I just wanted to say congratulations to Greg!

“DENVER, CO – June 23, 2004 – NewsGator Technologies, Inc., a leading developer of content aggregation tools and services, announced today that it has closed a round of funding with Mobius Venture Capital.”

I’ve been evangelizing NewsGator since I started using the early betas back January 2003. Keep up the great work!

Congrats to Greg Reinacker! His newly released NewsGator Media Center Edition is a proof of concept for things to come.

Specifically with the syndication of multimedia content via RSS enclosures.

However, the combination of RSS and PVR’s is not new. For example, the MythNews module for MythTV is actually an RSS aggregator for the open source homebrew PVR project, but MythNews does not support RSS enclosures (Yet! [wishful thinking]).

Personally, I think what Greg is doing in NewsGator MCE along with what Andrew Grumet is doing with RSSTV will have broader social impacts on the distribution of digital content.

For a little over a year I have been using a modified version of Julian Bond’s Google News to RSS script to pull news searches into my aggregator. I even had it pulling news feeds into a corporate intranet until the feed was deemed too “unfiltered” for corporate consumption.

If Google’s API included news (and other services such as Froogle, Groups and even Images), I, and I’m sure many-many others, would switch to the sanctioned API service in a heartbeat! Until that time, I’ll likely still use the script.

BTW, If you’ve been annoyed as I have with ./‘s half-hearted RSS feed, which only includes a brief summary of each post and none of the threads, then you’ll be keen on AlterSlash‘s full post Slashdot RSS feed that includes high-karma comments for each post.

Nice!

Perhaps I’m late to mention this because I missed the local news feature the first time I looked at Topix, but thanks to Tim Bray’s recent comments, I took another look at Topix’s beta targeted news service and to my delight they also have a RSS “feed for every ZIP code in the US, a feed for every public company, a feed for every sports team, a feed for every movie star, band and musician…and more” (via Rich Skrenta Blog)

Ray Matthews of Utah State Library Division has published an excellent tutorial on the various methods for searching RSS feeds. I think the best part is the comprehensive list of RSS-related search engines and tools.

The Well-Formed Web has made available a
Google2Atom web service that will generate an Atom feed from a Google search query

However, you’ll need your Google API key to generate the feed.

Yes, indeed it’s true yourmom.com now has her very own set of RSS feeds!

I’m sure you’ll sleep better with this wonderful news. In fact, there’s more! Your mom even comes in Atom 0.1 format — thanks to FeedCreator class v1.3

• New Joke Updates: RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.1
• Most Emailed Jokes: RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.1
• Most Highly Rated Jokes: RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.1

Enjoy :-)

Heh, RobotPolishers’ has created RSS feeds of MTA’s services updates for the NYC Subway over at Disorient Express:

“So out of frustration, sheer geekiness and a desire to toy around with RSS, I decided to put together some feeds of the MTAs service updates, based on a program scanning their own weekly website updates.”

I’ve actually been thinking of cobbling together a similar service that I could use to aggregate all of my various POP3 and Web-based email accounts as RSS feeds, which I could then read via NewsGator in Outlook.

I know- I know this sounds convoluted, but this idea was basically spurred because POP3, IMAP and many web-based mail services have been blocked via the corporate firewall here where I work, which has been instituted because of the rash email-based worms and of course the abundance of spam.

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.

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.

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!

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.”

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.”

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 proÂ’s email signature file as his or her email address, homepage, and phone number.”

Scott Johnson’s Roogle RSS Search Engine is starting to fillout nicely. (via Jeremy Zawodny)

Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft posted a a C# .Net News Aggregator on MSDN.

“The application utilizes XPath, XSLT, XML Schema, the DOM, and XML Serialization in the .NET Framework.” (via Don’s Spoutlet)

Julian Bond has a neat little PHP hack that will turn any Google News query into an RSS feed. I’m having a few encoding issues on my server, but for the most part it works well! Thanks Julian!

Update: I made a modfication to Julian’s hack and posted it here

I added a RSS 2.0 feed to hatch.org. The feed also includes a <comments> element for those aggregators that support it (like NG ;-)

Greg Reinacker says that an Outlook News Aggregator will “…possibly coming soon to a weblog near you.”

I say, Cool! However, I kind of have this functionality already using Aaron’s RSS to Email Aggregator, which BTW was just reviewed on OSDir.

Note to self: Clean up and post mods to the script.

Neat idea: “nntp//rss — Bridging the worlds of NNTP clients and RSS feeds, nntp//rss is an
application that will enable you to use your existing favorite NNTP newsreader
to read your [RSS] information channels.”

a slashdot thread and o’reilly article on my.netscape.com removal of the RSS 0.91 DTD, which broke many sites validating the XML of RSS feeds.