Rss

Switching to FeedBurner Without Handing Over Subscribers

I recently began using FeedBurner to publish the RSS feeds for five web sites, relying on it to provide usage stats, check regularly for errors, and make the feeds more useful. Since the service was acquired by Google, there's been some concern among bloggers about whether it's a good idea to trust a third party to publish your feeds. Though FeedBurner exec Eric Lunt is one of my homies on the RSS Advisory Board and I've had good experiences with the company, I think the caution is well-placed ... (read more)

2007/08/08

Robert Scoble and the RSS Advisory Board

On Sunday, Robert Scoble accused the RSS Advisory Board of being a plot by large companies to steal RSS 2.0: But, what really is cooking here is that RSS has been given (and if you listen to Dave Winer, stolen) to big companies to control. How so? Well, the RSS Advisory board, which includes members from Cisco, Yahoo, Netscape, FeedBurner (er, Google), Microsoft, and Bloglines and this new unofficial board +is+ changing the RSS spec all the time (they are now up to version 2.0.9). Dave Winer, ... (read more)

2007/07/23

Tim Bray: RSS 'Twice as Good' as Atom

Tim Bray, one of the creators of both XML and Atom, has some fun at the expense of the RSS Advisory Board: Yep, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like there's trouble on the horizon. On the RFC4287 syndication-format front, it may have been stable since 2005 and widely deployed, but watch out, there's a new version of RSS 2.0! (2.0.9, to be precise). RSS 2.0 is sort of RFC4287's main competition, and if there are two different specs, I guess that must mean it's twice as good. RSS 2.0 is clearly ... (read more)

2007/06/16

RSS Specification (Version 2.0.9) Published

The proposal to revise the RSS specification has passed 5-1 with RSS Advisory Board members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Christopher Finke, Randy Charles Morin and Paul Querna voting in favor, Eric Lunt voting against and members James Holderness, Meg Hourihan, Jenny Levine and Jason Shellen abstaining. The Extending RSS section of the specification has been clarified with the addition of the words "and attributes" twice in the following sentence: A RSS feed may contain elements and ... (read more)

2007/06/06

Buying a Dot-Com Domain for the RSS Board

I acquired the domain name rssboard.com this past weekend for the RSS Advisory Board, which publishes its site at an .org domain. The owner put the domain up for sale on Sedo for $250, which was a reasonable expense to avoid losing type-in visitors who think the site address ends in .com. Sedo handled the payment escrow and domain transfer process pretty well, calling me on the phone several times to help move things along. From start to finish, it took 16 days. The board operates with a $0 ... (read more)

2007/06/04

Clarifying the RSS 2.0 Specification

I voted for the proposal to clarify the RSS 2.0 specification this morning. I think it's the proper interpretation of what the spec means regarding namespace support, and the board's the proper place to address it. This is, of course, a controversial position. I have never found a non-controversial position involving RSS, other than "escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed." The political debate between ... (read more)

2007/05/29

Dave Winer and the RSS Advisory Board

The current proposal to clarify the RSS 2.0 specification has drawn a response from Dave Winer: Every so often I get an email asking what's up with the RSS Advisory Board. Here's what I thought in May 2004: "This group is not a standards organization. It does not own RSS, or the spec, it has no more or less authority than any other group of people who wish to promote RSS." Today I think it's even less than that. It basically stopped functioning later in 2004. The people involved went on to do ... (read more)

2007/05/24

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

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