Alex Barnett's blog : RSS

Moving my blog

alexbarn — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 21:38:00 GMT

OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog.

RSS feeds, OPMLs and Grazr

alexbarn — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:37:00 GMT

Kevin Briody of the Windows Live team has published the RSS feeds he subscribes to as OPML files for your feedreader. Some good feeds worth checking out there, including a bunch of Windows Live individual employee and team blogs.

Kevin, one way of displaying these as a blogroll is to use Grazr. Below is your OPML file for the Windows Live team blogs rendered inside the Grazr ui:. Just wack in the url of any OPML file here and then copy and paste the code...

I have to update my OPML file, but you can browse mine at my blog's left hand nav.

What is not RSS?

alexbarn — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:21:00 GMT

What is not RSS?

In case you were wondering.

Good luck Niall :-(

alexbarn — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 00:50:00 GMT

Well, I just read Niall's post explaining that he is leaving Microsoft. Niall was recruited in April to help the Windows Live team build an RSS / Atom based syndication platform for consumption across devices.

Like Scoble, I'm sorry to see Niall go. Niall really grokks the RSS / syndicated space and its potential - Microsoft will miss his talents.

I don't know what the ins-and-outs are regarding his decision, but Valleywag has a quick 'exit' interview with him, shedding a little more light on his reasons for leaving and Kevin, a friend of Niall's seems to sum up the situation in Niall's case:

"The startup is the thing my friends. It's a lot easier to convince the market that your idea is brilliant than it is to appease the gods inside Microsoft."

What a pity :-(

Good luck Niall, whatever you get up to.

Update: Techmeme going bonkers on this.

If you like microformats and RSS you will love this.

alexbarn — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 02:04:00 GMT

If you like microformats and / or RSS you'll love it.

If you don't know about microformats and / or RSS you need to watch it.

Channel9 interviews Matt Augustine and Paresh Suthar about Live Clipboard and Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE).

Syndicated search engines broken - Part II

alexbarn — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 08:34:00 GMT

A few days ago I grumbled at the poor state of the search engines specializing in syndicated (RSS'd or Atomized) content.

Today, ~~Michael~~ Marshall Patrick is enthusiastically supporting a proposed standard by Bloglines that is trying to solve an apparent problem:

"“Everything you blog goes on your permanent record!” How many times have we heard that lately? From employment to family situations, many people have been frustrated to find out that things they intended to write for a personal audience is now discoverable by anyone in the world via search engines.

From the Bloglines proposal:

"As a result, we are proposing (and have implemented) an RSS and ATOM extension that allows publishers to indicate the distribution restrictions of a feed. Setting the access restriction to 'deny' will indicate the feed should not be re-distributed. In a nutshell, the proposal"

I respectfully disagree with ~~Michael's~~ Marshall's view here, and a user of these services, can not support the proposal, for three reasons:

1. Keeping stuff out of participating engines wouldn't ensure leakage. As one commenter on the quoted post has already pointed out (by '007') how do you avoid the repost scenario? If you really need to sneak stuff under the radar (to avoid getting fired???), use something other than public blogsite - you will be found. Another reason: why wouldn't some service providers show up that wouldn't adhere to the rules that ensure they catch the slime? (I could imagine 'Slimesearch'...). Private networks - ok = group IM, SSL'd, groups, etc (even company email considered leaky) - but just don't use inherently public networks for this kind of stuff.

2. A common issue with search results is spam. Spammers won't use the tag. I realize this isn't a stated goal of the proposal, but worth pointing out, I think.

3. IMHO, these guys (Bloglines, Technorati, etc) should be focussed on trying to solve the precisely reverse of the 'problem' they are trying to solve here with an access:restriction' tag - they should be trying to get more complete indexes, not the other way around.

Overall, this syndicated content search space is broken. The priorities seem wrong here - I don't see this step getting us any closer to getting better services when there are other much more fundamental issues that need solving.

Syndicated content search - still broken

alexbarn — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 08:34:00 GMT

For a few months now, Randy Charles Morin has been tracking and grading the performance of search engines specializing in syndicated (RSS'd or Atomized) content.

These search tools can be invaluable when you are trying to keep track of what customers, partners, influencers and press are saying about your product.

Now, having customers use your feedback systems is great and all very well, but you don't get the whole picture, no matter how convenient these might be to use. From a product development / design point of view, listening to what your customers are saying about your existing and planned products requires the effort to reach out and listen to them in the places where they are talking.

Increasingly, 'those places' are blogs. 35m+ of them depending on who's numbers you believe. Needles in haystacks, and all that...

This where these tools come in and why they can be so valuable.

From reading through Randy's research and from my own personal experience I can only conclude that there is still plenty of room for improvement required from these types of syndicated content search service providers. In fact, I'd say there is still even room for a new player (or players) to enter and dominate this space.

The engines Randy has been tracking are:

Blogdigger
Bloglines
Blogpulse
Google Blogsearch
Feedster
Pubsub
Icerocket
Technorati.

For the last few months I've been running the same query ("ado.net") on these engines. The frustrating thing is that one week Icerocket might do better than Google's Blogsearch. Then the next week Technorati seems best. And the next week Bloglines. Without any of these making significant (apparent) improvements overall. This space is broken.

It means that in order for me to track what I want to, I have to track a number of search results (which I subscribe to) in order to get the complete picture. Lots of de-dupping. And yet there seems to be no rhyme nor reason for all this variation in performance.

This isn't a short term phenomenon. I've tried them all myself (some for over two years +) in a number of contexts, and like Randy, I've found their results variable at best, but sadly they perform mostly poorly, most of the time.

So what is 'performance' is this space? Performance attributes I consider high priority (listed in order of priority) are:

Completeness / size of index
Time taken for items (from publishing) to be included within index (i.e. minutes, not days)
Consistency of service performance over time
Order results by content type (e.g. blogs, 'news', forums)
Order results by date and relevancy
Low spam pollution

You can judge for yourself - here are the following results for "ado.net":

Blogdigger - http://blogdigger.com/search?q=%22ado.net%22&sortby=date
Bloglines - http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=%22ado.net%22&ql=en&s=f&pop=l&news=m
Blogpulse - http://www.blogpulse.com/search?query=ado.net&offset=0&operator=&start_date=&end_date=&sort=&max_results=
Google Blogsearch - http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22ado.net%22&scoring=d
Feedster - http://www.feedster.com/search/%22ado.net%22
Icerocket.com - http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=%22ado.net%22
Technorati - http://www.technorati.com/search/%22ado.net%22

As you can see, most of the results are all over the shop. Track them for a few days and weeks and you'll see the pattern - broken, broken, broken.

Today, it seems Bloglines provided the best results - today. Tomorrow? Who knows...Please, someone win here.

Let's REST!

alexbarn — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 03:11:00 GMT

A bunch of links to RESTful resources I've collated here and there - should be a good starting point to get a handle on some of the basics of REST, with links to example APIs / documentation as well as some posts ReprESenTative of the discussion in this space, plus some bonus randomly related stuff (rss). If you see some obvious holes here (and there are), let me know....

REST.

Representational State Transfer represents an architectural style for building distributed applications.

or

Really Extremely Simple Transfer. :-P

Intro to REST

Roy Fielding - Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, Chapter 5
Ryan Tomayko - How I explained REST to my wife
Wikipedia - REST
~~Sam Ruby~~ Joe Gregorio: How to Create a REST Protocol

To REST or not to REST

REST and Web Services: The ZapThink Take ZapFlash

"In many ways, however, the debate about Web Services and REST is as pointless as arguing whether a hammer or a screwdriver is a better tool."

Paul Prescod: on REST - Second Generation of Web Services
Don Box: SOAP vs. REST
Dion Hinchliffe: Creating Open Services That Last (And Anyone Can Use)
Danny Ayers - Is REST too complicated?
Ryan Tomayko - The Highs and Lows of REST

REST APIs, examples, documentation and bits

Random, but related, RESTful thoughts:

John Udell - Amazon's pragmatic approach to metered infrastructure

"SQS is a Web-based queue to which you post messages and from which you read them back -- without worrying about pesky details such as scale, concurrency, reliability, or guaranteed delivery."

Tim O'Reilly - A Week in the Valley: GData

"The big point for me was that GData is just Atom/RSS for reading, Atom Publishing for writing, and A9 stored queries for searching."

Optimistic concurrency (versioning) (We're not talking about dating here....Google Data APIs Protocol)
sqlREST and 15 minutes Guide to sqlREST
Don Box: HTTP, XML, REST and $100 -
Popular REST tagged articles in Del.icio.us

OurSS

alexbarn — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 05:06:00 GMT

ehehe...

More FeedBurner statcrunching

alexbarn — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

As you might know, I like to keep an eye on my Feedburner / RSS / Aotm / feeds stats.

Neville Hobson has just shared some of his Feedburner stat data and I thought it was interesting how similar some of the trends are compared to mine. Some differences too.

Around 47% of Neville's subscribers are using Bloglines (consistently) and NewsGator at #2 (14%) , while for me only 22% of my subscribers use Bloglines (that is big drop since Jan 06, see below) and Netvibes is number #2 (at 18%).

My reader breakdown (June 26 to July 02 2006):

For my subscribers, Netvibes is really a new entrant - it didn't feature in the previous update I gave.

Firefox Live Bookmarks features in both of our stats (he 6%, me 4%). Unlike Neville, Rojo readers have subscribed to me since I turned on my Feedburner service in September (around the 6-8% mark consistently). The following is a snapshot of same period above. It provides more data than I've highlighted here:

FeedDemon is still there, but not where it used to be for my FB subscribers (I wonder if some FeedDemon users are counted as NewsGator now?...Nick?).

Another difference between Neville's stats and mine in the intial take up of the feed. His has quite a sharp take-up in the first few days, while mine (see below) is much more gradual. I think this is to do with the fact that I haven't been able to include an automatic redirect (where as I think Neville could, am guessing though).

Overall number of subscribers Setp 12 2005 to July 02 2006:

I still can't shut down my other feed or do the redirect, but the proportions are looking a little better now since my plea - I think around 65% of my readers are now sub'd to the FB feed.

This tallies with the 'Share Your OPML' data, which counts my two seperate feeds er, seperately (67 on the old feed, 97 on FB feed, which if counted as one would put me in the top 100, but whatever).

But Bloglines is the big dropper for me. It was a 31% in January, now at 22%.

I haven't seen any aggregate data reports from Feedburner, and would like to compare on trends.

According to Kevin O'Keefe, who spoke to Rick Klau, VP of Biz Dev at Feedburner, FB is adding around 1,200 feeds from 800 to 1000 new publishers a day. That's a lot of data...a lot of readers and lot of publishers...

IE7 Beta 3 (more RSS goodness)

alexbarn — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 20:29:00 GMT

Microsoft's RSS team blog has this news.

"IE7 Beta 3 is here! We’ve snuck in some goodies in the feed reading user experience based on your Beta 2 feedback"

The post provides details on the new RSS-related features. More feedback sought.

If you have previous IE 7 Betas installed you need to know this (from the IE7 FAQs)

"Upgrading Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3
If you want to reinstall Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 (or install a newer version) you must first remove any existing Internet Explorer 7 beta versions on your system. You cannot install Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 over previously installed Internet Explorer 7 betas. To uninstall previous versions of Internet Explorer 7 refer to the uninstall directions below."

The IE team blog has more on this.

Update:

Max Stevens, Lead PM on the IE team shows some of the UX improvements made for this release.

My musical attention (data)

alexbarn — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 03:56:00 GMT

Earlier this month I mentioned that at the Content 2.0 event I asked LastFMs product manager, Matthew Ogle about the ability to export my data out of the system so it could be plugged into another. After all, the music I listen to, for how long and when I listen to it, user-defined tag and ratings, is my data - my musical attention data.

Matthew responded with a resounding 'we're planning to - absolutely'. I asked what format they would use and there Matthew admitted he wasn't so sure. An open standard, yes, but which? Is there one than can carry the data? Or does one need to be created? Offline, we discussed a few options.

Now, apart from the principle that my data should be something I can use as I like (meaning I should be able to export it out of the system that was used to generate that data in a non-proprietary format), there are other reasons for why you might want to 'own' your musical attention data.

At the basic level, my music library needs to be expressed in a way that allow me share with other people and systems (I'm not talking about the actual music file here, just the metadata). Today you can export your Window Media Library info from Windows Media Player (you need this plug in - it works with WMP 10 and 11 beta), but there is no music library standard, let alone one that can include other attention data.

Now, there are few playlist formats (including open standard formats - W3C's SMIL and Lucas Gonze's XSFP), but a playlist format is not a music library format. Playlists are collections of tracks.

Mike Torres proposed a good idea, one that comes at this from the perspective of music subscription services. The problem that Mike highlighted is that once you've stopped paying the subscriptions for the music your preferences (musical attention data) are lost along with the access to the music.

"Think about it; it isn't the actual bits on your hard drive that you care about - it's the fact that you spent 43 hours last month searching, previewing, and selecting that music. It's the metadata associated with the songs that's important; the actual WMA files aren't where the value is. You don't want to repeat the effort. Why treat your music subscriptions any differently from your RSS subscriptions? Those are portable. Your email archives and bookmarks are portable. Your music subscriptions should be too.
"

So there are two things here:

1. An open standard format to describe a music library. Scenarios it would support include:

Exporting and Importing - taking my music library out of a system to be able to plug into another (this is the music I like)

Sharing - publishing the library on the web (not the actual music, but what music)

2. An open standard format to describe the attention data about the music (how often I listen to which tracks, when I listen to them, how I've tagged them). Scenarios it would support include:

Recommendation - plugging in my musical attention data to get recommendations

Mike goes on to propose OPML may be a good format for the cataloging requirement.

"just let people export and import their subscription libraries natively via OPML."

Yup. Tom Morris had the same idea So did Kosso (OPML Listening Lists) and others.. In February, I even made listening list out of OPML. In fact, given that Podcasts are delivered via RSS enclosures, it's no surprise to see podcatching services have been using OPML as a 'directory' formats- import and export away. Some are share them while others are hacking to force the function.

Thinking out loud now, where do we go from here? Well, on #1 above, back to the Window Media Library export. It exports to a number of different formats, including XML. Maybe it could export OPML? Or someone could build a plug-in to transform on the fly? I don't know, but in this case it doesn't seem too far to get there.

And on #2 (the musical attention data format) - couldn't the attention.xml format (more on this here) be used as the basis for a musicalattention.xml? Sorry, just crazy thoughts...

Live Clipboard + microformats + RSS (SSE) + Microsoft Outlook screencast

alexbarn — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 02:54:00 GMT

Matt Augustine (works in Ray Ozzie's Concept Development Team) presented a demo at the Supernova 2006 conference in the "Decentralizing Data" workshop, moderated by Tantek Celik.

The demo, available here as a screencast, shows how to leverage Live Clipboard + RSS Simple Sharing Extensions (RSS+SSE) + microformats (mRc?) to synchronize calendars in both directions between a web application (Upcoming.org) and a desktop application (Microsoft Outlook).

A new technique is shown, pushing client SSE feed state to the server via HTTP POST, to circumvent the difficulties of feed cross-subscription in firewalled environments. It also shows a tentative representation of SSE feed references in the Live Clipboard XML format.

More discussion over at Live Clipboard discussion list.

Here's the screencast

Microformats and hCalendar are a key piece of the demo. Talking of microformats, Yahoo! Local have added their support to their listings service. Niall Kennedy and Dan Farber have more on that.

Time to get microformats the t-shirt...

Coping with Information Overload (video)

alexbarn — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:19:00 GMT

About four weeks ago I made my way over to ZDNet's studios in San Francisco to be interviewed by Mike Elgan for DevSource and discuss a number of topics close to my heart. The video (15-ish mins) is now published.

Mike asked me about microformats, tagging, information overload, OPML, attention data and of course web 2.0. From the article introducing the interview:

"Are your users drowning in data, and you have no idea how to help them navigate through the information available? It doesn't help to know that you're the only one without a life preserver. Fortunately, the Web is evolving, and new tools are being created to help you — and the people you serve — navigate the expanding information space.

...In our latest DevSource video, Barnett shares his expertise on Web 2.0, OPML, tagging, data programmability, and microformats."

I tried to stay away from pure geek talk and instead talk about some of the benefits and the application of the various technologies we discussed. I touched on Dave Winer's Share Your OPML (see my post on it here), Greg Linden's Findory, the Del.icio.us bookmarking service, Josh Porter's 'the Del.icio.us lesson', and enterprise tagging.

Thanks to Mike Elgan for thinking of me and asking such well researched questions :-)

The interview is part of the DevSource video interview series. Other interviews worth checking out are with Rob Howard talking about the evolution of ASP.NET, Jakob Nielsen discussing usability, Jesse James Garrett (who coined the 'AJAX') on AJAX and the Jeremy Bailenson interview about virtual reality.

Tags: web 2.0, tagging, microformats, attention, opml, video, interview

Go and microformat stuff! ('cause it's going to happen anyway)

alexbarn — Fri, 12 May 2006 10:01:00 GMT

JasonKolb, rightly in my humble opinion, is getting excited by the potential of the microformats, RSS and the clipboard (mRc?) combo (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, read on):

"With the looming rise of the clipboard to transport XML, disguised as a text and using Microformats, the use of the clipboard to transfer data from one place to another is just going to explode. And by data, I mean full records including contacts, events, reviews, and eventually I'm sure, orders, invoices, quotes, and products."

He goes on to predict some of the key milestones that might on the way to mRc reaching a tipping point.

To add, some obvious candidates for mRc inclusion:

hCalendar

Travel sites (BA.com, Orbtiz, etc, saving travel booking info into calendars - see Danny's take on this)
Event booking sites (TicketMaster, etc - movie, theatre bookings info into calendar)
Corporate sites (microsoft.com - event registration info, hq local office address)
See examples in the wild

hCard

Social networking sites (LinkedIn - copy and paste contact info into contacts)
Corporate sites (microsoft.com - hq, local office address into contacts)
See examples in the wild

There are quite a few that still don't 'get' the following, so at the risk of telling you something you already know, I just want to make sure your really 'get' what the excitement about mRc is all about:

mRc = Live data wiring

The microformats + RSS + clipboard (mRc) combo isn't just about copy and pasting static structured data into microformat-aware webpages and clients (though this on its own would pretty powerful stuff). The RSS piece brings with it the magic of 'liveness' to the data - the really simple magic of subscription. The point being that if the original data source changes, it changes at the destination (the subscriber). mRc makes dynamic data links - hence the 'Live' Clipboard name.

So for example, say I copy and pasted the Microsoft HQ address into my contacts app (either web-based or local client)...if the HQ address changed on the source webpage (where I copied it from) then when I next opened the record in my contacts I would then see the updated contact info. (Something to point out before you do here - if the original webpage is deleted the reading software should be designed so it doesn't break: it should use a 'last good' version of the dataset).

Granted, this example may not occur too often - Microsoft's Redmond address won't change for a while - but even here you can see the great value in using a simple and open data exchange format that all apps can standardize upon. Now, hCard isn't just for organizations, it's a people contact information format too...and people change their home street addresses, email addresses and cell numbers regularly enough to make the mRc-enabled scenario really ~~compelling~~ cool.

So I say unto you - go and microformat stuff! ('cause it's going to happen anyway).

Tags: microformats, RSS, clipboard, web, web 2.0, mRc, inevitable, data 2.0