Newsflashr

At last month’s North Shore Web Geek Meetup, I met Gal Arav, the creator of Newsflashr (and formerly creator of InstantBull):

Newsflashr aggregates feeds from a large number of news sources, and lets you scan the headlines from those feeds as a tag cloud (what are the interesting terms which appear frequently in the headlines in those feeds) as well as in a list sorted by Alexa rank.

It’s the kind of site you can spend a lot of time in, if you’re a news junkie, playing around with different sorting options and looking for trends in the data.

Here’s the tag cloud, for example of the “elections 08″ topic as I am writing this post:

You can also switch into feed view, in which case you’re arranging feeds on a grid, as you might in something like pageflakes or netvibes.

Worth a look if you’re a news junkie or just obsessed with the upcoming election.

Liveblogging Enterprise 2.0 - Using RSS to Bridge the Information Gap

RSS: Bridging the Gap Between the People and Information that Drive Business

Speaker - Sam Weber, VP Technical Services, KnowNow

Customer story - large outsourcing company and the challenges they face in keeping over 40,000 employees in 120 countries up to speed.

Roughly 30 intranets, portals, and knowledge bases, over 1000 internal blogs - the challenge is how to distribute information in such a mess.

Agenda:

• Information management gap
• The solution
• Customer examples
• Enterprise options
• Q&A

[Sounds a bit more like a pitch than I was expecting this morning . . . didn't even get my grande soy latte this morning, so I may just be less receptive, or more snarky, depending on your perception.]
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Movable Type Open Source

(via blog.wohlrapp.com among others)

The folks at SixApart have announced that coinciding with the release of Movable Type 4, there will be an open source edition of Movable Type, which will form the basis for the commercial products.

The Movable Type Open Source Project was announced in conjunction with the launch of the Movable Type 4 Beta on June 5th, 2007. The MTOS Project is a community and Six Apart driven project that will produce an open souce [sic] version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform that will form the core of all other Movable Type products.

I can understand Rod Begbie’s quip (”I’ll take ‘Two Years Too Late’ for $400, please, Alex”) and I too found the inability to spell “open source” correctly rather strange - I guess MovableType doesn’t have built-in spell check, even in 4.0 beta?.
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RSS is del.icio.us

Readers with an eye for detail will have noticed the “del.icio.us links” widget in the right column of this blog, just below the “reading list.” (I should say, of course, readers who’ve actually been to the blog, rather than just consuming this in RSS!)

That’s generated by a Wordpress Widget, which consumes an RSS feed from del.icio.us.

Whenever I add post a link to del.icio.us, it shows up in that list.

Well, according to the del.icio.us blog:

Well over half of the requests seen by del.icio.us are for RSS feeds[.] That means that people cruising around our site in browsers are actually in the minority, when it comes down to raw traffic. Instead, our heaviest hitters include personalized home pages, desktop news aggregators, and even stranger things.

One of the key joys of RSS is that it can be a wonderful cheap API into any site: server-to-human or server-to-server.

SXSW Day Two - Using RSS For Marketing

Sunday morning, I start to recognize what people mean when they say the panels start too early. Looking at the schedule before coming, I couldn’t understand how 10am could seem early. (AjaxWorld, where I am as I write this, has panels starting at 7:30am).

The 10am panel was rather plainly titled “Using RSS for Marketing.”

It was moderated by Tom Markiewicz (EvolvePoint) and panelists included:

• Emily Chang (Ideacodes, eHub)
• Bill Flitter (Pheedo)
• John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing)
• Greg Reinacker (NewsGator)

(Photo by Anton Olsen, Creative Commons attribute-non-commercial license)

That’s a pretty strong panel of folks with expertise in syndication and content distribution.

In addition to my notes below, Tom points to a set of other folks’ summaries.

My summary:

• Content Syndication is great for marketing (and other uses)
• RSS will become “plumbing” but for now you need to do some education of your users - chiclets are a kind of necessary evil at this stage of the web
• Don’t be stingy with content - headline only rss does not work
• Pay attention to user experience where the majority of your users are, but recognize you don’t control the context in which they consume your feeds (more…)