While I'm not at the stage where I'm automating my domaining efforts yet, I am starting to at least accumulate tools and even build a few. One such is an RSS Radar in Yahoo Pipes. It'll mashup RSS feeds from a number of forums and name-drop sites and filter to a couple of criteria. Then I'd use the same Pipe with different parameters. Since Pipes generates a different RSS URL for each combo of parameter values, I can then create separate feed subscriptions for each.

Thus, if I'm looking for PR5 domains on a given day, I check the appropriate subscription in my FeedDemon "domains + sites" folder. Each time I have a new criteria that I'll be interested in long-term, I create another subscription, suitably named.

Now, I apologize for discussing this and not actually having a Yahoo Pipe for you to look at. However, as soon as the RSS Domain Radar is complete, I'll not only drop a link but I'll have a video screencast here showing you how I built it.

[Raj Dash is a freelance writer and editor. Current projects include Tubetorial, Performancing, Search Engine Journal and Bootstrapper. You can read more about domain names and domaining at nameSonar.]

This means, as he says in his example, that your bank could deliver your financial information via (extended) RSS and your feed reader cum feed application could manipulate the information into something that makes sense for you. I.e., it would become a "semantic agent", something it cannot be in its current form.

This would be great for a way to consume custom feeds built in tools like Yahoo Pipes. Right now, I have about 30 pipes built there but cannot view all the information carried by the resulting feeds. I for one look forward to an extended RSS and tools for consuming them - even if the result isn't called RSS. Sure, there are a lot of things you can do with RSS, but there are even more that you can't but should be able to.

Now, Yahoo Pipes makes it easy to manipulate web feed data. Unfortunately, it's limited in that you can replace/remove text patterns but not extract them. Still, it's pretty powerful and will come in handy for numerous Pipes applications.

An example: You want to take the current top seeded stories at the social bookmarking site Digg (feed: http://digg.com/rss/index.xml), find the username of the person who submitted each story, and insert that name in square brackets, "[]", in each respective item's title, then sort the output feed by item title. Here is some sample output directly from my Yahoo Pipes Digg home page sorted by submitter pipe:

[Andy.D] IBM doubles basic CPU cooling capabilities
[Blakovitch] Halo 3 Xbox 360 Case Mod
[Blakovitch] Why Do Great Movies Get Terrible DVD Cover Art?
[BradGroux] Black Xbox 360 "Elite" Spy Shots
[Cinin] Color matching sphere (Great for people that need color schemes)
[DiggityMcDigg] Microsoft says Vista sales doubling Windows XP pace

The text in brackets is the username that submitted the story. My pipe, which you can clone and edit, just inserts the username into each title. Very simple, but illustrates one use. Problem is, Pipes isn't powerful enough (yet?) to group information. So if you wanted to count how many home page stories were submitted by each user, you'd have to use a custom application to parse and mine the web feed from my pipe. Hopefully Yahoo will add ever more powerful operators to Pipes, making it a full-blown visual interface with the power of database querying, but for RSS XML.

Now for those of you that are code geeks, you'll understand when I say that Pipes' Regex supports the regex syntax of the Perl scripting language. But you don't need to know Perl to understand regexes. I'm going to be doing a mini-series here on how to use the Regex module in Yahoo Pipes.

Be forewarned that my Pipes Regex series will be tech-heavy, but still requires no programming. So if you're not well-versed with regex syntax and you have a specific text manipulation you need done on a web feed, drop a comment here, specify the feed URL, and what you want to do. I will try to showcase the solution for any requests.

(c) Raj Kumar Dash / Chameleon Integration Systems.

Yahoo Pipes Video Tutorials
Useful Video has eight nice screencast videos on some of the basics of building Yahoo Pipes, as well as guidance on some of the modules. I'm hoping to have some basic and advanced Pipes videos here as well.

RSS Tricks
Want to track your feed clickthroughs? You can put a "?from_rss=1" at the end of your URLs in your RSS feeds.

(c) Raj Kumar Dash / Chameleon Integration Systems.

To summarize, Yahoo Pipes lets you take source web feeds, add some filtering rules, then produce a custom feed from the result. Teqlo goes a step further and lets you build plug and play web applications with no programming whatsoever. And the beautiful part is that you can build web apps fast. For example, they claim you can build an RSS feed reader in under two minutes. And it's true. I did it, and even threw in a few extra features to create a custom feed reader with a to-do-list, Google Calendar, email send, blog post builder, and more. A custom feed-based research tool in just a few minutes.

And with all the Teqlo widgets currently available (including Google Maps, Google Calendar, video, contact lists, etc.), there are a great number of possible applications that you can build that would be suitable for marketing tasks.

Now that I'm posting again here at RSS Cases, I'll be building case studies for both Teqlo and Yahoo Pipes. If you want to see something in particular, drop a comment and I'll try to put together an application and/or Pipe. A few screencasts for Yahoo Pipes are coming, and possibly for Teqlo as well. I'll be more than happy to run a case study on your web business, though because of other commitments, it may take me time to get through each.

(c) Raj Kumar Dash / Chameleon Integration Systems.

I've browsed through the tutorial, the PHP programming code, and the mySQL database code. It seems fairly straightforward, and, if you're relatively comfortable with PHP and mySQL, you could customize the code. I haven't test the code, but assuming it works, you could use it as is on your own web pages to display news feeds. You can see an example of the RSS reader in use at Jay's gotfoo website.

Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't know much about Radia, other than that she has contributed much to the development of the Internet. Richard writes (in the transcript version of the interview) that Radia "invented the spanning tree algorithm and is also sometimes referred to as the 'Mother of the Internet'."

Tim, too, has contributed much to the Internet. He is the co-author of the XML spec, upon which the RSS, Atom, and RDF web feed formats are based on. Most weblog platforms rely on XML, as do most web-based services such as SOAP, WSDL, etc. (He also co-founded Open Text Corporation. The company sells full-text search software and had one of the first search engines on the Internet. Surprisingly, Open Text has no (visible) RSS feeds on their website, a point which I made a while back.)

If you have any interest in web feeds (or the Internet) at all, this is a must-listen interview. The total length is about 37 minutes (Richard indicates that the podcast is 17 Mb, but I couldn't find a link to download it.)

About 24-25 minutes into the podcast interview, Tim talks about some of the flaws of the RSS format and the difference that the Atom file format and publishing protocol will make. He also makes a reference to Google's GData format, which is based on the Atom protocol and format.

Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/.

Currently supported IM clients include Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and pretty much anything runs on Jabber.

You can also use your IM client to configure your feed, make it private, change your nickname, and delete RSS feed items with simple text commands.

So no podcasting. But say someone took this concept and extended it to VoIP. Speak into your Skype, GTalk, or other VoIP IM client, and what you say is recorded and published to an RSS feed. Feed items would be auto-wrapped in the appropriate RSS enclosure tags. No muss, no fuss. Automatic podcast publishing, with embedded playback widgets.

Of course, not every one who podcasts is going to want their recordings to go live without editing. So maybe a switch to delay publishing might be useful as well. But there are possible applications where such an auto-podcasting tool could be used. I just have to think of some :)

Sources: Sabifoo.

Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

This is definitely something I'd want to use on some of my feeds. I'm subscribed to a number of feeds with technically dense content that I'd like to make pencil notes on top of. It's the way I'm used to researching, and I find it more effective than any method that does not use pencil and paper. Otherwise, I get information overload. Speaking of which...

Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press points out that while RSS is a boon for curing information overload, feed items "can pile up much like e-mail." His article talks focuses on the RSS filtering tool Feedrinse, which delivers only those feed items that match your filter patterns, thereby reducing your reading list.

He's made an important point. I just finished clearing out 9000+ feed items over a week, and only two days since, I've already got 4600+ items. Granted, I probably browse 50%, read 20%, and glance at 30% - but it still takes time.

I've talked about feed browsing methods before, so I'm just expanding a bit on previous discussions. Here's a bit of easy math to consider. I now have 436 feeds in my grazing list. I'm adding  10-20 feeds per day - although I occasionally clear some out. Not every feed has new content daily, but some have as many as 40 items.

High-activity feeds get barely a glance. If the title looks interesting, I may browse the content - which is inevitably either short content or partial-text of long content. I still prefer partial-text, but something that has at least 100 words rather than the 10-20 words I see some feeds having, if at all. Although, contradictorily, I've subscribed to feeds in Bloglines in full-text mode lately.

I'm estimating that during weekdays, I'm scanning/ browsing/ reading/ deleting close to 600 feed items per day - more than that on weekends. And lately, Bloglines is showing feeds to have new items when they really don't. That's taking me longer than necessary. Very annoying.

But say I could "scan" an article in 30 seconds or less. I'm guessing; I haven't timed myself. That means 600 feed items is taking me about 18,000 s = 300 minutes = 5 hours. Of course, that's part of my job, researching for my writing. Although, I'm not really reading everything. Not in 30 seconds. So I have to add more time to actually read full articles. How are people who claim to browse 600-700 feeds doing anything but reading all day long? How many feeds is too many?

Fortunately, most blog readers and aggregators have an easy way to unsubscribe from a feed. So culling the list is usually simple. Do you delete inactive feeds? Or do you let them sit in your grazing list, hoping the author(s) will eventually update?

Depending on the website, I sometimes delete a feed. There are a few I'm subscribed to that have had mangled XML for nearly two weeks now, as I mentioned in the last post. Something I'm suggesting webmasters do, maybe once a week, is validate your feeds. There are two easy-to-use services: Feed Validator and W3C Feed Validator. Just enter your feed URL and press the validate/ check button. Both work on either RSS or Atom feed formats.

Don't have a web feed for your site? RSS Scraper will screen-scrape your site and create an RSS feed for you. Only problem is that this needs for you to have the Ruby 1.8 programming language installed. Similarly, Feedalizer is a Ruby code library that scrapes your web pages and creates an RSS feed. Obviously, this too requires Ruby to be installed. So these are RSS tools for techies, not marketing types.

Another techie RSS resource is Blogapps, which hosts Java language-based RSS examples from the Manning Publications programming book RSS and Atom In Action. Although why the front cover has what looks like a bearded bald monk holding a bow (as in archery), I don't know.

Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

RSS is not mainstream because it?s XML and XML by its nature is unforgiving. If anyone expects to invent a protocol/standard and want widespread uptake, the barrier to adoption must be low.

But this is a dilemma. I fully support XML's unforgivingness on one hand, yet have seen the problem it causes in feeds on the other hand. For example, as I keep adding feeds to my grazing list, I run across feeds that won't display because they have some character that should have been made into an XML entity using &#...;, where the ... is a 4-digit numeric code.

In the past, I've scanned the XML source code in a twitchy feed, found the problem, then emailed the publisher. I can only do this so many times, and don't do it anymore.

The problem really is that the web feed toolset is still maturing. RSS editors and generators should automatically convert all characters to their entity equivalent as necessary. This part should be transparent. It's why I've said in past months, RSS may have it's greatest adoption in hardware, which makes it completely transparent - the way it's currently transparent in customized home page sites like My Yahoo!, etc.

Either that, or more browsers need to intrinsically know what to do when someone clicks on a feed's link. Because if they don't know what RSS is, they won't otherwise know what to do with that link except click it. This possibly means we need a new XHTML tag which explicitly indicates a feed link, regardless of its format.

Until that happens, RSS will still probably be most widely used transparently by My Yahoo! types of subscribers. And the more I think about it, does it really matter if people know they are using RSS? Aaron's article links to Devin Reams, who suggests that maybe changing RSS' name will not make a difference if RSS does not behave in a more acceptable manner in browsers. As Brian Clark at Copyblogger said:

The way to sell RSS is to tell people why it?s better than email for them.

Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

Bill Flitter of Pheedo links to John Gartner's article about how newspapers could increase readership using printable, nicely-formatted RSS feeds with ads. I've often been tempted to take the contents of an RSS feed and print them out so I could pencil in notes while researching. The only thing stopping me is how much paper I'd waste if I didn't format the RSS content first. But then I came across RSS2PDF, which takes a website or feed URL and generates a PDF of the feed content.

If you supply a website URL, RSS2PDF auto-discovers feeds and asks you to pick, if there's more than one. RSS2PDF also generates a "bookmark" index for each feed item. A link to the source page appears after each excerpt. The only thing I could have wished about this service is the ability to reverse the order of the items. Also, longer feeds seem to cause my browser tab (Firefox) to not display properly unless I refresh a couple of times.

Mitch Joel provides six lessons in podcasting at One Degree. He's using a piece of software called CastBlaster, which appears from the demo video to be the software equivalnt of a mixer. It allows you to mix in sound samples with direct audio recording. You can also cue up locations in longer samples and play them on demand.

CastBlaster is only in beta, but it shows promise. You can download the beta version for free or get the full version for US$50. If you intend to podcast, this is a good article to read. He also mentions something called slivercasting, which is broadcasting to a sliver of a market. Kind of like niche websites, but for podcasting.

Mitch links to his own article called Slivercasting Becomes The New Long Tail, which goes into the concept more thoroughly and provides several relevant links. The name may not catch on, though. My eyes keep seeing "silvercasting" instead of "slivercasting". A quick Googling shows that other people have the same problem, and have already started incorrectly referring to this activity as silvercasting - which should not be confused with silver casting, the act of cast an object in silver using wax molds.

Guillaume du Gardier of PR Thoughts provides 10 good reasons why a broadcaster should podcast. There are some exciting ideas in his list, but I think I like #1 best: "A good way to give a second life to a huge amount of content that would directly becomes archives." What a great idea. A digital archive of old radio shows would be a nice research base for communications students or even radio actors. And with some new experimental services that allow for text searching of audio transcripts, including audiomarks to fast forward to a segment... Well, I think you can see the applications.

I think that as podcasting and vodcasting mature, there will be lots of tools and lots of job opportunities in this new media industry. But for now, if you're looking for existing jobs in an RSS format, you might try RSS Job Feeds. From the layout of the site, there's an obvious American jobs emphasis. While they do have job categories on the lower half of the homepage, hopefully they'll expand the service to include other countries.

Hendry also links to an Ad Age report that NPR (National Public Radio), has been successful getting sponsors for podcasts. Their CPM ranges from US$20-60.

My feeling is that, aside from NPR and CBC TV (in Canada), etc., the only way audio podcasts are going to do well is to offer something unique. And they have to be promoted the same way that a radio show would, which includes any or all of word-of-mouth, unusual stunts, antics, original programming, and advertising on other shows (podcasts, radio, TV, etc.) and media.

Plain audio has too much competition with visual media. The Golden Age of Radio is long gone, and most human beings are visually-oriented. Audio podcasts also have to compete with the virtual cheesecake of ultra-popular vodcasts like Rocketboom. The vodcast reportedly makes in the high 5 figures in weekly sponsorship, and sometimes in the low 5 figures for a single minute of ad time. People may be too politically-correct these days to say anything, but given that a high percentage of podcast/ vodcast subscribers are male, visual media probably has an edge over aural media. Agree or disagree?

Guillaume du Gardier points out that the new Talkcast service (online voice discussion podcasts) can earn you money for hosting. The monetization option is not yet available, however.

Steve Rubel notes that Nokia has free software that allows podcast downloads to the Nokia N91 cell phone. He also recently posted 35 uses of RSS. Arc 90 posts 25 New Ways To Use RSS.

In case you don't check Arc 90's list, you'll miss Mailbucket. Mailbucket's email-to-RSS service does one of the things that I'd hoped to do with my webfeedmail.com site (but haven't because I'm always trying to do a million things at once). It currently only generates publicly-accessible RSS feeds from the email stream that you direct at it, but private lists are on the Mailbucket to do list.

Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

Last night, I clicked the wrong link, and in the blink of an eye, all of my unread feed items - all 3,000+ of them, disappeared, with no way to undo them wholesale. A week of research in building feed grazing list was almost for naught.

I say almost because I still have the feeds and can track and read future articles when they appear. But even though I'd culled my list of 9000+ items to 3000+, I actually wanted to read those 3000 items. Or most of them anyway. I can still go to each feed and refresh each feed back a certain amount of time. Except I now have over 340 feeds (despite my culling a few days ago), and Bloglines only refreshes one feed at a time.

Que sera sera. Hopefully, Bloglines will remedy this. If not, there are still the new items. Which got me to thinking, how long will it now take me to read my webscription items?

A quick glance at the total number of unread items, after obliterating my list, shows that I have over 470 items. At 10 seconds each, that's about 1.25 hours. But if I want to read something in detail and ponder the ideas, it might take me 3-5 minutes. Granted, I'd not be reading all 470 in detail, but even 100 items would take me the better part of a business day. So, I either learn to read faster, or be more selective.

From the publisher's side of things, consider carefully what fonts you choose. My own sites have a wide variety of fonts, which is a mistake that I'm trying to correct. You cannot help how your text appears in a feed reader or aggregator, but you can on your site. And if the reading experience in an aggregator is better than on your site, how do you think readers are going to browse your content?

Andy Patrizio of Internet News recently wrote a very revealing article about the future of RSS, which includes interview input from Tim Bray, co-author of the XML file specification. This is a must-read article. Even an RSS evangelist like myself didn't know some of the details revealed there. [Found via Nicholas Carlson's Can Publishers Survive in an RSS Age?]

In Patrizio's article, Tim Bray points out that a killer app will be web publishing from a cellphone, in particular photographs. There are in fact a few sites that already allow this. I would throw audio publishing into the app list. But writing text from a PDA is not something I'd want to do on a regular basis. I've tried it, and it is not an experience I want to repeat at present.

In Nicholas Carlson's article, which links to Patrizio's, he mentions that print publishers' websites are "atomizing" their content, breaking up  their content "into little chunks that folks can subscribe to."

In light of that, it makes sense that sites like Newsday, which I profiled the other day, would offer multiple feeds. I still think it would be worthwhile also having 2 or 3 umbrella feeds instead of just several dozen section feeds. This could be done for a subscription fee.

For example, New Scientist has several category feeds to subscribe to. However, some of them are partial-text feeds, and clicking on the "more" link takes you to a page that tells you can access the full-text if you subscribe, or even pay for that issue ($4.95), which gives you access to all the articles.

Newspapers like Canada's Globe and Mail, have a different approach to helping readers subscribe to RSS feeds. It's quite nice really, and despite the numerous feeds, does not seem so overwhelming. But they, too, do not have umbrella feeds.

Unfortunately, the feed that I tried has item summaries that are maybe one sentence. Clicking on a link takes you either to a full-text article, or a partial-text one asking you to register for free. (Depends on the article.) It'd be nice to get a bit more summary text in the feeds.

Also unfortunate, the Globe and Mail hides their RSS link at the very bottom of their page, as if they are ashamed of an extra toe. Why do such a nice job on the webscription page, only to hide the link?

Niall Kennedy recently posted a handy quick-list of links on his weblog to a variety of feed-related specifications. Check it out. There might be more specs out there than you think. Unfortunately - or not, depending on your point of view.

Skypecasting: Podcasting With The Skype VoIP Client

For those of you who love the Skype VoIP client software and want to record audio conversations, you have to currently resort to third-party software. Audio recording is not yet a built-in feature in Skype. There are actually a number of ways to do record, however, ranging from using pure software to throw some hardware (microphones, recorders, mixers) into the mix.

Whichever method you choose, they're both great for making podcasts. Think Vitamin has a tutorial on Skypecasting. Digital Inspiration, where I found the Think Vitamin link, has a list of options for Skypecasting.

Google GData Feed Format

I don't know how I missed this, but Google has a new content syndication format out. Their new GData format blends Atom and RSS formats, and the Atom publishing protocol.

My initial reaction was that this is a bad move. They should work to extend Atom (since RSS 2.0 is fixed and RSS 3.0 seems to be a mostly solo project) instead of coming up with yet another syndication format. No wonder they don't have their Alerts available in RSS (or Atom).

However, after browsing through some of the documentation, I see that their intent was to have a two-way data format for their services. You can output data from Google's numerous web service APIs in GData format, then reuse that data elsewhere. It's a convenient transport format.

I'll have to read the specs over again more thoroughly, and maybe provide a detailed comparison at some point in the future.