Yahoo! has RSS-enabled their news search (via Micro Persuasion).
Category: Syndication
OPML for Syndic8 categories
At Gnomedex, I had a chance to talk with Jeff Barr of Syndic8, and one of the things we discussed was enabling OPML listings for any Syndic8 category.
I’m happy to report that while I was away last week, Jeff was hard at work developing this feature. Now each category – and subcategory – at Syndic8 has its own OPML file. If you visit Syndic8’s DMOZ category list, you’ll find OPML links beneath each category. Just right-click on any OPML link, choose “Copy Shortcut,” then press Shift+Ctrl+N to display the new channel group dialog. From there you can create a new FeedDemon group from the OPML file.
Tip: Many of the top-level categories are empty, so you’ll need to either drill down to a specific sub-category or use the “OPML – This Category and Child Categories” link to avoid getting a blank OPML.
FeedForAll Beta
Recently several FeedDemon customers have asked for recommendations for RSS authoring tools, so I thought I’d plug the one from my friends at NotePage, Inc. FeedForAll is a new RSS feed creation, editing and publishing tool which is currently in beta, and they’re offering a discount on the final release to beta testers. If you’re looking for such a tool, give FeedForAll a try.
GMail and FeedDemon, Part II
I recently described how to subscribe to your GMail inbox in FeedDemon, and apparently this is a popular feature. However, if you have more than one GMail account, you may find it tricky to subscribe to both since only a single login is supported.
Luckily, there is a workaround for this – just include your login in the feed URL, using this format:
https://username:password@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom/
Update: I originally reported that this method shouldn’t be used when subscribing to your GMail feed in Bloglines, but this was a false alarm. My apologies for jumping the gun!
Update 2: As recommended in the comments, I’ve changed the URL from http to https.
RSS: Privacy and Trust
Given that RSS is primarily a one-way information tool – we get information without letting the publisher know anything about us – it might seem strange to think about RSS in terms of privacy. However, this may (some would say must) change for RSS to expand its usefulness. This requires a little background.
A point I made several times at this year’s Gnomedex is that we need to stop thinking about RSS in terms of subscribing to individual feeds and start thinking about how those feeds can be aggregated to provide us the information we really want. RSS feeds contain individual items, so why subscribe to an entire feed when you’re only interested in a few of its items?
The first step in this process already exists: bloggers who act as editors by gathering and reporting links of interest to their readers. These editors enable us to subscribe to a single feed yet still keep up with the interesting posts from multiple feeds.
Take my own blog as an example. Let’s face it, I rarely have anything interesting to say. I’m usually nose-down in software development and don’t have time for extended blog entries like this one. So rather than subscribe to my feed, wouldn’t you rather subscribe to a feed which lets you know when I actually have an interesting post, especially if that feed includes only the interesting items from several other feeds? Blogs such as Boing Boing are obvious examples of this, as are aggregate feeds such as the ones Daypop provides. Link blogs such as del.icio.us where everyone acts as an editor perform a similar function.
That’s the first step. The next step is for your aggregator to let you know when an item of interest to you has been posted, regardless of whether you’re subscribed to a feed that includes that item. In some ways, FeedDemon’s search channels perform this task, but these are keyword-based rather than usage-based. You can also do this by viewing the Technorati Link Cosmos for an item you find particularly interesting, but that’s a manual, one-item-at-a-time process. And online aggregators such as Bloglines provide recommendations based on your subscriptions – which is great – but this is a one-feed-at-a-time process.
What I’d like to see – and what I envision FeedDemon becoming in the future – is an aggregator that acts like Windows Update. You tell it to go out and find what you’re missing, and it comes back with items that it thinks you’ll find interesting. You’d still be able to subscribe to individual feeds, of course, but unless you’re Robert Scoble, you’d only subscribe to a few feeds and let the aggregator do the rest of the work.
I’ve seen experimental aggregators which operate along these lines, except that they require you to rank items, and these rankings are used to make recommendations. Nice idea, but given all the interesting items you read in a day, would you really want to have to rank them? It seems to me this would have to be seamless, and wouldn’t require extra effort on your part.
For this to really work, your aggregator needs to silently collect attention data based on your reading habits. That attention data would then be provided to a service which recommends related items. And that’s where the privacy issue comes in.
Any service that expects to receive your attention information must do so anonymously. It should be absolutely impossible for anyone – or anything – to discover who you are based on this information. That seems obvious enough, but so many companies have got this wrong in the past that it bears repeating: if you want my usage information, you can have it provided that it’s 100% anonymous. And that, of course, boils down to trust.
I should add that this isn’t going to happen right away, and even after it happens, aggregator developers such as myself will still need to provide filters and other tools to find interesting items. But wouldn’t it be nice if a trusted source could let you know about things you’ve missed?
Related Link: Steve Gillmor: RSS for Food
Read your GMail inbox in FeedDemon
As reported all over the place, Google recently added an Atom feed to each GMail account. To subscribe to your inbox Atom feed in FeedDemon, click the “New Channel” button and use this URL:
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom
After subscribing, you’ll be prompted for your GMail user name and password. The feed is fairly bare-bones at the moment, but it’s still a nice way to be alerted of incoming GMail.
RSS: What are we missing?
It’s clear that RSS has moved out of the “will it be the next big thing?” stage and will play an important role in the future of information delivery. So, I think it’s vital that we continue looking at RSS from a security standpoint. After all, email started off being the killer app, but thanks to spam and viruses it’s no longer a reliable player.
So far most of the problems the RSS community has foreseen aren’t with RSS itself but with how RSS feeds are displayed, since most aggregators rely on an embedded web browser. Any security problems in the browser could be exploited by an RSS feed, which is why aggregators such as FeedDemon strip potentially harmful HTML before displaying a feed.
But what are the security issues that are specific to RSS? Developers such as myself are so used to looking at the benefits of technology that we often fail to see the risks, so I have to wonder if there’s something we’re missing. I’d rather admit my naïveté now than find out about some overlooked security issue down the road, when RSS is much more widely used (and my paranoid self thinks this is doubly important given that many governments are looking for an excuse to “protect” us from information).
Quite honestly, though, my biggest concerns aren’t security-related at all. I’m more concerned about RSS being used as a tool for disinformation. We’ve seen plenty of examples of mass media being used to spread lies and half-truths, and there’s no reason that RSS won’t fall prey to this. In some ways we’re protected by the fact that the blogosphere can “fact-check your ass,” but keep in mind that many of the big players are already approaching aggregator developers such as myself offering to pay to have their feeds included. A tempting offer, but the risk is that we’ll end up with the same situation that infects today’s mass media, where the big voices are heard (and re-heard) all over the place, while the smaller – but equally vital – voices aren’t heard unless you search for them.
So I ask again: what are we – or, what am I – missing?
ESPN Columnist Feeds
ESPN now has RSS feeds for most of their columnists (via Kareem Mayan).
HowTo RSS Feed State
Nice summary of RSS bandwidth-saving techniques by Randy Charles Morin.
RSS Hype
Jim Rapoza’s recent eWeek column “Don’t Believe RSS Hype” is the latest in a series of high-profile articles downplaying RSS. I guess this is to be expected given the number of people overstating the importance of RSS, and in a way, I’m glad to see this happen because it means that RSS is starting to mature and be taken seriously. Here’s a quote from the article:
“Much of the hype has been deserved, as RSS clearly eases the distribution and consumption of information and news. But when breathless observers predict how RSS will change all software—not to mention the way we work and live—they are doing RSS more harm than good.”
Agreed. I’m obviously a big fan and promoter of RSS, but I can’t say I’m happy to see RSS support tacked on to so many products. It reminds me of the early days of XML hype, when everyone wanted to put the word “XML” on their box just to get attention, regardless of whether the XML features made any sense.
“Many large sites that deliver RSS feeds recently started complaining that they are being hit every hour with a flood of reader requests that is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing as a denial-of-service attack.”
Urgh. Here we go again. I’m assuming this quote refers to a recent InfoWorld column by Chad Dickerson that compared the hourly surge of RSS requests to a DDoS attack. What Rapoza fails to mention is that Dickerson posted a follow-up article in which he admitted that InfoWorld’s servers weren’t configured to minimize bandwidth consumption. Or perhaps Rapoza is referring to Robert Scoble’s oft-commented quote that “RSS is Broken” and failed to notice that the problem wasn’t due to RSS, but instead due to the way Microsoft was building their aggregated feed.
Look, there obviously needs to be some more “plumbing” work done when it comes to serving RSS, but there have been way too many exaggerated claims about RSS eating bandwidth. A big part of the problem is that many high-traffic sites make a feed available without understanding how it works and what steps they can take to lower bandwidth usage. These sites then complain about the bandwidth consumed by RSS, leading to yet another round of uninformed RSS-bashing which is (thankfully) taken to task by those in the know.
“Another problem facing RSS is that it isn’t really a standard. There are several competing versions of RSS on the Internet, which leads to incompatibility”
The differences between the various flavors of RSS are insignificant. Look at it this way: I’ve written an HTML editor, a CSS/XHTML editor and an RSS reader. Supporting every flavor of RSS – and Atom – was easy, but supporting every version of HTML and CSS is still a pain. Sure, I’d like to have just one feed format, but so far I haven’t seen many problems caused by having multiple versions.
For the record, the vast majority of incompatibilities I’ve dealt with aren’t due to the different versions of RSS, but instead due to publishers using badly-formed XML in their feeds. I’ve spent far more time trying to support mangled XML in FeedDemon than I have in supporting all the RSS versions combined.
“To those developing products that use RSS: Find ways now to address some of RSS’ shortcomings—and dig for problems heretofore unknown—so the technology doesn’t become a burden on those who decide to use it.”
Agreed. While there has been a lot of press about the RSS vs. Atom feuds, the reality is that there are a lot of people – including myself and developers with competing products – working together behind-the-scenes to resolve these shortcomings and make sure that RSS achieves its promise.