The FeedFire Blog -

Full text RSS feeds can be used for nefarious reasons by spammers?

Tue, 09 May 2006 15:52:59 +0200

Are you putting ALL of your content into the RSS feed, or just the title and description tags?

Perhaps you should think about what may happen to your content, if you decide to place everything into the feed?

A wonderful, and thought provoking, article by the Technology Evangelist makes me wonder whether enough people know about the issue of plagiarism via the delivery of RSS feeds.

Putting ALL your content into the feed, means that it can be 'parsed' readily into any other webpage and not necessarily with your approval or permissions.

Whereas just supplying the title and description means that the end user has to click through for the body of the content, supplying the full text means that you have lost control of your own [intellectual] property, to some degree.

A great article, sure to set you think more about this contentious issue. Please do read it, you'll probably re-think your strategies hereinafter.

Plagiarising your feeds?

Warm wishes, my property protecting protagonist pals,

Mike

Zookoda : RSS to email service - a case of the old meets the new, makes the newest?

Tue, 09 May 2006 15:29:28 +0200

Zookoda have today released the latest version of their service, after 8 months of beta-testing it.

It's a good way to further deploy RSS feeds, and shows continuing evidence that they can be utilised in methods which combine established mechanisms, with newer technologies.

If your customers or readers etc, still do not wish to use RSS as the method of getting to your content/information, don't worry. They can STILL benefit from RSS, even though they may or may not have to know anything about it.

Zookoda

The methodology is quite simple and, for now, free.

You give Zookoda your RSS feed, and then await for customers to subscribe [or import your existing client base etc].

Then, on a schedule set by you, the contents of the feed are emailed out [when new items are added etc etc] and your customers simply receive an email.

The beauty is...all you need to do, is maintain your RSS feed and the clients who do NOT want to use feedreaders etc, can still be kept abreast of your content.

This is clever. It is no use simply demanding that your clients update their heads to cope with the many, and varied, demands that RSS feeds place upon them...they'll not thank you for that, and who wants to be friendly with an arrogant, demanding content/information/product supplier?

Best to accomodate many people, most of the time...let your email savvy clients takein your content via email, and your RSS users will readily lap up your feeds.

RSS need not be exclusively for those with a leaning towards technology, it is meant for information propogation...and I believe that this should be welcomed, in ANY guise.

Warm wishes, my many marketing muckers,

Mike

RSS appreciation day is to be 1st May, annually. EVERY day is RSS appreciation day, in my book!

Tue, 02 May 2006 11:15:11 +0200

RSS appreciation day has gone by. Well, so far as the calendar is concerned.

We all know calendars are subjective things, apt to change by mighty emperors or religious figureheads, so let's not pay attention to the calendar...let's make RSS appreciation day, EVERY DAY.

The true reason for making such and such a day 'Such and such a day' celebration/rememberance/memorial day, is to bring to our hearts and minds the subject at hand, and to make us realise that a difference has occurred, a change has taken place, the old is replaced by the new. It also strives to remind us that change MUST be made and that the community is only as strong as the individuals that it consists of.

RSS day is May 1st, a great idea and a great blog.

For me, RSS appreciation day IS every day. I could not contemplate an Internet PRIOR to RSS/feeds of any nomenclature/architecture etc. 'The Internet' seemed SO cutting-edge, but what an archaic structure it now seems...and some people are still unaware of that and still living in that hierarchy. Of course, it will continue evolving, thank goodness.

I would certainly NOT want to go back to an existence wherein I had to find the news, and it did NOT come to me.

I would not want to go back to having to wade through hundreds of pages, just to find the one item I did want.

I would not want to go back to having to click through hundreds of pages to read the authors of my choice.

Of course, the list goes on and one...but you can add to it, tenfold. Can't you?

In short, I could not as much live without RSS/feeds, as I could not cope without email; to me, the 2 are utterly everyday items that life has become very dependent upon, much as the telephone or the automobile form of transport.

Do you appreciate the greatness of the tools that life has made available to our generation right now? Should RSS appreciation be a daily event?

Warm wishes, my XML excited extroverts,

Mike

Mapping your RSS feeds to suit your customers-make the feeds as diverse as your clientele.

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 19:01:00 +0200

What's the point in bunging ALL your content into one feed? Aside from trying to please all the people all the time [and you'll fail, spectacularly] it can often mean that people get turned right off by having to sift through tons of irrelevant items, to hear about the sector/items that they ARE interested in.

Whether a seasoned pro [and therein lies a mystery: What IS the seasoning used?] or an outright newcomer, the following article may just set you off down a WONDERFUL path of understanding and insight along topics which may have failed to register, hitherto. It's easy to overlook such things, and we're all guilty of [sometimes] overlooking the answers, when they are directly in front of us. End the sweeping generalisation there, but you know what I mean.

Clearly written, beautifully articulated and making sense from the first word to the last, this article is a gem of a find and I heartily reccommend that you take a sneaky peeky at it, right away-else I'll start scooping my eyeballs out with hot razor blades, if you don't.

This should be complusory reading, for ALL people involved in making feeds.

Don't forget, with FeedFire you can make as many feeds as you wish.

Deciding how to flavour your RSS feed

Warm wishes, my irascible inmates,

Mike

RSS advertising. Turns you on, or switches you off?

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 12:34:54 +0200

Will the recent movements to make adverts readily available in any RSS feed, mark the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

For me, it marks the beginning of a period which will see marketing efforts reach hitherto unscaleable heights, and that my RSS rambling rogues, makes me wistful, indeed.

Pheedo have announced their new advertising system which allows you to drop a piece of cut-n-paste code into a feed, and et voila an advertising campaign is born.

See Pheedo advertising in RSS feeds system.

It will be embraced [OF COURSE!] by marketeers looking to make money from feed delivery. But they don't matter that much, they'll always look for a way to make a Porsche or 2.

But I can't see the end user really looking forward to having adverts in their feeds. In a medium that doesn't need advertising-rather it's the other way round-why would this be heralded by anybody BUT the advertisers hawking products or services.

I think this will have repercussions on feed publishers who introduce the advertising into their feeds.

Personally, I'll be moving away from publishers who deliver ads with their content...I, as you, have this choice and I always exercise it where possible.

FeedFire will NOT be introducing adverts into ANY of our feeds...free or otherwise, I simply am opposed, diametrically and diabolically, to this.

With many, many, many feeds, we have already been approached by varying advertising entities with a regard to perhaps introducing ads into our feeds. [NOT Pheedo, I hasten to add. No such approach has been made and we don't expect them to].

We already have developed a mechanism to do this....but don't be alarmed, it's just us being as inventive as we can. We LIKE making new things here, you'd be surprised what we've done and what we've made and what we've done for other people.

Back to the topic in hand.

Of course, you can just filter out the feeds.

Several parsers already exist for this [for webpage display] and I am 100% certain that FeedReaders will soon develop new features that will incorporate such filtering methods, on a per feed and per feed item basis.

Update: The following website offers a local proxy based filtering tool [free for now but likely to go commercial] which you download, install and set filtering rules. It is promised to arrive loaded with filters and hopefully they will keep abreast of developments by ad-pushers and issue new filters regularly or on demand.

Filtering out all the ads via a system based proxy in your toolbar [including Feed readers].

I wish Pheedo well, they are pioneering the new frontier and they seem like nice people [I read their blog] and they have developed a GREAT technology...I just wish that they'd never dreamed such a wicked dream!

Warm wishes, my anti-advertising-amours,

Mike

Adverts in RSS feeds? What doth the future hold, Nostradamus?

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 19:24:58 +0200

If I had a little Jack Russell, I'd call him or her, Nostradamus. If I had a big Jack Russell, I'd be carting it off to the circus and earning a fortune in the freak show.

What have average/over sized Jack Russells and Nostradamus got in common together?

Not much, except that the thought of both has sprung from reading a post about the future of adverts interspersed within feeds. I told you I was mad, and you wouldn't listen would you, oh no, you knew it all.

Aside from the thought of income from performing mutated canines, I initially felt an icy wind flow through my passages.

Advertising and RSS? The 2 are not seen, by me anyway, as natural allies. Yet most marketeers will see them as their bread and butter, certainly in the forthcoming months they will, and there will come a time when they will express a wonderment at how they 'earned' their Porsches WITHOUT such an unholy combo.

I could go on about why I don't agree with it, but hey...who needs another opinion, in an already over-opined sector.

See : Advertising; ruining all that's good about RSS?

All I'll say is that we have NO plans, whatsoever, to introduce adverts into any of our feeds provided to our luverlee users at FeedFire.

We HAVE mapped out how to insert adverts into ANY other feed [any, not just FeedFire originated ones] and a system of ad management too, but like Oppenheimer should have done...we're not unleashing that beast.

Not until Larry and Sergey give me a billion quids, at least. I have expensive principles, you know.

And a gigantic Jack Russell that gets through 300 cans of Pedigree Chum, most weeks.

Warm wishes, my marketing maniac mates,

Mike

Really Simple Stuff...an article worth reading about RSS...simply put, a good starting point.

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 15:53:14 +0200

I like the cut of this man's jib. He talks straight and talks clearly. I like his article on RSS and I'd gladly send any newbies there, should anybody ask about said technology. If he ever went for President of the RSS bell ringing club, I'd give him my vote.

This is just what the Dr ordered, a straightforward and plain-talking article about what RSS, feeds and feed syndication is.

The only thing missing, is a mention of FeedFire for which I will forgive the scurvied dog, for having written such a well thought piece. Insert friendly, happy, smiley face here in case the guy is a world champ in finger-biting or visceral-fat-removal-with-a-spoon.

Anyone looking in and wondering what RSS etc is all about, take a quick sneaky peeky here: Straight talking RSS zealot tells it like it is.

Warm wishes, my technological-type chums,

Mike

Is this such a surprise to you? People who read RSS feeds, do NOT provide them?

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 15:35:09 +0200

Well, if you're a web site owner, that should really shame you senseless...fancy being part of the information revolution and not practicing what you preach. Naughty girls and boys that you are, Headmaster Mike has taken it upon himself to educate you further.

If you operate or own a web site/service/offering [many monikers exist for said items, take your pick] or are part of an organisation that does and yet YOUR website does NOT offer a feed of any kind [RSS/Atom etc] then you are guilty...and I'm the Governor with the electric chair just warming up ready to test the conductivity of your backside.

What's your excuse? Tell me, aside from managemental apathy and dinosaur indifference, what is there stopping ANYBODY from deploying a web feed?

Don't know what one is? Well, go learn...it will take 10 seconds or so.

Don't know how to make one? Well, that's what FeedFire is all about, we make'em and bake'em in the flash of an eye. [Moot point: Do eyes flash or am I, yet again, mixing metaphors? I suspect the latter, as I am a bit of a swinger, metaphor-wise].

Don't know what to do with one even if I had one? Again, get using your noggin and deploy the braincells for a wee while....you put them on your webpages, is a good guess to start with. Thereinafter, you can easily learn what else to do with them.

I dunno. Next thing is you'll be telling me you don't know anything about atomic fusion and injecting badgers with isotopic sardine cultures.

Have a gander at this, my FeedFrenziedFriends: Reading RSS, but not deploying it?

Warm wishes, I hope you are all happy and healthy,

Mike

Making sense of it all?

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 18:40:34 +0200

Q: Do you have to be a Brain surgeon or rocket scientist to understand what RSS, Atom etc are/is all about?

A: "No, but you'd be forgiven for thinking that way", says Professor Michael Mozart Einstein, Nobel Laureate, Brain surgeon and rocket scientist in residence, FeedFire.com.

This is a land of confusion, as Genesis [the group not the theological scribings] once said. I like to think of myself as a big stick ready to unleash my whipping power OR to provide a helping crutch to those who may fancy that kind of shenanigans. Thus in my guise of signpost, I'll put some links here to things I think you you'll find an interesting read to keep yourself abreast of what's REALLY happening in the world of RSS, feeds and content distribution as a concept.

I am also here to reassure you that once you start to cut through the mud, there is actually some drinkable water in there [not that I am advising you to drink water that once contained mud, no way. I'm just mixing my metaphors].

Take a look at the following post from the guys at Feedster, who know quite a bit about these things.

http://www.feedster.com/blog/2006/04/26/the-shift-away-from-calling-it-all-rss/

Warm wishes,

Mike