Spoken

Mr Safe: Well, the effective content model for RSS has been described as “Here’s something that might be HTML. Or maybe not. I can’t tell you, and you can’t guess.” so things that look like HTML are routinely misinterpreted. The author of FeedDemon indicates that he gets multiple bug reports per week on this issue alone. [Sam fires back…]
Source: Sam Ruby

How RSS can bust through: Fred Wilson says “RSS has to become brain-dead simple to use.”

I’m pretty sure we can do it, but it would require the companies to give up hope of locking users into their software, into their extensions, their mistakes. There are two barriers to brain-dead simplicity.

1. It must be easy to find relevant feeds.
2. Subscription has to be centralized.

[True, tech companies have to stop seeking lock in on subscriptions… but am I going to trust any of these large companies? Nope. I’ve been burned before. No question I would trust a university first… even though I’ve been burned by them as well. I’m not even sure why centralized subscription is necessary, but I think the reading list is a great thing.]
Source: Dave’s Wordpress Blog

Convert RSS feeds in Safari bookmarks to OPML: I have created an XML stylesheet that will scan Safari’s Bookmarks and find only the RSS feed entries. The output can then be redirected to an OPML file for import to readers like NetNewsWire Lite. [Nice.]
Source: Mac OS X Hints

RiverNews Ajax etc..: Daniel Berlinger posted a working ajax demo with the newsRiver interface. So, I implemented it in the NewsRiver aggregator. Basically it will delete a story when you click on the checkbox using AJAX. [Cool. That is exactly what I hoped would happen… that someone would get inspired to take a step with this stuff. (Ummm. Don’t install the root, that’s no the “right” way to update things, but still it’s great that someone picked up the ball) That’s also why I’m working on “spindrift.js” which is a xml-rpc implementation with AJAX support built in… I should have a first release soon!]

Jon Udell: Semantic screenscraping: Web services at one end of the tolerance continuum, and microformats at the other, are helping to create the data web. But it’s nice to see that the plain old web is getting more data-friendly too. [Sure is… but I’ve got little time to play with mashups. Sad.]

RSS Advisory Board Goes Public: A new era begins today for the RSS Advisory Board, an independent organization formed in 2003 that publishes the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) specification, helps developers create RSS applications and broadens public understanding of the format.

The board is taking on eight new members: Meg Hourihan, Lo Le Meur, Eric Lunt, Ross Mayfield, Jenny Levine, Randy Charles Morin, Greg Reinacker and Dave Sifry. I’m serving as chairman this year unless they kick me to the curb.

Under the board’s charter, the organization holds its deliberations on RSS-Board and encourages feedback from RSS publishers, software developers and users on RSS-Public.

I’m bringing the first item to the board: a proposed specification for RSS that represents completely new documentation for the existing RSS 2.0 format.

[Interesting…]
Source: Workbench