RSS Web-Feeds, The Next Big Thing?

mi writes "Yahoo! carries an Associated Press editorial about RSS-based news feeds, and how they are pushing the spam-ridden e-mail and advertising-ridden web-pages aside and consolidate information from multiple sites. Slashdot itself is mentioned by the author as one of his sources." We've been exporting our headlines practically since the beginning. (note that RSS link in the footer). I still think the problem with RSS is the name. It sounds stupid. Let's all call it 'Speed Feed'. Cheesy rhyming will help the non techno elite remember it, and this is a technology that needs to be more widely deployed. (It's also worth noting that Slashdot's RSS feed will have more article contents for subscribers in a few weeks)

God I hope so.

[Clemence]

Evolution uses them, you can link it into your own web-page. It makes surfing more efficient, and more secure. Formerly CRAYON was, IMHO a great site for quick-surfing only the news you wanted to read, but all the news you wanted to read in one place. Sadly, a lot of (general news) sites have pulled old RSS feeds, or made them far to difficult to find.

Kudos Slashdot. Hiss to CNN.

Re:RSS Readers

[Organized Konfusion]

Opera 7.5 supports RSS nicely.

Re:RSS Readers

[ptolemu]

Check out FeedReader [sourceforge.net]

Re:RSS Readers

[x3ro]

SharpReader [sharpreader.net]

Re:Browser integration

[Organized Konfusion]

It is built into Opera [opera.com]

Re:RSS Readers

[Anonymous Coward]

NewzSpider [newzspider.com] is good. Simple 3 pane interface. Import/Export of subscribtions in OPML. FREE trial.

Re:RSS Readers

[Organized Konfusion]

Sure there is [opera.com]

Bloglines - the perfect web service for RSS reader

[pgrote]

If you're looking for a stable, well performing reader that is host based, meaning you don't have to move your config files and pointers, check out Bloglines [bloglines.com].

Developed by the same person who started Egroups, Bloglines offers the ability to manage your feeds through a simple interface available anywhere.

The power also includes:

1) Disposable email addresses.
2) Sharing of your feeds.
3) Exporting of feeds.
4) Routing email to your account.

A great, free service.

Speaking of RSS...

[RoadkillBunny]

...does anyone know of a docklet for GNOME2 that shows the current headlines from a site (slashdot.org)? I remember something like that in GNOME1..

Re:um

[MoonFog]

I use it for news sites, meaning I get the news as soon as it is updated, and most news sites (at least not in Norway) doesn't require any form of log-on etc, so no cookies.

Also, some rss readers have browser capabilities, enabling them to store cookies iirc

Re:RSS Readers

[stubear]

I just discovered a great RSS news reader that integrates seamlessly with Outlook 2000 and newer called NewsGator [newsgator.com]. You can add feeds from NNTP as well but the nicest feature is the ability to right-click on an RSS link and select subscribe to. You can set NewsGator to check feeds at a set interval and if anything new is found it will notify you with an icon and balloon tooltip in the tray area. It's $29 but it's a nicely polished, well designed RSS news reader. The only problem I found, and this is an Outlook problem I believe, is I couldn't set the NewsGator folder home page to be the first thing I see when I open Outlook.

Re:RSS Readers

[rholliday]

I just use the RSS Reader Panel [texturizer.net] for Firefox. [mozilla.org]

Re:um

[idontsmoke]

RSS is just an XML flavour which most people serve using HTTP, so there is no reason why you can't use cookies alongside an RSS feed.

Re:RSS Readers

[Apreche]

If you use Firefox (firebird, phoenix, browzilla, etc.) the RSS reader panel extension is the highest quality. It's great for my morning routine. I go down the list of bookmark folders opening each one in tabs and reading all my non-RSS sites. Then when I'm all done I press Alt+R and I check all the news feeds with the quickness. I just wish slashdot's newsfeed didn't suck. I read penny arcade now only with RSS.

I wish all webcomics used it. Even better, consolidate all my webcomics into a single news feed. Then consolidate all the geek news into another, blogs in another, software updates in another and real news in the last one. Then have a program that makes noise when something new comes up.

Life would be sweet.

If you don't have an RSS feed, get one!

Re:RSS Readers

[pgrote]

Use Bloglines [bloglines.com].

It's online, free and includes a host of other features such as exportable subscriptions, disposable email addresses, etc.

Re:RSS Readers

[patelbhavesh]

Amphetadesk [disobey.com] is pretty popular.
If you want to embed RSS in your own home page(or any HTML page) like I have done on http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/news.html [freeshell.org] then you can use http://zvonnews.sourceforge.net/zfeeder.php [sourceforge.net]

Re:RSS Readers

[Xii]

I'd use this if it weren't for the fact that it opens articles in IE. If there's an option to change the browser please point me to it because I've searched hard and don't think it's there. There's no reason I shouldn't be allowed to choose Mozilla, Opera, etc to open a site. Sadly this is a problem for many of the news readers I've tried and if it isn't that it's another "feature" that prevents me from using the program.

Re:That's great, Taco.

[znu]

I've been reading a lot of RSS feeds through my Nokia 3650 lately, using Bloggo [bloggo.net]. This is really nice, but it's only practical for feeds which provide full text, because trying to view real web sites on a cell phone is a major exercise in frustration.

I've noticed that over the last few months, full-text feeds have become more common. Slashdot should really join the fun.

Re:God I hope so.

[stevey]

Ummmm they do.

For example I have the following two feeds in my snownews [kcore.de] aggregator:

• askslashdot.rdf [slashdot.org]
• developers.rdf [slashdot.org]

Re:Is this not just "push"?

[technomancerX]

RSS is not a push technology. It's basically a standardized markup format to summarize news stories. Readers then download the RSS file from the provider using an aggregator program.

It's all pull.

Re:RSS Readers

[FsG]

FeedDemon [bradsoft.com] is probably the most powerful Win32 RSS reader available. It supports tons of unique features like merging of feeds into a single "newspaper" of today's events.

Re:RSS Readers

[Shinglor]

FeedDemon [bradsoft.com] is one of the best but unfortunately the final release is only a trial version. It's made by the same guy who made the awesome TopStyle [bradsoft.com] CSS editor.

NewsMonster or AmphetaDesk

[giveuptheghost]

Here are my recommendations for RSS/news readers for Windows (and other platforms):

If you use the Mozilla [mozilla.org] browser, NewsMonster [newsmonster.org] is a great RSS add-on. It is cross-platform, and the basic version is free and open source. (There is a Pro version with a bunch more features for a fee.) It installs as a second sidebar in the Mozilla browser, and you can read feeds like you read email in most email clients. It also installs with about twenty popular feeds to get you started. It has a few bugs, but it is my favorite one overall.

Another one is AmphetaDesk [disobey.com]. It is also free, open source, and cross-platform. It displays all your feeds in a web page in your browser. It runs in the Windows taskbar, checking ever so often for updates. It's not as powerful as other RSS readers--it's not easy to tell which feeds and articles are new/updated, for instance--but it is rock-solid with no bugs that I've ever found.

Re:RSS acronym

[spydir31]

Google is your friend,
the specs [harvard.edu] say

Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.

RSS Readers and Aggregators for Linux

[wehe]

Setting up the TuxMobil News [tuxmobil.org] RSS feed , which features daily news for mobile geeks using laptops, PDAs and mobile cell phones with Linux, I have also made a survey of RSS news readers, tickers and aggregators for Linux (available at the link above). The survey contains tools for Gnome , KDE, text console, HTML and your favorite X11 window manager.

Re:What's so great about RSS?

[costas]

The site in my sig provides tons of XML. Technically, I agree with you that RSS is way to simple:

The original standard was so lenient (on purpose) that the quality of feeds is inconsistent at best.

RSS also piggy-backs on HTTP for authentication, modifications (304s), etc. This is great in theory, but in practice it has meant that every RSS client author has thrown together their homebrewed RSS client from an HTTP library without doing authentication, modification-checking, gzip compression, charset encodings, etc, etc, etc. It literally would have been preferrable for an HTSP (HyperText Syndication Protocol) to come out, just to force developers to use well-thought-out and well-behaved syndication libraries.

RSS is not NNTP (unfortunately): there is no interactivity, unless you provide additional controls to the subscribers somehow (memigo uses a frame-over) which is not consistent from site to site. Hacks like TrackBack are only half-way measures...

Related to the above: RSS provides meta-data only from the publisher side, NOT the reader side. Well, the vast majority of people are readers, not writers, and their meta-data vanish into clickthrus... sites like memigo try to fix that (by using implict ratings, page-read trackers, etc) but those are still kludges around the underlying technology...

In short, RSS is a good 1.0 technology, gopher waiting for HTTP...

It's happening already

[gregwbrooks]

In public relations circles, using RSS is a hot topic.

Me [west-third.com] on the subject.

Tom Murphy [natterjackpr.com] has written extensively on this as well, although his site lacks a search engine so you have to rummage around for relevant articles.

THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

I browse EVERYTHING, including Slashdot, via the PDA links, on my PC. I beg of you to do the same.

Even though I have a 3.2 GHz box with 2 gigs of RAM and a ATI 9800 TX with 256 mb RAM... yes, Battlefield is awesome at 6xAA, 1200x1000, at ~110 FPS :) back on topic... I will always browse the web using the PDA links if available.

IT'S NOTHING SHORT OF AWESOME. All my sites load instantly, no adverts or maybe just one, and everything is plain text with links underlined, and only a picture or two of whats really relevant. And when I do browse the web on my Treo 600, I see the exact same thing. Lean and mean and consistent.

Here are some links... enjoy!

Slashdot: no special link, just change your settings!

Wired: www.wired.com/news_drop/palmpilot

C|Net (for the M$ fanboyz): cnet.vitalstream.com

MSNBC: www.msnbc.com/avantgo/mmc.asp

BBC: news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm

New York Post: www.nypost.com/avantgo/index.htm

Google (yes, even leaner!!!): www.google.com/palm

Re:What's so great about RSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually don't get what's so revolutionary about RSS.

It's nothing about the technology, and everything about the human side of things.

RSS lets me keep track of ten times as many news sites as I would be able to by visiting each of them individually.

From a website's perspective, it makes it much more likely that your visitors won't drop you due to lack of time.

It basically serves up headlines. It's pretty useless without conventional HTML/CSS behind it.

It can contain the whole article, not just the headline. The fact that it requires HTML/CSS is irrelevent; you wouldn't state that HTML is not useful because it requires HTTP, or that CSS is useless because it requires markup.

My concern is that once it REALLY takes off there are going to be millions of people running RSS harvesting programs 24 hours a day. That means servers having to respond to all these behind the scenes inquiries for data that is almost NEVER going to be looked at.

How is that different to HTML?

This sounds like something that could be done a lot more efficiently by the likes of Google.

Then you've missed the point.

Re:RSS acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends which version you are talking about. RSS 1.0 is RDF, RSS 2.0 is Simple.

Basically, the format was developed by Netscape, simplified for a quick release, abandoned by Netscape, UserLand/Dave Winer released their own version (Simple), and everyone else released another version (RDF).

RSS 2.0 is not a successor to RSS 1.0; Dave Winer merely leapfrogged them in versioning to try and co-opt the format. Tricks like that caused a massive chunk of the RSS developers to abandon the format and create something much more technically sound, Atom.

RSS 1.0 is much more closely aligned with the original aims of RSS, RSS 2.0 more closely resembles the simplified format the was released in a hurry to get to market.

My advice is to publish RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds, and as soon as Atom gets to 1.0 and the majority of readers support that, switch to that and drop RSS. RSS is too prone to game-playing by Dave Winer and bitchiness by the whole community. Switching to Atom won't rid you of this entirely, Dave has recently been stating that as far as he is concerned, Atom is a "type of" RSS.

For Outlook users, try IntraVnews...

[cmeans]

If you don't mind reading your news inside Outlook, I'd suggest looking at IntraVnews [intravnews.com]. It's quite good, and provides a number of options.

Re:RSS acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

The specs [resource.org] also state that it stands for RDF Site Summary.

What you need to remember is that RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 are two different formats, with a shared heritage (RSS 2.0 isn't the successor to RSS 1.0), it's more like how Netscape and Internet Explorer were both based upon Mosaic).

Re:RSS Readers

[omicronish]

Try RSS Bandit [rssbandit.org]. It's based on an MSDN article, Building a Desktop News Aggregator [microsoft.com], that discusses how to build an RSS aggregator with C# and .NET.

Re:RSS has bandwith problems.

[GeorgeH]

This is already the case. Consider yourself corrected. Well-behaved clients support 304 Modified headers, ETags and other caching mechanisms. Also, as for the dynamically produced feeds (how do you know most are?) they can impliment 304 headers et all, if they don't they can't really complain, can they?

Re:RSS acronym

[ubernostrum]

As the AC mentioned, it really depends on which version you're using. RSS 0.9x versions and RSS 2.0 are "Really Simple Syndication" and RSS 1.0 is "RDF Site Syndication." Sometimes you'll see it referred to as "RSS/RDF" in that incarnation. Mark Pilgrim's "History of the RSS Fork" [diveintomark.org] is a good, quick summary of how that came to be.

And if you don't feel like reading that, just think of Emacs and XEmacs, but replace RMS with Dave Winer.

Re:Just Headlines? What's the use of that?

[GeorgeH]

It could be your RSS aggregator and I know wired.com doesn't put the full text of their stories in the feeds. A lot of sites do, however. If you want an idea of the kind of sites that are using RSS check out my Bloglines subscriptions [bloglines.com] or this list of the top 100 feeds [scripting.com].

My SharpReader fetches it every 15 minutes...

[Otis_INF]

and no exclusion whatsoever, nor do I need a Slash module in my reader.

The feed is also updated more than once per hour, so I think your info is a little out of touch with reality.

Top 100 Feeds

[GeorgeH]

If you're interested in the types of content that are available in RSS check out scripting.com's Top 100 RSS Feeds [scripting.com]. They generate their statistics from the users who upload their RSS feed list (called an OPML file) to the site.

Re:THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA

[timothv]

Actually, slashdot has a PDA link: http://slashdot.org/palm/ [slashdot.org]

eventwatcher

[srussell]

My big recent find (WRT RSS) was eventwatcher [sourceforge.net].

The problem I've had with most of the RSS browsers is that they don't distinguish between what you've read, and what you haven't. They either create a web page (which is sort of tedious to browse), or they ticker-tape the N most recent events. If you're off-line for a while, and N+1 events come through, you miss that first one, and in any case, you have to constantly scan the ticker for new events.

eventwatcher queues messages, and alerts you when any of your feeds has a new event. When you read events, you can trash them, or save them. If you save them, they go into a different queue which you can browse later; if you trash them, they're marked as "read", and don't show up in your queue.

eventwatcher is a KDE app, and it sits in the system tray, alerting you via a tooltip when a new event comes in (and telling you how many events you have in the queue). For an early release of the app, it is amazingly useful; I only have a couple of feature requests, and I highly recommend it.

I'm not affiliated with the project and have had no contact with the author yet.

RSS + Perl + Karamba = news on your desktop.

[NumbThumb]

When installing Karamba (KDE tool for putting dynamic content on the desktop), i noticed a perl script on the karamba homepage that would read a rss feed and display it on the desktop. I hacked it a little, to do nicer formating, read multiple feeds and handle different versions of rss, and now i have the headlines from /., kuro5hin, wired, the register and a few more on my desktop. Nice!

The i missed a way to klick on those headlines and open a browser -- karamba does not support stuff like that. So i hacked the script some more to write html to a file that i have open in my browser, updating automatically. In fact, i found this /. story this way....

Re:God I hope so.

[WCityMike]

Yes, Kudos! But why don't we have a RSS feed for every section (Games, YRO and so on)...?

You can.

http://slashdot.org/section name.rss,

i.e.

http://slashdot.org/yro.rss

Re:RSS has bandwith problems.

[ubernostrum]

There are problems with aggregators that check every 10 minutes or so, but that's far less of an issue than it used to be; most of the "big-name" aggregators finally started doing sensible things like looking to see if the feed has been modified, and prominent sites like Slashdot started banning aggregators that poll too often (try getting Slashdot's feed more than once an hour if you want an example...).

Plus, quite a few aggregators coming out these days are based on Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser [diveintomark.org], which is one of the most well-behaved aggregator backends out there.

And finally, for aggregators which understand certain of the namespaced extensions developed for RSS 1.0, there are the <sy:updatePeriod> and <sy:updateFrequency> elements from the syndication module [resource.org], which allow you to tell the aggregator how often it should poll your feed.

Re:RSS Readers

[DoraLives]

I went to the RSS Home Page [fls.moo.jp] and the Firefox 0.8 RSS installer worked like a champ. This, after confirming that the original link [fls.moo.jp] was indeed 404'ing.

No guarantee that this will work for anybody else, but it DID just work for me.

Re:RSS + Perl + Karamba = news on your desktop.

[Findus Krispy]

I have this exact same functionality with KDE News Ticker which I have dedicated to it's own bar at the top which I can hide when I don't want to be distracted. It's all colour coded to match the rest of the desktop and looks awesome.

Re:THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA

[ripflash]

I do the same thing. Some other low bandwidth sites I use:

MapQuest: mapquest.com/pda/
ITN (ITV News): avantgo.itn.co.uk/
PC World: pcworld.com/avantgo/
The Onion: mobile.theonion.com/
Wired: wired.com/news/avantgo/
Washington Post (not easy to find):
http://media.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn ?node=ad min/delivery/avantgo&language=palm

Re:RSS Readers

[shokk]

Anything web based. Set up Feed On Feeds [minutillo.com] on any Apache/PHP/mySQL system to get Usenet-like access and marking to the same feeds. Most others (including Yahoo's RSS service) do not do this marking which means you see the same topics over and over in the same feed. Sure, you can ignore the old stories, but realize that some feeds post dozens of items per day and that's a lot to remember.

RSS is a natural evolution of using the Web. Why constantly scour web sites for updates when you can subscribe to a feed from EWeek or Sourceforge or Penny Arcade and see the update shortly after it appears? I always keep Feed On Feeds open in a mozilla tab.

On the Mac side of things . . .

[Amiasian]

There's the Omniweb 5 Beta [omnigroup.com] preview that has built in RSS streams.
Or if you prefer not to switch browsers, I strongly recommend Slashdock (do a search on Versiontracker for it) to stream in a tonne of RSS feeds.

Re:Does it Push?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could always do XMPP pub/sub [jabber.org], as suggested here [jabber.com].

nice, but...

[NumbThumb]

...i use karamba also to show me a top, /var/log/messages, my inbox and a fortune... using the "program" sensor, you can get it to show almost anything on the desktop. Also, hacking that rss script gave me a reason to learn a little perl;)

BTW: I would really like a "ticker"-style text display in karamba. I tried to code it myself, but having never worked with qt and automake before, i'm having a dificult time to get that to compile...

Re:RSS Readers

[ptolemu]

The browser used to open articles depends on the browser set as default. As far as I know each version of Windows has the ability to set a default browser so you should have the option to do this as well. Opening articles on my computer opens a new or existing instance of Mozilla.

This is so amusing....

[DerekLyons]

Yahoo! carries an Associated Press editorial about RSS-based news feeds, and how they are pushing the spam-ridden e-mail and advertising-ridden web-pages aside and consolidate information from multiple sites.

The problem is... RSS doesn't really do that. You *still* have to visit the original web page in order to acess the actual content/information. Headlines and summaries are neither content, nor information.

Re:God I hope so.

[Ichimusai]

I myself happened to pull the feed about every ten minutes, and boy that god me on 72 hour ice. Now it is back - occasionally. I get headlines sometimes, but still sometimes they change into the message telling me I am abusing them still. Now I pull once an hour.

Re:God I hope so.

[glinden]

• Formerly CRAYON was, IMHO a great site for quick-surfing only the news you wanted to read

You might also take a look at Findory News [findory.com]. It's a personalized news site pulling from hundreds of news sources. The site learns from the articles you read and helps you find the news you want.

Livejournal does this

[samael]

Not only are all users automatically RSS producers:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/andrewducker/data /rss/ [livejournal.com]
but you can take any RSS feed and produce a 'user' from it.

I get all my news on:
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/news/ [livejournal.com]
which aggregates various news sources into one place.

Re:RSS Readers

[jwinter1]

Bloglines is worth using just because your subscriptions are automatically synchronized across all your computers (since it's web-based). It has all the features that the good win32 applications have, but through an actually well thought-out frames interface. It also is nicer bandwidth-wise on the sites who are publishing.

Not an employee, just a satisified convert from Sharpreader.