Very cool! I just read on Library Stuff that you can now use My Yahoo as an RSS news aggregator.

If you’re already a member, click on the following link to add the “blog” module.

• Add the Blog Module

Next, click on the [edit] button to add some RSS feeds.

Consume and enjoy.

Ram Duraikannu has just emailed me about his new service that converts (almost) any craigslist mailing list into an RSS 2.0 feed.

For example, the following feed is of Bikes for sale in the New York Metro Area:

http://www.rightho.com/craigs.cgi?url=http://newyork.craigslist.org/bik/

Nice work Ram!

Great quotes from Chad Dickerson’s latest InfoWorld column, RSS Killed the Infoglut Star
:

“…explaining to the uninitiated why RSS newsreaders are so compelling can be a little frustrating. There’s a certain jene sais quoi about RSS that reminds me of how it felt to describe the Web to people who hadn’t yet experienced it…

I hear you!

And then Chad goes on to say…

All I know is that I can’t go back to my old inefficient ways of consuming information. As the Buggles sang in the first MTV video: “We can’t rewind / We’ve gone too far.” And that’s a good thing.

So, how long before someone writes a parody? Shall we invoke the LazyWeb?

There’s a lively discussion on diveintomark about the road map for a new syndication format (i.e. a new version or RSS), which is in-and-of-itself a discussion of sorts on Sam Ruby’s Wiki currently known as Pie, but that name may change.

Wow!

I can hardly formulate a coherent opinion at the moment, let alone try to evangelize RSS to business associates and colleagues — as Tim Bray pointed out recently

I sure hope this settles down soon, because on the plus side all the talk seems to be generating quite a buzz around the potential of RSS.

I know I’m in it for the long-haul, I just hope businesses don’t get too put off by all the “chatter”.

The folks over at Blogstreet have released an RSS-to-IMAP service called Info Aggregator, which is pretty slick. (link via Blogroots)

However, it’s unlikely that I’ll be moving from NewsGator even though using the IMAP protocol does provide some alternative client options as well as remote capabilities.

The fact is I’m always in Outlook and my experience using IMAP has never been stellar.

I’ll certainly give it a try though.

BTW, I just tried Blogstreet’s RSS Generator and it works very well!

In fact, I’m now subscribed to an RSS feed for NextDraft, which you can get here.

Jeremy Zawodny spills the beans about Yahoo’s Buzz (search) indices now being available via RSS, which is very cool indeed.

It would also be cool to see Google’s Zeitgeist rankings to be available in RSS as well. Ideally with a greater update frequency.

Greg Reinacker talks about companies using RSS feeds to market products instead of opt-in lists and/or the dreaded spam…

“If I could subscribe to a RSS feed that’s personalized for me, containing advertisements and offers of stuff I might actually be interested in, based on information I’ve given, I’d be all over it. Not only would I read it, but I might even buy stuff from it. And it’s all under my control - if I decide I’m no longer interested, I just remove my subscription.”

I certainly agree with what Greg is saying. In fact, I’m subscribed to a number of “product-based” feed in NewsGator right now…

Like for example MoreStuff4Less, Sean Nolan’s Amazon API to RSS feed, and Daniel Bishop’s mod of the eBay-2-RSS script I posted about the other day.

Of course NewsGator makes all this easy to manage and puts the information where it’s most relevant to me … in Outlook.

Nice! Just enter an eBay search phrase and this little script will turn the results into an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite news aggregator

The code is based on this script from waxy.org (if you’d like to run it on our own server)

For some additional RSS goodies and more check out Fagan Finder’s using RSS page

I’ve been intrigued by the promise of RDF and followed the history from Guha’s MCF HotSauce application, through Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web

Although, like Tim Bray, I too have been looking for the RDF killer App. At one time I even had aspirations of what it could be.

It’s been a long time coming for RDF and as Tim rightly puts it, “… the killer [RDF] app that would make you want to View Source hasn’t arrived.”

However, I do think there are some very interesting applications and trends that have been emerging recently, like for example:

• Rob McCool and Ramanathan V. Guha’s TAP project
• Semantic Blogging @ HP
• Trusted Blog Search Tool
• The ‘friend of a friend’ project: FOAF

And I’m sure, many-many others that I’m either forgetting or I don’t know about (feel free to chime in with links).

Yet perhaps Tim Bray’s RDF challenge may inspire another round of apps that are indeed “killer”

Tim Bray’s RDF challenge: “To the first person or organization that presents me with an RDF-based app that I actually want to use on a regular basis (at least once per day), and which has the potential to spread virally, I hereby promise to sign over the domain name RDF.net…”

I sure hope so!

Via Jon Udell I’m happy to see that the PR Industry is starting to preach the value of blogging and the versatility of RSS.

For example, Phil Gomes writes in MediaMap’s ExperPR article:

“Today, companies — and, by extension, the agencies that represent them — can publish their corporate communications content in their online press rooms using RSS-supported, weblog-rooted principles. While perhaps not in widespread use now, the day will come when the online location of a company’s RSS feed will be just as much of a PR pro’s email signature file as his or her email address, homepage, and phone number.”

However, I find it a little ironic that MediaMap hasn’t yet started to pratice what Phil is describing given the fact that there is no RSS feed or blog available for the ExpertPR articles.