Roll your own news in RSS

Courtesy of Steve Rubel, here’s an ingenious way of turning non-RSS enabled news sources into RSS feeds, using GoogleNews and Gnews2RSS. Exceedingly useful for keeping up with those sites that haven’t got around to smelling the coffee and turning on their RSS feeds.

A similar way of achieving the same ends is through NewsIsFree, who have taken a portal approach - they claim to monitor 13,166 sources (currently) and offer a range of premium services. Interestingly they’re also including advertisements interleaved with the actual news items, something which I’m finding suprisingly unobtrusive. Effectively I just scan over the ads in much the same way as I would an article that doesn’t interest me - so it’s not entirely clear what kind of CPM metrics could be used to work out the ad’s payback.

But this type of ultra-personalised news is most definitely the future - now if only electronic paper would hurry itself up and arrive…

A test posting to check webfeeds

This is a test post to check the webfeeds…

Pedants-R-Us

Forgive the rant for a moment, if you will, but this posting at Master New Media is a symptom of something that seems to have become rather worryingly prevalent at the moment - namely that we’re all getting just a little bit up ourselves about blogging and RSS and the ‘death of mainstream media’ and so on’:

This is a clear sign of how incompetent the major news media outlets are gradually becoming when it comes to good reporting. A pro blogger offers much greater value without swamping my field of vision with ads everywhere.

‘Why?’ you might be asking yourself. Are we talking about missing the next Watergate, or definitive proof that there was someone else on the grassy knoll? Actually, no. The clear sign of incompetence was, and I quote:

In all cases Anne Chen should have written “Really Simple Syndication” and not “Real Simple Syndication”. And someone else after her, approving this for online publishing should have known better too.

It’s exactly this kind of precious, holier-than-thou, I-know-my-acronyms-better-that-you attitude to a new technology that slows down its adoption by mainstream technology users. Presenting what is - after all, in the grand scheme of things - a fairly marginally useful technology as some kind of precisely-worded religion is not going to make your average PHB sit up and take notice. They’re going to stick with what they know, thank you, because it’s safe and familiar and they don’t have to worry about being made to look a fool in front of their peer group because the R in RSS stands for Really and not Real.

Of course, this post might be a tongue-in-cheek spoof, in which case count me in as suckered - but if not, get over it! Given the holy wars and flying vitriol raging over syndication, a technical journalist venturing into the fray should be congratulated rather than criticised, let along picked up on a point of pedantry.

Some boss-friendly RSS explanations

As there’s an RSS theme to today’s postings, here’s a couple of links to some resources that may help answer the question “What is RSS, then?”

The BBC has been making extensive use of RSS for its news and current affairs for some time now, and they have a page that explains the how, what and why in good general terms.

But if your PHB doesn’t consider the BBC credible source, then every management type has heard of Tom Peters. The godfather of gurus has just started providing RSS feeds for his blog (yes, you heard that right - Tom Peters is blogging) - and he’s got a good explanation here.

And finally, here’s a couple of gratuitous plugs for our favourite newsreaders - Newsgator for the PC and Outlook, and Shrook for the Mac.

RSS going mainstream?

It seems that RSS - Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summaries, depending on your point of view - is starting to make it onto the corporate IT radar. eWeek, a well-respected enterprise IT publication from the Ziff-Davis stable has just published a slew of stories on the subject - a summary of the technology and potential benefits in RSS Makes Enterprise Headlines, a case-study in RSS Aids Relief Organization, and a cautionary view as Jim Rapoza says “Don’t Believe RSS Hype“. When there’s contrarian views under the same masthead as breathless hype, it’s a sign that the technology is on it’s way to maturity in our experience Separately they’re reviewing Moveable Type - a blog engine getting the same treatment as the latest corporate heavyweight application from Microsoft. Add to this the fact that management guru Tom Peters is using RSS to distribute his views, and it’s clear that there’s something going on.

The key to enterprise take-up of RSS in our view doesn’t necessarily lie in the strategic approaches that eWeek is featuring, however. Our experience is that the desktop - or rather the news aggregator - is the stalling factor in the widespread adoption. Several of our corporate customers have been wowed by the power of weblogs and wikis in capturing enterprise information and intelligence, but rather less ecstatic once they realised that there’s a client implication. Although it’s the best news aggregator implementation for the PC that we’ve come across, surprisingly it’s Newsgator that’s caused some of the sharpest intakes of breath - it seems that the somewhat cranky nature of Outlook that makes a wide deployment of a plug-in something that corporate IT functions are wary of. As one systems administrator commented, “We can’t keep up with patches for 30,000 desktops - never mind installing a paradigm shift”.

In the instances where employees have the ability (legitimately or otherwise) to control their own applications to an extent, the path of RSS introduction has been somewhat smoother - individuals can go ahead with an installation and become a maven for the technology once it transforms their working life. (And we don’t think that’s breathless hype.) There’s a lot of debate around about the rise of DIY-IT and how corporate IT policies might be holding back the adoption of beneficial technologies, so it will be interesting to see how quickly RSS finds its way into the mainstream. Perhaps we’re waiting for Microsoft to retro-fit newsreading capabilities into their out-of-the-box software - or perhaps this is an occasion when Redmond can’t move quick enough to ride the wave, and others can get there first?

Webfeed difficulties

Apologies if you’ve been experiencing difficulties getting updates from our webfeeds of late. We’ve been been experimenting with Feedburner as a way of getting some statistics on the readership of this blog, but unfortunately it looks like they’ve been having some problems over the last few weeks.

It’s a beta service, so some teething problems are to be expected - but if you want to get a completely reliable service, the links over on the sidebar are directly from our server, so fire, theft and witchcraft notwithstanding, these feeds should always be available.

Confused about RSS? Read on…

Confused about the difference between Atom and RSS? Perplexed by why RSS feeds have XML buttons? Glynn Moody wades through the alphabet soup with this article on syndication…

A superb guide to all things RSS (and why you should care)

This is an excellent introduction to all things RSS (or webfeeds as we’re now supposed to call them), and why you should be using them. Amy Graham goes into much (and very clearly written) detail. Part 7 should be required reading for anyone running, or contemplating running, an email newsletter…

More things you can do with RSS

Another glimpse of the possibilities opened up by RSS comes courtesy of Plusnet (I have to declare an interest here, as they’re my home ISP.) Like most ISPs that know what they’re about, they’ve got a ‘Service Status’ page that’s a quick way of finding out what’s going on with their service. Very useful if, say, you’re having a problem with their email server and you want to check if everyone’s having the same problem or if it’s just you.

But Plusnet have taken it one stage further by providing an RSS feed of their service status postings, which means that I don’t need to visit their site to see what’s going on - it simply appears in my newsreader. The advantage to me is that I can keep tabs on what’s going on in the background, the advantage for them is that it reduces the number of calls coming in to them from people just wanting to know what’s going on.

Having said all this, Plusnet are actually a great example of an organisation that ‘gets’ customer service in the first place. Take a look at what they’re posting on the Service Status page. It’s not just ‘this has gone wrong, we’re fixing it’ information - it’s proactive as well. I can see not only when things have gone wrong, but also what they’ve got planned, and perhaps most importantly what they’re doing about fixing the problems as they unfold. That takes a commitment on the part of the organisation - it’s all too easy to batten down the hatches and let the updates and information trickle out bit by bit, treating the customers as mushrooms as the saying goes. What Plusnet are doing is keeping me informed - so when things do go wrong, I cut them that extra bit of slack knowing that I can trust them to be telling the truth and be open about what’s going on and when problems are going to get sorted.

Why’s this important? Simply that the market for internet services is huge and highly competitive. I’d have little compunction about moving provider if their service was poor, because it’s relatively easy for me to do. To retain my loyalty - and better still, gain my recommendation - Plusnet have to work at it, and keeping me informed is part of that. RSS isn’t a magic bullet, and it would be no use at all if the organisation’s culture isn’t set up to regard customer service as a prioroty - but it’s a useful tool to add that elusive differentiator.

So what can you actually DO with RSS?

If you’ve been wondering about the practical use of RSS feeds, consider this idea from Phil Windley:

My friend Steve Fulling was recently in an auto accident–someone rear-ended him. That was no fun, but he was telling me about the awesome customer service he was getting from the body shop (Central Body in Provo). They called him up soon after his car was dropped off and said “Mr Fulling, I wanted to call you and tell you that your truck will be fixed on the day we promised and we don’t see any additional charges beyond what you were quoted.” In essense, they were reporting “on time, on budget.” They called again today to give him an update. That gave me the idea that what I’d really like is for the body shop (or anyone else providing similar service) to tell me: “Mr. Windley, we’ve emailed you the URL of a personal RSS feed we’ve set up for you. Load it into your feed reader and you will see twice-daily status reports on your vehicle.” I’m a geek–sue me.

And when you consider that the majority of organisations will have some sort of database-driven system to capture the details of each customer transaction, then the implementation of something like this becomes trivial in the grand scheme of things.