Webfeed Grab Bag, Dec. 5

Here are a few items related to webfeeds that caught my attention over the past month…

TOP OF THIS LIST: Bad Syndication, CMS Webmaster, Oct. 11. Excellent advice on which kinds of content do and don’t work well in a webfeed, and why.

Read the rest of this list…

Feeds: To sort, or not to sort? In My Whole Life in Happy Little Folders, Jeffrey Veen explains how he organizes and prioritizes his many webfeed subscriptions using folders. I use folders too. Dave Winer says folders are the wrong way to use feeds. Um, sorry Dave, but feed folders work for me – and that’s not “wrong.”
Teri Vogel’s list of cool new feeds: Teri strikes gold again – I love her blog. She recently published a list of webfeeds from a variety of government sources. Part 1 was published Nov. 3, and Part 2 came out Nov. 17. (Webfeeds – They’re not just for blogs anymore!) She noted: “…The National Agricultural Statistics Service proudly announced their new feed for news and announcements. I’m glad to see that government agencies are moving forward with this, [but] the piecemeal aspect of this movement is not encouraging. Ideally, the feeds should be offered at the top level (here, the USDA), with the news from the 17 agencies funneled upward.” …Yeah, that’s a great idea. It makes a lot of sense – which, I believe, violates federal communication policy…
Overture tests RSS ads, by Stefanie Olsen, News.com, Nov. 17. “Still, there is potential for controversy. Publishers and bloggers that offer their news via RSS feeds could view any third-party commercialization of their content as unfair.” In Searchblog on Nov. 16, John Batelle explored this in greater detail.
Advertisers Muscle Into RSS , Wired News, Nov. 18. Feedburner is running its a pilot ads-in-feeds program.
Here’s a question…, by Doc Searls, IT Garage, Nov. 17. Doc would like someone to develop a way to block ads in webfeeds.
The RSS Enclosure Exposure : In this Nov. 5 Internet News article, Sean Michael Kerner explores several possible uses for the enclosure feature of the RSS 2.0 standard. Enclosures are definitely not just for podcasting.
Why advertising in RSS is boring, by Dave Winer, Nov. 18. “[If] your feed only has summaries of your article (Example: NY Times). To read the full article you have to click on a link and (listen very carefully now) see an ad as you read the article. In other words, the RSS feed is itself an ad, pulling you in to read a page with a big ad on it. You want to put an ad on the ad? Okay, but it’s getting pretty thick. I might start feeling used and not like it, and unsub. In other words, think carefully about how much advertising you think your readers can endure.”
FeedForAll webfeed creation tool: I haven’t tried it, but it looks interesting. Unit price: $39.95 (US). (Thanks to WebProNews for this link.)
Feed readers that feed off each other. In his June 23 eWeek, column, RSS for Food, Steve Gillmor proposed an interesting idea: feed readers that share information about which items are getting read, as a way to both monitor popularity and get recommendations.
NewsGator online review: Another good one from Teri Vogel. On Nov. 4 she published a fairly detailed review of the pros and cons of the new free feed reader service NewsGator Online. Worth a read. I agree with her that it’s nice to see Bloglines get some serious competition.
DO NOT USE Feedfire: This tool is definitely one to avoid. As I’ve mentioned before, “scraped” webfeeds present an ethical and possibly legal quandary. A scraped feed is created when you use a program to automatically monitor the content of a web site or other online venue, scrape off the headlines and other desired bits, and use that to generate your own feed – without the permission of the content creator. Personally, I don’t have a problem with using a scraped feed solely for my own information (i.e., to follow the latest news), but I would never republish the contents of a scraped feed on my own site. However, the folks at Feedfire specifically promote the use of scraped feeds for syndication. I smell a lawsuit coming…