FEEDoTopia

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