rss

Oapmeal.org is a new project that I’m working on that will be a sort of launch pad to reading blogs. When I talk to people about blogs, one of the first questions is always, “what are some good blogs about X topic/field/industry, etc.?” The best I can usually do is point someone to tagged posts on Technorati, or one of the hundreds of blog directories. For people that I’ve worked with on blogging I create a topic focused OPML file for them, to give them the user experience of reading blogs on a specific subject. What’s an OPML file? It’s a file that contains a list of blogs that you can import to most rss readers, that automatically subscribes you to the listed blogs - more to it than that, but that’s the general idea for how I will be using it. So… Oapmeal will be a directory of OPML files that I will manage, with some community support, that people will be able to take and use to get started reading blogs on a particular topic. That’s a pretty simplified version, and I’ll have more details as more progress is made.

If the only person that ever uses it is me to tell people where to go to find blogs, that’s enough for me - not setting the bar too high on this one.

Update: I am now fully back to bloglines, but to be fair Google Reader does have a mobile version which I said that it did not.

A great weekend in Chicago has brought a decision in the new reader contest - I’m switching back to Bloglines. In the end the “m” was the the difference - as in m.bloglines.com. I don’t think any of the other contestants have a mobile version. I wasn’t in Chicago for any business or school purpose, I didn’t really want to think about web stuff for one weekend, so I left my laptop at home; having mobile bloglines, mobile gmail, lopico mobile marks (though I never got to go to the place I bookmarked), and motask I could get pretty much everything done that I needed to - and those that I couldn’t I put on motask. Mobile is becoming more and more essential for me as the way I work evolves. In mobile things need to be simple, quick, and they have to work. Rojo has a nice feature set but all I really want is a way to read when ever and where ever, for that Bloglines seems to be the clear winner.

Sidenote on Chicago: I don’t know what number trip this was to Chicago, but I finally tried a Chicago Style hot dog, though I couldn’t get the GF to have one I found it delicious. The city is one of my favorites, and a place I’d like to call home someday - just need one of those ‘real job’ things.

If you read my blog regularly you’ll know that I’m a big Rojo fan, even after the first round of problems following the acquisition I still praised the reader. But now I’m just unhappy with Rojo, it’s down too much and some of the changes don’t really work for me. So savvy readers of jdamer.com which feed reader should I move to? I used Bloglines in the past and I like it because it just works, but I’m also a fan of the underdog. I don’t think the poll will show up in most readers (any?) so please come to the site and vote. Thanks.

What better to do on a friday than make RSS feeds. Today I added RSS to motask and Lopico.

Motask’s RSS is limted because of privacy regarding to-do lists, you can only get the feed to work properly as a live bookmark. Perhaps more importantly, I also added RSS to Lopico Reviews. I did this to make it easier for businesses owners to find out when their business has been reviewed.

Original Signal is the latest site to pool a large number of popular web 2.0 blogs in one place - it looks nice and it’s a decent gateway, but I already subscribe to most of these feeds so it’s lost on me (and personally I wouldn’t count 37signals as a web2 blog).

What I want is a mass feed of all the blogs from all of the ‘web2.0′ sites. Almost every site on this list has a blog, take all of these feeds mash them into one and I’ll get my news that way. The bloggers on Original Signal are all great bloggers/podcasters but there’s no way that they’ll get all of the news from all of the web2 sites, in fact they’ll probably miss something great from one of the lesser known sites.

…and I’d call it FeedRita.

J.D. Amer

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately in places without internet access, but I want to be informed if anyone blogs anything about Lopico. Granted, I am the person that blogs the most about Lopico, I see other posts from time to time and with all of the recent changes I’d just like to stay on top of things. Combining Yahoo Alerts and a Technorati Watchlist, I can do just that. This is great for me and even better for someone with more press - but probably not great for an extremely large amount.

First set up your technorati watchlist for the topic you’d like to have monitored. This will track all blogs that are included in the technorati index for your topic. You can get an RSS feed for the watchlist, which you’ll need for Yahoo Alerts. The link for the feed is at the bottom of the page. Alternatively you could use Google Blog search, but I’m more of a technorati fan.

Next set up a yahoo alert to go to your mobile phone. The instructions are very easy, you just need the RSS address from the first step. That’s it. Now anytime someone mentions your business in a blog, or other RSS feed, you will be notified instantly. Very easy and very useful.

I’ve started moving my feeds over to Rojo from Bloglines.  There’s nothing wrong with Bloglines, it’s just not as good for the publisher as Rojo is. Rojo is just a more complete platform than Bloglines.  By combining tagging and Rojo Mojo it’s much easier for readers to explore and find feeds outside of those that they are already reading.  Will I spend my day digging through Rojo?  Probably not, but what I will do is give all of my blog posts Mojo (works like Digg) so that others will make their way to my blog.  By combining the rss reader (which is good on its own) with the promotional tool, Rojo is really doing more for Bloggers than any other rss reader that I’ve tried (certainly more than bloglines).  That’s a pretty solid strategy for inducing self-promoting bloggers to switch from a stand alone rss reader. For anyone trying to promote anything in the “web2.0″ realm it would be foolish not to add to readership with usage of Rojo’s technologies.  Hopefully growth continues, but I really don’t think that should be a problem.

I written about pandora a handful of times, and it is one of my favorite sites.  One of the few I visit every day without exception. It’s also the first site that I’ve noticed that provides a feed for its job postings.  Aggregators are fine, but the only way to know that you won’t miss a posting from a certain company is an rss feed.  Now if only I could narrow my feed by job function.

Related:  R-S-S me a J-O-B

Back to the rewrite (Why can’t all browsers get along?)

There’s one thing I can’t seem to figure out about tech company websites: why don’t they have RSS feeds for their job postings?  I’m sure I’m not the only person that regularly checks the job postings for certain companies, so why can’t I do this through bloglines?   It’s a simple idea really. Craigslist slams my feed reader with job postings, most of them irrelevant, so why can’t a company like Technorati send it’s own postings out this way?  This way I’d find relevant posts without having to sift through the “work from home make $800 a day” crap that I get from Craigs list.

Mayber there is a reason, and maybe I’m missing the companies that do this, but I can’t seem to find the companies or the reason.  Rest assured, if Lopico ever starts hiring the jobs will be posted in a feed (emphasis on the if).

Nice NY Times article on RSS.

Reminds me in a way of Seth Godin’s Atmosphere Cancer piece. The name RSS doesn’t communicate the right message to those that don’t already know what it’s about. It may not communicate any message.
Neither does a little orange icon - in fact this makes it even harder for RSS to become adopted. Now I have to know 1) what the icon means and 2) what RSS means.

tags: rss