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UPDATE II: Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged up a storm over at ReadWriteWeb, writing an epic Ode to RSS to honor the day and the technology itself. It’s the best blog post on the subject that I’ve read and will, I suspect, a canonical post about RSS for some time to come. As Marshall points out, blogging and podcasting as we know it simply wouldn’t be possible without RSS.
A hearty thanks to the pioneers and early adopters whose dedication, hard work and dogged advocacy have brought the technology to its present state!
Thank to its ubiquitous advertising spots on BoingBoingTV, I’ve discovered the IT Room. Clearly, I’m part of the target audience of this new take on tech support humor, ’cause I found the trailers and initial 4:22 minute webisode (embedded below) hilarious.
The IT Room has ambitions to be more than just a series of webisodes created by Motiv Studios, written by a group of writers in a snark-laden conference room. The producers want the audience of IT geeks (and perhaps a few end users) to submit their own IT horror stories, which they can then use to create further episodes.
Is it a way of dodging the ongoing writer’s strike? Perhaps. We’ve had some luck with getting users to submit their own IT bloopers in the past, though we haven’t assembled a crack comedy team to make them into video shorts quite yet. The monkey promises to give the best written IT horror story a Dell Latitude, so there’s some extra incentive in there, too. The site gathers submissions in a transparent and decidedly techie way — you contribute the story as a blog post, visible to all.
The cynic in me notes that Motiv works on marketing programs for Dell, though this is obviously more than just extended commercials. There’s no Dude getting me a Dell (instead, he’s offering me a pint), happily, but until I see a battery meltdown or a frustrating tech support mobisode focused on relentlessly calm Indian associates offering scripted responses, I’ll be a tad suspicious…. even as I snarf my coffee a bit when I tune in.
Yuval Shavit, a triple threat of writer/coder/sarcasm maven over at SearchITChannel.com, turned me on to the xkcd webcomic a few months ago. Today, he pointed out the edition above, an example of DB humor that might just result in coffee-laced chuckles in server rooms worldwide.
xkcd is written by by Randall Munroe, a Christopher Newport University graduate who worked on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia before he began producing xkcd full-time.
These days, his witty, snarky comic is produced three times a week and has found its way into the offline world on prized geeky t-shirts everywhere. Techies who live and breathe acronyms (and challenge themselves to identify them) may be disappointed to learn that xkcd doesn’t actually stand for anything; according to Randall, “It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation. It stands for the comic and everything the comic stands for!”
What does the comic stand for? Mostly funny pokes at a geek’s challenges, including work, the quest for love, the oddity of daily life and quirks of technology, but that’s probably too narrow. Randall is unapologetically nerdy, honest and manages to inject his sparsely drawn figures with actual pathos, along with a brand of humor that seems to speak directly to the reptile brain of techies everywhere. With subjects ranging from raptors to Red Spider, zeppelins, Vanilla Ice, Mussolini, Guitar Hero and Firefly, xkcd plays on the heart strings of modern geek culture to hilarious effect, though occasionally with a thoughtful note. Cory Doctorow loves it, and so do I.
If you happen to live in Massachussetts, keep an eye out for the next real-world meetup. And if you’re looking for updates, here’s the xkcd RSS feed.
Dave Winer, generally considered the father of RSS, has been playing with different ways of organizing, aggregating and displaying feeds for years. OPML was a meaningful contribution (and, for once, a less controversial one) to the syndication world, allowing users to share, import and export lists of feeds, all using free tools at opmlmanager.com.
Recently, with the launch of the iPhone, an RSS hack that Winer created two years ago has been getting much more attention. Essentially, he’s optimized all of the content that a news site makes available through RSS so that it’s ideal for viewing on a mobile device, removing formatting, images (read: advertising) and all other content extraneous to the simple - and potent - combination of headline, link and summary.
To use the newsriver, just point your browser, mobile or otherwise, to bbcriver.com for the BBC or nytimesriver.com for the New York Times. To see how it works, view this video of a BlackBerry user browsing a newsriver:
Critics of the technique and technology point out that Avantgo and other clipping services have provided similar functions to early adopters using wireless Palm Pilots or Pocket PCs years ago. That being said, the explosion of smartphones like the BlackBerry, Treo, Windows Mobile devices and now the iPhone has made quick-loading, mobile optimized news content much more compelling than the graphically-clogged homepages of many providers. Of course, the iPhone’s ability to browse the “full Internet” makes it quite possible, even pleasant, to surf through the different major newspaper and online media sites, but if you’re stuck on the EDGE network as you browse, it’s quite possible that a newsriver may be preferable.
I’m not sure whether Dave deserves credit for something entirely new. I do know that what he’s created makes it easier for me to access the news on the go, and for that I thank him. I’m not alone in that. A-list bloggers like Jeff Jarvis, Dan Farber, Read/Write Web, Scoble and Dave Winer himself have all held up newsrivers as something revolutionary. Steve Rubel, over at MicroPersuasion, recently pointed out that Megite, which aggregates blog posts like TechMeme, now provides a newsriver.
The point that Dave makes in the post that reintroduced the concept of the river - and defends it against critics - is much the same as the one I just made above. While it’s been possible to do this sort of thing on a PDA or BlackBerry for some time, no one has made it as easy as simply pointing your mobile browser to a URL.
Now, in the wake of losing my MDA on a fishing trip last weekend (RIP), my next challenge to decide which mobile device I’ll be using to paddle down the newsriver.
If you Google lifecasting, the odds are that you’ll find lifecasting.org at the top of your search results, a site dedicating to “lifecasting artists” who make 3D copies of living human bodies. The current new media hype around Justin.tv, a new always-on videoblog featuring Yale-grad Justin Kan, may just enter an alternate meaning for the term “lifecasting” into the lexicon.
We’ll make sure to add it to our glossary of ‘casts, to cover our bases.
JustinTVGuide, a blog dedicated to tracking the life and times of Justin.tv, describes Justin’s video experiment as “lifecasting,” for instance. Dandelife.com is doing as much as anyone to support this version of the term. In the info section of Dandelife, for instance. you’ll find a definition for lifecast. We prefer this, slightly amended vesion:
A lifecast is a publicly available streaming video netcast of an individual’s life.
Regardless of what you think of Justin’s programming choices (his life, more or less, which may or may not be your cup of tea) the delivery method, Sprint’s 3GEV-DO wireless telephony network, is certainly worth noting. Given that 3G is a reality in many major metropolitan areas already, you may see many more “Justins” lifecasting around your neighborhood soon.
You’ll certainly see them on the blogosphere, as noted by Wired’s Epicenter blog. According to Adario Strange:
Juice Receiver is an open source application written in Python and licensed under the GPL that allows you to save Internet audio (like, say, podcasts) onto your local hard drive to listen to at your leisure.
Sweet timeshifting and placeshifting goodness, free of DRM concerns.
The application has been ported to more than 15 languages as of March 2007, supports multiple media players and is accessible to blind and disabled users. If you’re looking for a “fresh squeezed” alternative to iTunes, check out this app!
A new messaging service has gained some real traction in the blogosphere and offline among the “digerati,” though to be fair most of those coders, writers and futurists are rarely truly offline anymore. Just look at how often they are creating “tweets” with Twitter.
While Twitter was born as a side project within the offices of Odeo in March of 2006, it’s taken adoption by A-list bloggers like Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel to raise the profile — and usage — of the tool. Twitter allows members to effectively “lifestream,” constantly providing details, mundane and trivial as they may be, of their daily lives. One user, David Troy, created an extraordinary mashup Google Maps and Twitter, Twittervision, which tracks “tweets” in real-time on a global scale, moving from one post to the next.
Twitter, along with its founders, was recently profiled in the New York Times’ Business section, along with the service, in “From Many Tweets, One Loud Voice on the Internet.” Jason Pontin, the author of the article, described Twitter as :
“…a heady mixture of messaging; social networking of the sort associated with Web sites like MySpace; the terse, jittery personal revelations of “microblogging” found on services like Jaiku; and something called “presence,” shorthand for the idea that people should enjoy an “always on” virtual omnipresence. “
What is Twitter? It’s a simple service with an Ajax-y Web presence that allows users to share where they are, what they’re doing and how they can be contacted. You can post to Twitter using SMS, much like Blogger or other tools. The difference is that the platform then sends those posts to a group of subscribers (friends, clients, family) by phone alerts and to your channel on Twitter. Users can turn off mobile alerts if they like — an important feature, judging from the feedback that, for some, Twitter is rather addictive. The service is currently free, though interested parties should check with their mobile telephony providers regarding SMS charges, which are certain to rise with greater use.
Twitter is part of Obvious Corporation in San Francisco, California. For up-to-date info about Twitter, make sure to visit the Twitter blog.
Using Democracy, a user can search within YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video and others video aggregators. Democracy also works as a BitTorrentclient, so users can search, download and watch torrents from within the same interface. The application plays most video formats, including Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI and XVID.
In fact, the Democracy platform’s engineers state that they have created a new approach to building a cross-platform application using open source technologies like Mozilla, XUL Runner, VLC and Python. The player runs on OS X, Windows XP/2000, Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian platforms.
Using the fluid GUI, you can subscribe to more than 1000 video RSS feeds using a built-in channel guide. Popular vlogs like Rocketboom, Ask a Ninja and Ze Frank sit next to lesser-known vloggers, geeky screencasts, MSM netcasts, independent warvloggers and YouTube auteurs. While both Google Reader and of course iTunes can be configured quite easily to subcribe to video Web feeds, Democracy has a number of alluring features.
For instance, the Democracy player supports full screen playback, including HD support for those lucky enough to have a PC hooked up to a HD screen, and has been translated into more than 40 languages. GetDemocracy.com, where Democracy is available for free download, has been translated into more than 18.
Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.
If you’re a particular flavor of Alpha geek, the concept of “pipes” is nothing new. In fact, naming this project “Pipes” was a deliberate nod to the Unix programmers that, over the years, have done extraordinarily clever things by connecting simple utilities together using pipes built on the command line.
So the concept of pipes has been out there for years — but creating a fluid, visual and (mostly) non-technical interface that enables non-coders to create mashups of sites like Craigslist and Google Maps may be. Tim O’Reilly certainly thinks so. He posted that Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is “a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.”
Dapper makes it easy to extract and use information from Web sites. If you’re familiar with Web services, you might recognize Dapper as an API maker. We discovered Dapper through GridLab, where a clever Italian blogger applied Dapper to WhatIs.com. Put even more simply, Dapper creates an RSS feed for any Web site, which then can be manipulated in a number of ways. Dapper will only work on HTML-based sites, so if you’re trying to create a feed from a Flash or AJAX-heavy site, you’re likely out of luck. It’s possible to make your widget private, too, if that’s of interest.
Even if you aren’t ready to dig into serious coding, this widget is worth a look. Dapper is still in beta, free to all.
Podlinez allows users to listen to podcasts on a phone. Simple, a tad brilliant and free, other than any charges you might incur in calling.
All you have to do is enter an RSS feed on the Podlinez Web site to retrieve the specific phone number to call to hear a podcast. You can simply browse the site to find numbers for popular shows as well.
Once you’ve called in, just use the # and * keys on the numeric keypad of your cell phone to reverse or fast forward through podcasts in one minute increments.
Tired of clicking from one metafilter to the next? Thomas Marban’s PopURLs.com displays the most popular links on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, Fark, Slashdot, Wired, NewsVine, Metafilter and many others, all on one page, with direct links to the stories. Federated Media calls it a “dashboard for the hive mind,” a statement we’re inclined to agree with entirely. Constantly updated headlines are displayed on a minimalist black background. You can simply rollover a story to get a summary to pop up, which makes browsing that much easier. There are also feeds for the most tagged photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube, iFilm and MetaCafe.
Are you hip to Really Simple Syndication? If you’re still behind on the adoption curve, May 1st is RSS Awareness Day.
Using Democracy, a user can search within YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video and others video aggregators. Democracy also works as a 
Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.
Dapper