FEEDoTopia: 2007

Monday, December 24, 2007

Have A wonderful XMAS!

Find Santa Here!
VOIP IP Telephony: Track Santa OnLine As NORAD Follows Santa,!
Tags: Track Santa, The Worlds Fastest Flying Object, XMAS,

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Why You Should Redirect Blogger Feeds

Yes I thought like you too. Why redirect my feed to feed burner? Blogger is good. I had a feedburner account and basically playing with it. I also had the feed count showing on one of my sites. But the count was about 10! Yes nothing big, in fact tiny. Then Yesterday I redirected my feeds through feed burner. It was because some people were using my posts and taking my keywords away.
This morning I was a bit surprised. feed count is 129 and I also found few others who were using my feeds, which were in full for their own good.
How do you go about doing this? well you can follow the instructions on feedburner Blog;
"Getting started
Our Blogger QuickStart guide has been updated to include all the necessary info for redirecting your feed. And, since you've made it this far in today's post, now is a good time to let you know we're still accepting Publisher Buzz submissions, so if you have a good story to tell about your newly integrated Blogger feed or your experience using our feed-related services, submit it to buzz@feedburner.com."
Tags: Feedburner, Feed redirection, Feedotopia, blogger

Monday, November 19, 2007

Newsgator Puts OpenSocial to Use

Latest NewsGator social application taps into a programming model developed by Google to deliver and enable discussion about the best video and image content for Google users

Nov. 2, 2007 — NewsGator Technologies, Inc., a pioneer in RSS and Enterprise 2.0, today announced the release of Didja Hear!?, the latest NewsGator social application that will give Google users the ability to easily share and discuss video and image content.

Didja Hear!? leverages OpenSocial, a programming model developed by Google in which developers are provided with a set of common APIs enabling distribution of their applications across multiple sites all with the aim to help the Web become more social and to make sharing great content easy. Didja Hear!? and its participation in OpenSocial reinforces NewsGator’s continued commitment to innovation and highlights the power and flexibility of NewsGator’s RSS platform to deliver compelling, social and useful applications.

Didja Hear!? leverages NewsGator’s database of nearly two million feeds and the editorial controls of NewsGator’s Widget Framework to present the images and videos that are most compelling and enjoyable for users to pass on to their friends. With Didja Hear!?:

• NewsGator automatically recommends the top video and graphic content from nearly two million RSS feeds – more than seven million articles per day;

• The NewsGator Widget Framework divides those videos and images into categories including movies, sports, celebrities, television and more; and,

• Users can easily send a cool video to their friends along with comments – and reply back with comments on any videos they get – as well as see existing comments on anything they have sent.

“Didja Hear!? and our early participation in OpenSocial exemplify our mission of getting the right content to the right people. We developed Didja Hear!? to filter and deliver the best video and graphical content from across the Web to the users who want to interact with it,” said Brian Kellner, vice president of products at NewsGator. “Didja Hear!? is like a Web 2.0 mashup of a greeting card store and a coffee shop – it’s a fun way for people to communicate, interact and socialize around quality content.”
For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Quantifying your Feeds, Casts with Quantcast.

I just joined Quantcast free service to checkout their services. I only added one of my blogs and it is yet to get any meaningful data from my site. (It is not a very busy site but I using it to verify accuracy of the services as I have other systems from Google to tiny startups providing similar services. I have looked at reports on sites that Quantcast has collected enough data and seem to be interesting. You can follow the link in the following News release by QuantCast.

San Francisco, CA - September 25, 2007 - Quantcast, the world's only open internet ratings service, today announced that it has launched a robust suite of media measurement services for publishers in its Quantified Publisher program. The program, which is free to join at Quantcast.com empowers publishers to demonstrate the unique value of their audiences by tagging their websites, videos, widgets and games for direct measurement.

Available today, Quantcast's enhanced suite of free media measurement services includes:

Tabbed Quantified Publisher Profiles for individual media properties including a rich traffic overview that provides greater depth and insight on key audience metrics.
The Quantified Publisher Network View, providing measurement of unduplicated reach and aggregated traffic statistics as well as a single point of control for publishers with multiple sites and services.
Secure Quantcast Measurement Tags to measure transactional pages on e-commerce sites of all kinds.
Video and Widget Measurement Services to track impressions and interaction with Flash-based videos, widgets, games and more.

"The response has been overwhelming. More than 15,000 publishers with several million web media assets, including sites, blogs, widgets and videos, have joined our free program," said Konrad Feldman, co-founder and CEO, Quantcast Corporation. "Today, we are pleased to continue the drive for transparency and accuracy by providing a robust suite of media measurement services that help publishers better understand and monetize their properties."With millions of 'Quantified' web destinations and services, Quantcast measures more than a billion page views per day. Quantcast's models are derived from visits by more than 350 million Internet users every month, including more than 80 percent of all U.S. Internet users. "Quantcast's Network View helps us demonstrate our unduplicated network reach and highlight the popularity of our sites - which net 50 million visits per month," said Christopher Batty, Vice President, Sales, Gawker Media. "And the new traffic tab makes it easy for advertisers to see the power in the network - complete with daily, weekly and monthly statistics on all of our sites combined and individually - from Gizmodo and Valleywag to Wonkette and Defamer."Details on Quantcast's enhanced suite of media measurement services follow: Tabbed Quantified Publisher Profiles: Quantcast profiles will always feature the popular summary view for each online property. But now they include an enhanced traffic tab that provides greater depth and insight on key audience reach, engagement and frequency metrics.Key metrics, including unique visitors, visits and page-views, are presented in dynamic daily, seven-day and trailing 30-day charts. In addition, a traffic summary automatically calculates average visits per unique visitor and page views per visit. Coming soon, this tab will include time-on-site metrics. The Quantified Publisher Network View: This new interface enables publishers to track their portfolio of properties, including websites, videos, widgets and games, in a single dashboard. It also provides one-click access and a single point of control for the Quantcast profile for each media property. The network view features the new traffic tab with the same easy-to-use dynamic charts to provide a rich overview of network metrics. Unique visitors ("uniques") are reported as unduplicated network reach, and the other network metrics are shown in the aggregate. The network view is automatically created when a Quantified Publisher tags a second website or media element such as a video, widget or game. As always, Quantified Publishers can adjust their Quantcast profile settings to control which elements the world can see. Secure Quantcast Measurement Tags: Paired with conventional Quantcast measurement tags for content pages, new secure Quantcast tags enable online retailers and e-commerce providers of all kinds to measure the traffic on their transactional 'https' pages with no interruption to check-out, and no affect on the shopping experience.The secure tags are available free of charge to all Quantified Publishers. They can be found by logging-in to Quantcast.com and going to the 'My Quantified Sites' page. Video and Widget Measurement: As announced in July, Quantcast now offers free video and widget measurement services with the ability to track any Flash-based file. These new capabilities help publishers track the web-wide distribution of their media elements to demonstrate their true network reach. Visit http://www.quantcast.com/quantified-video.jsp.

Pricing and Availability: Quantcast's enhanced suite of media measurement services is available free of charge to any web publisher, site or service that joins the free Quantified Publisher program http://www.quantcast.com/quantified-publisher.jsp.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

PRWeb Webinar Series, Orientation for New Users and Avanced Features Training for Current Users

PRWeb would like to welcome you and provide you with the basics of how PRWeb works, press release tips, and show how easy the submission process truly is. They also will show you how to get the most out of what has become the most advanced and robust system for distributing news releases to reporters, search engines and thousands of web sites that download news via PRWeb's daily XML/RSS feeds.
I am a member and it has been a smooth news feed for me!
Mario Bonilla of PRWeb will be conducting the series and you will be able to enroll here.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

News Feed On Your PS3

The 2.00 Firmware Update for the PS3, which was just released, will add the Information Board to your XMB. Once it's activated, headlines will begin scrolling in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. Sony plans to use the Information Board to release information on games, hardware, Store updates, and so forth, but you can choose not to display it if you'd rather not be bothered.
PS3 News Release

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Microsoft's web analytics tool, Gatineau, Introduced

After getting exposed by a attendee of ADChamps about Gatineau, screenshots and all, Ian Thomas, who is "responsible for bringing Microsoft's new web analytics solution, codenamed Gatineau, to market", decided to provide his own informative report and also about the beta program with that anyone interested could apply to be included.
He also provided some screenshots (one above) of his own; according to LiveSide, Microsoft's official news blog.
The Gatineau is not much different from Google Analytics but LiveSide says that it will be able to leverage Live ID to provide to offer demographic information. But I have already seen these information on other Analytics product, not only Google Analytics.
Of course as with any product that links user to the web, privacy concerns have come up regarding Live ID usage.
But Ian has replied the querry;
"the answer is that we do get this information from users’ Live ID (formerly known as Microsoft Passport) profiles, but I would stress that we get this information anonymously, and there is no use of PII (Personally Identifiable Information, such as name or e-mail address) in the product."

LiveSide Article

To request an invitation to Gatineau: http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoft-adcenter-gatineau.

Lies Damn Lies (Ian's Website)

Are you aware That You are Being Tracked on the Internet

I know I am!
Geemodo: Most People are Unaware That They are Being Tracked on the Internet

Friday, November 02, 2007

Future of News Media, and Tom Curley Yes....

Associated Press Head Tom Curley seem to have got it all right. (To borrow from Blodget at SAI);

We -- the news industry -- have come to that fork in the road. We must take bold, decisive steps to secure the audiences and funding to support journalism’s essential role in both our economy and democracy, or find ourselves on an ugly path to obscurity.

Yes...

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Get Your Site Optimized and your Feeds smoother: Upcoming Website Optimizer online seminars

If you are going to get your web site optimized, (Good websites give Good Feeds!), then I think you attend two web seminars provided by Google's Website Optimizer team has brought about.
I am going to register as soon as post this post.
"

The first online seminar, Introduction to Website Optimizer, will be geared towards those who are unfamiliar with website content testing and optimization. Tom will discuss the importance and benefits of optimizing your website design and content, and he'll provide a detailed introduction to Website Optimizer and review the product's latest features (including A/B Split testing and the ability to delete experiments).

The second online seminar, Website Optimizer: Creating & Launching Experiments, builds on the first and is designed for those who have previous experience with Website Optimizer or other site testing tools. Tom will give a step-by-step demonstration of how to successfully launch multivariate and A/B experiments, and he'll also answer your questions.

Other members of the Website Optimizer team will be available during the online seminars to chat individually with attendees and answer questions in real time.

Here is the schedule and registration information:

Introduction to Website Optimizer (New or inexperienced users)
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 10:00 - 11:00am PDT
Register to attend.

Website Optimizer: Creating & Launching Experiments (Intermediate and advanced users)
Thursday, November 1st, 2007 10:00 - 11:00am PDT
Register to attend.

Once you've registered, you'll receive an email from WebEx with participation details."
Google Analytics Blog: Upcoming Website Optimizer online seminars

Sunday, October 21, 2007

The Gap between PR Professionals and Media is Widening According to Journalists

ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The results of Bennett & Company’s 25^th anniversary survey suggest the divide may be growing between PR professionals and the media. This year’s survey polled more than 29,000 journalists, with 688 completing the survey, or 2.3%.

When asked if they see a growing divide between PR professionals and the media, 49 percent of journalists say “yes”.

Bennett & Company found that 62 percent of journalists now obtain less than 10 percent of their content from PR firms. “Communication channels have expanded to the 1000s, including grassroots social networking, and therefore, our relationships with the media are one of many tasks we do every day; twenty five years ago when this survey began it was how we spent the majority of our day,” explains Laura Bennett, president of Bennett & Company, in reference to this year’s results.

One reporter responded, “I don’t feel a growing divide, but I don’t see the divide getting smaller either. PR professionals need to become more informed on the needs of print media.”

Building a relationship with the reporter fills one such need and makes a difference. Thirty eight percent of journalists said the number one reason they open their email is because they know the sender. Reporters are more likely to use a responsive source they know and trust.

PR professionals need to be just as reliable when things get negative. “Speak openly and honestly when bad news happens. We are seeing a trend of PR people trying to avoid the media or ignore bad news. It only makes things worse,” wrote a network television news director.

The prevalence of “fluff” remains a distracting put-off for busy journalists. “Be fair. Don’t stretch the truth or tell half-truths. When words such as “first,” “best,” “biggest,” or “only” are used, there better be supportive explanations,” one journalist noted.

However great or small the divide is between PR professionals and the media, building relationships with open communication and reliability are still the key. After 25 years, Laura Bennett does not personally feel there is gap, but concedes that her team’s approach to marketing is now more holistic than it was five years ago. Bennett concludes, “The media plays a very important role and PR professionals serve best when they know and respect that role.”

Bennet & Company

RSS Feeds, PodCasts Turns to Phonecasts

Feed your podcast feeds directly to a phone!
VOIP IP Telephony: PodCasts Turns to Phonecasts

Friday, October 12, 2007

Popuload Feeds for While You Wait

Popuload is a free RSS reader with a difference: it appears and disappears alongside your computer's loading bar. The innovative idea is that computer users will never sit there bored waiting for their computer to perform tedious functions. While waiting to download, copy and print files, with Popuload, you can read the latest news, sports result, celebrity gossip or the news feed of your choice. Indeed, the choice of feeds is vast; from news to entertainment, Popuload offers an expansive range of top quality news feeds. Additionally, if users see a piece of information that is of particular interest to them, they can simply click on it to take them instantly to the full article online. Now when you are waiting to download that file or movie, you can browse leisurely through the news snippets to keep you both informed and entertained with the latest information.

The main difference between Popuload and other feed readers is that Popuload loads automatically with your computer's loading bar. It is also designed so that it can be accessed at any time. In addition, rather than the common method of displaying news feeds in a list, Popuload allows users to interactively browse news items individually through its streamlined, compact window. This feature eliminates the frustration of being confronted with too many feeds at once. Best of all, Popuload is free, and very easy to use. All these features, when taken together, are what makes Popuload truly innovative. Entertainment while you wait has never looked better.

Popuload is free. Go to www.popuload.com

Saturday, October 06, 2007

China Blocking RSS feeds, Any RSS Feed

Ars Technica reports that China is blocking any RSS Feeds to China. I verified this with the WebsitePulse' china firewall test none of the feeds were available from Bejing,China, but the same feeds were available in Hong Kong.
ARS begins with
" As many readers who follow the antics of the Chinese government know, when it comes to enforcing the "Great Firewall of China," consistency isn't exactly its strong point. While certain phrases, concepts, and entire web sites are regularly blocked from reaching the eyeballs of many Chinese Internet surfers, things like high traffic are enough to let a number of forbidden concepts slip through. And then there's the indecision of China's Public Security Bureau (PSB), which has blocked certain sites (such as Blogspot and Wordpress blogs) on and off for some time now, and enforces the blocks inconsistently between provinces. For a One True China, there are certainly many interpretations of what is and isn't allowed through the country's cyber connection."

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Feeds are shareable, just mash them up

Google Mashup Editor Blog: Sharable $user feeds
GME allowed application feeds to be shared. But now due to changes made to the GME, user feeds which were private previously, are now shareable. Now this might bring out more mashable ideas!
Feedotopia is currently playing with GME in certain features and hope to use this new opening to the fullest as our application is completely user based.
If you want to see examples of this feature, have a look at MultiTask (a shared task list) and My Travel Map, ( a travelling mashup?).
Feeds are shareable

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Read any feed with multilingual Google Reader

Google Reader goes multilingual as well as breaking away from the Google Labs.
I have been using the reader, The Google reader from it's inception and all I see are improvements. I think now that it has broken away from Google labs, the stand alone Google reader will do well with the line up of other google applications and services that serve us well and it self! ;)

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Learning through RSS at OpenLearn

RSS versions of the OpenLearn units are being made available at OpenLearn Units as RSS). I have been keeping in touch with open university The Open University, best known as OU has made strides in offering various courses for people from all over the world.
It is exciting, to my mind at least, to see the RSS versions of each of the OpenLearn course units (this is still in the process of implementation).

Here's an example: a course unit on Babylonian mathematics (via RSS).

You can find the full list here: OpenLearn Units and thier RSS unit content feeds.

The feeds are also reachable from each course unit landing page (example):

Find the feed you need or reach feedotopia!

Google blog tell us how the information overflow and how to tame it with Google reader. Because there is search added to the Google reader now! Although it is focused on blogs and news sources, I hope this post will help Feedotopia to jump through the hoops of filtering and become popular so that I would be able to help the world, to reach Feedotopia. Blurb from Google Blog;
Find a needle in a feedstack with Google Reader
"Your sources filter out the noise and present the most interesting bits to you in a useful way. For many of us, these sources include newspapers, magazines, and of course blogs. We built Google Reader as a way for you to see all of your online sources in one place."
And the utube, youtube video!;

Saturday, August 25, 2007

BLO.GS not working.

The attempts to ping blo.gs has not been successful last few times I tried to ping. Perhaps Yahoo is dumping the service. I still have to code from the time Jim released it and perhaps time to whip it out have the service under Feedotopia.com!

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Simple Sharing Extensions for Atom and RSS, SSE 0.94

Of course Microsoft has to do something to all these simple thing and make extensions so that nothing will work after that! (Kidding I have not tested or verified any of this.) Anyway I was going to write about (Just make links basically) ATOM 1.0. But this made it easier. All in here.

Overview

The scope of Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is to define the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely-cooperating applications to use XML-based container formats such as Atom and RSS as the basis for item sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous synchronization of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.

Simple Sharing extends the following specifications:
Atom 1.0 - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287
RSS 2.0 - http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss

One of the guiding principles of SSE is to reinvent as little as possible(HA HA)—hence the use of Atom and RSS in this spec as the underlying format for exchanging SSE data. It is expected that there will be additional container format bindings for SSE in the future.

SSE continued here

Outline Processor Markup Language, OPML 1.0 specification

Well after looking up RSS 2.0 specification my next stop was at Outline Processor Markup Language, OPML 1.0 specification.
OPML an XML-based format that allows exchange of outline-structured information between applications running on different operating systems and environments.

In the summer of 2005 Dave Winer, released an open source OPML Editor, for Windows and Mac OS.

To learn more about outliners, the software category that inspired OPML, check out outliners.com.

The OPML spec has a liberal copyright, adapted from the copyright of the IETF, which has stood up well over time.

Dave Winer's OPML Validator came online in October 2005.

RSS 2.0 Specification

Have you ever wondered what RSS 2.0 specification is. I did not until I had to look it up for some of the work we do at FEEDotopia.
So here is where I read it at; RSS 2.0 at Harvard Law
Contents at the site;

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Mixing that Most Paint apps fail! Krita on Linux does it with ease.

Today I saw this video on YT via this post on DIGG. Well I was working on mixing feeds at the time. Then I thought "How nice, I can mix two feeds and get an entirely new feed!" OK, I am still mixing and do not find anything worth while. So until then enjoy the nice colors!.

Monday, August 13, 2007

Ready for Some Stories! RSS

Quick Post via email
According to about page;
FeedRaider allows you to lasso the interesting parts of the web for your viewing pleasure on a single page.
(1) Gather feeds
(2) Create a page = stay updated and save time!
(3) Embed = feeds on your blog/page easily!
(4) Customize
At first glance it seems plain feed site. But if you look close enough and use the site, one will begin to see the depth of work put into the site.
I will write another post once I have gone through the complete site. Meanwhile, you can register yourself and enjoy some feed raiding!

Saturday, August 11, 2007

gridtech: Novell owns Unix and Unixware Copyrights Judge say so.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

developerWorks RSS feeds

I deal with a lot of developer networks and IBM developerWorks is one of the places I roam when I have time. I have built my own feed so that I can get exactly the news I want. There is also a iPhone feed ;), good if you are a developer and a iPhone user!

Monday, August 06, 2007

Digg effect on SnapVoIP

One of our sister sites got the DIGG effect and it is good, and I think it will give a good boost to SnapVoIP. Now I have get the same for Feedotopia!
SnapVoIP on DiGG
VOIP IP Telephony: Google Phone coming soon!

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Google Supplemental index, stil in force, it is the name that got dumped.

All theses indexes, feeds and publications are a method to get in to a search engine index like Google or Yahoo and countless other search engines and be prominent in the results.
The Google maintained a supplemental index that to keep search results that dont quite have enough juice to make the main Google index. But according to a Webmaster central post, Supplemental goes mainstream, the gap between supplemental and the main index has been narrow and does not show as supplemental in your search results. But it is there, and if you are bored or extremely intelligent, you can guess where the results for that search came from.

To get more information such as the supplemental index (read more - and here's Matt's talk about it on video) and countless comments could be found by following the link below.
Happy Google feeding
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Supplemental goes mainstream

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Is RSS Mixer a Twitter with out Social Network?

Masable writes about RSS Mixer being the twitter sans the social network. RSS Mixer is a new service that will combine all of your feeds into one. A feed aggregator, if you will.
Mashable article.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Go get you Map Mashup on!

Where do you get map mashups other than Frappr, Zooomr, Trulia, and still do something worthwhile to spend your (UN) productive time with. I am always in the look out for mapping tools as they are very good feed tools as well, if you configure them right!
So set out to look for some but then realized that Mashable's Adam Ostrow has already done it for me. I don't know why but he found 13 worthwhile maps (why not 12 or 14, I don't know. May be he is trying to take unlucky ness from #13) Well if you count all the plugs in comments, it is 33 sites I think!
Anyway I think it is a good investment to spend some time smashing these map mashups! All are supposed to commemorate newly released, Google Mapplets, that is two P's.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Google sitemaps (webmaster tools) improves feedback

Google webmaster tools have improved it's way of reporting errors! Now some of them will be reduced to warnings depending on if they are minor problems or major errors!
According to the post,
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: New warnings feedback
Warnings allow Google to provide feedback on portions of your sitemap that may be confusing or inaccurate, while saving the real "error" alarm for problems that make your sitemap completely unreadable. Google hopes the additional information makes it even easier to share your sitemaps with them.
The new set of warnings includes many problems that we had previously classified as errors, including the "incorrect namespace" and "invalid date" examples shown in the screenshot above. We also crawl a sample of the URLs listed in your sitemap and report warnings if the Googlebot runs into any trouble with them. These warnings might suggest a widespread problem with your site that warrants further investigation, such as a stale sitemap or a misconfigured robots.txt file.
So if you have not done already, get an account on webmaster tools and improve your site so I can have good feeds on my feedotopia!

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Got Blog...ger? Burn it

If you host your content on a Blogger blog with a blogspot.com address (or use Blogger's “custom domain” feature), you can now redirect your native Blogger feed to your FeedBurner feed (quite easily, might we add). Gone are the muggy, languorous days of wrestling with "autodiscovery" tags in foreboding corners of your Blogger template code or hacking through this tangled discussion thread for a glimpse of configuration clarity. Starting right now, you just log into your Blogger account, select Settings | Site Feed, enter your FeedBurner feed address and click "Save Settings." Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Now you've got the complete picture of how your content is being consumed out here, out there, out everywhere.

Everyone burn free with feedburner!

Feedburner is a part of the Google family now and offering several of its used to be “Pro” features free. Both the “MyBrand” tool, and TotalStats, a tool which allows you to see views or clicks of your feed, are now available to everyone for free.

PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. You will now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content. You can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the "Item Views" checkbox to activate these PRO features.

The MyBrand service (also PRO-level) is located under the "My Account" tab after you've signed in. MyBrand lets you maintain consistency between your feed address and your hosted website's domain, if matchy-matchy is your thing. For example, rather than using feeds.feedburner.com/MyFeedName, your MyBrand-ed feed address can be feeds.myexcellentdomain.net/MyFeedName. To get started with MyBrand, sign into FeedBurner, click the "My Account" link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click "MyBrand". Nota Bene: You must be comfortable playing around with DNS entries and own the rights to the domain whose DNS entries you'll be playing around with in order to successfully activate MyBrand.

And if you have been paying for those features, feel better! you will not be charged for the month of June 2007 and beyond.

Monday, July 02, 2007

World of RSS Feed resources, 120+

You will get a bellyful of RSS information from this link. I think I don't need to go anywhere, just use this link to find things to write about Feeds and feed technology! May be it is good enough to be called mini RSS Feedotopia!
Follow The Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS Resources to feed your RSS hunger.

Is Yahoo killing BLO.GS?

For some time now I have not been able to ping BLO.GS and the lists of Updates, and recently added are empty.
Further more there is no indication or notification on the home page. May be it is time to wip up that old open source code by Jim Winstead and bring up new blo.gs!

Monday, June 25, 2007

Google's AJAX feed api gives you a slideshow gadget for your iGoogle

I was browsing through Google code site when I noticed that Slide Show Control is now available as a gadget for iGoogle.
I have been interested in Google AJAX Feed API because, well, this site is about feeds and Google Code has taught me a thing or two.
The Google Gadget supports any direct feed that uses the MediaRSS extensions. In addition, it has configuration support for discovery of public Picasa Web Albums and tag-based search over PhotoBucket. We will most likely add other tag-based domains in the near future. Why not try to work it out with Flickr?
I read about this here; Google AJAX Search API Blog: Slide Show Control now available as a Google Gadget

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Don't follow the feeds, make feeds follow you with Google Gears!

Google Gears (beta) has brought out a new dimension to how you interact with web applications! Since RSS Feeds, ATOM Feeds and OPML Feeds are our life blood, let's see what it could do to feeds! Will it give us feedotopia?

According the developer site, Google Gears consists of three modules that address the core challenges in making web applications work offline.

	LocalServer Cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally
	Database Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
	WorkerPool Blogger: FEEDoTopia - Edit Post "Don't follow the feeds, make feeds follow you with..." Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously

But where is the feeds or feed store, for that I had to go to another site! Yes to Google reader site!
But I got the Idea from an article on Google Blogger! According to the article Google Reader is the first application available for online and offline use. Once you have Google Gears installed, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an Internet connection.
How do you do that? simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Feedotopia, social bookmarking and RSS

Content syndication and distribution on line is getting a shot in the arm from social bookmarking. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project 28% of Internet users have tagged or categorized content on line such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day on line, 7% of Internet users say they tag or categorize on line content.
I usually do it twice for my posts, once as blogger labels and then Technorati tags. So why all the fuss? may be just to organize one self, many selves!
But an article I read today says there is more to this tagging and labeling. Heidi Cohen, who teaches in New York University's Masters Program in Direct and Interactive Marketing, says in her ClickZ column (I learned about Heidi's column at Press-feed)that what makes social bookmarking importnat to marketers is that it's another cost-effective way to augment search marketing efforts, distribute content, and aid branding.

Social bookmarks are links allowing users to store, classify, share, and search content through a process known as tagging. Tags are a user-generated taxonomy that makes information easier to find. Social bookmarks can be applied to various types of content, including Web sites, blogs, PDFs, audio, video, photos, and tools.

Major social bookmarking sites include del.icio.us, Furl, StumbleUpon, and Google Bookmarks. TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden suggests adding commentary to bookmarks to aid search within the social media site. Social news sites such as Digg and reddit are often counted in this category. These sites can be important for reputation management and branding, notes SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin. To mitigate the effect of negative information about your company, create articles portraying your firm in a positive light and optimize them on these sites.

And it seems that all these should end up in RSS Feeds. Feedotopia, will take you to utopia of feeds, soon!

Friday, June 01, 2007

RSS Announcer comes to read your feeds, just like TV or youtube!

I thought I have seen all the RSS bots and readers. And I see that I have not! ;). Televirtual has announced Karina, the RSS Announcer based on their AiVATARS & AiCASTERS technology

Despite their small client PC or mobile phone footprints, AiCASTERS boast a range of complex expressions and gestures, which allow them to interpret and augment the information they deliver. This ability can be semantic-related or 'tagged' manually by an RSS editor, and allows them to bring added performance to the material they deliver. To match this performance we integrate only the best available synthetic speech solutions.

Televirtual's Rapid Information Delivery system is not limited to character performance. It can also manage. control and handle rich content including still photography, maps, diagrams or movies. The auto-generated result simulates a conventional TV news or information bulletin.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Feed ADs in your RSS FEED stream

MyADLETS tells about Pheedo' s Feedpowered advertising. Hmm.. there must be something in it! for all these feeders, Bottom, Middle and Top!
MyADLETS informtion trickle!

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Feedburner is in Google oven now.

This Techcrunch article explains, what was a rumor for sometime now as to be a fact. Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner

from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi

, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.

Update;

Google official blog explains the deal and a audio file, the discussion with feedburner CEO.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

RailsConf more stuff.... Opening Keynote and ....

I am not going to write about the opening keynote because someone else have done a really good job of it. Actually a whole bunch of it. Since my writing (I write?) is really bad and information is all I am trying to provide, I will have to direct you to Nick Sieger. (If you have touched, ActiveRecord-JDBC connector, or seen inner working of JRuby + NanoContainer, you have been touched by Nick.)

Once I found that Nick was blogging, and found that I can catch up with presentations, that I have missed!, I gave up even thinking about writing. He did write a lot of very good material, I spent a lot of time reading his blog already!

Once you read his articles, you will feel that you have actually been in the presentation.

Here are the article;

RailsConf 2007 Opening Keynote: David Heinemeier Hansson

RailsConf 2007: Evan Weaver: Going Off Grid

RailsConf 2007: Saturday Morning Keynotes

RailsConf 2007: Bradley Taylor: Virtual Clusters

RailsConf 2007: Chris Wanstrath: Kickin' Ass with Cache-fu

Friday, May 18, 2007

Railsconf, Ruby on Rails and Portland

I was hooked on Ruby on Rails from the day I discovered it almost a year ago. Railsconf now in session in Portland is a sold out event!
Just to keep railsconf news tidbits afloat, My favorite tool, Komodo,

Active State has a IDE for Ruby On Rails;
ActiveState, the leading provider of tools and services for dynamic languages, released the latest version of Komodo IDE today at RailsConf 2007, introducing unparalleled Ruby and Ruby on Rails support to the award-winning development environment. Komodo IDE 4.1 is a multi-platform, multi-language IDE for dynamic languages and Ajax technologies, now featuring the most advanced Ruby and Rails editing and debugging available in any development tool.

But I liked the Fiveruns studio better
FiveRuns, a pioneer of enterprise-class management for Rails
and other popular open source and commercial systems, today announced the general
availability of RM-Manage, the first product offering within the FiveRuns Enterprise Management Suite for Rails. Built to integrate with the FiveRuns Enterprise Management Platform, the Enterprise Management Suite for Rails will ensure Rails applications are enterprise-ready, performing and available.
More feeds on railsconf here on FEEDoTopia soon.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Sendouts Pro’s RSS Feed Technology Integrates with Indeed.com to ease job and candidate hunting

eMediawire News release.
May 17, 2007 -- Sendouts LLC, provider of Sendouts Pro, the #1 on-demand recruiting software for recruiting and staffing agencies, has completed a seamless XML feed integration with Indeed (www.indeed.com) and Simply Hired (www.simplyhired.com) enabling clients to fill more job orders and find more qualified candidates.

Sendouts provides its clients with Webconnect, a product that enables recruiters to automatically post job openings to their websites from within their Sendouts Pro recruiting software. Recognizing a need for more qualified candidates and further exposure for clients’ job postings, Sendouts Pro has implemented RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) technology. An XML format, RSS feeds are creating a standard way to automatically deliver fresh content to websites and blogs.

Rest of The News release.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

BlogTopsites and Blogflux services are under one roof now!

The services provided by Blogflux is very familiar to blog authos and publishers. I use Blogflus services in many a weblogs and direct others to do the same.
Blogtopsites ranks weblogs based on number of visitors to weblogs or blogs. Although they are both owned by the same company, Bloggy Network (Thanks goes to Vincent McBurney for clearing it up. Like him I thought the same when I got the Blogtopsites email). Good news is that you can use both the services with a single sign on at Blogflux.

I did not have any problems with this merger

, but there seems to be some problems with some sites. (I just noticed that I lost one of my site registration, although everything works fine.

)
May be I should send an email and get it corrected.

Vincent has written a better article and instead of rewriting I will direct you to his article!

Links;
Fix duplicate accounts here
Bloggy Network
If you have trouble email merger@blogtopsites.com for support
Vincent McBurney

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Google Analytics gets a new face

If you are like me, using the free Google Analytics service for monitoring, optimizing your websites, I have good news for you. I was at the Emetrics Summit and witnessed Brett Crosby and Jeff Veen unveiled the new version of Google Analytics.
I took a break from a few hectic days and now I am seeing the new interface at GA (Google Analytics).

I tried to capture my screens but seems to be having a bad luck with it. So I just got the image from Google Analytics blog.
Visit or Join Google analytics if you are not a member and enjoy all those insider views into your site/s.
But visiting this link;
Google Analytics Blog: New Version of Google Analytics!
might help you to get your bearings!

Monday, May 07, 2007

ADLETS are born it seems

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Did you feed unwanted stuff in to a search engine?

If you did and if the search engine is Google, you will have a chance at removing those indexed feeds or content.
I never thought of this procedure until I read the following post on Google's Google webmaster central blog.
Earlier I thought that if my robots.txt or robots meta tag would take care of all that But now I have access to a new tool. A tool that let me withdraw pages slipped through those barriers.
But the following article takes you through every step of removing a web page that got indexed by mistake. I hope other search engines will pick a clue and provide the same to webmasters.
Now where did that feed go!

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Requesting removal of content from our index

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Teqlo, The Next great Mashup

If your idea of feeds and other web services comes via pipes, like yahoo pipes beta, then you are in for another surprise.
Teqlo which is also in beta at he moment offers something everyone could be happy about. If you ever have tried to build a pipe on yahoo pipes, you know the drill. The difference at Teqlo is that it is focused on getting your work done without having to worry or think about about APIs, coding, or scripting. For Technical and non-technical people alike.
You can even plug in Yahoo pies as well, are we talking mash ups or what? Instead of reading my rumblings here I think it is better to head over to Teqlo and try out.
Word of warning though, about registration/ sign up page! If you are the type who wants to know terms of service or terms of use, please do that before filling up your information. It is at almost bottom of the sign up page. Why? 'cos you have to type up your information again, if you click on the terms of use link!
But the rest of the Teqlo is super for me, so far.
This is what their Executive summery has to say what Teqlo is all about;
"Web application developers have been building sophisticated services interfaces and protocols into their applications for years as a means of stimulating third party developer activity, we are taking that one step further by enabling non technical users with the capability to drag-and-drop components to a web page and enable reliable communication between services. Through enabling co-creation of process and task automation applications we unleash a wave of new applications that really do represent the way people work, because they are built by the people who use them!

Imagine you want to drop sales leads onto a map and then select contacts for daily calls, such as a sales person would do. Maybe you want to automatically notify your preferred customers when you are having a promotion event, or plan an event, or manage employee expenses. Teqlo's breakthrough sequencing methodology and data routing technology enables these and many more user generated applications without the steep learning curve imposed by competing technologies."

Links;
Teqlo the next great mashup

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Mix, Burn and Subscribe to your own feed mix

James E. Lee carries you through a feedmix elevator ride to give a pitch to feed technology!. I really enjoyed reading and trying out his article on "how and why to mix feeds"
Head over to his blog to get a bellyful.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

WeSeePeople: un-Boring Technorati... if it was boring to you!

If you are checking in your feeds at Technorati, find out how to be in the top 100.
WeSeePeople: un-Boring Technorati... if it was boring to you!

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Red Sweater gets Marsedit from Newsgator

Red Sweater Software announced today that it has acquired MarsEdit, the popular weblog publishing software, from NewsGator Technologies, Inc. The acquisition promises an exciting future for the application, which provides an intuitive, email-like interface to the web's most popular publishing systems.

MarsEdit's simplicity and power make it the tool of choice for many of the platform's leading writers.

"Nearly every word I write for Daring Fireball is published through MarsEdit," said John Gruber, author of the popular Daring Fireball weblog. "It's a terrific tool, and I'm glad to see it in good hands. I can't wait to start pummeling Daniel with feature requests."

Daniel Jalkut, the founder of Red Sweater Software, is himself an avid blogger. "MarsEdit has long been one of my favorite applications, so it's a thrill to welcome it into the Red Sweater family of products," he said. "I am both passionate and confident about steering MarsEdit into the future."

"I've already sent a bunch of feature requests to Daniel," said Brent Simmons, MarsEdit's original developer. "I use the app every day, and love it, and I'm so glad that it has a bright future. I look forward to being a MarsEdit user, to seeing what cool stuff Daniel does."
Links;
Press release at Red Sweater
Marsedit

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Geemodo: Now there is a Badger in my Yahoo Pipes

Very nice use of Yahoo pipes to add RSS feed badges to a site or weblog.

Geemodo: Now there is a Badger in my Yahoo Pipes

Friday, February 09, 2007

Yahoo pipes pipes feeds and more

Although it is some time since Yahoo let the pipes beta out, I did not have enough time to test it out. I did get a chance today and well, very clever piece of work. If worked hard enough, one would be able to pipe all his internet information through Yahoo Pipes. If you trust the Internet enough, then you will be able to create pipe that transfers data from one place to other. Like a VPN that we use to connect network to network.
I created a my own pipe, (Basically saved a copy of another pipe that a rather creative person has created and modified for my uses) and I am rather amazed and disappointed with the results. The disappointment is not due to Yahoo pipes but for what Yahoo pipes showed me. SPLOGS stealing blog data. I was searching for exact line by line copying of blog information. I found many, my own blogs, (yes I do have a few blogs! why? same reason you have your bookmarks categorized. you have? don't you.)
I invite you to visit Yahoo pipes and let some ideas flow.

Links;
Yahoo pipes Beta

Friday, January 12, 2007

Write comments and win big, no Spam!!

Did you ever thought that a comment that you leave on a weblog could earn you some money? Now you can.451 Press is hosting a comments contest. Just by commenting on the some of the blogs that this network is publishing, you can win up to $500. Requirements are that those comments have to be “quality comments,” not spam. The closing date for the comment contest is January 31, 2007. So get your comments brain up and head over to the link provided below.

LINKS;
Comment Contest