this is sippey.typepad.com

congrats to google on feedburner

I'm incredibly happy for Dick, Eric, Steve, Matt, Don and the rest of the folks at FeedBurner...and congratulations are definitely in order for the corpdev team at Google, who with the acquisition signal both the strategic importance of RSS to Google, and the extraordinary talent of the nice midwestern team who in three short years defined the state of the art in syndication services for publishers large and small.

I've known Dick and Eric for nearly ten years now -- I first met met the pair when Mr. Lunt and I were on the advisory board for a Miller Freeman Web 1.0 conference -- and I'm proud of being even marginally affiliated with the company and services they've built.  I gave them a little bit of advice over beers when they were leaving the Spyonit technology in the hands of 724 Solutions and thinking about what would come next...I don't quite remember what I said, but I'm fairly certain they rightly ignored whatever I told them.  And then nearly two years later, after I had landed at Six Apart, it was a natural fit to help make it easy for TypePad users to burn their feeds and flare their blogs...because by that point some crazy number of our customers were so in love with the FeedBurner service that they were doing it the hard way themselves.

Like Anil, I'm a bit concerned about Google's gravitational pull on talent  (I mean seriously -- Veen and Norton and Costolo and Lunt under one corporate umbrella? The mind reels...), but I'll worry about that on Monday.  In the meantime, I'm hoping there are some nice meals being planned in Chicago.

reconstitution

It's early morning, and I'm walking through the Southwest Florida International Airport, doing my best to ignore the piped in Muzak.  But the task becomes impossible when a watered down version of Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are" comes on.  It's astonishing, but it is actually possible to water that song down.

I know there are a myriad of complicated licensing and performance rights issues that have brought us to the point where early morning travelers catch themselves singing "Don't go changing to try to please me" in time with an anonymous female song stylist.  But because I'm generally boring and single-tracked, I'm sitting here wondering what the online equivalent to Muzak is. F8? Widgets? RSS Readers? The mobile web? My Yahoo? The entire AOL experience?  When we add value do we water down? You've gotta believe that the people programming the Muzak channels believe they're doing Good Work, just like you.

Note to self: blog posts from airport terminals always seem like a good idea.

feed splicing

So I'm kvetching to a friend in IM how there aren't really any user-friendly tools out there for feed splicing (and how both the Bloglines and Newsgator APIs should break out of the feed-by-feed mode).  How is this remix cultcha supposed to happen without things that make it easy to remix?

And then literally less than an hour later I find out about the new "share" feature in Google Reader, which will output recent items from a labeled set of feeds (or your starred items) as a styled clip for your site, or as a feed itself.  Voila, user friendly feed splicing.

feeddemon style

I've been an avid FeedDemon user since Nick Bradbury announced the 1.0 beta.  One of its best (and least-exploited) features is its user-customized newspaper styles:  FeedDemon uses XLST to create different views of feed data, which end up rendered in an IE control.  I've been building a newspaper style based on the "Savvy" style that uses a some simple JavaScript to show/hide news item details on click.  Install this style, maximize the browser control (F11) and voila -- a streamlined 2-paned reader instead of (IMHO) an overdesigned 3-paned "Outlook style" reader.

Even though about five of you will know/care what the hell I'm talking about, I give this to you.

>> Download Sippey.fdxsl (9.2K)

feedburner / delicious

More chocolate + peanut butter: Feedburner is now splicing delicious feeds, grabbing them once per day and inserting them a la Veen. If you're pulling my Feedburner feed, you're now seeing my delicious links in there, along with my public Flickr photos.

feedburner, flickr and feed splicing

If you subscribe to my feed, you may have noticed the today's appearance of a few photos. These are the result of a very interesting partnership between Flickr and Feedburner. Feedburner now supports Flickr photo feed splicing: all I had to do was give Feedburner my Flickr username, and since Flickr outputs my public photos in Atom and several flavors of RSS, Feedburner grabs it, and merges it into my blog feed based on pubdate. Chocolate, meet peanut butter.

As FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo points out in his post on the Burn This blog, the new feature points the way towards a much richer future for XML content delivery; one where the notions of syndication and aggregation begin to blur...

This new capability begins to expose part of the real vision for FeedBurner. There are many publishing/media/communication channels that make up an organization or individual's digital personality. Currently, when we want to communicate our images, thoughts, bookmarks, favorite music, etc., we must find the appropriate publishing mechanism, and then separately find an appropriate sharing and communication mechanism.

This is why the content syndication space is so interesting. As I ranted about in a post on the Supernova conference blog, if you're out to use RSS to replace email, you've got a long road ahead of you. But if you can use it to start to change the way that "publishers" and "subscribers" produce, distribute and consume information, then you're on to something. Flickr and Feedburner are on to something.

(And for the three or four people who don't know this already, and care about things like transparency and full disclosure, I'm an advisor to Feedburner, and a friend of Flickr.)

clip clip clip

As a quick reminder, a good definition of walled garden from whatis.techtarget.com.

On the Internet, a walled garden is an environment that controls the user's access to Web content and services. In effect, the walled garden directs the user's navigation within particular areas, to allow access to a selection of material, or prevent access to other material. ... Although the walled garden does not actually prevent users from navigating outside the walls, it makes it more difficult than staying within the environment.

Don't be fooled, people. It's all about the interop.

where does rss belong?

A quick thing to note about Apple's preview of Tiger: they're putting the RSS reader in Safari instead of Mail.app. It's decisions like these by the major players (Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Google, etc.) that will define the consumer mental model for feed consumption: does RSS augment/improve/replace the messaging experience? Or does RSS augment/improve/replace the browsing experience?

measurable syndication

The FeedBurner guys are dealing with all the tough problems related to content syndication. Case in point -- they just released a new version of their statistics functionality, a key component of their service that lets publishers track feed readership, aggregator usage and item-level clickthroughs. If you thought tracking web readership was difficult, try tracking RSS/Atom usage, with the heterogeneity of clients, feed polling intervals and multi-user aggregation systems (like My Yahoo or Bloglines). Disclaimer: I'm on the FeedBurner advisory board.

Dick Costolo, FeedBurner's CEO, outlines the new approach in a post on the product blog. With the new release, they're presenting a calculation of "daily circulation," which they're defining as...

Unique IP addresses accessing your feed today on behalf of a unique client feed reader plus the number of subscribers to your feed reported today in any accesses of your feed by an online aggregator.

Dick continues by pointing out that that "circulation is by no means perfect."

There are a few different issues with trying to make a highly accurate count via this approach, including the usual IP address as person issues (although we try to mitigate this issue by only using "daily circulation" and not "weekly" or more, so that you have less likelihood of DHCP users reporting multiple IP addresses over the time period). The key is to think of circulation in much the way, well, commercial publishers think of it. It represents the best current approximation of how many people you reached today, via the various agents reporting back to us through feed accesses. This number is particularly interesting as a trend over time.

Whether FeedBurner's approach is perfect or not, if RSS/Atom is going to evolve into a medium that supports commercial applications, we're going to need to settle on a common definition of XML "readership," while respecting the diverse landscape of feed consumers. Remember the transition in the web space from "hits" to "page views" to "visits"? We're about to see something similar here.

aggregation as backup?

Dialing in from the land of unintended benefits, Mark Fletcher of Bloglines is offering to help anyone left stranded by the sudden disappearance of Weblogs.com recover their content. Nice.