RSS4Lib

Google Reader's A-Changin'

2011-10-25T12:55:48Z

Google recently announced that they are soon to relaunch Google Reader with a new design and are "going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles." Although I am not a huge fan of Google+ (Aside from the coolness of Hangouts, I haven't seen a reason to convert from Twitter and Facebook; my social circles don't see to be active in Google+), one of the things that has griped me about Reader is that there has been no way to share RSS items with my Plus circles. If nothing else, that will soon change. Something else that will change is that the Google Reader API (an unofficial, undocumented, and formally unsupported API) will at some point be phased out. This doesn't make a difference to users of the Google Reader web site, but does matter for anyone who has been using Google Reader to track what has been read in applications like FeedDemon and others. If you want to get your data from Google, they will continue to offer an OPML download of your feeds, but will be augmenting the list of subscribed feeds with your other personal data, including your shared items, friends, likes, and starred items. What you do with them then is your business.

The Link to This Post Has a Half Life Measured in Hours

2011-09-08T16:17:40Z

A recent research report by Hillary Mason of Bit.ly explores the lifespan of a link shared through social media. Her findings are that links shared via Twitter, Facebook, etc., have remarkably short life spans. She measured the half-life of shared links (the amount of time it took for a link to receive half as many clicks as in the previous time period) and learned that, for most links, the half life is two-three hours. (The outlier exception is links shared from YouTube, where the half life of a shared link is a whopping 7.4 hours.) Graphs and the full report are available on the bitly blog. Of course, this post is immortal, because as we all know, blog posts never die. Right?

Just How Dead is YOUR RSS Feed?

2011-01-13T20:14:00Z

There has been another incarnation of the "RSS is dead" meme in the past weeks, with posts at TechCrunch and GigaOM debating the point. The conclusion of these posts seems to be that RSS is continuing its gradual evolution from being perceived as an end-user tool to being viewed as plumbing. And this is probably a good thing. While I still consume most of my "blog-like" news and commentary via an aggregator, I rely more on recommendations through my social networks for learning what's new. Perhaps that's because I've become lazy about actively following lots of sources, and prefer the crowd to do the filtering for me. Perhaps its because the blogs and news sources I follow are less frequently updated (I know this blog falls in that category). Whatever the reason, I know my consumption patterns have changed. And I'll wager that most people feel too busy to sift through everything published in every publication they like, and prefer instead to find like-minded individuals who share things of interest. Again, much like I do. Still, if you're curious to learn how your feed is consumed (and don't use Feedburner or the equivalent), take a look at RSS4Lib's YourStats log file analysis program. If you upload your publication's log files and tell it what your RSS feed URL is, it will show you where your RSS feed is consumed -- providing a good guess at your RSS readership. You may find the numbers surprising (high or low).

Farewell, Bloglines, It's Been Swell

2010-09-13T13:19:27Z

Bloglines, the venerable RSS reader that I -- and tens of thousands of others -- have used since 2005 is shutting down on October 1, 2010. Bloglines is making it easy to continue your feedreading habit elsewhere, replacing their front page with the 3 simple steps to export your folders and subscriptions in OPML format:

The inevitability of this, in retrospect, seems enormous, and I'm surprised my fondness for Bloglines' simplicity has made me put up with its quirky behavior. (Quirky, of course, means almost constant brief outages on their perpetual beta version.) Bloglines' move into selling advertisements on its front page (see Bloglines Succumbs to Advertising from September 2008) was obviously not enough to bring in the revenue needed to keep the service. When your only serious competitor is Google, I suspect almost nothing can save you. In the blog post announcing the shut down, the trend behind the news is made clear:

The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year, being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology - the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn't the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.

I made a similar point about the phase change in RSS from being a commodity in itself to being a transport mechanism in September 2009. Just as soundbite reporting in television and radio news changed that medium, so has 'textbite' exchange of information on the Internet. The overwhelming force of the conversation in Twitter and Facebook -- where the granularity of information exchange is much smaller and seems to permeate the Internet with greater fluidity -- has changed the game. I'm not giving up on my RSS feeds (from blogs, news services, and other sources), but I'm switching to the only other game in town: Google Reader.

Survey Report on Librarians' Use of Online Tools

2010-08-11T18:49:18Z

A recent survey of WebJunction users showed some interesting statistics on use of various online tools by librarians (the write-up is at at "Library Staff Report Their Use of Online Tools"). The trend from the survey indicates that social media (such as Facebook) is making inroads on email as a communication tool. Of particular interest to me is the finding that RSS feeds are used daily or weekly by only 24% of respondents and used never by 50%. Blogs are used daily or weekly by only 27%, and never by 40%. I know I spend much less time reading blogs (and, as those of you who read RSS4Lib in its native blog for or via RSS might notice, writing for one). I do wonder how much RSS usage is un-noticed or un-recognized by respondents; as RSS (and XML in general) become the way data move, do its consumers care how the data appear where they're consumed? The survey results highlight differences between academic and public librarians (academic librarians are more likely to use online tools than their public counterparts) and a series of interesting differences between urban and rural librarians.

Google Chrome Out of Beta sans RSS

2010-05-25T20:04:51Z

Google Chrome for Mac came out of beta today (see "Google Chrome for Mac: Ready, beta, now stable!") with many new features, but not with built-in RSS support. Even my first-generation iPhone can do better than that (granted, with a redirect through an Apple server to parse the XML of the feed into something intelligible). An RSS feed still displays as a jumble of text:

Not that I spend a lot of time reading RSS feeds in my browser, but if I click on one (intentionally or otherwise), I really ought not get gibberish. If Google intends Chrome to be a serious competitor in a marketplace of choice for Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari, it really ought not leave users in the lurch. This is very un-Google-like behavior. This is just the most recent in my series of rants about Google Chrome and RSS here, here, and here.

RSS Replay: Read a Blog Archive at your Leisure

2010-04-26T17:41:06Z

Found a new-to-you blog that you want to read, but you don't want to get sucked into it for the next few hours? RSS Replay looks like the tool for you. Give it an RSS feed and how often you want it to give you a new post, and it will do the rest. You can specify a new item from the backfile every day, every few days, or other intervals. You can also set a PageRank filter so you only see posts that have PageRanks above a specific threshold (all, good, great, or best). This brings "slow reading" to a much different level!

FreeMyFeed: A Really (Poor) Clever Idea

2010-01-18T16:47:45Z

Have you even wanted to subscribe to an RSS feed in Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Bloglines or Google Reader (or anywhere else, for that matter), but discover that the feed is inconveniently served from behind a login-protected server? We all have, I think. Well, now a free web service allows you to do just that. As convenient as it is, this is a spectacularly poor idea. FreeMyFeed handily takes care of those pesky login problems. You give it your feed URL, your login, and your password. It then gives you an alternate URL at FreeMyFeed that contains your login information in an encoded way. FreeMyFeed then acts as a proxy, grabbing the feed without storing your login credentials on its own server, and passing it along to your reader:

So I created a COMPLETELY FAKE login for this blog's feed. The login does not exist, does not work, and is (of course) not a real login to anything: username rss4lib and password temp1234. The FreeMyFeed link that encodes this is:
http://freemyfeed.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5yc3M0bGliLmNvbS9pbmRleC54bWw6OnJzczRsaWI6OkxzUGcwWHRrRktDUytJdkFrUTFMN0RvNk5BPT0= Well, it is encrypted, but there's usually a good reason that a feed is behind a login. This takes those feeds and puts them out in the public, where any search engine find them, index them, and expose your organization's secure information. End runs around reasonable security are poor choices. I would recommend that, if your organization has RSS behind a login, that you work with your technical group to block FreeMyFeed from accessing your site. To their credit, there is a fairly explicit disclaimer of the risks on the FreeMyFeed front page, that includes a warning to be careful and not to share your personalized URL with anyone (other than the feed readers, of course). So if you must use this tool, use it only on your own browser, not on an aggregator to minimize the sharing of an all-access URL to your feed. Don't be tempted.

Upgrade Complete

2010-01-14T01:57:13Z

Looks like the upgrade went smoothly. Please let me know in the comments or by email to rss4lib@gmail.com if you see anything wonky that you want to report.

Upgrading RSS4Lib

2010-01-14T01:05:13Z

I'm doing a long-overdue upgrade of Movable Type tonight. Back, I hope, soon.

Farewell to Full-Text Feeds?

2010-01-11T18:31:50Z

I've noticed over time that the number of people who 'consume' RSS4Lib on RSS4Lib.com has declined steadily over the years. Yet the number of feed subscribers is still steadily increasing (see today's subscriber report and has recently broken 2000). At the same time, few articles I post are read on RSS4Lib.com more than 100 times the day they are published, and most are viewed only a few times a day after that. (Selected items in the backfile, thanks to Google and Bing, get more traffic than recently published items once the new posts have aged a few days.) I suspect this trend holds true across many blogs, whether they're produced for love or money. (This one, to be clear, is not produced as a moneymaking venture.) Some are suggesting that the days of full-text feeds are numbered (see "Say Bye Bye to Full RSS Feeds and RSS: What's the Deal in 2010?," as examples). I'm curious to know if these commercial prognosticators are correct -- will bloggers tend to pull people toward the richness of their sites, even if there is no particularly strong monetary incentive to do so? Or will full-text feeds continue to be the way to go? I suspect a trend toward full text feeds (for blogs that are works of avocation) and snippet feeds (for those that are more vocational). And I'll wager that this will break down (to oversimplify greatly) into an academic/commercial divide.

RSS Readers Not Dead Yet

2010-01-07T01:54:55Z

ReadWriteWeb says, "5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock." To summarize the post, here are the five reasons RSS readers are still relevant, according to RWW:

Control over Information Flow
Evolving User Interfaces
Tracking Twitter
Mobile News
Categorized News

This post is in response to an earlier RWW post, "RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline," which engendered a lively discussion in the comments. Dave Winer, a pioneer of RSS, noted in the comments to the more recent post that RSS readers get one thing fundamentally wrong: they treat feeds like email by telling you how many unread messages you have and encouraging you to read each one. (I'm one of those weirdos who cannot stand having messages, especially unread ones, hanging around in my inbox. Having a growing tally of unread RSS items pushes me right over the edge and is the main reason I stopped consuming my feeds in my mail application.) A number of automated tools offer filters for RSS feeds (many have been reviewed or discussed here). Most of them rely on explicit, user-defined keywords. Others, like Twitter, rely on one's peers to identify the interesting stuff. However, I have yet to find a tool that offers the best of keyword filtering (letting through articles on topics that are of likely interest) while still surprising and delighting me with nearly, but not quite, on-topic posts. That's an incredibly delicate, arbitrary, and undefinable balance to strike.

RSS to Twitter Tools

2009-12-31T16:18:25Z

Twitter makes it easy for you to post updates to your followers, or the world at large. It's well suited for quick updates, but less for "bloggy" content. How do you get your blog into Twitter without any particular effort? There are a variety of tools to help you do this. Here's a quick overview of some of these tools. Use one I don't mention? Let me know in the comments -- I'll update the post as needed. All of these tools post on your behalf, which means that they use your Twitter account login and password behind the scenes. You provide the tool with your Twitter account login and password. You may wish to set up a separate Twitter account just for your blog if you're concerned about sharing your Twitter login with a 3rd party.

FeedNest

FeedNest. This tool asks you for a bit more information about your feed than do others, so that users can search FeedNest and find your blog's content. It asks you to describe your blog's content and give the name of the site.

RSS Twitter

RSS Twitter. A simple interface -- your Twitter account and your blog's RSS feed.

TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed. I've used this tool for this blog in the past. It offers some statistics tracking for how your posts are read (by redirecting the links from Twitter tweets through its own server).

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools (WordPress plugin). If you publish your blog with WordPress, there's a plugin that will automatically send a tweet to Twitter when you publish your blog post.

Missing your Favorite?

Leave a comment and let me know which tool you use.

Google Chrome Beta for Mac and RSS

2009-12-08T17:34:44Z

Another version of Google Chrome (version 4.0), on a new platform (now for Mac OS 10.5 and up) and the same old news about RSS: support isn't there in the browser. Both RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds display inline in the browser as a huge jumble of text. (Get Chrome for Mac.)

(Click image for full size version)

I've railed about the lack of RSS support for either rational inline display or for live bookmarks since the earliest versions of Chrome here and here. Otherwise, a quick test of the new Chrome beta for Mac shows that it's fast and efficient, as I've come to expect from Chrome's Windows betas. I'm not sure I'll trade over from either Safari or Firefox, even when Chrome does get RSS support, but Chrome is coming along.

Spectives: A Nice Tool that Abuses Intellectual Property

2009-12-01T15:42:03Z

I found a new tool (via a review at ReadWriteWeb) that offers a visual presentation of changing RSS feeds: Spectives, a "search for visual news." Conceptually, it's quite interesting. Its use of intellectual property is unfortunate. Spectives is focused on visual content. It ignores plain text entries on a blog, highlighting those posts with images. I created a collection called RSS and added this blog's feed to it; Spectives pulled in the most recent posts that included images:

Interestingly, Spectives ignores posts with embedded video (at least, the UStream feed embedded in a recent post on this blog). Spectives' front page offers a one-minute tutorial right up front -- probably because the point of the tool is a bit vague, if intriguing -- and then lists popular and featured collections. The "Nature Photography" collection (under featured) offers pictures from five photography feeds; the "Celebrities" collection pulls in feeds from 15 gossip/tabloid sites. While the tool is interesting, its mechanism for getting users to the source content is highly annoying. Each collection (and search) comes with its own RSS feed that includes all the items in the source's feed, not restricting it to images. Clicking to the full text of an item in the RSS feed takes you to the original site, which makes sense. However, Spectives puts a translucent toolbar across the bottom of the page with a link "Back to Spectives" and a link to share the post on Twitter -- with a Spectives URL built in. Here's a sample of my previous post, in its entirety, with a Spectives URL and my Creative Commons license, along with the Spectives toolbar.

(Click image for full size version)

At the moment, this is probably in technical compliance with the Creative Commons license -- however, as the "advertise" link on the bottom of every Spectives web page indicates, the site is clearly trying to monetize other peoples' content. In my opinion, Spectives' reproduction of my entire web site separated from my URL crosses an ethical, if not legal, line. I am not a fan.