IT service continuity management

Search Engine Journal reported earlier this week that Yahoo has acquired the assets of RSS service SearchFox, which announced recently that it would be shutting down later in January.

SearchFox provides a very similar style of RSS aggregation/ reading as does Bloglines, and although I didn’t become a regular user of the service it was certainly one of the closest competitors in terms of Bloglines-likeness of the many competing services out there I’ve used.

Complete Article
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Broadcaster the BBC has launched a web service to “demystify” really simple syndication (RSS) technology. BBC FeedFactory provides users with basic and technical information about RSS and the syndication services available from the BBC.

“FeedFactory not only seeks to demystify this world, but also showcases what you can get from the BBC on a single page, making it easy to find what you want,” said Tony Ageh, BBC Controller, Internet. FeedFactory pages explain RSS technology with no jargon in order to attract a non-technical audience.

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Blog post compares 16 Free RSS News Readers on OS X in summary:  

“Despite widely varying versions, there are three most worth considering: NetNewsWire Lite, NewsMac and PulpFiction Lite. No clear winner here, so I’ll have to see what I use most. All three have paid versions waiting for when I see the light on how important a good RSS reader is to me. It should be noted in finishing this that the commercial RSS readers are significantly better than all of these.”

Complete Review

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Nuvvo is using RSS feeds to syndicate course listings and class offerings.

Additional Info
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Dummy Software has released a new version of RSS Submit!

RSS Submit version 1.3 includes enhancements specifically geared towards RSS traffic management. Integration with FeedBurner allows users to access traffic per day and month for feeds hosted using the service. Traffic statistics are displayed in the software for each supported feed.

Registered users of RSS Submit will unlock additional RSS directories and receive upgrades to the latest version at no charge. Registered users may also download plug-ins to further enhance the software with the ability to ping blogs, submit podcasts, and compile reports.

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Blogs, Podcasting, Video Casts, Content on Demand… all are emerging as indispensable marketing tools for business and all are made possible by RSS. The eCommerce RSS Radio Show brings you world class experts for marketing success with RSS. We bring you the strategy, tactics and measurements that impact your bottom line, the kind of “put to work now” stuff that makes a difference.

RSS Radio
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Bill Flitter from Pheedo does a great job recapping RSS in 2005.

Now that 2006 is upon us, let’s look back at some of the great developments in RSS from 2005. Was 2005 the “year of RSS?” Maybe… It certainly was the year that RSS started to go mainstream, and the amount of innovation and forward thinking in 2005 has set the stage for 2006 to show record user adoption. I think we will see the true potential of RSS in the months to come. Here are some of the more interesting 2005 happenings.
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The future-rss.php script is used to automatically delay the publication of Items in an RSS feed. This allows Items in a RSS feed to be created ahead of time, and then slowly released over a period of time.

Many people have tried to set the PubDate field on their RSS feed Items to a future date and time, in an attempt to have that particular item become ‘visible’ to their feed’s subscribers on that particular date and time. Unfortunately, they will soon find out that many RSS readers and aggregators don’t honor future PubDates, and immediately show all their feed’s items. The future-rss.php script ‘hides’ the future items from RSS feed readers and aggregators, until their PubDate becomes current.
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2005 literally took the world by storm. The tragedies of the Asian Tsunami, the Hurricanes that blew through the US Gulf Coast and the earthquakes that swallowed parts of Pakistan have left an indelible mark on 2005. While mother nature cast a shadow on 2005, it was technology that delivered the impact that resulted in a huge outpouring of donations. The world was touched by the human element seen real-time in pictures and videos. Today’s technology was able to deliver the graphical grittiness that portrayed the nightmares occurring half a world away.

Technology is usually thought of as impersonal, but something needs to be recognized; without technology the personal elements of the 2005 tragedies would not likely have been conveyed to the extent and timeliness they were. Reflecting on 2005 and looking forward to 2006, technology will undoubtedly continue play a significant role in the future both on a personal and impersonal level.

In 2005 Blogs gave birth to splogs, where senseless web scrapers generated massive amounts of senseless content. Spam reached a whole new level, right along side the ethical debate of content scraping. Copyrights have been stepped on and I foresee a new host of tools that will emerge to protect content.

2005 in Review, Predictions for 2006

Other Industry Predictions
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FeedForAll has announed a new Namespace directory.

The namespace directory is a free information directory containing namespace extension details. The directory is designed to be a central repository for namespace extensions. The intent of the directory is to help prevent redundancy and assist users with the process of extending RSS 2.0.

The namespace directory contains detailed steps on creating a namespace extension. While anyone can create a namespace, users are encouraged to a specific and well-planned reason to do so. It is important to realize that RSS readers or RSS processing applications will be unable to use the namespace information unless they were specifically designed to support the custom information.
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According to Alex Barnett’s Blog

The study actually showed that 4% knew they were using RSS, while 27% were using RSS without realising it.
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According to a report on Slashdot only 4% of Internet users use RSS feeds. Just because only 4% of Internet users knowingly use RSS feeds that does NOT mean that only 4% use RSS.
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GoogleReader posted an interesting summary of common errors in RSS feeds. There are lots of tools available to create rss feeds, and even tools like FeedForAll that will fix malformed feeds, so I really don’t understand why they are seeing such a large percentage of improperly formed RSS feeds.
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As a result of roundtable discussions at the recent Syndicate Conference, Greg Reinacker has proposed a namespace extension that would indicate feeds should not be indexed. This would address the issue of personalized feeds. The namespace proposal is very straight forward and makes perfect sense.

More on Greg’s No Index Proposal
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While this site is focussed on all aspects of RSS, the podcasting blog focus’ on RSS feeds with audio content in the enclosure field. If you are interested in exploring the world of podcasting Podcasting Tools is a good place to start.
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Companies that offer RSS reader products and services are now in a race against time, as Microsoft prepares RSS functionality within Outlook.

I think NewsGator is positioned to really challenge Microsoft for the space but it will be interesting to watch the outcome. Of course Microsoft could just purchase NewsGator and head to market faster…
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Rok Hrastnik has announced a content addition for Marketing Studies. RSS Cases is written by Raj Kumar Dash and will provide RSS technology advice, to help you understand RSS technology issues and explain different RSS business cases.

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The RSS Specification Blog was nominated on KbCafe’s list of best RSS blogs!  We’re honored to be included in the list. Voting is open until New Years Eve.
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From USA Today -

RSS will become the biggest thing since …

The Web browser? Beanie Babies? Salt? Hard to say yet. But there is no shortage of effusiveness about Real Simple Syndication, or RSS — software code used to deliver news stories, blogs and other items via the Internet to your computer screen on readers such as My Yahoo or NewsGator. The prediction is that RSS will become the primary way everyone accesses stuff on the Web.

“We believe 2006 is the year of RSS,” says Mark Carlson, CEO of RSS company SimpleFeed. Adds author and consultant Steve Waite, “RSS is likely to take off in 2006 and could well displace e-mail as the killer app on the Net.”

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nFeeds is another new RSS Feed directory. What I don’t understand is on the submission page why do you have to fill out all the details? Why can’t the directories extract that information from the RSS feed?

Would certainly simplify the submission process.

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Automotive Links is an RSS directory specifically for auto related RSS Feeds. Similar to Finance Investing and Security Protection , topic specific RSS feed directories are becoming more popular.
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FeedForAll Mac an application for Apple’s to create, edit and publish RSS feeds now includes integrated support for Microsoft Simple List Extension. While FeedForAll Mac supports all RSS 2.0 namespaces, the program also currently has integrated support for the Apple iTunes namespace, Dublin Core, Syndication and Content namespaces as well. Ironically the Mac version has integrated support prior to the Windows version, which currently has rudimentary support for namespaces in the FeedForAll v2.0 beta.

According to the Press Release:

“Support for Microsoft Simple List Extensions has been added to FeedForAll Mac. FeedForAll Mac, a popular tool for creating, managing and publishing RSS feeds, now includes integrated support of the Microsoft’s Simple List namespace.”

“FeedForAll Mac has a built-in wizard that makes creating and maintaining the RSS feed and Simple List Extension easy. FeedForAll Mac currently has integrated support for the Apple iTunes, the Microsoft Simple Lists Extensions, and the Dublin Core namespace, making the management of those namespaces significantly easier.”
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Another idea for RSS feeds -

Duke’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) has developed an RSS feed to help keep the university community informed and updated about interruptions to technology services.

The Service Updates page is updated daily with service maintenances scheduled by OIT, in addition to unplanned outages. The announcements contain the name of the service; whether the interruption is planned or unplanned; start and end times; and an explanation of how the interruption affects users and where to go for more information.
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Microsoft will designate RSS feeds in the Internet Explorer 7 browser using the same orange icon that appears at the far right in the address bar of Firefox.
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Today at the Syndicate Conference, Pheedo, the RSS advertising and analytics experts, released its second in a series of “Pheed Read” reports, providing RSS publishers, advertisers and users insight into RSS usage patterns. The complete “Pheed Read” report is available on Pheedo’s blog.

Pheedo’s analysis is based on the activity on its network of advertisers and publishers.The following conclusions and analysis are based on traffic during Fall 2005. Study findings include:

– Standalone RSS ads are far more successful than inline ads. A standalone RSS ad (the entire post is the advertisement) generates, on average, a 7.99% click-through rate (CTR) — over nine times more clicks than an inline RSS ad (an advertisement within a publisher’s post).

– Placing RSS ads in every other post yields the highest percentage of click throughs. When ads are placed in every other feed post, users clicked on the ad 3.24% of the time. This is over three times more effective than placing an advertisement in every post in a feed, where the CTR is 1.04%.

– RSS content and advertisement CTR varies significantly based on the day of the week. Contrary to earlier “Pheed Read” data, which showed peak CTR on Tuesday, Monday and Saturday have emerged as the days with the highest
CTR while Thursday and Friday show the lowest percentage.

– Mid-week readership of RSS feeds highest. Consistent with the previous “Pheed Read” report, RSS readership rises
steadily at the beginning of the week, peaking on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then declines through the weekend. Average weekend readership is over 67% lower than average weekday readership.

– RSS ads are outperforming similar Web ads. With traditional and rich-media online ads garnering CTR ranging from .20% to 1.17% CTR, according to a report by DoubleClick, standalone RSS ads, with an average CTR of 7.99%, are outperforming traditional online ads by a wide margin.

– Bloglines leads RSS readers in market share. Bloglines is the most used RSS reader among Pheedo publisher subscribers, consistent with previous “Pheed Read” data. With 34% penetration, Bloglines overshadows Yahoo, NetNewsWire and Mozilla — each with about 14% reader penetration.

The “Pheed Read” is released quarterly by Pheedo and details trends in RSS usage. In addition to the “Pheed Read,” Pheedo provides capabilities that allow publishers to view detailed feed usage information about their feeds.

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Retailer giant Target has created an RSS feed that contains details from their weekly circular. The feed advertised to “get a jump on Sunday’s paper” highlights the week’s discounted items.
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Reuters, the world’s largest international multimedia news source, has selected FeedBurner, the leading feed management provider, to expand its delivery of text news via RSS subscriptions and to enable advertising within the feeds. Through its RSS service, Reuters global network of websites distribute relevant news updates to consumers. FeedBurner is providing Reuters with advanced services to manage its feeds in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan, to help it grow subscribers, reach new advertisers and to measure the circulation of its subscription feeds. more…

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Top 10 RSS Internet Resources. RSS has become increasingly popular, the following resources are the top online resources for learning about RSS.

RSS Specifications
rss blog, general information and rss articles

KbCafe
RSS blog and chicklet generator

FeedForAll
tutorials, free rss2html script and free button generator

RSS Compedium
list of resources

FeedBurner
free hosting services

Harvard Law
specifications and RSS version history

Marketing Studies
educational blog and RSS articles

Lockergnome RSS Resource
long established blog

MNot RSS Tutorial
features and benefits tutorial

Userland
articles and history

Make RSS Feeds
instructional site
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Feedster is conducting a feed countdown.

Since 2003, Feedster has selected a Feed of the Day to acknowledge an undiscovered blog or topical feed. The new Feed of the Year award was created to honor writers who have displayed continued excellence in blogging. A panel of independent judges reviewed each 2005 Feed of the Day and rated them for uniqueness, freshness, presentation, usability, and community.

I’m disappointed they are not recognizing non-blog feeds in the competition.  

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Psssst! Get the best of Comedy Central delivered directly to you via RSS. Comedycentral.com’s new RSS feed lets you know when they have updated last night’s Daily Show Headline video, your favorite show clips, read our Jokes of the Day and even see the latest entries on the Comedy Central Insider.
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The nomines for the 2005 international Edublog Awards have been annouced. Over 60 nominations forms went into providing this year’s list – which gives a very good overview of the quality, diversity and scope of how blogs are being used to support and extend teaching, learning, and research, and to create and reinforce educational communities. more…

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Convert your RSS feeds to spiderable HTML web pages. Free PHP script automatically updates each time the website is accessed.

More Info on free rss2html.php script
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AOL today announced that its video search engine will now feature RSS feeds from MTV Networks’ programming services. Video content from the company’s highly popular CMT, Comedy Central, Logo, MTV, MTV2, mtvU, The N, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Nick Jr., Nicktoons, Noggin, Spike, TV Land and VH1 Web sites are now accessible through AOL’s best-in-class video search engine available through the AOL.com portal’s Video On Demand , AOL Search  and on the AOL service.

In addition, Singingfish , one of the Web’s premier video and audio search engines, and its network of search properties will also feature content from MTV Networks.
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RSS Investors — the newly-formed venture capital firm that is investing in all things related to really simple syndication has made its first investment. It joined with SmartForest Ventures to invest $9 million in Portland-based Attensa.

The folks at RSS Investors, which reportedly was looking to raise a $100 million fund, are obviously big believers in the Attensa technology.

Attensa, Inc. is developing an end-to-end RSS Network that automatically and intelligently delivers prioritized, relevant RSS information to anyone in the world and on any device.

Looks like Attensa is going after NewsGator’s marketshare.

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Measuring and tracking RSS while a fairly simple concept, is really anything but. Unlike websites, RSS have the added caveat of potential syndication, making accurate tracking a challenge to anyone but the extremely tech savvy.

It is not unrealistic for marketers to want to know how many subscribers they have, which items in their feeds attract the most interest, or how many click-throughs are generated as a result of an RSS feed.

There are a number of 3rd party providers who focus on tracking the consumption of RSS feeds. Some solutions are rudimentary but likely sufficient for a small business testing the waters with RSS. Other RSS tracking solutions are more complex and while they can come close to being accurate, with syndication there is no solution that tracks with 100% accuracy.

Monitoring and Tracking RSS Feeds
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Murdoch feels RSS and syndication is a threat to traditional newspapers.

The media magnate Rupert Murdoch predicted a gloomy future for newspapers, which he said are failing to adapt to the realities of the Internet.

Murdoch, whose global business interests include leading titles in London, New York and Sydney, said the traditional press and the Internet would exist side by side “for many, many years to come.”

“There will always be room for good journalism and good reporting,” he told Britain’s media trade journal Press Gazette, but costs had been stripped to a bare minimum.

“They have already all stripped all the costs out, now they have to depend on advertising. And that is certainly under threat,” he said.

Complete Article
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Yahoo was set to unveil on Wednesday a new Really Simple Syndication feed alert service and integration of RSS feeds into its new Yahoo Mail beta, making the company the first to offer RSS in a major Web-based e-mail system.

The new RSS feed alert service will allow people to receive alerts via e-mail, instant message or SMS message, just as they currently can receive alerts for news stories about a specified topic, stock moves and game scores. more…

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Sony has released version 2.60 of the PlayStation Portable firmware in Japan and North America, expanding on the functionality of the console with the addition of features including WMA audio playback and RSS feed reading.

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Give the gift of RSS this holiday season. Some gift giving ideas include:

The RSS Diary

From the popular Rok Hrastnik an ebook containing the latest RSS marketing and RSS publishing news, commentary, advice and developments. Your primary source for RSS marketing information and marketing development.

FeedForAll

Easy to use software to create, edit and publish RSS feeds and podcasts.

RSS Book

Content Syndication with RSS offers webloggers, developers, and the programmers who support them a thorough explanation of syndication in general and RSS in particular. Written for web developers who want to offer XML-based feeds of their content, as well as developers who want to use the content that other people are syndicating, the book explores and explains metadata interpretation, different forms of content syndication, and the increasing use of web services in this field.

RSS and Atom Programming

Beginning with an introduction to all the current and coming versions of RSS and Atom, you’ll go step by step through the process of producing, aggregating, and storing information feeds. When you’re finished, you’ll be able to produce client software and Web sites that create, manipulate, aggregate, and display information feeds effectively.
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A new report from Nielsen//NetRatings says RSS users are significantly more engaged in online news than non-users, visiting an average of 10.6 news sites compared with 3.4 news sites for non-users. RSS users also visit news sites three to four times more frequently than non-users. more…

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As part of its CRM strategy, Travelocity has worked upon a customised RSS Feed Solution, developed and launched by hospitality Internet marketing company E-site Marketing.

Utilising RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology, E-site Marketing designed an application that enables Travelocity to notify subscribers via their RSS news readers when Travelocity finds lower fares to their favorite destinations.

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Chooselaw.com, the legal website of the people, for the people, and by the people, has announced that it will be offering use of its legal content for other websites, via RSS and Javascript based feeds absolutely free of charge. This amazing feature allows a multitude of users such as lawyers, law students, businessman, as well as the general public to have access to an immense wealth of useful and practice information acquired and produced by Chooslaw.com

If you have a law related website and are looking for easy to use website content, then we at Chooslaw.com encourage you to make use of our free content feeds. Our articles come from a number of sources and we offer an RSS feed of our law articles that is written for practicing attorneys, students of law preparing for the bar and general help for the consumer needing legal assistance.

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Check out the first RSS feed submission software. RSS Submit was the first submission application specifically for RSS feeds.

As more web masters begin to incorporate blog and RSS feed technology to distribute their content, they may soon realize not enough readers know about their feeds.

RSS Submit is an automated software tool which submits RSS feeds to the RSS search engines and directories. Real-time status is displayed throughout the submittal process. Once complete, the user may browse a listing of the result pages from each search engine, verifying their feed was successfully submitted. Submitting a feed to more than 25 RSS search engines can take less than one minute to complete.

RSS Submit also contains several features to make adding RSS feed URLs to the software easier. The validation feature allows users to test their RSS feed for compliancy prior to submitting. The auto-discovery feature allows users to enter a web page instead of a direct RSS feed URL and any linked feeds can be automatically added for submission.

If you prefer to manually submit feeds there is a large list on RSS Specifications.


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immedi.at helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes.
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When is the perfect time to communicate with users? What is the best way to communicate with software users? Consider using a direct channel of communication that can be used to notify users of:

- new releases - related products
- security alerts
- performance tips

How? Take a look at what Thornsoft Development did with their latest version of ClipMate.

Thornsoft integrated FeedForDev into ClipMate which allows  Thornsoft to notify users of important items by simply updating an RSS feed.
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Yahoo Publisher Networks! has announced the availability of ads in syndication (e.g.: RSS, ATOM) feeds for folks who are already signed up for Yahoo Publisher Network. more…

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Weekly new articles are added to the RSS Article directory.  The articles cover everything from RSS Metrics and RSS Marketing to RSS Copyrights.

Be sure to grab the article feed and stay current on the latest RSS news.
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KbCafe writes a great overview of the State of Blogosphere Search. What engines are updating and when. more…

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In a further sign of momentum in the RSS advertising space, Pheedo, a blog and RSS ad network, today officially unveils its RSS analytics service.

Similar to e-mail analytics, Pheedo’s service looks at open and click-through rates for articles and ads that publishers send to online users via RSS.
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Feedexa is a new free online feed aggregator for subscribing, searching and tagging feeds, blogs and the like.

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This year’s executive RSS summit is designed to share experiences, new tools, lessons learned and best practices with marketers, advertisers, and public relation professionals across industries and country borders. The 2006 RSS Submit will be held February 27 - March 1, 2006 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge in Cambridge, MA
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Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago have added RSS feeds
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MySyndicaat is a news mastering tool that allows you to retrieve, filter, mix and monitor content from remote content sources available on the web. Collected content is cached by MySyndicaat and can be retrieved later on either by using MySyndicaat content viewer, or by subscribing to it using any RSS 2.0-compliant RSS aggregator
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BlogsSay is for sale. Blogs Say is an RSS and blog search engine.
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Uber-auction site eBay has rolled out RSS-based content syndication capabilities to all eBay Stores, letting buyers subscribe to feeds from specific stores and in that way receive new information about items for sale, the San Jose, California, company announced this week.

Add RSS on eBay
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A New Jersey school district will pay $117,500 to a student who was punished for creating a website that included critical statements about his middle school.

The settlement of the lawsuit brought nearly two years ago follows a decision by a federal judge ruling that Oceanport school administrators violated Ryan Dwyer’s free speech rights.

Student Wins Suit as Blogger
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Check out the latest RSS Software portal all software on the site is related to RSS and content syndication.

The site contains links to RSS software solutions including RSS scripts for syndication, RSS aggregators, RSS editors, RSS parsers and scrapers. Site includes software reviews, version information and related RSS news.
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Randy over at KbCafe has launched a new Chicklet Generator the new  chicklet creator has no bandwidth requirements or restrictions on use!
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MarketingVox announced:

FeedBurner is expected to launch today a new RSS ad network that it’s been testing for some nine months, reports ClickZ. The network will offer advertisers a choice of various categories: business, technology, current affairs, consumer electronics, entertainment and digital culture. The tech channel reaches 150,000 subscribers, and the business channel 100,000 - but the company doesn’t de-duplicate, so there is some double-counting.


FeedBurner splits ad revenue among publishers, who can decide how frequently ads appear and whether to run campaigns. Ads are sold on a CPM basis, with prices between $4 and $7.
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Topix.net has started crawling blogs. They announced yesterday on their Weblog that they’ve added 15,000 blogs to be crawled. This is significant news.

Topix offer RSS feeds for any keyword that you add to it so that if any newspaper that it follows has an article with the keyword you get it in your feed. Now it’ll automatically present you with results for blogs and papers. Very
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Unique approach to an RSS directory. Security Protection is a categorized directory of security related feeds. You can conduct keyword specific searches or simply navigate the directory of RSS feeds using the categories.

Some of the categories include:
Computer Security Feeds
Virus Related Feeds
Firewall Related RSS Feeds
Internet Security Feeds
National Security RSS Feeds

Visit the site to get a better idea of the classifications.

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RSS Spider’s Feed Seeker Bot (FSB) is RSS-Spider’s home page crawling robot. This bot does not crawl pages other than your home page. Why? Well simply becuase we’re looking for the RSS aware tags in the HEAD of your home page.

See RSS Spider for Details

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Online political expression should not be exempt from campaign finance law, the House decided Wednesday as lawmakers warned that the Internet has opened up a new loophole for uncontrolled spending on elections.

The House voted 225-182 for a bill that would have excluded blogs, e-mails and other Internet communications from regulation by the Federal Election Commission. That was 47 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed under a procedure that limited debate time and allowed no amendments.

The vote in effect clears the way for the FEC to move ahead with court-mandated rule-making to govern political speech and campaign spending on the Internet.

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With MonitorThis you can subscribe to 15 different search engine feeds at the same time. Enter a search term and click the ‘make monitor.opml’ button to get a list of rss feeds in OPML format.

Similar to TalkDigger and Ego Searches.
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NotePage is pleased to announce a new release of FeedForAll Mac. FeedForAll Mac is designed to help publishers create, edit and publish RSS feeds and podcasts. The new release of FeedForAll Mac fully supports Apple iTunes extensions, giving publishers and easy way to create iTune compatible podcasts.

FeedForAll Mac has a built-in wizard that makes creating and maintaining RSS feeds easy. The wizard’s new extended support, walks users through the creation of iTune compatible podcasts. An FTP upload feature makes the publishing of feeds quick and easy.

FeedForAll Mac can be used to create and maintain an unlimited number of RSS feeds and podcasts, enabling users to flawlessly maintain and distribute multiple content streams simultaneously.

More on FeedForAll
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Travelocity has launched a new program that tells you when fares to your favorite destinations drop by at least 20%.
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Opmlmanager is an online webservice that makes maintaining your own opml-file very easy. This opml-file can be a file that is part of a distributed directory, like the ipodder directory, a subscriptionlist, a readinglist, a file you use for taskable.com, etc.
The outline-structure of your opml-file is represented in a foldertree that can be edited with a click of your mouse. You can easily add, edit and delete nodes and links.
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Take a look at the screenshot, purportedly taken of IE7 in Windows Vista Build 5231 (also known as Community Technical Preview 2). Notice how “Web Feeds” seems to have been replaced by … yes, “RSS”.

Complete

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While much of the online world crows on about the benefits of interactivity and community building, the plain truth is that such openness punching through from the open Web to intranets gives most corporations nightmares.

A Wired News article points out that it’s common practice for many corporations to filter out weblogs using many of the same tools used to eliminate email spam and access to entertainment sites.

But of potentially greater concern to companies than someone sneaking a peak at their favorite time-wasters online is the tendency of people to post comments on weblogs that may reveal corporate secrets that would pose both competitive and compliance nightmares.

Today’s corporations are publishing entities more than ever, with both legal and regulatory interfaces to the public as well as sales and marketing front ends via Web sites and other collateral that reaches many audiences.

Blog Filtering

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The Virginia Piedmont Technology Council (VPTC) will host a speakers luncheon at the Omni Hotel indowntown Charlottesville on November 17th at 11:30 a.m.
The VPTC luncheon will focus on how Blogs, Podcasting and RSS Feeds are Changing Business Communications. A panel of experts will define and discuss exactly what these new tools are, how they are changing the way companies interact with their customers, and present some fascinating scenarios describing what’s happening in the Blogosphere right now.

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Beta OPML validator.
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RSS Compedium has added an OPML resource.
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A Roman Catholic high school has ordered its students to remove personal blogs from the Internet in the name of protecting them from cyberpredators.

Students at Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta appear to be heeding a directive from the principal, the Rev. Kieran McHugh, to remove personal postings about the school or themselves from Web sites like myspace.com or xanga.com, even if they were posted from the students’ home computers.

Officials with the Diocese of Paterson say the directive is a matter of safety, not censorship. But constitutional experts say the case raises interesting questions about the intersection of free speech and voluntary agreements with private institutions.

Complete Article
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A few weeks ago I published an article about Ego Searches that details how to use RSS feeds to alert people to product or company mentions. Well Talk Digger has taken it a step further by allowing users to create a Super Ego Feed that merges the results of ego searches.
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The Blogging Enterprise is a one-day conference that will explore blogging, podcasting and video podcasting and their potential benefits and value in building brands, educating prospects, making sales and cultivating customer loyalty. Attendees will depart with new ideas and a better sense for how to implement this new technology successfully…

The conference will be held in Austin, Texas on November 2.
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RSS Spider looks for RSS feeds. Feed Seeker Bot (FSB) is RSS-Spider’s home page crawling robot. This bot does not crawl pages other than your home page.

Well the spider is looking for the RSS aware tags in the HEAD of your home page.  (for details on how to do this read step #4)

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Robin Good has updated the RSS Top 55. The RSSTop55 Premium, Maximum ExpoRSSure, is a 60-page mini-guide that complements and augments the freely accessible public RSSTop55. The publication is designed to assist individuals with their RSS feed promotion.

Another alternative is the RSS submission list on RSS Specifications.
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The consumer advocacy group Commercial Alert has asked the FTC to investigate “stealth” marketing campaigns, where companies create and maintain blogs that appear to be from ordinary people but are in fact created by Corporate Marketing Depts for the purpose of selling products, among other tactics. more…

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Sounds like a complete fishing expedition to me. CNet points out that XML is progression of the SGML standard which has been around since the 80’s.

Charlotte, N.C.-based Scientigo owns two patents covering the transfer of “data in neutral forms.” These patents, one of which was applied for in 1997, are infringed upon by the data-formatting standard XML, Scientigo executives assert.

Scientigo intends to “monetize” this intellectual property, Scientigo CEO Doyal Bryant said this week.

Complete Article on CNet
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Blog and RSS feed advertising network Pheedo has begun testing a program to make it easier for advertisers to create integrated, multi-channel campaigns across blogs, Web feeds and podcasts.

“If your ad message is only in one of these channels, there’s a chance it will be missed by part of the customer base,” Bill Flitter, Pheedo’s founder and CMO, told ClickZ News. “We’re tying the channels together for the advertisers to make sure the consumers will get the message in their preferred way.”

Pheedo has been running integrated campaigns for a handful of advertisers since June on a less formal basis, but are now building a turn-key program, which should be ready to launch by the end of the year. The RSS analytics and ad server and blog ad network are already in place. To complete the offering, Pheedo is currently developing technology around podcast ad serving and building out its podcast network.

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Randy has a great piece on the “brokeness” of RSS search. The bulk of the larger RSS search engines are so cluttered with spam and non-sensical posts that they have been rendered virtually useless.

In my opinion, some of the smaller RSS search engines that manually approve listings do a better job. The downside of course is that as RSS grows its not practical for a search engines to manually approve submissions. Looks like RSS Search is due for a “Florida” update
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Internet services company VeriSign Inc. said Monday it has acquired news aggregator Moreover Technologies Inc. for $30 million in cash to bolster its position as an organizer and gatekeeper of information flowing across the Web.
Moreover, a closely held San Francisco-based company, gathers and filters online news and blogs, then automatically parcels the information in a headline-like format, also known as RSS feeds, to corporate customers, such as Microsoft Corp.’s MyMSN.

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I spotted a whole new breed of RSS spam that is particularly worrisome. It appears that “sploggers” are taking legitimate RSS feeds and imbedding links using keyword phrases in the RSS feed’s item description. It appears to be an automated script but there is some intelligence to how this is done because the posts are often still “sensical”. The postst gives the appears that the original RSS feed creator is recommending the linked resources, which they are not. It is bad enough to have content “borrowed” on a regular basis without appropriate credits, its even more disturbing to have content modified in such a disturbing way.

In the long wrong, if there is wide spread adoption of this tactic, it could harm the credibility of bloggers. more…

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