Dynamically Search and Browse RSS News Headlines

Dynamically Search and Browse RSS News Headlines
Last week I authored a SearchDay article about Surfwax making their dynamic search navigation technology, LookAhead, available to any webmaster to license and use on their site(s). LookAhead can potentially help the searcher focus a news or RSS search with very little effort before clicking the search button. In other words, dynamic search navigation can save search time and provide them with better results with very little effort.
Now, Surfwax, the providers of LookAhead are offering a free RSS search tool that demonstrates the technology. Here’s how it works.
+ Go to http://lookahead.surfwax.com/rss-index.html and begin entering terms hat might be of interest to you.
+ As you enter terms, the TITLES of potentially useful posts will begin appearing in a box directly below the search box. The list also contains the source of the post and the time it was posted.
+ Now, click the title/headline and you’ll be taken DIRECTLY to the article or blog post. That's right, now search results page to review.
+ Remember, your search terms are “rotated,” so you’ll see useful headlines regardless of what order you enter your search terms.
Users are encouraged to suggest feeds for the service to crawl. We’ve also learned that a larger index will be released very soon.
Here’s a list of just a few other services that provide similar types of services:
+ WikiWax from Surfwax+ News Accumulator from Surfwax+ Snap Suggest from Snap.com+ Pinpoint Shopping from AOL+ Google Suggest
Posted by Gary Price on Sep. 27, 2005 | Permalink

4 Of The Top 5 Search Engine Benefits To Article Marketing

Tinu Abayomi-Paul | Contributing Writer | 2005-08-19

You've probably heard by now that article marketing can help you build links back to your site.

But there's a lot more to it than that. Articles aren't only good for leveraging yourself stronger positions in Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other big search engines, though that's what we'll be focusing on today. Keep in mind that learning a more balanced view of promotion and marketing with articles can help you reap all the perks with essentially the same amount of work.

For now, let's start with four of the top five search engine benefits.

1- The One-Way Link of a Resource Box backlink is More Powerful.

A link from a site that you're not linked back to has more value than one where you may be required to link back to, simply because changes in the way search engines rank sites now include an adjustment for exchanged links.

The logic is that this would make the voting power of a link that points in one direction weigh more heavily than one that is traded. In theory, this makes it easier for sites that have earned link popularity to get more credit than those who have bought or traded for it.

Of course, over time, this effect may be adjusted and partially dampened so that articles that are just being submitted to resources with no editorial process will count less than those that don't undergo this process. So make sure you're not submitting junk content for the purpose of linking alone.

2- Article Resource Box Links Back to You Are Relevant

If you write articles that stay on the topic of your site, the page where your article appears is more effective as a page that links back because it is more relevant. Again, depending on the search engine, the more topical the environment where you are linked, the more credit your site gets for the link itself, particularly if you're submitting to an online directory which allows you to make better use of linking.

There are a few little changes you can make that will make your links and articles more topically relevant than 90% of other articles, merely because other authors don't think to balance the search engine benefits of article promotion with its value as content, rather than favoring one or the other.

3- Many of Your Articles Appear on Pages with High Google PR

If you take a look at your Google Site Information page, you'll probably notice that Google seems to pick up only sites that have high page rank under the listing for sites that link to you.

Then, of course all the sites that use the text of your site URL, hyperlinked or not, can be found under the last setting for sites that contain your link.

Google Page Rank is typically not something to get in a frenzy over, but it does have an importance that can affect your bottom line for two main reasons.

First, on the occasions that Google Page Rank can help you get better search engine positioning, the process of being linked from these sites can help bring you more targeted traffic, which can lead to more sales. Again, this has to be part of an overall strategy, not your sole reason for submitting articles.

Second, if links from sites with higher page rank get are being spidered more frequently than your site, your link on these sites can also get crawled faster. If you have unique content on your site, this can give you a competitive edge when your content gets included more rapidly.

4- These links back to your site are permanent.

That means that instead of buying a link on a site that appears there for three months and disappears, you are getting a free, topically relevant link pointing back to your site that may be archived, but not dropped.

Over time, if you submit articles on a regular schedule, each effort towards publication is building on previous exposure, helping you brand yourself and your company, as well as build a strong link campaign pointing back towards your site that is free.

As the quality of your articles improve, you can also get qualified leads from the process, an increase in traffic and sales, and publication in resources who have stronger brands than you do, which you may then leverage for additional exposure.

Just remember, the search engine benefits of promoting your site with articles represent only the tip of the iceberg. With articles you can also brand yourself, use your knowledge to establish yourself as an expert, network, develop relationships and increase your leads, sales and traffic.

RSS And Blog Marketing For Real Estate

Tinu Abayomi-Paul | Contributing Writer | 2005-07-30

Earlier this month, Realtor Magazine announced that they would be featuring an article about Tampa Bay Realtor John Mudd and the success he has been having in attracting prospects and media attention with his blog on real estate.

Since then, many others in the Real Estate market have been curious about how to implement similar strategies to capture leads in their areas.

This article is part of a series that provides insight to the unique ways that the strategy of blogging and the use of RSS and/or Atom feeds can be applied as part of your web promotion strategy.

1. Capture better search engine positioning for your local market with a blog.

By now it's apparent that blogs with unique content can bring you better search engine rankings. This advantage is strengthened when you use a blog software tool that enables you to publish posts on your own server, which we'll go over in more detail in part two of this article series.

RSS and Blogs bring you special web promotional opportunities that can help your blog and the site where it resides rank higher in search engines, due in part to the way they are organized. Particularly for narrow local markets, this can both widen and deepen your audience within 3 - 8 weeks with proper implementation.

By far, this is not the only benefit of blogging or RSS - though if you're looking for better organic search engine ranking across a multitude of keyword phrases, this just may be the answer for you.

2. Dominate your local niche by becoming a resource for information for home buyers and sellers in your area

The ease of publishing content to a blog, coupled with one of the easier ways to implement RSS, its accompanying feed, gives you the ability to provide fresh and relevant information, often at the same rate of time it would take to write a short email.

With the proper blog publishing system, the speed at which you can now provide information means that you can publish updates more often, drawing more attention to your web site from search engines and visitors alike.

After landing in your blog, links to other relevant parts of your site can draw visitors to the areas you most want them to pay attention to, such as your updated listings - which can also be made available via RSS if you so choose.

Why RSS?

It can mean 100% delivery of your message to your prospects, in a fashion that they choose to have pulled to them. Rather than attempting to digest all the information at your blog in one visit, they can skim your headlines, read a summary or post, and then click through to your site upon finding information that draws them in.

You can supplement this with email for users who are more comfortable with receiving your information the traditional way.

While promotion and updates via email are not necessarily to be discounted, the use of RSS and other feed formats lend themselves to additional promotional possibilities.

3. Have yet another reason to remind prospects to return to your site - and shorten the sales cycle using a multiple feed strategy

With the combined power of blogging and RSS, you can construct multiple outlets for information that are each hyper-targeted to several segments of your market. Instead of attempting to force your static web site to capture home buyers and home sellers for your area, as well as provide the statistical information on your locale, you can build several focus areas and promote them side by side.

For example, if your local area is Frederick, Maryland, you can dedicate one blog and its accompanying feed to recent Frederick listings, and then have a separate feed that automatically provides updates on area schools, crime rates, cost of living and other statistical information home buyers consider when making purchasing decisions. Separate blogs and feeds on the same site could focus on the needs of home sellers in the area

The possibilities are truly as endless as the number of markets you wish to capture.

It is often said that it may take up to seven times for a prospect who comes across a marketing message to buy. Therefore, the faster the opportunity arises for you to contact your potential client, the closer they may be to a buying decision. If you are able to provide them with the information they need to make that decision with updates from your site, the likelihood that they may ultimately make that purchase decision through you increases.

Updates to blogs and RSS feeds can give you the power to make this transition happen at a faster pace, as the production cycle of the content takes only the time you would need to publish that information.

Rather than contacting your web content management department, forwarding content, and waiting for the page to be published, then picked up by search engines, with a blog, you simply log into your administration area, type and publish.

These pages can also get picked up by search engines faster through the power of syndication - those already following your feed receive your update instantly.

There are more ways that you can use RSS to draw more qualified prospects to your business which will be covered in part two of this series.

Why Google Blog Search Matters To Your Business

Why Google Blog Search Matters To Your Business
Tinu Abayomi-Paul | Contributing Writer | 2005-09-27

According to Google, Google's Blog Search is "Google search technology focused on blogs".

It includes search engine results specific to blogs not just in the Blogger.com community, but across the blogosphere at large. You can access it at http://www.blogsearch.google.com/

What the Big Deal Is

A lot of people have probably heard about this extra version of search Google has added and are greeting it with a big yawn, particularly since it's still in Beta. So what is the big deal, anyway?

The big deal is that the top search engine in the world, which was already paying particular attention to blogs in regular search results, seems to make a subtle statement with the introduction of blog-specific searches.

Blogs are important enough to warrant their own special level of search, and not just as an advanced search option, but in their own search engine.

If search engines are paying attention to blogging that closely, you should be too -- if you want better search engine results.

Current fans of blogs will be able to search the freshest results so that they can see what is being discussed right now - information that is often as fresh as the news, and draws upon sources that the media-at-large either doesn't have ready access to, or interest in.

So to those with even the most obscure interests or hobbies, a blog search powered by a top search engine gives ready access to fresh information on any subject that someone can blog about.

And if a blog doesn't yet exist on these narrow themes? You can be the one to start the discussion.

Why It Matters to Your Business

Speaking of the media, this is likely to become one of the many tools that a journalist in the know would use in order to research a story, or to find out more information about a company, directly from the people who use its products or services.

Technorati, is at present, arguably a better tool, but it's just not as well known as the Google brand. If you're a power searcher, you already know what Technorati is. But the key thing to understand is that most consumers - even B2B consumers - aren't as deeply involved in the internet.

But even those folks know what Google is.

There's an even more obvious advantage to this specialized search.

Google Blog search has the unprecedented potential to bring the mainstream surfer into blogging, even more than Yahoo's RSS Headlines pioneered the start of making RSS mainstream about a year ago. Why?

While many of your clients will fall instantly in love with RSS, it's more fair to them to present its possibilities in a format that's easier for them to digest. It's not as hard to explain a blog - and if you can't you can simply tell them it's a more frequently updated part of your existing site.

When Google's Blog Search is brought more to the front in coming months, if your site gets into position to be visible when more of the internet population becomes blog-happy, then the traffic potential for your site may prove to be enormous.

The proper use of one RSS feed in one of my content management systems doubled my traffic, with most of the new users coming from Yahoo, this time last year. Another feed increased my daily traffic another 75%, and brought me additional return traffic as well.

At the time the margin between Yahoo and Google was wider than it is today -- so the potential increase from being in Google boggles the mind.

How to Get Listed

According to the Blog Search Help Page:

"If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven't picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this."

This means that if you're already blogging - and responsibly pinging, you're probably already listed.

If you haven't been blogging, you're in luck. This special brand of Google search is still in Beta, so if you get moving now, you still have enough time to start getting into position. And since the search currently seems to be focused on freshness and relevance, if you keep up the blogging once you start, and you keep your theme narrow, you could still dominate your niche.

Do It Today

The mantra for blogging before was that, proper blogging is a sure fire way to increase traffic, as well as build stronger ties to your end users or clients, not to mention that it is the simplest of the many implementations of RSS.

Now, with all three major search engines paying more attention to both RSS and Blogging, you can get spidered more frequently, get more of your pages indexed more deeply, and be included in more searches.

You have absolutely no time to waste - if you're not blogging already, you need to get started quickly. Many webmasters are hesitating because they haven't been able to find a blog system that fits well with their site, or find the most popular tools too sophisticated for their needs.

There are literally dozens of free resources to help you decide between the standard systems that were originally built for the personal blogger, and the more robust solutions that are aimed at the medium-sized or corporate company - but that's another article.

Whatever you chose, the important thing is to get started blogging today. You'll be missing out on targeted traffic from the most dominant search engine, from the most sophisticated surfers today, and sooner than you know it, the mainstream web.

Birth of the Business Blog

Blogging enters the business world

by Line56 Staff

Blogs have been a topic of great corporate interest. To that end, we wanted to share this feature article from one of 2004's issues of Portals Magazine in the hope that a business audience will find it mainstream. Remember, blogs are about community, and loyal communities mean loyal customers. -- Editor

The story of Stonyfield Farm is the stuff of legend for the entrepreneurial set. In 1983, friends and activists Gary Hirshberg and Samuel Kaymen decided to start an organic yogurt company in Wilton, NH. The idea behind the company was that it should have a dual purpose: to revitalize New England's dairy industry while capitalizing on the growing health concerns of the baby boomers. CEO Hirshberg has been widely quoted as saying the two started out with a yogurt recipe, seven cows, and a dream. Today, Stonyfield Farm generates more than $150 million in annual sales, produces upwards of 350,000 cases of yogurt a week, and distributes its products in all 50 states.

What looked like a business on the fringes 21 years ago is now mainstream. The same can be said of a technology combination that Stonyfield and other companies are increasingly turning to: portals and blogs. Once the arena of technology purists who used the tool as a way to quickly share new ideas and solicit feedback and angst-ridden teens whose posting ambitions were confined to true confessions, blogs are coming to be accepted by businesses for everything from external marketing to low-cost content management systems that can power employee intranets or portals (see "Big-Time Blogging" on p. 32 for more information on how blogging technology works).

In the case of Stonyfield, blogging tools are being used to create tighter relationships with its customers, and with consumers who have not yet been converted. Taking inspiration from the now-defunct Howard Dean presidential campaign, as well as tutorials from some of Dean's own bloggers, Hirshberg became convinced that blogs could be used to effectively reach out to the company's dedicated customer base.

As the third-largest yogurt distributor in the United States, Stonyfield is always looking for innovative ways to get its message across that don't require multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. The company has several active email newsletters with more than 500,000 subscribers, and it regularly places messages and promotes causes it believes in on the lids of the yogurt cups. The lids (about five million a month) will be used to promote the blogs starting this summer.

"It is all about our relationship to our consumer. It is all opt-in--people are choosing to read it or not. We're not forcing you to buy more yogurt," says Cathleen Toomey, Stonyfield's vice president of communications. "The more you know about our company and the way we operate in the world, the more loyal we think you will be."

Available directly from the Stonyfield portal, the five Stonyfield blogs each play a distinct role. The Dairy Planet focuses on environmental issues; Strong Women Daily News provides information and updates on the Strong Women partners program; the Bovine Bugle explains how an organic dairy farm operates; the Daily Scoop features details from inside the factory; and Creating Healthy Kids provides information about the company's healthy food in schools program. All of these blogs are XML-enabled, using RSS feeds, so that a reader can subscribe to the content and automatically receive it online whenever new material becomes available. New content is posted to each of the blogs once a day, five days a week.

While each blog features unique content, it is all produced by a single in-house writer hired exclusively for this purpose. The writer, Christine Halverson, has a background in journalism and new media. Prior to joining Stonyfield, she had never blogged before, but she likens the task to a daily news beat.

In many respects, the blogs reflect the values and interests that Hirshberg brings to the company. According to Toomey, during the first month, Halverson met with Hirshberg every day to "get inside his head and hear how he says things, learning his expressions and how to represent him." Even now, Hirshberg reads every post before it goes up on the site to ensure that the content is on target.

At this stage, aside from Halverson's salary, the investment for Stonyfield has been minimal. The sites are maintained using Movable Type software, and only two of the five blogs have a budget for graphic design. The concept is a work in progress, but it is also a chance to experiment; Halverson has recently begun playing with the addition of audio posts on some of the blogs. "I hope that over time people will use the blogs as a way to talk to each other and have a relationship with one another," she says. This should lead to a lasting relationship with the company, its vision, and, of course, its products.

TECH BLOG

Though among the first, Stonyfield is not the only company looking for ways to use the portal-blog combination to its advantage. This past spring, at Microsoft's CEO Summit, Bill Gates espoused the value of blogs as a solution to the drawbacks inherent in the use of either email or a portal on its own, bringing together the best of both in a single tool.

There are already plenty of well-known examples among Microsoft employees who are actively and publicly blogging. The company's developer's forum, known as Channel 9,
is a group blog that has been wildly successful. It has thousands of regular visitors who go there to learn about and collaborate on more effective application-development techniques. In addition to active posts listed in a reverse-chronological order, which is standard formatting and style for blogs, Channel 9 also features photo and video posts, as well as a wiki, which is the rough equivalent of an online whiteboarding application. Channel 9's wiki is open to contributions and changes that are made directly by the end users.

Another Microsoft example comes from Robert Scoble, a self-described "evangelist" on the Windows team. His Scobleizer blog offers the combination of an insider's view of life at Microsoft and a very personal writing style. However, it also includes links to technical information for developers and those interested in both the Windows operating system and applications.

PERSONAL BUSINESS

In the case of a business-sponsored blog or an employee blogging on behalf of that business, there are likely to be liability or risk-management considerations. For instance, Scoble's blog includes a disclaimer noting that the contents represent his personal opinion, and that it "is not read or approved before it is posted."

Similarly, Phil Libin, the president of technology company CoreStreet, maintains a personal blog that often discusses and promotes the work of his company but is not intended to be a mouthpiece for the business. Since the beginning of the year Libin has been blogging once a day, three to four times a week. He says he does most of his writing during non-business hours and typically spends an hour or so on it per day.

Libin's blog was originally used to promote a freeware download developed by CoreStreet called Spoofstick, which is an anti-phishing tool. "The blog was a perfect way to start talking about it," Libin says. By posting information about the beta release on his blog, he was able to generate interest among other bloggers, who linked to his post. Within a few weeks the software was ready for its official launch. (This was a tool that CoreStreet was giving away as a public service; it is not his company's primary product offering.) Word-of-blog created an unanticipated viral marketing opportunity that was good for CoreStreet and also served to heighten the credibility of Libin's opinions. Today, the blog is also a calling card for Libin, where clients or potential customers can learn about him prior to meeting him.

While he freely admits that his blog doesn't have legions of fans, Libin wants it to be a place "where people go to read original content." Rather than jotting a burst of short entries, he uses the blog to "articulate a thought about something important to the industry that could stand on its own." He offers insights and perspective about the technology industry while also trying to show that he has a sense of humor for the work itself. After all, his blog is called Vastly Important Notes. The costs are minimal; Libin reports that he spends approximately $14 per month for the software and Web hosting, both of which are provided by TypePad.

Whether purely personal, purely professional, or a combination of the two, blogs are becoming yet another tool in a company's collaborative kit. As with many collaborative software applications, blogs may not be particularly compelling when taken alone. However, the combination of blogs, portals, and the appropriate uses of those technologies has the potential to open the door to new ways of working with customers, partners, and colleagues.


In the ever-evolving realm of e-business, it's valuable to take a breath every once in a while and remember where we were and what was news only yesterday -- to see both where we came from and to get some ideas about where we might be going. A few times a month, Line56 looks back at past stories and features from Line56.com, Line56 Magazine, Portals Magazine and Knowledge Management Magazine.

Picking the Best RSS Client

Sorting Through the Many RSS Options
Ron Pacchiano

It's not too hard to choose a good Web-based reader for RSS (Really Simple Syndication), because there are only three major online players. But if you want a reader that runs as an application on your PC, there are dozens to choose from.

Early this year, the blog for FeedBurner, a free service that manages more than 70,000 RSS feeds, released some of the most recent information I've seen on the number of different aggregators being used. There were more than 700 "user agents" at that time polling FeedBurner's top 800 feeds. The number has certainly grown since then.

RSS will soon become a household word when it gains support from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.0 later this year, as I wrote on June 28. I published on July 5 a ranking of the Top 20 RSS readers, and on July 12 I rated the best of today's Web-based readers.

Today, in my fourth and final installment in this RSS series, I'll describe your best choices for a client-based RSS reader.

Knowing What You Want

Since Web-based readers allow you to see your favorite RSS feeds — no matter what computer you're using anywhere in the world — you might wonder why anyone would want a client-based reader.

The answers are many. For one thing, if the company you work for publishes RSS feeds for internal communications, it will probably want to keep those feeds private. That means you'll need a username and password to access your intranet feeds. But Web-based RSS readers can't authenticate themselves to get inside your firewall in this way.

Other people simply prefer to read their RSS streams within an application they use constantly. Some like their RSS feeds to show up as a toolbar in their browser, while others want RSS to be displayed side-by-side with their incoming e-mail messages. Still others prefer a standalone RSS application.

All of these considerations mean that there's no single "best" RSS reader for everyone. The answer for you will depend upon which environment, if any, you want your RSS reader to be integrated with.

Wouldja Like An Application With That?

If you know where you want your RSS feeds to appear, you're already halfway home to a decision. There are clear market leaders in each of several categories:

• Mac users. For those who run Mac OS X, the overwhelming favorite client-based RSS reader is NetNewsWire. If you're not going to use Apple's Safari browser — which has had RSS support built in since Mac OS X 10.4 — NetNewsWire is the obvious choice.

• Firefox users. Firefox, the fast-growing browser alternative to Internet Explorer, has a native feature called Live Bookmarks. Since this displays only headlines in a pull-down bar, however, many Firefox users prefer to install a separate "extension" to read RSS feeds. Far and away the most popular extension is Sage, which adds newspaper-style feed rendering within the browser.

• Users of both Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you use IE at work, but run Firefox at home, you'll be interested in Pluck 2.0. It's the first RSS reader that synchronizes your selected feeds between different browsers and even different operating systems, according to Pluck CEO Dave Panos. Pluck offers an IE BHO (browser helper object), a Firefox extension (which is in a late beta with full release within weeks, Panos says), and a Web server that matches up your feeds on different machines.

• Microsoft Outlook users. There are plenty of reasons to integrate RSS feeds into your e-mail inbox. For one thing, you're probably checking your e-mail application several times a day already — why not check your feeds, too? If your e-mail client of choice is Microsoft Outlook, the obvious adjunct is NewsGator Outlook Edition. (The company is unrelated to Gator, an adware publisher now known as Claria.) Starting at $19.95 per year, Outlook Edition allows corporate admins to configure RSS feeds for mobile phones and other devices in addition to Outlook. And NewsGator's E-mail Edition supports Outlook Express, Eudora, or any POP3 e-mail client.

• Standalone RSS readers. You may want your RSS reader to be completely separate from any other application. That way, you can open and close it independently, move its window around without regard for which other apps are running, and more. If so, arguably the most popular standalone aggregator is FeedDemon, a $29.95 application. Since FeedDemon was purchased in May by NewsGator, full integration between the different program's components is promised soon.

• Podcasts only. If you just want to download podcasts — which are RSS feeds associated with audio files — you don't need a specialized RSS reader. Instead, you can use a specialized music download app. Apple's iTunes (starting with version 4.9, which was released on June 28) and the open-source iPodder will do the trick. Of course, you can also get both podcasts and regular RSS feeds using FeedStation, a free beta feature of NewsGator and FeedDemon.

Conclusion

The wealth of RSS readers makes it somewhat confusing to select the best one for your company. But if you know which application you'd like to associate RSS feeds with, it's not too hard to make a choice.

And you can lean back and appreciate the benefits of diversity. Unlike Web browsers, RSS readers haven't yet been reduced to just two or three serious choices. Enjoy it while it lasts.


News courtesy of internetnews.com

Getting a Handle on RSS Technology

Getting a Handle on RSS Technology
Lee Underwood

RSS (define) is one of the hottest technologies on the Web today. The acronym stands for "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary," depending on who is promoting it. It's also known as a "webfeed."

An RSS feed can be used for many things: to update news, provide a change log, give notice of upcoming events, or to notify your customers of new products. It can even be used for creating and updating online lists, and according to some people, RSS feeds are better than e-mail newsletters. And new ideas for its usage are being developed at a rapid pace.

The information in an RSS file is collected and viewed in a news aggregator (reader), such as SharpReader or FeedReader. Some Web browsers like Mozilla Firefox and e-mail clients are starting to incorporate RSS reader capabilities into their interfaces as well. These tools and features make it possible to view several RSS feeds at the same time without having to visit each individual blog or Web site.

On our site we have many tutorials and articles that discuss RSS and its usage. There should be enough instructions to help you get RSS up and running on your Web site without too many problems.

Most of the problems that do arise are associated with the creation of the actual RSS file itself; everything else is just content.

Picking the Best Online RSS Reader

July 12, 2005
By Brian Livingston


Getting good numbers on the most popular online readers of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) isn't easy, as I said in my column last week.

I published figures in that column on the top 20 RSS readers, both online and client-based. The figures were provided by FeedBurner, a free service that handles more than 70,000 RSS feeds. Client-based RSS users are easily counted (each personal computer is counted once per feed.) Web-based readers, by contrast, self-report a subscriber count for each feed as part of HTML's so-called User-Agent string.

My column showed that My Yahoo tops every other RSS reader, claiming 59% of all RSS subscriptions. Bloglines come in at No. 2 with 10.4%. Since some RSS feeds are turned on by default for many new My Yahoo users, I also published a Top 20 list that excluded the 10 most popular feeds. In this second list, Bloglines came in first with 19.5% of subscriptions, while My Yahoo dropped to sixth place with 6.7%.

In separate interviews this week, spokesmen for My Yahoo and Bloglines differed over how their online services count subscribers.

Scott Gatz, senior director of personalization products for Yahoo.com, says My Yahoo counts (and reports to FeedBurner) only those subscribers who've actually logged into their online accounts within the last 30 days. "I understand that Bloglines counts the total number of people who've ever subscribed," he says.

Mark Fletcher, the founder of Bloglines, confirms that his service reports every subscriber, even those who haven't checked in for months. Asked what percentage of Bloglines accounts have logged in lately, Fletcher demurred: "I'm not exactly sure what we can release." He cited a recent acquisition of Bloglines by Ask Jeeves as one reason exact figures can't be given out. "As far as I know, My Yahoo is the only one that monitors activity," he states.

Greg Reinacker, CTO of NewsGator Technologies, says that his company's Web-based RSS reader, NewsGator Online, reports "everyone who hasn't canceled." Both Bloglines' and NewsGator Online's counts, therefore, would be lower if only those users who've logged on in the past 30 days were reported.

If only half of Bloglines' users have been active within the past 30 days, Bloglines would represent only 1/10 as many total RSS subscriptions as My Yahoo, not 1/5 (as shown last week in Table 1). Not counting the 10 most popular feeds, Bloglines would represent only 46% more subscriptions than My Yahoo, not 192% more (as shown in Table 2).

My Yahoo Is Biggest, But Is It Best?

By any measure, My Yahoo is a huge online service that delivers news and entertainment feeds of all kinds to 25 million users, according to the company. Yahoo's Gatz makes a strong case that My Yahoo is the best online RSS reader, for the following reasons:

• Non-RSS feeds. Yahoo has worked for more than 10 years to integrate constantly updated information from a wide variety of sources. This includes stock quotes, localized weather, current air fares, alerts to new e-mail (for users of Yahoo addresses), and more. Much of this information will never be available as an RSS feed. Stock prices, for example, may change thousands of times a day.

• Mobile information. My Yahoo has integrated its feeds into a mobile product for users of advanced cell phones and other portable devices.

• A dashboard to your life. With its easy page customization, My Yahoo aims to be "a dashboard to your life," not just an RSS reader, Gatz says. Once you get the layout the way you want it, My Yahoo offers you a view of just those bits of information you need to check every day.

Unlike Bloglines and NewsGator Online, My Yahoo does not use the right side of its two-column layout to show the full text of news items. Instead, both columns show only headlines (and, optionally, summaries). You must click a link to open a new window to see the full text. If you wish to see links in a left-hand pane that display the full HTML in the right pane when clicked, you might prefer Bloglines or NewsGator.

Bloglines Zooms Ahead With The Blogerati

Bloglines, which was established as recently as 2003, has become extremely popular with bloggers and those who thrive on reading blogs. Reports abound of Bloglines users who've subscribed to hundreds of different RSS feeds.

According to Bloglines' Fletcher, his service is designed to make the user's experience fast and efficient:

• You open it, it's marked as read. The default behavior in Bloglines is not to show you an item you've previously seen, once you've opened a particular RSS feed you subscribe to. This behavior can be changed to retain items until you specifically delete them. But Fletcher believes Bloglines makes RSS reading fast, which users like, even if they're logging on to their Bloglines account from different machines (and therefore might want to see an item more than once).

• Universal inbox. Like Yahoo.com, Bloglines encourages users to create e-mail accounts ending in Bloglines.com. "You can create an unlimited number of e-mail addresses at Bloglines.com," Fletcher says, "and they'll show up in your Bloglines accounts." This can reduce the number of browser windows you need to open to follow all of your e-mail and RSS notifications.

• Saved searches. Both Bloglines and NewsGator Online have the ability to save a search, so you can check it later. "NewsGator requires you to pay for that service, whereas Bloglines has that for free," Fletcher says.

NewsGator's Reinacker disputes that, saying NewsGator Online users get up to three saved searches, called "smart feeds," for free. Paying users of various premium service levels can save between 10 and 150 searches.

NewsGator Covers The Waterfront

NewsGator Online may have achieved a lower growth rate than Bloglines because NewsGator's Web-based service originally charged a fee. Now that the basic service level is free, NewsGator Online is rapidly gaining users, in addition to the client-based versions the company offers, Reinacker says.

Aside from NewsGator Online, the company is perhaps better known for integrating with such corporate applications as Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and Active Directory. NewsGator's synchronization software allows feeds to be updated across different computers, including mobile devices.

The company's Web-based service, NewsGator Online, offers several features that other online RSS readers can't currently match:

• Job bulletins. In partnership with the employment service Work.com, NewsGator Online allows users to subscribe to help-wanted listings within any given radius of their chosen city. Reinacker cites this as an example of many up-to-the-minute services NewsGator is planning.

• Integration with Media Center Edition. People who own a PC with Microsoft's Media Center Edition can get multimedia feeds, including video. The service is accessible to MCE users by clicking Online Spotlight, News and Sports, NewsGator MCE.

• Podcasts that come to you. Perhaps the most compelling new feature of NewsGator Online is its support for "podcatching." This buzzword means automatically downloading audio and video programs that are posted on the Web. If you have NewsGator's free FeedStation application (now in beta) running on a home PC connected to an iPod, you can do amazing things, Reinacker says. "If you're at work, and you see a podcast you want, you click to download it to your iPod at home. This also works with Windows Media Player. FeedStation actually downloads the stuff and puts it in your playlist at home."

This support for podcasts was recognized by Audible.com, a large Internet source of audio material, when it announced on June 24 that its content is now available via RSS through FeedStation.

John Federico, a marketing executive with Audible, said in an interview that this capability is currently supported only by FeedBurner, which integrates with NewsGator and its client-based subsidiary FeedDemon, and not other RSS readers.

"There's a link in Bloglines, and you click the link and download the podcast manually, and many people are happy with that," Federico said. "They probably have something [automatic] in the works, but not yet."

Conclusion

If you absolutely have to have stock quotes and local weather included on the same page as your online RSS feeds and other news, then My Yahoo is the only choice for you. The variety of sources that My Yahoo integrates is unparalleled.

For everyone who needs the ability to read a set of RSS feeds on different machines in different settings, NewsGator beats the competition. NewsGator's early support for podcasting, and its wide product range, which scales from a single user all the way up to the needs of a multinational enterprise, gives you the widest set of options to choose from.

Remember, online RSS aggregators allow you to read your feeds almost anywhere in the world, but they're not for everyone. Web-based RSS readers, for example, cannot easily download intranet feeds. These require ID-and-password authentication when a user is outside the corporate firewall.

In a future column, I'll examine client-based RSS readers, which solve this and other problems that can stump browser-based services.

RSS Readers: Narrowing Down Your Choices

July 5, 2005

By Brian Livingston

If Microsoft starts supporting RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as a native feature of the new Internet Explorer 7.0 this year, RSS feeds will become even more popular than they already are.

Which RSS readers will people use to read all of the constantly updated bulletins? And, more importantly, which one should your company pick?

I reported in this space last week that Microsoft had announced it would release an updated browser with full RSS support before the end of 2005. That means IE will automatically detect blogs and other Web sites that offer content as RSS feeds. One or more icons will then appear on IE's toolbar, making it easy for users to subscribe to regular updates. The competing Firefox browser has had a feature similar to this since November, 2004.

The best reading experience for RSS, however, is not in a browser itself but in an application specially designed for the wide variety of RSS content.

Let's look at your choices.

Dozens Of RSS Readers Beckon To You

Although only a small minority of Internet users have ever subscribed to an RSS feed, the number of blogs out there now is reportedly more than 10 million worldwide.

RSS adoption is growing rapidly as a result. Because RSS is, well, really simple, everybody and his brother seems to have written an RSS reader (also called an aggregator) and is vying for your attention.

Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, links to more than 130 different RSS readers in its list of news aggregators. This includes applications -- a number of which are free -- designed for Windows, Macs, Unix, and cross-platform use.

Very few companies, obviously, are going to install and try out all of those programs to choose the one that works best. So it's necessary to narrow the field, perhaps evaluating only the most popular software. When you start researching this market, however, you find it's tremendously difficult to get accurate and up-to-date figures on how many people are using each RSS reader.

Growing Like Weeds

To get the latest numbers, I turned to Eric Lunt, the cofounder and CTO of FeedBurner.com. His service, which offers both free and paid accounts, currently manages technical stuff for more than 70,000 RSS feeds. This includes everything from a personal blogger, whose feed is followed only by a handful of family members, to the giant BoingBoing tech blog, which claims more than 600,000 RSS subscribers.

Lunt extracted for me a set of figures showing how many RSS readers are pulling updates from FeedBurner's 1,000 largest-circulation feeds, which he says is a good representation. The tables below, compiled on June 29, show the results. (The three product names that are followed by an asterisk [*] are online services, which differ somewhat from client-based applications, as I'll describe later.)

Table 1: Top 20 RSS Readers of FeedBurner-Served Feeds


My Yahoo* -- 59.02%;

Bloglines* -- 10.42%;

Firefox Live Bookmarks -- 4.20%;

NetNewsWire -- 3.74%;

iTunes -- 3.37%;

iPodder -- 2.38%;
NewsGator Online* -- 1.82%;

Pluck -- 1.59%;

FeedDemon -- 1.56%;

Reader not identified -- 1.02%;

Apple CFNetwork Generic Client -- 0.96%;

SharpReader -- 0.86%;

Thunderbird -- 0.82%;

Safari RSS -- OS X Tiger -- 0.61%;

iPodderX -- 0.54%;

LiveJournal -- 0.52%;

NewsGator Outlook Edition -- 0.51%;

RSS Bandit -- 0.50%;

RssReader -- 0.34%, and

Opera RSS Reader -- 0.33%,
Holy cow! It looks like My Yahoo, a personalized page where members of Yahoo.com can select RSS feeds, gets more action (59.02%) than all the other Top 20 aggregators combined.

Not so fast, Lunt says. "We have a few very, very popular feeds at the top of the list -- things that show up by default on a new My Yahoo page, for example. So these results are skewed somewhat by these popular feeds," he adds.

It's much more interesting to look at the Top 20 list with these 10 default feeds removed. Table 2 shows the leaders of today's RSS aggregator market are a lot closer together than it first appeared.

Table 2: Top 20 RSS Readers (excluding 10 most popular feeds)


Bloglines* -- 19.49%;

NetNewsWire -- 10.07%;

iTunes -- 9.53%;

Firefox Live Bookmarks -- 7.25%;

iPodder -- 7.17%;

My Yahoo* -- 6.68%;

FeedDemon -- 4.23%;

NewsGator Online* -- 3.83%;

Reader not identified -- 3.07%;

Pluck -- 2.07%;

SharpReader -- 1.91%;

iPodderX -- 1.77%;

Thunderbird -- 1.75%;

Safari RSS -- OS X Tiger -- 1.75%;

LiveJournal -- 1.44%;

NewsGator Outlook Edition -- 1.27%;

Apple CFNetwork Generic Client -- 1.21%;

RSS Bandit -- 0.99%;

Opera RSS Reader -- 0.90%, and

Sage -- 0.82%.
The second table shows a market that's still highly fragmented. Seventeen different aggregators have more than 1% of the current user base. (NewsGator purchased FeedDemon in May, giving those two products and NewsGator's Outlook Edition a combined 9.33% reach).

[Note: Bloglines and NewsGator Online count all subscribers who have ever signed up, whereas My Yahoo counts only "active" subscribers who've logged in within the past 30 days. For more on this, see my July 12, 2005, column.]

"The market becomes more and more fragmented every time we measure it, which indicates that we're still very much on the innovation upswing," Lunt says.

That's apparent in the varied nature of the applications on the list.

Among the client-based aggregators, which must first be installed on a personal computer to work, the range of programs included is extremely wide. On the one hand, you have Firefox Live Bookmarks, which is an RSS feature built into a browser, while on the other you have iTunes and iPodder, which are optimized to download audio "podcasts."

Furthermore, iTunes 4.9 -- the first version to natively support podcasts -- was released as recently as June 28, only one day before the above figures were compiled. In less than 24 hours, iTunes zoomed from nothing to 9.53% of all RSS downloads shown in Table 2, above. "We have never seen such rapid adoption of a client," Lunt notes with a hint of wonder.

Unique Advantages

Even more interesting than client-based aggregators are the Web-based, online RSS readers in the tables. If you read your list of RSS feeds from a desktop computer one day and from a laptop the next, the easiest way to keep your feeds synchronized on the two machines is to read your news online. You sign up for an account, probably for free, and you see the same updated list of your feeds every time you browse to your preferred service.

That means you'll be choosing from what Lunt calls "the top online aggregators... My Yahoo, Bloglines, and NewsGator Online."

A SEM Tool for Content Creators

A SEM Tool for Content Creators
By Zachary Rodgers | September 19, 2005
Search marketing firm Reprise Media has developed a tool that lets online publishers rapidly deploy search campaigns to promote their content on a rolling basis.
Called FeedCast, the tool takes XML and RSS feeds submitted by content creators and automatically extracts keywords and phrases from them, bids on those terms and converts them into ad copy. Sponsored listings are distributed to the major search engines and contextual networks through the use of APIs.
Reprise claims the product reduces the process to hours, when it once took days.
FeedCast is in a private beta now with 12 publishers, including TV Guide, who are using it to place 20,000 daily keyword buys. Others declined to be identified for competitive reasons. Clients have the option of using FeedCast for ongoing promotion of all content, or on a one-off basis when ad inventory to a specific site section is sold out and new traffic is wanted.
"We have some clients who are using this as an ongoing program," said Reprise Managing Partner Peter Hershberg. "We understand the really high value areas within their Web sites. We understand in many instances how sold out they are."
The phenomenon of publishers using SEM -- essentially buying ads to sell ads -- has become much more common in the past year. This week, Forbes.com tapped 360i to bring in more traffic from search engines.
"FeedCast allows us to promote our breaking Emmy content automatically and within hours," said Dave Bovenschulte, VP and general manager of TV Guide, in a statement. "As a result, our search campaigns are far more current than any of our competition."
The auto-generation of keywords and ad copy is nothing new, though the application may be. Google has long offered technology that parses Web sites for appropriate keywords. Quigo also offers automated search marketing workflow tools.

Jakob Nielsen on the Unwieldy Web

Jakob Nielsen on the Unwieldy Web

The Web usability whiz says some sites are getting better, but far too many remain too complex and frustrating for typical users

Jakob Nielsen has long been the acknowledged leader in making Web sites more usable. As a principal with the business design consultancy Nielsen Norman Group, Nielsen is hired by dozens of companies that want to improve their Web sites. He walks the walk: His Web site, useit.com, itself is a paragon of simplicity and speed, with absolutely no graphics on the home page because they slow the experience for millions of people still using dial-up connections. Advertisement

Nielsen doesn't pull punches. He thinks Web sites generally are still poorly designed and badly written, and that Web logs, the current darling of the Web, are useful in spurring dialogue, but are a step back in usability for the average person. In a recent conversation with Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Robert D. Hof, Nielsen discussed the state of the Web and where it's headed. His conclusion: The Internet still has enormous shortcomings -- especially internal corporate Web sites and e-mail, the hidden majority of Net activity -- that need to be overcome if it's to reach its full potential. Following are edited excerpts of their conversation:

How is the Web of today different from 5 or 10 years ago?
The main utility of the Web is still very information-oriented. People's blogs are fun, but not of any particular value typically. The main problems that we see on the Internet are not being addressed.

Like what?
Bad content and lack of information people need -- either because it's not provided at all or because it's written in a poor, impenetrable style. Companies must stop doing brochureware and start answering customers' questions in plain language. You often can't even tell from the home page what the company does.

Search is the second problem. Even though there has been progress on Webwide search -- Yahoo! (YHOO ), Google (GOOG ), and Microsoft (MSFT ) have done really nice search engines -- when you go to a corporate Web site or an intranet, the search is typically extremely poor. That to me is a particular scandal, because people come to the site on purpose, to find something.

The third problem is e-mail overload. Those three big problems are holding us back much more than any of the new services are pushing us forward.

Tough problems. What would be some solutions?
On the first two problems, you have to recognize that the Web is a communications medium, a two-way medium. It's not a broadcast medium like TV where you want to be glamorous. People go to Web sites because they have questions they want answered. That's just not being done. We don't really need any new technology. We just need to use the technology we have appropriately.

What about e-mail?
E-mail overload, on the other hand, does require new research. There has been some progress in spam filtering lately, such as the collaborative spam filters of Cloudmark and those types of services. They cut down on spam dramatically.

But phishing and other kinds of untrustworthy computing are making computers and the Internet a very scary environment. That is another really big issue.

What do you think of the rise of Web logs?
They support one of the basic concepts of the Web, which is diversity in services and the ability of everybody to participate on equal footing. That has always been one of the benefits of the Web. I've always said that small companies should be the biggest manufacturers of the Web, because you don't have to have a big marble building or send salespeople out to play golf with the clients to have a good Web site.

Web logs are a media form that is optimized for the Web because they live by links. They're able to link to the original material and then provide their spin or twist or commentary. It's much easier to comment on the story than it is to research and report the story in the first place.

When millions of people do that, sooner or later you're going to come up with some interesting comments. Then other people link to the interesting comments more than they link to the uninteresting comments. You run that little loop a few times, and the good stuff will bubble to the top.

Blog, or RSS, feeds, however, still seem quite primitive to me.
The technology is definitely at an extremely geeky level at this time. It's only really for the bleeding-edge early adopters. Some people live by Web logs, but that's not the average user. The average user is too busy. They just want to get work done.

Those little RSS icons? They're meaningless to most people. One of the big lessons from user testing is that life is too short to click on buttons you don't understand. News readers also will have to be dramatically simplified in how you subscribe to feeds and use them.

Apart from the technology, what do you think of the content of Web logs?
Most writers of Web logs simply cannot write something that makes sense out of context. If you read these headlines and you scan down, what is relevant to you, and what you need to click on, is rarely communicated very well.

Is there a prospect for that changing anytime soon?
We're talking about millions of people without any training...so it's hard to imagine getting the content up to a higher quality standard. Even commercial Web sites with professional writers and professional editors...still do not have content that's sufficiently attractive and informative to users. So I'm rather pessimistic on the hope that bloggers will really learn how to do this well. I think they're probably always doomed to being a little bit of a secondary thing that people turn to when they want to check on gossip or whatever, but not really for hard-core purchase decisions.

What new kinds of work on Web design are you doing these days?
There's a broader set of users than there were before. So I've been looking at how teenagers use the Web, or how seniors use the Web, or low-literacy users. Those are large groups of people who have grave difficulty using the Web. Old users, for instance, constitute a very rich market, and they're coming online in big numbers. Yet their needs are ignored. It's very sad.

When it comes to conventional business Web sites, what problems are you working on?
The people who are in charge of these Web sites don't know how difficult they are to use by outside users. People fool themselves into thinking they have the basics right when in fact they have them wrong. They don't know how new customers behave because most companies don't run a study with real customers. This has been a problem for the last 10 years.

Gee, hasn't anything improved?
Every year, it does in fact get better. More companies do user testing. But it takes a lot of time to make changes. It's still too difficult to make these changes happen.

That's where the technology can help. There's less and less required to be hand-built. More and more capabilities are available that you can just sort of plug in. Take the Yahoo! Store, for small companies to sell online. You outsource to Yahoo your shopping cart. It's not a perfect solution, but it's a nice solution.

Who else are Web sites doing right?
Google has done many, many things right. It has such a sparse home page that there's no doubt what you do. It's also very fast. That's something that every study of Web usability has shown people get excited about. This is true for all users and across all applications.

A wealth of tools are available to customize your Web. How much can these change the Web experience, and is that a good idea?
In some ways, it's a good idea, because it allows people to tailor the experience to their own personal needs. Mainly, though, it's just not something you should expect the average user to do. It's just too complicated.

And users don't care about technology. Users don't care about Web sites. They just care about getting their work done and getting the computer out of the way.

What new technology or techniques are needed to move the Web to the next level?
We need to have much more powerful navigation tools in the Web browser. We need more visual navigation on sites themselves. But most of the efforts have been stand-alone attempts to improve particular features. We need a bigger, more integrated solution -- which maybe Microsoft or somebody else can do.

We also need much better collaboration features. The Web is still very much a single-user environment. Wikis -- multi-user Web sites that can be built with many people -- are a great example of what is working. At Wikipedia [the collaborative online encyclopedia], the individual components may not be so great, but they can add up to something valuable. I think there will be many more specialized projects of a similar nature.

Computer, know thyself

Computer, know thyself

Rafe Needleman September 19, 2005

We examine several 'dashboard' products that help you monitor your computer -- and much more.
My Saab has an unusual feature on its dashboard: a button labelled Black Panel turns off the lighting on all of the car's instruments and readouts except the speedometer and the clock. The idea is that you press this button when you're driving at night to reduce the distractions coming at you from things like the tachometer, the fuel gauge and the radio station display. The car is smart enough to turn on a gauge if it needs attention -- for example, if your fuel level gets low, the fuel gauge will light up.
It's cool to drive along at night with nothing illuminated in your line of vision except the speedometer. It's like driving a Swedish-made 1968 VW Beetle. But what people like me really want is not Black Panel but More Panel.
I'd like to know the oil pressure in my car, which my Saab doesn't tell me. I'd also like to know the tyre inflation pressures, the transmission temperature and other data, too. Why? Because I want to know why my machine is working the way it is, and I don't completely trust product designers who think that flashing a warning light once things have started to break is sufficient notice.
You know where this is going: I like keeping tabs on my computer, as well. And lately my obsession with creating a 'dashboard' for my PC has got a little out of hand. You'll see what I mean when I describe the latest dashboard products I've been experimenting with. Here they are, in ascending order of geekiness.
Google Desktop
Google Desktop is an important product: it's Google's first general-purpose application with a persistent desktop presence. The company's other Windows applications -- Picasa and Google Earth -- are special-purpose programs and not nearly as 'in your face' as this one. The Google Desktop beta includes a Sidebar application similar to the one Microsoft showed us a while ago for its upcoming Windows Vista operating system, but it's here today.
The Google Sidebar does a lot of useful things, such as showing your latest email headers, RSS feeds (automatically updated based on sites you visit -- slick), news, stock data, weather and so on. It will also show you random pictures from your hard disk (although if that's what you really want, I recommend the brand-new application called Slide instead). There's also a downloadable plug-in that will monitor your system and show your CPU loading, network traffic, disk throughput and memory use.
The Google Desktop Sidebar is the easiest way to get into the dashboard thing. It's a beta version, but it's easy to install and use, and the information feeds that it displays are useful. If general information is what you're looking for, Google Desktop is a killer solution. But if you find the level of detail lacking on the system information, keep reading.
Yahoo Konfabulator
Yahoo recently bought the company Pixoria, maker of the wonderful Konfabulator product. Konfabulator enables your desktop to show 'widgets', much like Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger does with its Dashboard feature. The first thing you notice about widgets is that they are gorgeous, in contrast to the functional and plain Google Desktop (they also take up a lot of system resources).
However, if you want to keep a close eye on your system, some handy widgets will display useful information, such as your system's battery charge state, Wi-Fi signal strength (and the name of the network you're connected to), CPU loading (either instantaneous or graphed over time), memory use, the name of your most resource-intensive application and many other esoteric system stats.
Like Google Desktop, Konfabulator excels at showing non-system data such as newsfeeds, the weather, a clock (the selection is mind-boggling), the current phase of the moon and so on.
I use Konfabulator on my desktop to show CPU load as well as to display the weather and newsfeeds on my second monitor. On my notebook, I monitor battery state and Wi-Fi strength. All very handy, but not quite enough for the true system fetishist.
Close to the metal: MBM and SpeedFan
If you really want to know what's happening on your system, you need an application that can read all of your computer's sensors. For that, try Motherboard Monitor or my pick, SpeedFan. SpeedFan will report temperatures from the various sensors in your PC, as well as the speed of various cooling fans. You can also collect information on the temperature of your video card, the health of your hard disks and the voltages inside your system (which is interesting if you are an overclocker or if your system throttles the CPU when it's idle).
A tool like SpeedFan can really help you see under the bonnet of your PC. However, unless you're building your own computer or need to wring every last bit of speed out of your system, SpeedFan is more interesting than useful. But you know what? It's still not enough.
Get a real dashboard with an external display
The problem with all of the above tools is that they show their data on your PC's monitor, cluttering up your display. Now, granted, if you have a wide-screen LCD or two monitors, you probably have some extra space, but it is somewhat inelegant to put all this geeky data on your screen alongside your work.
If you've come this far, what you need is an external display, such as one from Matrix Orbital. This can reveal all the information discussed above on a separate display mounted either in a drive bay in your computer's case (tower users only) or in an external enclosure if you have a notebook or if you want the display on your desk. A lot of multimedia PCs come with these displays, and in addition to showing media information (what's playing, for example), they can show system data such as temperature, fan speed and so on. They also make nice, if hugely expensive, digital clocks. Once you set up one of these external displays, you can move all the dashboard data off your monitors to clean your system.
Getting an external display up and running is very easy (just plug it into a USB port), but you'll probably want to tweak the default settings a bit. And you'll still need either MBM or SpeedFan installed to send sensor data to the display, so be prepared to spend some time messing about with it.
Can it get more ridiculous?
Oh yes, it can. So far I've described tools that monitor your system. But SpeedFan, the Matrix Orbital system (with its included LCDC software), and dozens of other products can also control your computer's innards -- mostly adjusting fan speeds and turning on indicator lights. Sure, most computers do a fine job of running themselves, but where's the fun in that? Might as well drive a Beetle.
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New 4.0 version launched by MedReader

(PRLEAP.COM) MedReader is a free RSS Reader and RSS Publishing Solution that is tailored to the Medical & Healthcare Industry. With version 4.0, Medical Professionals and Healthcare Professionals will have more functionality and more resources then ever before.MedReader, www.medreader.com, is the world’s only medically oriented RSS Reader and RSS Publishing system online. MedReader is broken down into 4 editions for Physicians, Business, Nursing, and Allied Health professionals. Each edition of MedReader is then subcategorized to provide specialty specific information that is suitable for all Medical and Healthcare Professionals. “The newest version of MedReader allows for more functionality then ever before”. Users are now able to select multiple folders for easy management, have a scrolling updated alert tool for recent information, and uses persistent search technology. MedReader also has a Podcast client which enables the user to listen to music or other media through a single interface” MedReader’s Brent Stanley said.Very popular sites like Medical News Today, www.medicalnewstoday.com and Sound Practice, www.soundpractice.net, partnered with MedReader to promote and educate Medical Professionals about the benefits of RSS. Through these partnerships, MedReader has expanded quickly and has become the content management tool of choice for many Medical Professionals. “With today’s vast amount of medical news, MedReader is a much a needed application for busy medical professionals. Unfortunately RSS readers are not used as much as they should be in the medical sector. It is our opinion at The Doctors Lounge that MedReader could change all that” states Dr. Tamer Fouad, the President of The Doctor’s Lounge, www.thedoctorslounge.net. “The goal of MedReader is to enable medical professionals to save more time and find information faster then ever before. With our partners, and highly categorized resource channels, Medical professionals are able to manage their content better,” Stanley added.About MedReader:MedReader is a RSS Reader, Podcast Client, RSS Directory, and RSS Publishing solution built specifically for the medical and healthcare community. Information is categorized and sub categorized on a variety of topics to include Cardiology, Therapy, Psychiatry and more.

Feeding the RSS appetite

The Feednation RSS reader is a simple service that allows users to keep informed by email, mobile phone or online
By Mark Chillingworth 16 Sep 2005
The landscape of the internet is covered with little orange boxes with the letters RSS written inside, and a plethora of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader technologies are arriving on the scene.
Feednation is one of the latest, and, despite its design weaknesses, is a powerful information gathering tool that supports mobile phone access and is available for free.
Setting up a Feednation feed is simple and fast. Your email address is your username and confirmation of your account arrives within seconds. Sadly, the UK-based Feednation organisation doesn’t provide enough guidance and information in setting up your account, which will deter new users from gaining the most benefit from an independent reader like this.
The Groups method of using Feednation is a very nice tool that enables a user to collate a wide range of information on everything from professional information to personal love affairs with cricket.
Once a group folder has been created, users can use a search system for discovering the feeds they want. A page of results appear with a short description and the ability to click on buttons for a preview or subscription to the content. IWR really liked the ability to read previews of content, especially when selecting the blogs that we would consider reading.
When setting up Group folders, users can select whether they want the content to be emailed to them hourly, daily or weekly. The email is a grey column in the centre of the email message with the full headline, standfirst and introductory paragraph, providing users with a clear indication of whether they want to read the full story.
The only complaint with Feednation is the design of the website, which is made up of fluorescent blocks reminiscent of the 1980s and the early days of the web. Overall, this is one of the most user-friendly RSS readers about and the email features are a real boon. IWR recommends Feednation be added to your information menu.

Keeping It Really Simple

RSS News Feeds Via E-Mail: A Technology That Actually Delivers
September 15, 2005
By PHIL HALL, Special to The Courant

Next time you visit your favorite news-related websites or your must-read blogs, look closely in the margins or toward the bottom of their home pages.

There's a good chance you will see a small box or a collection of boxes inviting you to try, among other services, "RSS." Though these boxes take up minuscule space, they represent a major new wave for online information distribution.

The technology is Really Simple Syndication, or RSS. RSS allows readers to receive continuous text, audio or video updates from their favorite web sources, which can be received via subscriptions (mostly free now) and accessed via software programs called aggregators. Those maintaining websites feed updates to their subscribers as soon as the new material is published online.

RSS was developed in 1997 for online syndication from Internet news sources but attracted little interest until bloggers started plugging into it the past two years. With much to say but no easy way to get their message to stand out, the blogging sphere set up free RSS feeds to provide updates on their latest observations, commentaries and put-downs.

Aaron Swartz, co-author of an early version of the RSS computer language and author of the rss2email technology that delivers newsfeeds via e-mail, says RSS has offered a sense of empowerment absent from the Net surfer's previous hunt for distinctive voices and viewpoints.

"RSS has put information under the user's control," says Swartz. "Before, you had to go out to every web page you were interested in, see if there were updates, read them in a variety of different formats. Now the information comes right to you, presented exactly the way you want it."

"For the average Net surfer, manually checking 20 or 30 sites every hour for breaking news would make it impossible to actually do any work," says Christopher Null, editor of Mobile Magazine.

For Net publishers, particularly bloggers, the technology has been invaluable.

"It is difficult to blog without it," says Paul Conley, a media consultant and commentator who writes a blog on business-to-business trade publishing. For Conley, RSS has provided a two-way street: Subscribers receiving his feeds have sought out PaulConley.com for more commentary. "I'm averaging 200 unique users a day, which is extraordinarily high, given this unique area I cover."

RSS also has helped to aid the rapid rise of another new media outlet. "Podcasting wouldn't exist in its current format without RSS," says Elle Webb, contributing editor for PodcastingNews.com. "Podcasting is built on RSS 2.0, a standard developed by blogging pioneer Dave Winer. It's a very simple standard, but also very flexible. RSS is an open standard, so people have adapted it to do many different things. Podcasting is one example, but video-podcasting is likely to be popular in a year or so, and many other uses are possible."

Even Net denizens not completely up to speed on how RSS can help them are aware of the technology as a must-have tool. Chris Sobieniak, a Toledo, Ohio, artist who runs his own animation history blog (www.studio-toledo.blogspot.com), recently added an RSS feed while acknowledging a lack of expertise on the subject.

"I still don't understand RSS yet myself," he says with a laugh. "I just figured it was a perfect way of attracting attention."

Getting attention isn't easy, especially because RSS has been adapted quickly in the past year by major media outlets and even the corporate communications offices of multinational companies. This explosion of RSS interest is felt at the Feedster search engine, which specializes in blog and other RSS listings.

"Our traffic is a combination of subscribed RSS feeds and people performing searches on Feedster.com," says Chris Redlitz, vice president of Feedster Inc. "We currently index nearly 11 million feeds. A great majority of the feeds originate from blogs, but our index also includes several thousand edited news services, such as The New York Times, plus product listings and job listings."

RSS has not gone unnoticed by another community: advertisers. A recent Forrester Research survey found 57 percent of the marketers they polled had an interest in pursuing RSS as an advertising channel. But it's uncertain whether Net surfers will accept RSS advertising. Swartz never intended the technology for marketing and doubts others will tolerate it.

"I think the users will revolt," he says. "The whole process of reading is interrupted. If RSS writers insist on putting it in, RSS readers will start taking it out. It's that simple."

Yet Null says the intrusion of advertising is not unexpected.

"Eventually everything turns into a platform to sell advertising: e-mail, HTML, Google," he says. "I'm not really surprised or affected emotionally either way."

More confusing is a situation typical of the high-tech world: a lack of uniform standards. Different versions of RSS transmission are available, and some Net publishers actually offer multiple choices for subscribers to pick from. Even Swartz is uncertain which standard will triumph.

"It's rather unfortunate that there are so many overlapping and confusing standards around the subject," he says. "But it's a fool's game to try to predict what will happen."

Google Looks For Money In Blog Search

Google Looks For Money In Blog Search

By Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb News

Google Inc. on Wednesday launched a blog-search tool to gather information on what people look for in blogs, as the search-engine hunts for new areas for online advertising.
Google is the first among its major rivals, which include Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, to offer a dedicated search tool for blogs, one expert said. The others, however, are expected to follow soon.
Web surfers are reading blogs in growing numbers. In July, 29.3 million people, or 20 percent of active U.S. web users, accessed blogs or blog-related sites, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That number represented a 31 percent increase since the beginning of the year.
With that much interest in blogs, it makes sense that search engines would be interested in tracking use of the emerging medium.
"We want to begin the process of seeing what people want from a blog-search product and how they use it," Jeff Reynar, product manager for Google Blog Search, said. "Right now, it's in a testing state."
In the future, however, Google would certainly look to "monetize" blog search, Reynar said.
Google generates most of its revenue from text advertising lined to search results.
Nielsen analyst Jon Gibs sees blogs fall into three categores today: the personal journal posted by individuals, the more journalistic opinion and reporting blogs, such as Gawker Media; and corporate blogs, which companies use as a marketing tool. The latter two comprise the beginnings of a commercial market.
"What will be interesting to see is the degree to which individuals use the new Google search tool. Are they looking for information on Johnny's blog or the more personal blogs, or on the more commercial groups," Gibs said. "If it comes from the latter players, than it really could open up the possibilities for new commercial growth."
Topics discussed in blogs are too numerous to count, stretching as far as people's imaginations. The challenge for search engines will be to carve this universe into segments and opening them up to advertisers.
Chris Sherman, associate editor of Search Engine Watch, said Google is the first of the major search engine to offer "full-blown blog and feed search capabilities."
"Now that Google has launched blog search, expect the other major search engines to follow suit fairly quickly," Sherman wrote on the Search Engine Watch Web site. "All have been feverishly working on blog search over the past year, and now that Google is first out the gate the others will likely move quickly."
The Google tool, which was released in beta, indexes blogs by crawling content sent through their site feeds. Many blogs distribute content updates to newsreaders via RSS or Atom, both standards for content syndication on the web. A newsreader is software used to aggregate and manage Web-site feeds.
Indexing the feeds enables Google to update search results with new content much faster than standard web searches, the Mountain View, Calif., according to the company. Also, feed content enables Google to find precise posts and date ranges with greater accuracy.
Google plans to eventually provide a form for blog writers to manually add blogs to the company's index. For now, blog content goes back only as far as June 2005, but Google is looking to go back further.
Blog Search contains many of the advanced capabilities of the regular web search engine, including searching in foreign languages, exact words or phrases, and restricting search to particular dates.
Google is not the first search engine to offer blog search. Smaller companies, such as Technorati, Icerocket, and Feedster, have offered similar services for awhile.

Freeware Software Tool for Webmasters: RSS Writer

9/14/2005 
Phelios announced the release of an offline internet software tool for webmasters called, "RSS Writer." The free software application is being offered to website owners who would like to offer an RSS feed of their own sites.
RSS Writer benefits those webmasters who maintain their sites using the traditional html methods or are using templates for their sites that do not create and automate updated XML files for RSS syndication.
The clean interface of RSS Writer is self-explanatory and streamlines the user experience as much as possible, whereby the webmaster simply enters the site information, then inputs the title for each item, links and descriptions. Following input, RSS Writer creates an .xml file and the webmaster must then upload the file. Each time they update their site, they must also do the same with their .xml file then upload it.
RSS Writer is available for both PC and Mac, and is available to download at the following URL:http://www.phelios.net/rss-writer.html
SOURCE: Phelios