Posts with tag rss
Posted Oct 8th 2007 7:45PM by Ian Smith
Filed under: Fun, Internet, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0
Launched over the weekend as part of a one-day-startup party,
Tagmindr links up with your
del.icio.us account and lets you easily and automatically send yourself bookmarks in the future. Simply signup and then tag your del.icio.us bookmarks with the tagmindr tag and a date in the format of "remind:YYYY-MM-DD". Tagmindr will then put your bookmark in an RSS feed on the date you indicated. Eventually they may support SMS, Email and IM. But it probably wouldn't be wise to hold your breath.
The product took about 6 and a half hours to create (plus 4 hours of cleanup) last Saturday as part of a
Seattle Saturday House meeting.
Leo Dirac has some more detail on the process if you are interested. Hopefully we'll see more slick and useful tools created in this manner.
Posted Oct 5th 2007 2:00PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Internet, News
While China has a history of blocking computer users' access to many sites on the world wide interwebs, many clever Chinese citizens have figured out that RSS feeds provided a way around the Chinese firewall. Until now.
Ars Technica reports that China has started blocking any URL that starts with "feeds," "rss," and "blog." That makes it pretty difficult to access the feeds for an awful lot of websites, including pretty much any site syndicated by FeedBurner.
It looks like some Chinese users are having success with online feed-readers like
Newsgator. We'll see how long it takes before China bans Newsgator. In the meantime, there's always proxies and anonymous web browsers like
Tor.
If you want to find out if your website is blocked in China, Website Pulse has a
Great FireWall of China testing tool.
[via
TechCrunch]
Posted Sep 26th 2007 5:00PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0
Feed Each Other is a new social RSS reader. What does that mean? Well, it's kind of a social network and RSS reader all rolled into one, sort of like a cross between Google Reader and Facebook.
As an RSS reader, the layout should be pretty familiar to anyone who uses Bloglines, NewsGator, Google Reader, or any of the other popular web-based RSS readers. You can organize your feeds into folders and you can choose to view just headlines or full articles. Feed Each Other also has a pretty good site discovery feature. Type "Download Squad" into the search box, and our feed will come up right away.
But the social aspects are what really make Feed Each Other shine. When you view our feed, you'll see a list of popular feeds show up in the bottom left corner. These are feeds that users who like Download Squad have subscribed to. You can also view profiles of individual users who have subscribed to Download Squad on the upper right hand side just above our feed's content. You can click on a user profile and see what they're reading. If you like their taste in news, you can add them as a contact.
You can also share interesting articles from your feeds with other users. While Google Reader publishes your shared clips as a sort of standalone link blog, Feed Each Other lets your contacts see your shared items when they login. You can also leave comments on your shared items or others to see and respond to.
Feed Each Other has just emerged from an invitation-only beta, so while it's pretty robust, there are still a few kinks to work out. But the service definitely shows promise.
[via
Read/WriteWeb Posted Sep 20th 2007 9:00AM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Internet, Video
Waveexpress is releasing an updated version of
TVTonic for Windows Vista. The big news is that the upgrade adds support for native QuickTime video playback using Windows Vista's Media Center interface.
TVTonic is an application that works in conjunction with Windows Media Center to download and stream internet video using a 10-foot interface. In other words, you can watch video podcasts like
RocketBoom in your living room.
You can download and watch pretty much anything that has an RSS feed, but TVTonic also has an index of 358 video channels. And almost all of them use the QuickTime format, which means if you're using Windows Vista Media Center, up until now you could access only a limited number of channels. Not only does the new version of the software support QuickTime playback using the TVTonic application, but you'll be able to watch QuickTime movies stored in your "My Videos" directories.
Posted Sep 19th 2007 12:00PM by Chris Gilmer
Filed under: Business, Design, Internet, Text, E-mail, Web services, web 2.0
Looking for an easy way to set up an email newsletter?
Nourish will take any RSS feed and convert it into an email newsletter. The service is free to use, and relatively easy to set up and send out.
Want to keep customers up to date with your own newsletter?For companies that have a blog up and running, you can take that fresh content and easily package it into an email broadcast. Users register an account and presented with a campaign dashboard; four steps then stand in the way of your escape from the land of newsletter-less losers.
- Choose a name, subject and to and from name and email address.
- RSS Feed import - Paste the URL of your RSS feed, and grab posts from a certain date.
- Scheduling - Daily, Weekly and Monthly newsletters can be created at certain times of the day.
- Custom design (optional) - if you want your newsletter to better present your brand identity.
Subscribers to the newsletter are imported via a CSV file. When newsletters are sent out, Nourish will provide you with subscribers open rates, click through rates and the number of emails delivered. It's a great free service that has only one drawback, albeit a major one, there are currently only 10 subscribers allowed per account.
Posted Sep 18th 2007 8:00PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Google, Beta
Google Reader has
come out of beta. That's right, Google now has at least two services that don't have a beta tag, their search engine and Reader. Gmail, which predates Google Reader still wears a beta label even though it's been a while since we've seen any major new features.
But just a few weeks after Google
added the much sought-after search function to its RSS Reader, the company has decided the product is all grown up and ready to go out into the world. And we mean that literally, Google has added support for new languages including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. There's even a UK English version.
But we have to say, there does seem to be a bit of extra white space at the top left of the screen where the familiar "beta" once rested.
Posted Sep 17th 2007 2:00PM by Ted Wallingford
Filed under: Business, Blogging
In the early days of the web, before high-fallutin' content-management systems, document control, and database-driven blogs, web authors were for the most part forced to stage their content in a clumsy, time-consuming way. Manually uploading and resizing graphics and hand-writing HTML in an early web editor like "
HotDog" or "
HotMetal" (remember those?) was how we all did our first web authoring, and thank goodness the times have changed.
With the evolution of multi-user content management software (like Blogsmith, for example) and simple syndication protocols like RSS and Atom, it has become much easier to run high-volume web sites that require constant content additions and alterations. Sadly, the productivity evolution also made it easier for plagiarists to steal content and rebrand it as their own--mostly, we suppose, because of RSS, which give friend and foe alike equal, unfettered access to most blogs and news web sites. Since RSS is an open system with no access controls, it's as easy to rip somebody off using their news feed as it is to use it in the manner intended--usually, syndication with proper attribution of author and publisher.
Seeing this as a problem with a business answer, a former Yahoo exec started a company called
Attributor, whose service can track and monitor the use of syndicated content across the web. This is an interesting idea, and aside from setting these Redwoodians up as obvious Google Bait, syndication monitoring appears to be good business, too. Attributor just signed up Reuters as a new account. Not a bad fish to have on the hook, especially when you're just getting started. Attributor also offers a service which will enforce content licensing--allowing publishers to monetize their syndication in a way RSS alone cannot.
Posted Sep 6th 2007 9:00AM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Internet, Google, Search
In all our excitement about the long-overdue
search bar in Google Reader, we forgot to tell you about
some of the other awesome updates to Google's RSS reader.
Increased unread items countsIf you subscribe to 2 or 3 RSS feeds, you might not have noticed. But Google Reader used to have this annoying habit of capping the number of unread posts that it would notify you about at 100. If you had 87 unread posts in a category, you could tell at a glance. If you had 874, you were in the dark.
Google has raised the cap to 1000. But as you can see from our little screengrab, even that's not enough for some people (who we won't name).
Back and forth and back and forth againDon't like having to look at just how many unread message you have? Just click the arrow that separates the side navigation from your reader window and you'll be left with nothing but articles. Or you can just hit the letter U on your keyboard, like always.
And Google Reader now supports navigating with the back and forward buttons on your browser. If you switched folders and want to switch back, just hit the back button.
Posted Aug 31st 2007 4:30PM by Chris Gilmer
Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Web services, Adobe, Social Software
Are you a designer? developer? Like color? Want to do some cool things with
Adobe's Kuler application? Now you can.
The Adobe Labs project Kuler, is a hosted color picker application that allows for inspiration, creativity and sharing, they now have an API for developers. This new
Kuler API allows developers to request RSS feeds of the highest rated or most popular color themes, and incorporating them into web project and web sites.
Check out some Kuler API usage in the
Showcase. Warning, most do require users to have Adobe AIR installed.
Posted Aug 31st 2007 1:00PM by Chris Gilmer
Filed under: Business, Developer, Video, Web services, web 2.0
Get ready for the newest widget platform on the market,
Joost. They have just rolled out their API and opened things up for developers to make masterpieces that integrate with the P2P TV client application.
The launch of Joost's latest version 0.12.0 is a little overshadowed by the
API introduction, which is the icing on Joost's cake. The somewhat hush hush announcement in the product forums of their website will open up the application to a whole new realm of developers who will go beyond what Joost has already done with their current RSS, chat, and clock widgets.
The official
Joost API website is currently password protected.
[via
NewTeeVee]
Posted Aug 29th 2007 8:00AM by Chris Gilmer
Filed under: Business, Internet, Blogging, Productivity, Web services
We heavily rely on RSS for easily managing our online resources. Thats why its great to learn about sources that can help us create feeds without any effort to keep things in order and manageable. Especially when websites might not have RSS feeds.
Feedmarklet is a way to set up your own RSS feed, and add content to it via a bookmarklet. It's as easy as creating the bookmarklet in your browser, pressing it whenever you come across good content, whether it has an RSS feed or not. The page you are visiting will get added to your feed with the Feedmarklet application extracting the page title and URL dropping it into a form. All you need to do then is write up a description (which can be done by selecting some page text before hitting your "add to feed button") and be on your RSS way.
[via
webworkerdaily]
Posted Aug 27th 2007 4:00PM by Ted Wallingford
Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Productivity
Any child of the 80's will recall
Max Headroom, the stuttering talking head that made fun of movie stars and politicians, as a pop-culture hallmark of the decade. Of course, Max Headroom is an entirely forgettable character, so most children of the 90's and later just say "huh?" when you mention his name.
But for all you Headroom fans, and for those of us who just like our computers to behave more like people and less like programmed silicon,
Noodle Reader offers some old-fashioned talking-head fun. The program is an
RSS reader for Mac OS X that audibly reads the news to you--using the Mac OS's speech synthesis. Unlike other readers, though, Noodle also gives you a certifiably creepy 3D talking head to do the reading, just like good ol' Max. And if you get tired of the built-in "actors" that Noodle supplies, you can download more.
Posted Aug 27th 2007 12:15PM by Chris Gilmer
Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Blogging, Web services
Bloglines has just packed a bunch of new features into its online news feed searching, subscribing to and reading service, and it all begins with a start page.
Bloglines headlines its new feature developments with a personalized start page. This is the page that brings everything together in a quick and easy view with an
AJAX interface. There is nothing like starting feed reading off with a view like this to help you distinguish and gravitate towards your top interests first, before they get lost in a sea of unread material. Users can also now drag and drop feeds to add them into a three panel interface. To make things even easier, Bloglines has integrated mouse over previews to get a quick snippet of the content for a more in depth look at the article. Two other views are also available to complement the three panel view, a full view, and quick view mode. The quick view lists out titles for an easy news scan, with the full view listing out full article content.
This new redevelopment comes more than two years after the Bloglines acquisition by IAC interactive, the company that owns the popular ASK search engine. It can be accessed at
http://beta.bloglines.com.
Posted Aug 22nd 2007 6:30PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Internet, Google
E-mail notifiers are great if you're the sort of person who doesn't like to keep a lot of unread messages in your inbox. But unless you only subscribe to a handful of RSS feeds, we're not convinced that an RSS notifier is anywhere near as useful. That's because we've never met anybody who manages to actually keep up with their RSS feeds. And what use is a notifier that constantly reminds you that there are thousands of unread items awaiting you?
Well, it turns out,
Google Reader Notifier actually can be kind of useful. That's because you can set it to monitor items with a particular label. So if you've got one label for general news, another for technology news, and another for silly pictures of cats, you can just check out the unread cat photos every day. We're big advocates of setting low goals to avoid disappointment.
Unfortunately, there's no way to select multiple labels. If you'd rather have your notifier as a browser plugin, check out the
Google Reader Notifier add-on for Firefox.
[via
gHacks]
Posted Aug 21st 2007 11:00AM by Sue Polinsky
Filed under: Business, Blogging
So you want to start a business blog? Congratulations! Let's start out by avoiding some of the "great blog mistakes" that too many potential bloggers make.
- Who are you? If you're going to blog for business, make sure the readers know who you are and update the 'About the Author' page frequently. Tell us your title, what company you own or work for, and enlighten us about some of your accomplishments. A small picture helps us connect to you through the digital divide and an email link can be worth its weight in gold.
- Bad post titles. Headlines are important since that's probably what shows up in most blog aggregators (RSS). Work on the post title's cleverness and avoid trite or meaningless titles (like "Today is Boring"). If you want people to click your link from the RSS feed, invite them to your site with a catchy post title.
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