import and export their subscriptions by OPML. I don't see that they are, and the way that Newsgator supports OPML is one of it's best traits. Gotta have that.

Newsweek is so cool in fact, that a month ago today they announced that they are using Feedburner to manage all their feeds. Silly as it might sound, that's hip enough to convince me to renew my print subscription.

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Management by Feeds?

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-11T16:56:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS

I was asked to write a guest post today over at The Big Act, the company blog of a neat web services provider for small businesses called SproutIt, on a topic they call Management by Feeds. In other words, using RSS to keep track of your team and work. I love questions like that. I wrote a long post focusing on obstacles I see before this otherwise very promising approach would seem viable to me.

Those were:

The number and sources of feeds to be watched are so dynamic and unpredictable that synchronizing across a team adds a whole new layer of complexity. Maybe dynamic OPML reading lists will help with this.
A huge percentage of end-users are cannot be relied on to contribute to decision making processes based on RSS. Too many people are still unfamiliar with the medium, and browser/email support for RSS isn't helping the situation.

The full article is at Two Obstacles to Management by Feeds.

The company, Sproutit, is quite interesting as well. One of the most noteworthy things they offer is an email program that learns to recognize common types of emails you receive and recommend past emails you've sent in response. Sounds pretty cool to me.

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Newsgator Enterprise to hold weekly webinar demos

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-30T14:42:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS

I love Newsgator Online and am consistently impressed by what the company in general comes up with. No exception here: the Newsgator Enterprise Server team is going to start offering weekly webinars to demo the product and answer questions. Do you know anyone else bridging the consumer/enterprise gap that is taking a step like this? I don't, but I think it's a great idea.

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Filter an OPML file for keywords and IM me with results? It's on its way!

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-30T13:08:00+00:00

Filed under: email, IM, RSS, OPML, reputation

I couldn't be more excited about the work being done over at ZapTXT, a great service that filters your selected RSS feeds for keywords and will send you an IM, email or SMS whenever new results appear. Now the service is answering the call of users who want to filter multiple RSS feeds bundled into an OPML file all for the same query without having to repeat set-up for each feed filtered. No idea when that feature will be available, but that's what the good folks at ZapTXT are working on.

Will this pull them ahead of competitors in the space like immedi.at and Rasasa? We'll see!

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Microsoft and RSS authentication: an email exchange

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-29T16:58:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS

Charlie Moon over at the Moonwatcher blog, a good source of info about enterprise RSS, has exchanged emails with Microsoft RSS Team senior program manager Sean Lyndersay concerning Microsoft's decision not to support many forms of authentication (password protection) of RSS feeds in IE 7 or the next version of Outlook.

As Moon points out, this has the potential to really dampen the impact that the company's support of RSS could have on adoption. Enterprise RSS is going to be complicated for sure. Check out the email exchange, though, the details are interesting.

Lyndersay summarizes his response like this:

We don't support storing different credentials for different feeds.
We do support NTLM/Kerberos pass-through for using the users logged-in credentials
We do support SSL-encrypted feeds
We recommend using personalized feeds, where possible.

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FeedRinse filters RSS feeds

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-27T17:37:00+00:00

Filed under: RSS, attention

FeedRinse is a new service that lets you set up keyword, author or tag based filters for RSS feeds. It plays nicely with OPML too. Very nice UI, good company blog, nice features, fair pricing for premium service: I feel good about FeedRinse. The bookmarklet doesn't seem to work for me, but everything else does. I'm told that this is processor intensive stuff, so good for them taking it on. A very nice feature that we don't have to hack and work around to make happen any more. I'll be subscribing.

People say they are going to be acquired soon, I think that's just a sign of enthusiasm for the service. I'll add this to my list of services I think Feedburner ought to acquire, but I won't be betting on it.

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Yahoo! moving to integrate RSS with email

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-21T11:16:00+00:00

Filed under: email, RSS

Yahoo! email Beta in a handful of countries, excluding the US and most recently including Canada, now includes a number of interesting new features. (Correction: I learned in comments below that Yahoo was offering RSS in its email system for US users some time ago.) Drag and drop email organization sounds more AJAXian than GMail! Perhaps most important, though, is the baked in support for RSS. MyYahoo! has already had huge success in introducing new users to RSS (many of whom don't know that's what they are using - not that that's a real big deal) and I can only presume that YahooMail integration of RSS has even greater potential. The company's press release describes its leverage of syndication in a way that sounds more sophisticated than the relatively anemic implementation in MyYahoo. Anyone in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, France or Korea care to comment here on how seriously a Yahoo Mail user can use RSS?

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