RMail Feeds RSS to 20,000 Email Users

The path Randy Charles Morin is taking with RMail, a service for reading RSS feeds by e-mail, is beginning to remind me of how Joshua Schacter's hobby project, del.icio.us, was adopted by so many people that it mushroomed into his full-time gig and was acquired by Yahoo six months later. Users are joining RMail at such a fast clip that Morin finally realized there's commercial potential in the idea.

With absolutely no Web 2.0 fanfare and a web design that's optimized for Internet Explorer 3.0, RMail has grown to 20,000 users who receive 30,000 emails a day, and he told the Canadian tech site Maple Leaf 2.0 that 15,000 people joined in the past 90 days.

I never really considered Rmail a product when I wrote it. It was a solution to my own pain. But in the last three to six months, I've been gaining users at an increasing rate as RSS becomes mainstream and other RSS to email services fail to deliver. In fact, I didn't even consider Rmail worthy of funding until I heard that FeedBlitz got funding for doing nothing less than what Rmail has been doing for a year.

I signed up today to try it out. If you'd like to test RMail with a feed that updates frequently throughout the day, here's a subscribe box for the Drudge Retort:

Step one in Morin's business plan is to secure enough funding to work full-time on the site. He left off Step 5: "Buy the Toronto Maple Leafs and bring the Stanley Cup back to Canada where it belongs."

Rss · Email · Startups · 2006/08/15 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Steve Gillmor's Got My Attention

Steve Gillmor parted company with ZDNet and shut down his InfoRouter blog a few weeks ago, stating afterward on his personal blog that there were "real issues, some of which I can't discuss except by indirection."

I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I've come to appreciate Gillmor's bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper.

Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking the Cartel, but by peeling the layers of the emergent user in control of point to point content. As I told Furrier last night, tech is the new rock n roll. The big budget production is not the target, nor is user generated content. Everybody except the Gang make the mistake of voting at one end or the other of this continuum. In fact, PROFESSIONALLY rendered user-controlled content is the sweet spot. It's not amateur hour, it's applying low-barrier technology and rapid development methodology to the real competition: soap operas. ... We're funding this effort by delivering return on investment (datapoints) to users and incenting them away from silos and towards the pool.

Please don't ask me what that means.

Gillmor's a tech journalist turned tech blogger turned tech evangelist, pushing the concept of attention, which I can't explain because it doesn't hold mine. Lately, he's been baiting current and former colleagues into arguments regarding his work performance.

When Gillmor claimed that the Gillmor Gang tech podcast had been cancelled by Sirius Radio, Adam Curry responded that it was demoted from regular airing because of the show's lack of updates.

If you can demonstrate consistent, timely delivery of the Gillmor Gang, it will be welcomed with open arms into Sirius rotation. ... Give the Audience the respect it deserves.

When Gillmor wrote that he was fired from his eWeek blog in 2004 because "I just didn't give a damn what some online pinhead in the San Francisco office had to say about what journalism was all about," his former editor Matthew Rothenberg replied that the real disagreement was over his lack of updates.

We didn't burn out on you based on page views, we burned out on you because you weren't actually posting much of anything! I could pay a high-school kid or my mom or a fire hydrant not to post -- and pay them a lot less than we were shelling out to you based (ironically or not) on your past tech bona fides working for the mainstream media you affect to disdain.

I don't know what's going on here, but as a writer myself, I wouldn't want to get into public fights with former editors regarding busted deadlines (thank God I've never missed one). One of Gillmor's final InfoRouter posts stated that he recently quit Paxil and lost a beloved 13-year old family dog, both of which might make bridge-burning seem like a better idea than it is.

Tech · Journalism · 2006/08/14 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

RSS 2.0 Specification (version 2.0.8) Published

The RSS Advisory Board proposal to revise the RSS specification has passed 7-0 with members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Loïc Le Meur, Jenny Levine, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin and Greg Smith voting in favor.

The specification has been edited to reflect http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification as the document's permanent URL and RSS-Public as the mailing list where users should post RSS-related questions and comments. No other changes were made.

All edits to the specification are logged. This revision of the document has the version number 2.0.8.

Rss · 2006/08/12 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Flying Under Security Level Red

Arriving for a flight out of Boston's Logan Airport at 4:30 a.m., Doc Searls caught the leading edge of the London terror story:

Something bad happened (they won't tell us), and now the TSA won't let you carry any liquids, gels, pastes or fluids of any kind (pens?) through security checkpoints. Gotta check your medicines, sunblock, water bottels, whatever. This directive went down this morning (it's 4:30am here at Logan in Boston) and has caused a huge backup at the ticket counters and the security checkpoints. ...

Source: "This is the real deal."

What are they not saying? Gives me the creeps.

The Department of Homeland Security declared the highest possible threat level on "flights originating in the United Kingdom bound for the United States," which is the first time the terror alert swatch has gone red.

I thought they were saving red for another horrific day like 9/11, when there's such a heightened state of emergency that planes are grounded, government officials head for safety, people scramble to account for loved ones and TV goes 24/7 terror.

Politics · 2006/08/10 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

Most Major U.S. Papers Offer RSS Feeds

The Bivings Group has issued a study on RSS, podcast and blog adoption at the top 100 American newspapers:

• 76 of the newspapers offer RSS feeds
• 0 of those feeds contain the full text of articles
• 0 of the feeds contain ads
• 31 offer podcasts
• 80 offer reporter blogs
• 19 publish reader comments
• 77 don't require registration

I'd love to have the study's list of papers that offer RSS and don't require registration, because they're the best sources for news articles to pass along on blogs like the Drudge Retort. I hate sending readers to media sites that require registration.

Three no-registration, feed-publishing papers I read regularly: the Cincinnati Enquirer, Houston Chronicle and in Canada, the Toronto Star.

Rss · Podcasting · 2006/08/07 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Why Lieberman Will Lose Tuesday's Primary

Joe Lieberman in December:

It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril,

Joe Lieberman yesterday:

What I don't think is right, as I've said over and over again, are many of the Bush administration's decisions regarding the conduct of the war. The fact is I have openly and clearly disagreed with and criticized the president. ...

I not only respect your right to disagree or question the president or anyone else -- including me -- I value your right to disagree.

Though I eagerly supported his vice presidential candidacy in 2000, I won't miss Sen. Lieberman when he loses Tuesday's Connecticut primary and is defeated in the general election (or drops out beforehand).

Lieberman lost the primary when he said he'd run as an independent. This announcement legitimized the possibility he'd be defeated by challenger Ned Lamont, showed disloyalty to his party and indicated he's a sore loser. This gave his opponent all of the joementum, and Lieberman's been in free fall ever since.

I keep reading how angry Lieberman has been over Lamont's opposition, which demonstrates one of the reasons he's in such trouble. A three-term senator with all the advantages of incumbency, he can't get over the fact that this election wasn't just handed to him.

Politics · 2006/08/07 · 29 COMMENTS · Link

U.S. Troops Secured Baghdad Rally for Hezbollah

U.S. troops provided some of the security for the rally in Baghdad today where thousands of Iraqi Shiites demonstrated for Hezbollah:

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr summoned his followers around the country to attend a mass rally today in the city's Sadr City district in support of the Shiite militants of Hezbollah battling Israeli troops in southern Lebanon.

Iraqi government television said the Defense Ministry had approved the demonstration, a sign of the public anger over Israel's offensive in Lebanon and of al-Sadr's stature as a major player in Iraqi politics.

Crowds of young men began arriving in eastern Baghdad's Sadr City late Thursday and were housed in mosques and Shiite community centers. U.S. Army vehicles guarded approaches to the slum to prevent clashes between Shiite and Sunni extremists.

Dressed in white shrouds to indicate their willingness to die for the cause, demonstrators waved Hezbollah flags and chanted "death to Israel" and "death to America":

"I consider my participation in this rally a religious duty. I am proud to join this crowd and I am ready to die for the sake of Lebanon," said Khazim al-Ibadi, 40, a government employee from Hillah.

Al-Sadr followers painted U.S. and Israeli flags on the main road leading to the rally site, and demonstrators stepped on them with relish. Alongside the painted flags was written: "These are the terrorists."

So the U.S. is simultaneously supplying bombs to Israel for use against Hezbollah; encouraging a ceasefire to stop the bombing; working with Sunni Arab states who fear a Shiite alliance across Iran, Iraq and Lebanon; propping up a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government; and protecting Iraqis eager to join Hezbollah and wipe Israel off the map.

No matter which side you've taken in the Middle East, America is on your side.

Politics · 2006/08/04 · 27 COMMENTS · Link

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