Millifeed

Feeds in the enterprise

paulmwatson — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 09:56:10 +0000

While I don’t think the phrase “Feed Bleed” is a good one this is a good introduction to RSS in “the enterprise.” I think the lines between enterprise and not-enterprise are blurring so much of the article can be applied outside of an enterprise.

My iTunes using feeds

paulmwatson — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 14:34:40 +0000

It is good to finally see iTunes reversing their relationship with the world wide web. The Music Store in particular has long used web technologies but all within a walled garden. It gave consistencing and control to Apple but made it difficult for anyone else to innovate off of iTunes without building complicated extensions.

Now My iTunes is exposing your iTunes data via feeds and Flash widgets. You can get a Flash widget of your iTunes Purchases and here is the atom feed (sadly it is only syndicating my last purchase and not the last 10 or all of them.)

You can also get out any reviews you have written and your “favourite” iTunes tracks. A good step by Apple and obviously part of their recent iLife update which included widget support in iWeb. I hope to see more.

An RSS interface to a wine database

paulmwatson — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:05:20 +0000

It is good to read about sites using existing technologies, RSS and the all powerful URL, to expose their data rather than implementing custom web-service query and return formats.

The wine site mentioned in the link above lets you query their database of wines using parameters in a URL. The return format is RSS which lets you either use it for a custom system or just slot it right into your feed reader. With a simple interface anyone could use this system to specify what wine information they want to be kept up to date on.

The web is atomising data with RSS and the URL at the forefront of it. Atom is a strong contender for this too as it offers more than just GET requests.

Atom is finished

paulmwatson — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:59:47 +0000

The Atom spec. is finally complete and only awaits “editorial processes” as Tim Bray puts it.

If you are thinking Atom was finished ages ago with Atom 1.0 you’ll be interested to know Atom is more than just a syndication format. It is a publishing and editing protocol. Google already use something of it in their GData system.

I personally like RSS but realise Atom is the future.

RSS second most valuable to enterprises

paulmwatson — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:42:51 +0000

A Forrester report has ranked RSS second behind Instant Messaging in value to enterprises using Web 2.0.

FeedBurner goes free

paulmwatson — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 12:55:27 +0000

Previously subscription based services from FeedBurner have been made free. FeedBurner is a handy way of not only making your feeds more useful to your users but also for tracking how your subscribers are using your feed. The Pro Stats package is now free on FeedBurner, mainly thanks to Google who acquired FeedBurner recently.

Keep track of PR

paulmwatson — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 10:30:01 +0000

PR Web has released a 500 strong list of press-release feeds. Useful for staying up to date with companies and areas.

Watch Robert Scoble use Google Reader

paulmwatson — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 14:45:02 +0000

This is not the most entertaining video but it does show how a prolific feed reader such as Robert Scoble uses an aggregator. In this case, Google Reader.

RSS dominance over Atom, and gaining

paulmwatson — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 11:08:17 +0000

Atom may be the newer and technically fancier syndication format but RSS is not only dominant in numbers but is gaining even more ground over Atom. At least according to data pulled from Syndic8′s 800,000+ feeds; 80.6% RSS to 16.6 Atom.

The RSS Blog attributes part of this to the backwards compatibility of RSS since 1999. Keep it simple and you will do well.

Duplicate data

paulmwatson — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 10:56:26 +0000

Duplicate data is a real headache with feeds. Go ahead and subscribe to a handful of feeds from the BBC site. You’ll soon see the same item many times across many feeds.

Technically feeds have unique IDs but in the real world they aren’t used properly by feed publishers which leaves the problem of duplicate detection up to the aggregators. We are working hard on this at Millifeed but it is a long road. Even Google finds it hard and had a conference on it recently; Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced.