Rss

Clarifying Namespace Support in RSS 2.0

Randy Charles Morin has proposed the addition of four words to the RSS 2.0 specification (emphasis added): In the section Extending RSS, we propose that the following sentence be changed: "A RSS feed may contain elements not described on this page, only if those elements are defined in a namespace." It should be revised to read as follows: "A RSS feed may contain elements and attributes not described on this page, only if those elements and attributes are defined in a namespace." This proposal ... (read more)

2007/05/22

Linking to the RSS 2.0 Specification

As chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, I've been called into two discussions recently about where people should link when referring to RSS 2.0. There are two leading contenders: the RSS 2.0 specification published by the board and an older copy archived by Dave Winer. The board's web site moved off Harvard's server in January 2006 to our own domain, rssboard.org. We've published the RSS 2.0 specification since 2003 and the current version of the document will always have the permanent URL ... (read more)

2007/05/15

NBC Buys RSS-to-Email Service R-Mail

The largest email-based RSS service was sold to NBC Universal this week, an event that's curiously absent from the tech press. Randy Charles Morin's R-Mail was purchased by the entertainment network for an undisclosed amount. The service has 50,000 users, 100,000 subscriptions and sends out more than 50,000 e-mails per day, according to DMW Daily, though I suspect a zero's missing from the last figure. When I wrote about R-Mail last August, it had 20,000 users. R-Mail makes it possible to ... (read more)

2007/04/27

Chris Finke Joins RSS Advisory Board

Chris Finke, a senior engineer at Netscape, has joined the RSS Advisory Board. Finke's a Netscape.Com and Netscape 9 browser developer as well as the creator of the Mozilla Firefox extensions RSS Ticker and OPML Support. Netscape played a formative role in the development of RSS, publishing the first RSS specification in 1999 and spurring adoption by encouraging publishers to create feeds for the first aggregator -- the recently relaunched My.Netscape. Netscape published RSS 0.90, the common ... (read more)

2007/03/12

Searching for Ways to Move Up in Google

A year ago the RSS Advisory Board moved to its own domain, losing all Google juice associated with its old site. Because the search term RSS is enormously popular, we've found it difficult to attract search traffic and build a decent Google pagerank. It took nearly a year to crack the top 100 for that term on Google; we're currently up to the 80s. I've been using this experience to learn the arcane art of search engine optimization (SEO). The first SEO technique I undertook to make Google happy ... (read more)

2007/02/06

Re-Elect Rogers and Rogers Rabbit

I've secured my first endorsement for RSS Advisory Board chair: it's like running for president of your own imaginary treehouse. with rabbits. "hello, my name is rogers, and this is my rabbit running mate, rogers. we're running for imaginary treehouse president on the rogers-and-rogers-rabbit ticket." ... (read more)

2007/02/03

Running for Chair of the RSS Advisory Board

I announced today that I'm interested in continuing for the next two-year term as chair of the RSS Advisory Board, the group that publishes the RSS 2.0 specification and helps foster interop on issues such as RSS autodiscovery and the common feed icon. The board went public one year ago with eight new members, publishing our charter and conducting all votes on a public mailing list. Previously, we operated in private and were accorded little credibility -- when I joined the board in 2004 at ... (read more)

2007/02/02

Microsoft Seeks Patent on RSS Platform

Don McArthur passes along some huge news in the syndication world -- Microsoft filed for a patent today on the Windows RSS Platform, a common feed database and API that can be used by other applications to read, write and store RSS and Atom feeds: The web content syndication platform ... can be utilized to manage, organize and make available for consumption content that is acquired from the Internet. The platform can acquire and organize web content, and make such content available for ... (read more)

2006/12/21

Bloglines Fixes Atom 1.0 Display Bug

Bloglines has fixed the glitch that was causing Workbench's Atom 1.0 feed to display incorrectly, as a feed preview demonstrates. I reported the bug to them in e-mail last week and was told they forwarded it to the "appropriate technical department." I never figured out any possible cause of the error, but the fix is another sign that Bloglines is a lot more actively maintained today than it was a year ago. ... (read more)

2006/12/13

Proposing a New Name for RSS 1.0

Whenever you talk about syndication, you have to deal with confusion regarding the multiple meanings of the term RSS. RSS refers to the format Really Simple Syndication, also known as RSS 2.0. RSS refers to the format RDF Site Summary, also known as RSS 1.0. RSS refers collectively to all syndication feeds, whether they're in RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or Atom format. I floated a proposal to the RSS-DEV Working Group last night to rename RSS 1.0 as RSS-RDF (RSS for the Resource Description Framework). ... (read more)

2006/12/12

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