I’m sure the first thought Dave had when he was born was the genesis of RSS. It had to be, nothing as simple as RSS could be created in less years. It takes hard work and thought to create simplicity.
So, happy birthday Dave Winer, father of RSS.
(Geek-out over.)
I was looking forward to subscribing to the Authors@Google videos which are hosted on YouTube. Sadly I cannot find an RSS or Atom feed on the YouTube channel page. This seems to be a trend at YouTube; a lack of feeds and when they are available they are hidden away.
Does anyone know where the RSS feed is?
If you are a web-developer in Ireland, or willing to live here, and want to be involved in a public RSS project then drop me an email. We are looking for someone who knows CSS, XHTML and JavaScript. That means you can do it in a text-editor, not dragging-and-dropping in Dreamweaver. It means you either already do OO in JavaScript or are willing to learn. Ajax and all that goodness too. Experience, qualification etc. requirements are not set in stone, if we see the steely glint of a web-dev in your eye it will be good.
So Twitter is nice to have in the background bumbling away but like many programmers I am paranoid I will miss something (admit it all you programmers; you read every single RSS item, every single email and anything that scrolls too fast to read completely is annoying as fek. Programmers want 100% solutions, not 80% or 99.999% solutions.)
Thankfully your Twitter stream comes in RSS (actually, atom) too and you can use a simple feed keyword filter system like FeedRinse to catch any tweets/twits you miss. Here is one I made on my Twitter stream that looks for “@paul” which is how it seems most of my Twitter buddies ping messages at each other.
Simple and Twitter didn’t have to provide the functionality. Yahoo! Pipes could provide an even more complex Twitter filter setup.
Twingly Screensaver is an interesting visualisation of blogosphere activity. It renders a turning globe with blog activity spiking out from different parts of the world. It reminds me a bit of Mapped Up.
Traditional feed aggregators are still a lot more powerful for churning through news than this. But this kind of visualisation could be useful as an adjunct for trend watching. They should really allow you to keyword filter Twingly Screensaver.
(It requires Windows and OpenGL but works OK in Parallels.)
Google Reader has started reporting subscribers properly and the difference in feed stats is noticeable. Above are my stats from the past Monday. 105 subscribers with the biggest group coming from Firefox Live Bookmarks (excluding the Other group.)
Now the stats from yesterday:
Not a big jump in subscribers, just to 117, but Google Reader now has the majority (excluding Other.)
I will keep an eye on it over the next week as subscriber stats change quite a bit day by day. Feed stats are actually quite difficult to understand. For instance Google Reader hits my feed once and reports the total # of subscribers to FeedBurner. But Firefox Live Bookmarks is a bunch of individual Firefox browsers being fired up and hitting my feed one by one. I wonder how good FeedBurner is at leveling it all to report meaningful stats.
As for Google Reader’s jump it is not surprising. Google Reader has no competition.
Watchlists are an important part of the future of RSS feeds. Unfortunately the Technorati implementation is quite poor though in fairness so are all the other watchlist systems I have used.
An example will illustrate this best. For ego and practical use I have a Technorati watchlist with the following query; “Paul Watson” -pirate -captain -whale
Looks odd but there is a good reason for it. My name is quite common and in particular there is an infamous Paul Watson who receives many blog and news entries per day. Without the -pirate -captain and -whale I’d get a lot of irrelevant results.
Recently though Japanese and French bloggers have started blogging about Captain Paul Watson and my watchlist is once again becoming useless.
Technorati either needs to let me specify “English only sources” or translate my query as best it can (unlikely). They already have the former functionality with their main search engine but I haven’t seen the option for watchlists.
There are other problems with Technorati watchlists. One clever blog spams by subtley updating it’s feeds so fooling Technorati into marking the RSS item as new or updated when to my eyes there is nothing new about it. It is very annoying and I eventually unsubscribed from that watchlist. You also cannot edit a watchlist once you have created it. You have to recreate it with your query change, unsubscribe from the old one and subscribe to the new one. There is no blacklist system to block out sources you are not interested in. Nor is there a whitelist system which would be useful too. Duplicates are a problem too. Please, anyone working with RSS needs to implement deduping, it is a basic and fundamental requirement in my opinion. Clustering would be useful too, such as TechMeme does.
Programmers out there will tell me I can do all of this by refiltering my watchlist output using some other system or a bit of unix piping or Yahoo! Pipes etc. etc. No thanks. Watchlists need to be fast and easy, they need to be flexible and usable.
So, I’d really love Technorati to get going on improving its watchlist system (maybe spare a developer from the WTF team? I don’t use WTF.)
If you are in or around Phoenix, Arizona tomorrow (the 17th) then I’d be in your debt if you attended a Microsoft and NewsGator event and reported back.
Getting back to a couple thousand unread RSS items after a months holiday is not pleasant. Software is rarely designed to cope with absence.
It also highlighted something to me. Feeds which are lists of new things (e.g. MoMB, eHub etc.) are largely worthless when you are also subscribed to leading feeds in your area of interest (e.g. Read/Write, TechCrunch etc.) Anything interesting in MoMB or eHub will also be picked up by the TechCrunch lads. They will also filter out the uninteresting items that are automatically included in other lists.
The bottom line is that interesting things will come to your attention without you needing to be subscribed to “up to the second” list feeds.
Daily bits...
Feed comment
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007I just spotted Kottke Komments and had a further little idea; Create a site that allows anyone to punch in a feed URL and start commenting on the items. So Kottke Komments but any feed URL.
Some problems would be multiple feed URLs for one conceptual feed (e.g. an Atom and an RSS 2.0 feed URL), objections by the author of the feed (would that be an issue?), good old spamming (though I guess spammers wouldn’t get the page-link authority score as it isn’t on the original site) and just general abuse (Kottke doesn’t want comments on his site, maybe he doesn’t want comments on any of his posts?)
I’ll see if I can whip up a prototype and launch it this week. Anyone want to help?
Posted in AAA, Atom, Comments, Feed, feeds, kottke, kottke komments, rss | Comments