Rss

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

RSS Graphic Under Creative Commons License

In March, when I wanted to illustrate why web publishers should support the common feed icon, I put together a graphic showing the ways RSS and Atom feeds have been identified on the web. I just received another media request to use this graphic in a publication, so I'm releasing it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. For publications that can't use a Creative Commons license, send requests in email. ... (read more)

2006/12/11

Feed Autodiscovery Wiki Launched

Robert Sayre has created a Feed Autodiscovery reference that's growing more useful by the minute. He took the original document created by the RSS Advisory Board, placed it on a brand-new wiki, and is encouraging submissions from the public to cover autodiscovery for all syndication formats. One way people can help is to add software they use to the supporting products section if it supports feed autodiscovery. I like seeing a Creative Commons-licensed document I worked on put to use elsewhere, ... (read more)

2006/12/01

Read More Entries