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.