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another quick break from “all things rss”

i don’t always agree with friedman, but i definitely do re his criticisms of the bush/cheney energy policies. the last part of this npr interview is very compelling (caveat - i caught this on the road and midstream today).

wow, what a cover story - congrats… :)

also, this is exactly why we launched feedflare (see my last post)…it’s about enabling lightweight community participation (aka sharing, commenting, tagging, etc.) in rss feeds…

and, to come full circle, you can also see an example of flare in the newsweek feed itself.

so, i finally saw office space last night. pretty funny movie…

of course, now i understand why the feedburner team named our item level tools feature “feedflare.” so, jason - you were right!

luckily we have more than 15 pieces of flair flare available for your feed and site. for example, i use 6 flares -> email this, add to delicious, add to myweb, digg this, subscribe to my feed, and technorati links (only shows up when there are links).

i’m jonesing for my phone…when i got into a car accident two weeks ago, the screen on my nokia 6630 crapped out.

i wasn’t a huge mobile person before getting the 6630, but now i’m addicted. i read email, send IMs, manage my calendar, read books (yes, full-length books - i’m reading “the world is flat” right now), read key rss feeds, look up movies and locations, and take a ton of pictures. i’m pretty dependent on it actually - it just makes life easier (less time on the computer) and more fun…

i can definitely see how the world is going to change…as soon as all phones are at least as powerful as the 6630…

so, a break from regularly scheduled programming (”RSS all the time”) to talk about coffee. of course, i’m dependent on good coffee to get thru my rss feeds and email…hmmm, that’s a problem… :)

as i wrote about early on, i just got into coffee roasting. i thought people like me were crazy too, so don’t judge me … unless of course you’ve tried it and believe we’re all loony.

i use the iRoast2 from hearthware and get my beans from sweetmaria’s (incredible selection and customer service - these people are serious about their coffee…but, they need an RSS feed for their weekly coffee selections!). this weekend, i’m drinking coffee from kenya and it’s absolutely fantastic.

there’s something great about roasting your own coffee, but it’s hard to explain…yes, the community includes a bunch of people that do crazy things like build their own roasters and keep detailed logs of their roasts. in fact, i’m sure someone’s going to make a funny documentary - there are some real characters floating about. for instance, what is this person doing and is there really an Apple roaster?

but, again, don’t knock it till you try it. i’m convinced that starbucks’ global domination is going to create opportunities for speciality coffee. folks will start to want something “else”…hence the growing interest in different types of beans from around the world (sustainably farmed, fair-trade, variety of tastes/quality, etc.). while home roasting isn’t likely to take off, i’ll bet that in 5 years, there will be coffee tastings across the US (at least on the coasts that is…).

before i end this post, i have a question…which description below is referring to wine and which one to coffee?

1. ” …sweet and aromatic, lighter body that others, with plum fruits and spices”
2. “…virtually no acidity, heavy body, baker’s chocolate, mild earth and wood tones”

steve, one of my colleagues at feedburner, wrote about the new sharing feature in google reader.

it allows users to share favorite items (by “label”) via email or by using a javascript widget that can be placed on sites. i like it (nice and viral), but it’s clearly just the beginning - they need to incorporate a few things to establish google as the sharing platform:

- allow users to subscribe in other readers (you can do that from the email option, but not via the javascript) - most people use My Yahoo, Bloglines, and/or firefox

- leverage important bookmarks from the beta google bookmarks…or better yet integrate del.icio.us :) - reading isn’t confined to RSS apps

- integrate seamlessly with gmail, alerts, gtalk in some fashion - email will continue to be the dominate app for communication and information consumption (newsletters/rss) for quite some time. newsgator and yahoo mail are betting on this.

it’s a great first step, but competition is going to be rough as yahoo and microsoft look to leverage their rather large pools of registered users. yahoo is in an especially good position as my yahoo is the #1 rss aggregator, they’ve integrated rss into the new yahoo mail, they have MMs of IM users, and they own del.icio.us.

additionally, people are already doing this using delicious and feedburner. delicious has JS badges, but we provide feedsplicing and javascript tools (called buzzboost). that way you can promote your bookmarks, blog posts, etc on your site and users can subscribe to one meta feed. my uber feed is a great example as it has my blog entries, my “my web” links and my flickr photos all in one…

anyways, here is a sample of the google js (image, not live):

UPDATE: note jason’s comments from google. this is a beta labs product and should be treated as such. plus, it’s not easy to integrate sharing into the reading environment. the new yahoo mail beta with full-text rss aggregation does allow users to “blog this,” “save to my web”, and email items, but people can’t subscribe to other people’s streams of saved items. so, google should be applauded for this…and, of course, they will continue to iterate…btw, i’d also like a stream of recommended links based on someone’s subscriptions, reading habits, and favorites.

the transcript of gates’ keynote at the Microsoft MIX06 conference is a must read - all the way through. what made the team at FeedBurner quite happy was that he dedicated a fair amount of time to RSS.

RSS is about to explode, partly due to Microsoft, but also because Yahoo, Google, and AOL are focusing on this. the masses are coming to full-text RSS in ‘06 - My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail, IE7, and Vista (even with the recently announced delay) are set to get real distribution…

here are bill’s RSS comments:

RSS

RSS, a lot of discussion about that. We’ve seen it do a number of things that we’ve put out as industry standards for people to adopt around RSS. We think it’s very, very important. We’ve got the simple list extensions that make feeds better particularly for structured data. We think the amount of RSS going on is going to skyrocket. It’s already very significant. It will move up to new levels. And making it easy for you to manage those feeds so that they show up in the appropriate place, and some of the same mechanisms that we’ve thought about with things like e-mail rules can be applied here so that even when your information comes in it’s coming to exactly the place that you’re interested in seeing it. We’re going beyond just a textual-type notification where people will have photos and the podcasts themselves.

When you think about RSS as the start of a programmable Web, as you expose APIs to your Web sites, amazing things can happen. eBay, of course, is an extreme example where over half the product listings now are done in a programmatic way. And the tools that are turning the Internet essentially into a programming environment where any Web site is almost like a component in a software application, where you make a request to it like you would a subroutine call, it comes back asynchronously with the information, that’s allowing people to think through architectures in a very different way. We have lots of software tools to help with these messaging type connections. The richest is around a set of standards called WS*. We call that the Windows Communication Framework that was code-named “Indigo,” and there’s a lot of industry support for those strong standards. And what you get there is, without your having to write a lot of complex code, exchanges where you’re calling a Web site to do something can actually be secure, you can exchange a lot of rich information, and actually pick in that protocol suite exactly what - tuned for the interaction that you want there. So, you can move from very simple types of Web call requests all the way up to the highly structured environment without you having to do a lot of software work.

Ray Ozzie, of course, is the person we have very focused on this new application pattern, and most recently he came out, and I hope many of you saw it, and talked about the idea of thinking of the Web as a place that you can exchange information with what he called the Live Clipboard, an analogy to what we’ve done between applications on the PC now working between Web sites. Whether it’s programmatic or the user being able to take pieces and combine them, this idea of modularity, Web sites being able to specialize in something and then being able to connect and get together in a rich way, that’s a powerful idea whose time has come, and we’re just really at the very beginning of taking advantage of that.

this is unreal… All Things Web 2.0 - “THE LIST”

saw Darwin’s Nightmare last night. this is a fantastic film about lake victoria and the non-native nile perch fish. somehow it’s able to intelligently weave in many different issues - AIDS, globalization, the environment, etc….here is a link to the official site

frank barnako noticed a comment I put in my post about FeedBurner…so, i thought i’d elevate it to a blog post.

tuesday morning after posting about FeedBurner, i took my son to school. on the way home (fortunately not on the way) i got into a car accident…i’m fine, but have a mild concussion.

and, most importantly, i broke the screen on my nokia 6630…so, my flickrstream is on hold until i replace it :)

btw - the irony of this is that for the past three years i’ve driven nearly 500 miles a week to yahoo without incident…