FeedHenry

Geek News Central has a short list of do’s and don’ts for RSS Syndication. Some are good though the “opt-in” statement needs to be clarified as requiring 50 million opt-ins is going to hurt the network effect of an aggregation and syndication system. By all means, allow opt-out and respect robots.txt and licenses but lets not kill off the network effect of syndication by thinking in old world terms of ownership.

SplashCast has been making waves in the podcasting community as they aggregate and redistribute publishers feeds with little or no linkback. It is more complex though as even with linkbacks publishers are not happy as they want consumers to consume feeds directly from them and not through a third-party.

It is a thorny issue as SplashCast think they are offering a valuable service to consumers (and publishers) while publishers are generally just angry with them.

Aggregators and redistributors of syndicated media need to pay heed to the thoughts of publishers. What seems like a cool idea can turn into a copyright case.

In a way it is sad state of affairs as it devalues the potential of syndicated items living on the internet.

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.)

In more news, FeedLounge have announced that they will be terminating operations on June 1st of this year.

An interesting post from NewsGator on new releases and the past year.

More than a 100 companies, a majority of them being Fortune 1000 companies or highly recognizable brands, have purchased NewsGator Enterprise Server and NewsGator Private Label Platform.

An extensive comparison of various feed aggregators (thanks to Martin for the link.)

Blogbridge can be a bit clunky to use but one thing they do really well is in guiding users to content. They hire and encourage people to become “expert guides” in an area. These guides create libraries of feeds around a certain topic and make it very easy to find the best content on the web.

RSS is largely about text though with a growing video and audio usage base. Text to speech systems are usually a bit of a joke and until now I hadn’t heard one that did the job well enough for me to seriously think about using it. BlueGrind though is pretty good.

RSS text feeds to audio and played over your mobile phone or saved as podcasts and synced to your iPod. Some big potential in text to speech coupled with RSS.

Google has released a Feed API that allows you to pull down items from RSS and ATOM feeds in JSON or XML formats. It deals with all the peculiarities of the syndication formats and one would imagine is reliable and up to date, being Google (though it must be said that Google Reader is known to be a good 20 to 30 minutes behind Bloglines for updates.)

This API though should be of no concern to Millifeed, Newsgator, Attensa and co. This is because the API is specifically conditioned for AJAX usage. It is meant to be used for sites who want feeds in their sidebars or tickers. It is likely that Google would cut your API access if they detected you using it for powering a major feed reader or aggregation platform.

It only took a couple of years for Darwin to formulate the idea of evolution by natural selection. It took thirty years to frame that idea in a way that would convince other scientists and the general public.

Darwin’s rhetorical strategy is an important realisation to make when it comes to selling technology.

We can have the best technology but we are going to be a minor footnote in the landscape if we can’t get people to accept it.

The pillar approach mentioned has to be done carefully though otherwise we will come across as a lecturer and there is automatic emotional backlash to that in our current day and age.

I do think a European style of getting technology to market will make a comeback; A quiet, persistent and practical approach to technology in our lives, not technology as our lives.