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 instance, suppose Netflix’s planned video-on-demand service offered an RSS feed with enclosures to its subscribers?
Hypothetically, I can imagine a “Top Rated” feed from Netflix, which is comprised of movies that have been highly rated by other Netflix users. NewsGator users’ would simply subscribe to the feed and receive a fresh supply of choice content.
Indeed, this starts to get into the territory Andrew is paving with RSSTV, which is why I think the synergies of multimedia content and syndication technologies are starting to produce some interesting results.
Soon, changing channels on your TV will be akin to flipping through syndication feeds in your aggregator. Perhaps we’re already there…
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.
Frankly, like Julian, I’m surprised that Google hasn’t extended its API to include News and other services.
Julian Bond: “I shouldn’t really complain as I’m fairly clearly breaking their terms. However, I’m getting increasingly fed up that they don’t have an XML (RSS or Atom) output from their search results. It’s also become pretty disappointing that their SOAP API still only covers the main search engine and hasn’t been extended to support the other parts of Google.”
Clearly there’s demand as this hubbub demonstrates. Come’on ‘G’ cease with the desist letters and extend your API!
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)
Subscribed! (Well, not to all of them ;-)
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
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.”
Turn any mailing list into an RSS feed by using Tom Dyson’s clever little Mailbucket.org service.
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.
However, not that I want to counter corporate policy; I was thinking that this would be niche service for some (like me!)
Of course it would be ideal to include spam and virus filtering, but I’m getting a head of myself. Although, I believe most of what’s required to do this is already out there in some for or another (e.g. Zoë). Or perhaps it’s just a simple add-on to one of the many OSS Web-based Mail clients?
I think it’s worth more investigation…
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.
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.