Dylan Greene dot com

Earlier tonight Scoble issued a Developer Challenge: I'll switch blogs to the first blogging service that supports OPML.

Hmmm.... that's not too hard. I created the OPML support tonight. It only took a few hours.

And... it worked on the first try!

• Posts and photo albums grouped by tag: http://www.DylanGreene.com/opml/tags.xml
• Posts and photo alums group by year: http://www.DylanGreene.com/opml/archive.xml

All DABU sites now have automatic OPML support.

The coolest part is that you can drill down from the list of posts and photos albums down to individual comments and photo captions using OPML tools like OPML Editor from Dave Winer (see the screen shot).

I don't know if Scoble will decide to use DABU, but I'm glad to have spent the couple hours to keep ahead of the ever-changing standards curve.

DABU is the free blogging service I created that I use for this site, and almost 100 other people are using for their sites. http://www.DABU.com

OPML is an outline format in XML. It is similar to RSS in that supporting it today will impress a small number of geeks but support for it in the future is going to be practically mandatory if you care about your users.

Just two weeks until Gnomedex, the annual meeting of geeks lead by the lockergnome himself, Chris Pirillo. The subject matter is blogging and everything that revolves around it.

Some cool things:

• It's sold out!
• Over half the audience blogs (the list)
• Presenters include Dave Winer, Steve Gilmore, Steve Rubel, Phillip Torrone, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, John Battelle, Dan Gilmor, and may other A-list bloggers, editors, writers, and inventors. It's like the superbowl of blogging.

For people going:

• The .NET Guy is getting people together for dinner on Thursday. Contact him if you are interested.
• Robert Scoble may be hosting a camping trip after Gnomedex.
• I'll be staying at the Sixth Avenue Inn.
• I'll be in Seattle June 22 till Tuesday, June 28.
• On Monday and/or Tuesday, I'll be visiting friends at Microsoft. Major Nelson, John Porcaro, Dennis, Dave, etc - I expect cool demos that I can't talk about here! <g>

Image is from the great Podbat Blog.

According to my FeedBurner stats page, the circulation of my RSS on the first 24 hours of using FeedBurner was an awesome 303 people.

That should show the awesome power that RSS has. I can't even name 303 people, so it's not just people that know me interested in reading the silly things I write. Hi, curious onlooker!

According to Google AdSense, web pages on my site in that same 24 hour time period were looked at by people 11,730 times. I don't know how may unique people that is since many visit multiple pages, but I'd guess around 8,000 people. That shows a huge potential for growth for feed readers. Or the next market Microsoft or Google will take over.

If this whole "RSS" and "Feeds" thing doesn't make sense to you let me know and I'll write a blog entry about.

I resisted joining FeedBurner for a long time because I didn't want to give up full control of my feeds. FeedBurner has some nice features, such as adding Amazon ads and showing stats of how many people subscribe to your feed. Since I wrote my own blogging tool, it's not hard for me to add those features, or to do them even better, but that takes time away from other projects, so it was time to let somebody else take care of it.

FeedBurner has a setting that lets you set the "Original Feed URL" - so if FeedBurner shuts down or starts charging, I can make a quick preference change on my site and my RSS subscribers will resume getting their feed from here.

WorkBoxers has a FeedBurner Review, which I found out about on ProBlogger.

According to NeoWin.net, the next version of Internet Explorer will support tabbed browsing. The screenshot seen to the right is their proof.

Also, possibly even more noteworthy, is that they say that the next version of Internet Explorer will include a RSS aggregator.

This will fulfill Reason #4 for why RSS is not Ready for Prime Time, an article I published in January 2004 about why RSS isn't ready for most users.

I'm pleasantly surprised by how many names I recognize in the Gnomdex Blogroll.

Gnomdex is a conference I'll be attending this summer that focuses on RSS, blogging, and other related technologies.

A blogroll is a list of related blogs - in this case the blogroll is a list of blogs from people who will be attending.

Wow, there's a lot of blog search engines. Yet another reason why blogging is great for business...

1. 2RSS
2. Ageless Project
3. aggregator.weblogs.co.uk
4. Blawg Search
5. Bligz
6. Blogarama
7. Blogdex
8. Blogdigger
9. Blog Dump
10. Bloghop
11. Bloglines
12. Blogmatrix
13. Blogrunner
14. Blogsearchengine
15. Blogstreet
16. Blogvision
17. Blogwise
18. Bloogz
19. Boogieplay
20. Daypop
21. Eatonweb
22. Fastbuzz
23. Feedster
24. Get Linked
25. GetBlogs
26. Globeofblogs
27. LocalFeeds.com
28. Memigo
29. NewsIsFree
30. Pepys
31. Popdex
32. Postami
33. PubSub
34. RDF Ticker
35. Rootblog
36. Search4Blogs
37. Sindic8
38. Technorati
39. Waypath
40. Zopto

Source: EBook Marketing.

Now only if I knew which one to use....

I've registered for Gnomedex 5.

Why?

I want to bounce an idea off people. A concept that won't fit in a blog entry.

And I want to share this concept with a small crowd of visionaries with the experience and expertise to know what to do with the idea, or for them to tear it apart so I know what I need to bring back to the drawing board. They will be at Gnomdex.

What's my idea?

Now that blogging is practically everywhere, we are going to face a new problem. Too many blogs.

I predict we will see a blogging implosion from it's own popularity.

There are too may blogs to read, and the less popular ones are going fade away, leaving us with the blog equivalent of newspapers.

Choice is good, but we don't really need dozens of online book stores, auction sites, or pet food stores, and we don't really need dozens of blogs about the same mp3 players, digital cameras, and right-wing conspiracies. Rather than weed out the less-popular, I think I have an idea that will keep everybody who wants to blog interested in blogging, and won't require us to read a Scoble-riffic 1000 blogs to keep up with the topics we're interested in.

I have an idea, and I look forward the sharing it at Gnomdex, and I'm looking forward to hearing everybody else's ideas.

BTW, thanks to Steve Rubel and Brad Wilson for the heads up. And I plan on posting the idea here too, but I'm still trying to decide if I should have the idea looked over by a patent-lawyer-type-of-person first. (Not so that I can lock it up, but so that I can make sure nobody else can.)

New beta version of my favorite RSS reader is now available!

Why do I use intraVnews?

1. I'm able to keep up with over 200 web sites as fast as scanning through emails.
2. intraVnews optionally downloads the full web page.
3. intraVnews integrates into Outlook, which I already use for email and scheduling, and makes it easy to forward new items.

What's new in the 1.1 beta:

1. Atom 0.3 support
2. Blogging support via IBlogExtension plugins
3. New options dialog accessible from Options/Preferences within intraVnews
4. Auto Discover when subscribing to new feeds: You can click & drag (or clipboard copy) an HTML page containing a link to the RSS feed for that page and intraVnews will automatically resolve the feed URL
5. Edit URL of subscribed feeds
6. Help file (in progress)
7. Performance, both startup/shutdown as well as in operation
8. Less memory overhead
9. Better handling of hidden instances of Outlook due to ActiveSync and other programs that start Outlook without UI
10. Balloon can be customized and behaves smoother
11. Toolbar can be customized and all changes persist between sessions
12. Content can now be displayed in 3 ways instead of 2: Description, HTML or Description + HTML

I highly recommend checking intraVnews out.

http://www.intravnews.com

http://www.intravnews.com/beta.htm

Sam Ruby notes that there are a bunch of RSS feed validators. Note to Sam: The one at feeds.archive.org has disappeared. That's the one I used to rely on.

Ross Karchner is building a web-based front end to the multiple RSS feed validators.

I would just like to have one RSS feed that I can subscribe to that only has an entry when it sees a problem with one of my RSS code. Problems with my RSS code are rare, but I like to know when they occur.

I don't know of any banks, credit card companies, or utilities that have a secure private RSS feeds would let us know when our statements are ready or bills are due. But almost all of them will send us that information via emails.

The trouble for me is that I don't read my personal mail much anymore. I get over 150 spam mails a day. Even with two layers of filtering (I use a bayesian filter and a human-based P2P filter), junk messages are missed and occasionally good messages are marked as spam.

What if there was an Outlook Plug-in (or is it Plugin?) that uses Search Folders in Outlook 2003 to dynamically build RSS feeds? Bill notifications, newsletters, important announcements, etc would suddenly be available in a more convenient manor.

Ironically, I use Outlook for reading my RSS feeds, so I could just use the Rules Wizard. But that thing is a pain in the ass.

Maybe it's just finally time for the Outlook team to redo the Rules Wizard... And time for banks, credit card companies, etc... to start supporting RSS.

Beyond all of this is security - Bank notices from a secure RSS feed can be trusted. Emails can never be trusted because they can be easily forged.

Some links:

• Using Search Folders, Using Search Folders (video)
• MailBucket - a Public Email-to-RSS Gateway
• Lots of Email-to-RSS discussions - but no Outlook Plug-in

Yesterday I posted 10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time. Thanks to the many sites that linked and welcome to the couple thousand of new visitors.

Here is my list of things that we should be doing done before RSS becomes as mainstream as browsing the web:

1) Authentication Standard. Today some RSS readers include support for Basic Authentication. There must be a standard - for both the client and server - for secure authentication. All feeds should at least ask for user name. Like FTP, this could be "anonymous" or it could be your user name and password.

2) Query Standard. Today RSS feeds only have the newest 10-20 entries. There needs to be a standard way to query for entries other than those entries. Here are some example queries that should be optionally* supported:
A) "All new or modified entries since [Date Time]."
B) "All entries from categories [X, Y, Z]."
C) "All entries containing [Search Terms]."
D) "All [Comments | Trackback | Referrals | Etc] for Entries [X, Y, Z]"
*These should be optional because they don't apply to all uses of RSS.

3) Content Format Standards. Today some RSS feeds include partial text, others include all of the text, some include HTML formatting, others include no formatting. There should be a standard way when querying the RSS data to specify which version you are interested in:
A) Text only
B) Partial Text
C) HTML - full web page
D) Partial HTML - just the post
The standard must also support unicode characters for internationalization.

4) New Name. The name for the RSS file format doesn't matter, just like HTML doesn't matter. In general we call them "Web pages" not "HTML pages". RSS needs a word like "Web" that can be commonly associated with the purpose of having RSS files. ("MP3" worked because there was free music involved.) Subscribing/Subscription is a common word that would works except most users tightly associate it with receiving newsletters and eventually spam mail. We need a new word, like TiVo and Google (thanks K.G. Schneider).

5) Ad Standard. None of us want ads in the feeds, but they are going to come anyway. We might as well invent a "nice" standard now before companies like Doubleclick invent something we all hate.

6) DRM and Encryption Standards. Another feature that we rather avoid, but it's going to have to happen, and we might as well create it now before we're all forced to install Microsoft or Adobe Reader just to read a blog entry.

7) Attachment Standard. I've never seen attachments with RSS, but I'm sure we will soon. Imagine subscribing to a feed that, instead of listing latest movie trailers, actually had movie trailers included. Or a new music feed that included sample music. Or a radio station that was just an RSS feed with music included. This means that RSS Readers need to have caching, offline storage, and other features to prevent downloading something you might already have.

A "nice to have":
8) Roaming Subscriptions. In 1998, while working on IE 5.0 (I was an intern), I saw an incomplete feature that let you synchronize your favorites with multiple machines over the Internet. I don't know why this feature never made it out the door, but anybody with multiple machines knows keeping bookmarks straight over multiple computers is not easy. RSS must not follow this path. Using OPML makes life a little bit easier, but it doesn't work at the entry level. I should be able to read a bunch of feeds on my work computer, go home, and then continue from where I left off. Feed I read at work should be marked as read at home. This should not require me to use a web-based RSS Reader such as Bloglines or NewsGator Online. Using a 3rd party service to do the synchronization would be fine. I should be able to use a different RSS readers at work than at home, and of course have the option to not bring my work-related RSS feeds home.

I like to list my ideas in groups of 10, but I've found when you ask for too much, too often you get nothing.

While working today I listened to the RSS Winterfest, a free audio-only conference about RSS hosted by many top names in blogging.

Chris Pirillo, aka the Lockergnome, had a comment during the "What is the future of RSS?" session that I strongly disagree with: "RSS is good enough."

I strongly disagree with this comment. While I agree RSS is good, I believe RSS is not good enough to become mainstream. Here are my reasons:

1) RSS feeds do not have a history. This means that when you request the data from an RSS feed, you always get the newest 10 or 20 entries. If you go on vacation for a week and your computer is not constantly requesting your RSS feeds, when you get back you will only download the newest 10 or 20 entries. This means that even if more entires were added than that while you were gone, you will never see them.

2) RSS wastes bandwidth. When you "subscribe" to an RSS feed, you are telling your RSS reader to automatically download the RSS file on a set interval to check for changes. Lets say it checks for news every hour, which is typical. Even if just one item is changed the RSS reader must still download the entire file with all of the entries.

3) Reading RSS requires too much work. Today, in 2004, we call it "browsing the Web" - not "viewing HTML files". That is because the format that Web pages happen to be in is not important. I can just type in "msn.com" and it works. RSS requires much more than that: We need to find the RSS feed location, which is always labeled differently, and then give that URL to my RSS reader. The user should never have to hunt for the orange "XML" button (OT: Why is it labeled "XML" and not "RSS"?) or a link that says "Syndicate This." How subscribing should work: In my RSS Reader I type "dylangreene.com" and I see a list of feeds that I can subscribe to. Each feed has a one-sentence description, and I can preview what I'm going to get by subscribing. Newsgator, a shareware RSS Reader Plug-in for Outlook adds a cool button to IE's toolbar that, when you click it, searches the page for the RSS feed and subscribes you. This is a good step, but the button doesn't always find the feed, and when there's multiple feeds on the page, I don't know which one it's going to choose.

4) An RSS Reader must come with Windows. Until this happens too, RSS reading will only be for a certain class of computer users that are willing to try this new technology. The web became mainstream when Microsoft started including Internet Explorer with Windows. MP3's became mainstream when Windows Media Player added MP3 support. Many don't want Microsoft to control the RSS Reader market, but this is a vital step to gain mainstream usage in a world where most computer users simply don't know how to (or are afraid to) download new software.

5) RSS content is not User-Friendly. It has taken about 10 years for the Web to get to the point where it is today that most web pages we visit render in our browser the way that the designer intended. It's also taken about that long for web designers to figure out how to lay out a web page such that most users will understand how to use it. RSS takes all of that usability work and throws it away. Most RSS feeds have no formatting, no images, no tables, no interactive elements, and nothing else that we have come to rely on for optimal content readability. Instead we are kicked back to the pre-web days of simple text. If you want to see the pictures, tables, and other formatting that makes information on the web easier to read (and often more interesting than the plain-text equivalent), you must click a link to open your browser to visit the web page - bringing you right back to where we are today: a slow-loading web page. Some RSS feeds can render HTML, but not all RSS readers support correctly rendering the content, and most feeds don't even include the formatting.

6) RSS content is not machine-friendly. There are search engines that search RSS feeds but none of them are intelligent about the content they are searching because RSS doesn't describe the properties of the content well enough. For example, many bloggers quote other blogs in their blog. Search engines cannot tell the difference between new content and quoted content, so they'll show both in the search results.

7) Many RSS Feeds show only an abridged version of the content. Many RSS feeds do not include the full text. Slashdot.org, one of the most popular geek news sites, has an RSS feed but they only put the first 30 words of each 100+ word entry in their feed. This means that RSS search engines do not see the full content. This also means that users who syndicate their feed only see the first few words and must click to open a web browser to read the full content. From what I've seen, Movable Type, one of the most popular free blogging packages, only supports small snippets in the RSS feed, again adding to the amount of work required to read the feed.

8) Comments are not integrated with RSS feeds. One of the best features of many blogs is the ability to reply to posts by posting comments. Many sites are noteworthy and popular because of their comments and not just the content of the blogs. The Dullest Blog in the World gets 100-400 comments for every painfully dull post. Comments in Scoble's blog have started movements both inside and outside Microsoft that will effect features in upcoming products. RSS feeds often link to the URL where comments can be found, but the actual comments are not part of the feed, and most sites don't even have an RSS feed for the comments. This means that you have to manually click on the comments link to open a new browser window to see if there are comments, and then revisit that web page to see if anybody replies to your comments. This should be automatic: Entries should show the number of comments, the comments' content, and optionally inform me when replies to my comments are posted. RSS Search engines should also be able to search the content of the comments.

9) Multiple Versions of RSS cause more confusion. There's several different versions of RSS, such as RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and RSS 3.0, all controlled by different groups and all claiming to be the standard. RSS Readers must support all of these versions because many sites only support one of them. New features can be added to RSS 1.0 and 2.0 can by adding new XML namespaces, which means that anybody can add new features to RSS, but this does mean that any RSS Readers will support those new features.

10) RSS is Insecure. Lets say a site wants to charge for access to their RSS feed. RSS has no standard way for inputing a User Name and Password. Some RSS readers support HTTP Basic Authentication, but this is not a secure method because your password is sent as plain text. A few RSS readers support HTTPS, which is a start, but it is not good enough. Once somebody has access to the "secure" RSS file, that user can share the RSS file with anybody. If a site wants to charge for their RSS feed, there is no way to prevent subscribers from sharing the RSS feeds with other people because RSS does not have a standard for encryption, digital rights, or any other modern security features. I think this will hurt commercial uses for RSS.

Again, I am I huge fan off RSS-style technology. This technology is the TiVo of the Web: I only see what I want to see. Every site I ready (except two stubborn ones) I only read via RSS, however I am usually up with the latest technology, and I think there is a ways to go before there is mainstream RSS acceptance and use.

intraVnews, the RSS reader I use and highly recommend, has reached 1.0 Final.

I like intraVnews over Newsgator because it downloads the news page along with the RSS content. This is helpful because many RSS feeds are truncated or just have the titles, and hardly any include formatting or images.

RSS explained for normal folk:

An RSS feed is an XML file that has the latest news, photos, comments, or whatever from any web site that supports it.

Here is a sample example RSS feed from this site: http://www.DylanGreene.com/rss.xml

If you look on the left side of this web page, you'll see an orange XML button. That is the link to my RSS feed. I also have feeds for the latest comments and photo captions.

The XML file is too confusing to read without a tool. The tool you use (the Web Browser of the RSS world) is called a RSS Reader or RSS Aggrigator. These tools download the RSS files that you have "subscribed" to and show you the items that are new or have changed. This is better than web browsing because the tool brings what is new to you, rather than you having to go to each of your bookmarks to see if something is updated. RSS also typically cuts out a lot of the fat from the web site, like ads, menus, and unnecessary graphics, only showing you the content.

If you use Outlook, tools like intraVnews and NewsGator are excellent choices for your RSS needs.

If you have any questions, post them here. I'll see when your comments are added because I've subscribed to my site's Comments RSS Feed - I don't need to come back to this page to find out if people have added new comments. RSS makes us more efficent.