line of site

blox0r

If you use firefox, and like to browse feeds, you should give blox0r a try, at least to see a cool use of technology.

It's amazing what can be done with just a browser these days.

Which web aggregator am I using these days?

Still Newsburst. I'd like to use Rojo, but it's still too slow. Bloglines? never anymore.

update: this is an XUL application

at Syndicate

if you are at Syndicate - feel free to seek me out by sending me email. should be a good conference. i am looking forward to it.

new features at FeedBurner

in case you missed it, we have a few new features over at FeedBurner worth noting:

•  Total Stats PRO - we've always provided the details on the number of subscribers you have to your feed and the popular feed readers used to read you content and will continue to do so for free - but if you publish any type of feed and want to know details on who has viewed the full-content items in the feed versus who has clicked thru on items, as well as much more, then you want to subscribe to our first premium service, Total Stats PRO. Matt McAlister has a great post on more of the details here.
• Yahoo! Media RSS Support - If you currently use the FeedBurner SmartCast service to easily publish your podcast from publishing tools such as MSN Spaces, TypePad, or Blogger, you can now optionally add markup to your podcast feed to support Yahoo! Media RSS. By doing this, directories, search engines, and aggregators that support Media RSS (for example, Yahoo!'s products) can better index your podcast and display results for users that want to consume your content, whether it be audio, video, or even just photos.

Keep watching Burning Questions for more features and products we will be releasing in the very near future.

MSN buys Messagecast to catch up to AOL Journals

Yesterday, Microsoft announced they had completed the acuisition of Messagecast into MSN. Messagecast is a pretty cool company that basically transcodes RSS into MSN Messenger Alerts, something I'm a big fan of since we also did this same thing back at Spyonit in '99.

What this says to me, and it's not out of line with what MSN says, is that MSN Spaces is much more worried about keeping up with features of the likes of AOL Journals, which offers some really cool features of notifiying you via AIM or AOL IM if someone comments on your posts, or one of your friends has added new posts, than they are worried about the likes of Six Apart or even Blogger for that matter.

no gamma version for FeedBurner

yes, it's been the longest running joke in the RSS world that FB was in pre-alpha, then beta versions with gamma and delta versions coming next (yes, i can say the greek alphabet three times before i get burned by the match) - but i am pleased to announce we have finally changed the homepage graphic. pretty neat, eh? it's that easy. change the graphic.

okay, i'll yield. i'll even call them "vlogs"

first i was skeptical of podcasting, then "vlogging". i am a skeptic no more. watching josh leo's vlog on vlog hammered it home. this is quite hilarious in addition to making a point - watch it.

at any rate - this is a new medium for the exact reasons josh calls out - and it will continue to develop more and more. i now get a couple bizdev requests a week concerning vlogging. yes, it's true - there's a lot of people working on platforms for this stuff out there.

oh yeah, the gratuitous FeedBurner product placements in josh's vlog were not our doing, i swear.

via Rick Klau

jobs, jobs, jobs

in association with the closing of a B round of funding, we finally have the jobs page up at FeedBurner. If you are interested or know someone who is, give it a look or pass it on!

y! in the mobile feeds game

the team at my yahoo! and y! mobile have released their WAP/xHTML version of my yahoo! that includes reading of feeds - so finally there is a free alternative to bloglines mobile if you choose to read your feeds via a WAP browser.

we at FB continue to think feed data propelled to phones is a huge opportunity and will continue to get bigger and bigger.

podcasting and videocasting via feeds will be the next step on 3G networks and is coming faster than most people think. with handsets coming out with true 3G throughput and mass storage options on board, it will totally be possible in the next year to get this data directly to the device.

my prediction is that more big players will join the likes of CNET and Y! and get into the mobile feeds game sooner rather than later.

stay tuned.

see dick, videoblogged

two of my co-founders, dick and matt, are out at TED this week - the collaborative effort which is the TED Blog has captured an interview with dick on video. i hope we don't start calling these "vlogs" - that's tough to say, unless you speak Romanian.

check it out

congrats to ev on the launch of odeo

congrats to ev on the launch of odeo. i talked to him a few weeks ago about the company and i think it is going to be hot.

at first it may not seem so novel, but i think the timing is right on, and they'll do it with the right amount of cache to make it a success. best of luck to ev an his new team. so much in this business has to do with momentum.

of course you can follow the odeoblog feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/odeoblog

you know you've made it when...

apparently a company called "simplefeed" is buying keywords for "feedburner". adsense overture

allofmp3.com - the tech - what podcasting needs

there's an interesting music download site that's stirring up lots of legal pots lately, even so much to be covered in boing boing and the WSJ, called allofmp3.com, a russian site that uses a loophole in russian copyright law to distribute music based on cost of bandwidth rather than the pure licesnsing cost. as i understand it, they are distributing it via licensing much like ASCAP where the artist gets paid a lump sum from some corporation based on the number of listens or something, but that's not important for this snippet.

what is important is the tech used in allofmp3.com - on the fly music transcoding. you as the user can specify how you want your songs delivered from lossless WAV all the way down to 128K MP3, and it also supports Wma, Ogg-Vorbis, Mpc, FLAC, and MPEG4/AAC. you as the user order up the song, specify the format and the song is delivered in a matter of seconds down to your machine in the desired format. based on the attention this site has gotten, it looks like it is scaling pretty well.

especially in a mobile world where this has been dubbed the "year of the music phone" - this technology is extremely relevant. transcoding servers have always been an important part of mobile infrastructure, and as more and more devices are released with various capabilities on the client, it will be more and more important for transcoding servers of rich media. someone who comes up with a carrier-grade engine for transcoding audio and video on the fly is going to make a pretty penny - and essentially allofmp3.com has done this already.

enter podcasting. soon we will see "podcasting studio" applications for publishers to author content and store in publishing engines such as typepad and blogger - surely these things will spit out multiple formats of audio. the real cost here will be bandwidth, not disk space, but there will be various clients consuming podcasts as well, and especially on mobile devices, users will be fine with a lower quality spoken word podcast in exchange for faster downloads and less bandwidth usage.

so allofmp3.com will probably continue to make money for quite some time selling music by the kb, here, but they easily have a $50 million dollar piece of tech today, $150 million piece of tech tomorrow, and who knows what this will be worth over the next two years.

why podcasting will be successful...

...or fail.

as part of what we've been tracking with FeedBurner and podcasting, i'm generally responsible for the user agreements and other legal matters which go into distributing content, any copyright infringement claims we get, etc. so i've been following the podcasting trend closely as obviously issues will arise where one person distributes a copyrighted song over a podcast as an example. since we don't actually host the content, this usually means pointing the inquiry back at whomever is hosting it and bringing the publisher into the mix.

but an interesting podcast showed up in our top 20 recently that will bring up some additional legal issues to the community:

the seduction and strip clubs podcast.

now, when i first experienced podcasting, i heard quite a few amatuers who were basically just reading their blogs, and didn't find them that interesting, but now i think the content is getting quite professional and varied - so much that it will be successful in appealing to those outside of the tech community. it definitely has a very real potential to expand quickly, even perhaps before RSS itself as a text medium does.

the seduction and strip clubs podcast way exceeded my expectations from a quality standpoint. this is a very professional radio show with guests, background music, etc, recorded at very high quality. the host brings in guests who have a lot of varied experiences and interesting anecdotes about the exotic dancing industry in the spirit of howard stern and his ilk, with a few interesting exceptions:

1) it is totally uncensored for language
2) it is totally uncensored for content

a few of the guests make some interesting remarks even to the point where some comments might be considered racist (although it's purely a case where the guest is totally ignorant, not malicious). the host does his best to react to such things in a totally professional matter but what this points out is:

podcasting is a medium that is totally unregulated beyond copyright law. the FCC has no reach into it, so it will grow unfettered as a medium until if and when some congressman or woman brings up legislation to inject the government into the middle of it all.

in my mind, the growth of podcasting, invented by ex-MTV DJ Adam Curry, presupposes the government not getting involved for quite a while. it's a lot like larry lessig's presentation on what would have happened to Kodak if the government would have required permission to ask someone before taking their picture...the industry would have grown a lot differently, or not at all.

i suppose podcasting could be lumped in with Ham Radio legislation if such a thing exists, with the exception that it's reach is immediately global - not limited by the reach of a radio signal. I beleive Ham radio does fall under the FCC rules and regulations because it uses the regulated spectrum here in the U.S., but probably isn't highly monitored or enforced.

it's easy to see that the unregulated nature of podcasting is one element which will continue to propel it's growth and popularity, but there are others. there are a few companies i've talked to that will soon release some sophisiticated tools for podcasters and their subscribers (listeners) so we can expect to see a lot of growth in this market in the very near future.

i could see us eventually having to inject an RSS namespace into podcasting feeds that has some sort of rating for content, and have the various podcasting clients display warnings and such when the rating exceeds a certain level - especially as podcasting clients get built directly into the firmware of audio devices and mobile phones.

very interesting.

Newsburst

(click for larger view)

i can't beleive no one found this until now because it's been out there flapping in the breeze for a few months, but now that it's in boing boing, i feel free in endorsing CNET News.com Newsburst, which i have been using as my home page for quite a while now, and really really like.

i can't really put my finger on what i like about it (the same way some people like bloglines) but it does the job for me.

i love the dashboard view - this is just done so much better than the others.

great job, CNET and News.com!

RSS feed stats for this blog

i thought i'd post the RSS/Atom reader breakdown for this weblog, because it seems like that's the in thing to do these days...especially now that we have these handy-dandy graphs over at FeedBurner.

line of site RSS Reader breakdown

it's also quite a bit different that what i get over at the bluetooth car weblog which has fewer feed subscribers but has way more traffic than this blog from search results:

the bluetooth car weblog RSS Reader breakdown

One of the things i've noticed is that Bloglines appeals to the "techie" crowd, but has less appeal to the masses (probably because of it's unprofessional look and feel) and i think NewsGator has made a lot of strides to take over a lot of the "professional" subscribers. I base this not only on these two feeds but the 10-12 others i manage and have stats for. All interesting.

my current experience with ads in rss

Now that this is becoming such a huge topic and i've been quoted/misquoted/shortquoted in the press etc ( i think the full quote was something like "A lot of these publishers have a business model of ads on their HTML sites, and a lot of people read a lot of the same content in the RSS feeds and never go to the HTML website - and our publishers are telling us that their readers are telling them more and more that they want full text in their RSS feeds because they like the experience of reading everything in one tool, their RSS reader." ) I wanted to offer my perspective on the subject as I deal with a lot of feed publishers on a daily basis.

The first thing i'll say is that it's that there are a lot of bloggers out there who write to me/us on a daily basis and want to make money off of their feed. I'm sure there are also a large number of bloggers that don't. Some of them want to do it via advertising, some of them want to do it via affiliate marketing, and some want to do it via a subscription model.

Here's where I see personal publishing business models landing over the long term at an equilibrium (and no one who states this is inventing this, it has ALL been said before).

Publishers who are currently getting paid for their content in some way will likely offer one or more of the following feeds to their readers:

1) A full content feed with some sort of contextual advertising or sponsorship

2) A summary feed that is advertising free and links back to the site (this is the dave winer "the feed is the advertising" model)

3) A full content feed that is provided under some monthly subscription model whether bundled into a pay aggregation service such as newsgator or provided by server software or intermediary service (down the road, but coming soon)

4) A full content feed that is provided under some pennies-per-click to read model (way down the road)

I'm not saying any of these are right or better for the greater good of the "blogosphere" but that's the equilibrium that i think publishers will land at with their readers/subscribers. That's very important. This is between publishers and their subscribers. If a publisher loses some percentage of their subscribers because they put ads in their feeds, but gains an income stream from the rest that don't mind, it is up to the publisher to determine which is worth more to them: a larger number of subscribers or a fewer number that supports the model financially.

If you are reading this via my feed, you know i've been messing around with all sorts of advertising here for months in both the feed and my HTML. I've been doing this semi-scientifically. I can tell you a couple things: 1) my subscriber base continues to grow and 2) I make more money when advertising in both the feed and the blog HTML than just in the HTML alone.

Does anyone like advertising in their media? I don't think so, but most people tolerate it up to a point because they understand it's necessary to fund services they might otherwise not enjoy.

I for instance am an XM radio subscriber. I choose to pay a subscription fee because advertising on the radio has gotten out of hand AND i think the content is much better. Are subscriptions a viable business model for XM and sirius? Not yet. Is advertising a viable business model for terrestrial/analog radio? yes, it seems to be. but this is another market that has not yet reached an equilibrium because the satellite companies are not profitable and subscription fees clearly do not outweigh the costs yet. XM recently got rid of ads in their broadcasts perhaps because a number of OEM cars were released, perhaps because they thought ad free radio is their competitive edge.

I wish there were a happy medium. Digital quality radio with some reasonable level of commercials and perhaps a low subscription fee. Business models for RSS/Atom i think will reach this happy medium quicker because there are so many more publishers and subscribers.

At any rate, i don't plan to get involved to or react to any of this from a religious perspective - such things are rarely productive. I will continue to be involved in this as it is part of my job/company and i am interested in it from a legal perspective. Such things such as "if i'm a publisher and i put ads in my feeds, does that become part of my copyrighted content? if someone uses my content without the advertising, is that violating my copyright?" are pretty interesting to me so i can't wait to see where that goes.

ciao.

--steve

my turn to podcast, um SongCast

partially so i could eat my own dogfood and learn how to use what we created at FeedBurner with SmartCast™, and partially because i've been waiting a long time to have an easy way to do RSS2 enclosures to start publishing some rich media, i've decided to publish some old songs i recorded in high school, college and beyond by jumping on the "podcasting" bandwagon. the time is nigh.

so i created a Blogger blog called SongCast and published a few tests in .m4a format.

believe it or not, i play guitar (well, i used to play guitar before i stopped) and most of this stuff used to be available on the old mp3.com (do a google search for "register mp3.com") until they performed a "rm -rf /" on the great big SAN before handing it over to vivendi.

i hope to play again soon, but i think i'll only record some funny covers and publish some of the stuff i've been messing around on with GarageBand because home recording is a lot of fun, but until then, Eccolo...

current king of the hill in blog search

in the continuing game of leapfrog that is weblog search technology - the one that is working best for me these days is blogdigger. what's different about them? who knows, but they seem to give the most up-to-date and correct search results.

we'll see who topples them next. it always seems like yahoo or google are one search parameter away from putting all these companies into a world of hurt, or of course identifying them as acquisition targets. we'll have to see how it plays out.

it amazes me how there are still a bunch of companies entering the search market trying to build the new new thing in search engines. snap.com (wonder how much NBC sold that URL for) and blinkx are two examples that come to mind of trying to do search in a much different way. (If Google Desktop intrigues you but you use Firefox, you should give blinx a try.)

newsgator online services is now free

Cool. Newsgator Online Services now has a free tier. It looks pretty good and offers some cool features like ratings - it will be interesting to see if i as a reader can reap any benefit from that.

It makes you wonder how they would measure up against bloglines if they had a free tier all along.

at any rate, great job Greg and team!

more on the feed:// protocol

it seems this convention has jumped over to the windows world as well. the new version of FeedDemon 1.1, which we have co-branded with FeedBurner also supports automatically adding feeds with "feed://" urls. this is going to make adoption of rss accelerate greatly, in my opinion.