Tyler Reed, who recenly joined (yesterday in fact!) the podcaster in-crowd, has another achievement to be proud of… That of winning first place in the Apple ipodcast Comedy & Standup Category (Week 3) with his podcast, Jannie’s GPS System!
Well done Tyler! We can’t wait to hear more of it!
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
RSS feeds are a great way of staying in touch with conversations on one’s favourite blogs. I have been subscribing to many different feeds in Feedreader lately simply because I don’t have time to browse immediately, but often read a post or two whenever I get the chance. There is just one (slight) problem I have encountered… There seem to be an increasing number of sites with RSS url’s that look something like this:
This is a problem because Firefox does not recognise the url as a feed url at all (neither does Feedreader) and gives me an error message, as can be seen below, instead of automatically inserting the feed into my Feedreader.
The work around is to simply edit the url, deleting the “feed://” part, and inserting a semi-colon between the http’s p and the first forward slash (/) like so:
http:/
and then copy the new url into Feedreader. Note: You can also do the editing within Feedreader.
My question is however, why are some feeds represented like this in the first place?
At the WebPR+ conference Sally Falkow expounded on a variety of means one can draw on to make it easier for blog visitors to syndicate and access one’s content. This is certainly not one of them.
Case in point: even though I am comfortably net-savvy, when faced with this error the first few times I actually thought the feed was broken and immediately browsed away without the syndicated content. What will a first-time RSS user do?
I hope that there is a really simple solution and explanation for this phenomenon! Until then, some of the RSS feeds I want to subscribe to will continue to go *bump* in the night…
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
chilibean is all about passion, and lots and lots of luvin… Indeed, everytime we hear people talking about us our hearts do a little chili dance (watch this space - I’ll be publishing evidence of this soon)!
Our chilibean passion came to fruition when we launched chilibean media on Valentines day - the international day of luvin - and now we’ve caught wind of a growing chilibean fan base. You must know what that does to us - infact, I’m still trying to locate Paul in the stratosphere!
However, we don’t really know who you, our chili fans, are.
It’s with this in mind that we’ve devised a strategy through which we’d be able to get to know you better, and the best part of all is that it’s really easy to do. Bookmark your site with the tag “chililuvin” on del.icio.us. We’ve already set up the feed so that the moment you add the chililuvin tag to your site we’ll know who you are.
These are the steps to follow:
Voila! You are our newest fan, and by association, we are yours. So tag your site with “chililuvin” and join our fan club… you know you wanna!
Oh, and if you haven’t quite had enough of all the chililuvin going around, why not spread the love and add our funky flash banner widget to your site?
Tags: chilibean media, chilibean, chililuvin, launch, del.icio.us, fan club, mike stopforth
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
I found this interesting article on Economist.com this morning, as I was researching new media solutions. The article explores the history of media from the discovery of the technology of movable type in 1448 to new media as it is today, and in particular the “reincarnation” of movable type.
These two incarnations of movable type make convenient (and very approximate) historical book-ends. They bracket the era of mass media that is familiar to everybody today. The second Movable Type, however, also marks the beginning of a very gradual transition to a new era, which might be called the age of personal or participatory media. This culture is already familiar to teenagers and twenty-somethings, especially in rich countries. Most older people, if they are aware of the transition at all, find it puzzling.
The article is definately a worthwhile read. What I find exciting is the discussion of how new media is participatory, providing for new business models where the “audience” or “consumer” actually input information and knowledge instead of just sitting pretty at the receiving end.
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
I have been using Feedreader ever since I was introduced to Feeds many many moons ago. I find it just right for my feed needs… just as most people have a preferred email client, I have my Feedreader (although I have to admit that I am looking at the Google Reader, based on Paul’s article, as I type!) Be that as it may, I have found one fault with Feedreader… when I am viewing my feeds at work, from behind a proxy, I cannot see any of the images embedded in the feeds. Of course I just wrote this down to “proxy issues” and forgot about it (I don’t have the time to read each of my feeds in a browser, simply to view the images!)… Ah but wait. I downloaded and installed the latest version of Feedreader, version 3.06, today and viola! I have images. I don’t know how this issue was resolved… but that is the beauty of new media, you don’t need to understand the how’s, all you need to do is appreciate it… Just as I’m appreciating my feeds, especially those chilibean ones, with all their images!
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
According to an article on Tectonic[1], Web 2.0 is listed as a key emerging technology in Gartner’s “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2006″ report. The report targets organisations who plan to adopt emerging technologies, and features 36 technologies “that have great potential impact or that are being significantly hyped or underhyped in the marketplace”(Gartner). The report highlights three key areas, namely Web 2.0, the Real World Web, and Applications Architecture. Those technologies categorised under Web 2.0 are Social Network Analysis (SNA), Ajax, Collective Intelligence, and Mashup.
2006 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies (Gartner, 2006)
The emerging technologies hype cycle covers the entire IT spectrum but we aim to highlight technologies that are worth adopting early because of their potentially high business impact,? said Jackie Fenn, Gartner Fellow and inventor of the first hype cycle. One of the features highlighted in the 2006 Hype Cycle is the growing consumerisation of IT. Many of the Web 2.0 phenomenon have already reshaped the Web in the consumer world?, said Ms Fenn. Companies need to establish how to incorporate consumer technologies in a secure and effective manner for employee productivity, and also how to transform them into business value for the enterprise?.
[1] Incidentally, Tectonic announced the termination of publication of its magazine this week, citing a lack of funding - specifically in the form of advertising - and a need to focus its energies on its web presence as the fundamental reasons for its decision.
Technorati tags: web2.0, gartner, hype cycle, emerging technology, social network analysis, ajax, collective intelligence, mashup, real world web, applications architecture, tectonic
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
Now that you know more about blogs from Paul’s articles (I & II), it’s time to introduce you to web feeds, which are usually closely coupled with blogs.
Web feeds go by many names including just plain feed?, XML feed, web syndication, syndication, aggregation, RSS, and Atom. In this article I’m going to refer to it as a feed? for the sake of simplicity.
So what is a feed? A feed is a small file published in a special format (XML). It contains a summary of the recent content published on a web site, and allows you to find out about updates to that site without having to browse to it. This is one of the cool advantages of feeds, not only are you updated with new information from your favourite sites, but you’re kept posted with any changes on them too.
Who publishes feeds? Feeds are mainly associated with blogs and news sites, but are growing in popularity for syndicating almost any information on the web. This even includes sharing company information across an organisation! Another development is the use of feeds for publishing newsletters. Imagine publishing your newsletter on your website, whilst it is automatically sent out to all the people who subscribe to your feed, at the same time.
How do I know whether a site has a feed? Most sites conform to displaying an orange button or a link labelled with either XML 
, RSS 
, or Atom 
in the sidebar (although it could be placed anywhere on the site) to show that they have a feed. Another handy way of discovering whether a site has a feed, and if you use Mozilla Firefox as your browser, is to look in the right hand corner of the navigation bar. If you see a button like this 
called a live bookmark, you’ll know that the page has a feed.
Where do I begin? The first thing to do is actually subscribe to, and read, some feeds. Before you can do that you need to find a feed aggregator / feed reader / RSS reader / RSS client. There are two types of feed readers, web-based and installable applications. The pro to using a web-based reader is that you’ll be able to view your feeds from any computer with an internet connection, but you won’t be able to access your feeds offline as you can with a reader installed on your computer.
Here are some feed readers to get you started:
- Feed reader - Windows-based desktop feed aggregator (what Victoire uses)
- NetNewsWire - A newer, standalone desktop aggregator for MacOS X (what Paul uses)
- Headline Viewer - The original desktop aggregator. For most versions of Windows.
- SharpReader - Windows-based desktop aggregator; many features.
- Radio UserLand - Hybrid desktop/Web aggregator and weblogging tool. Windows and Macintosh (7.5.5+ and OSX).
- News is Free - Another Web-based aggregator which also does some third-party scraping.
- Apache JetSpeed - An Enterprise-class Java Portal that supports RSS.
In part two I’ll go into more detail about how to publish your own feed, as well as some nifty ideas and tricks on using feeds.
Resources for further reading:
- SixApart - About Feeds (XML, RSS and Atom)
- RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters
More links to resources can be found at my del.icio.us feeds bookmarks page: http://del.icio.us/victoire_za/feeds
Technorati Tags: feeds, syndication, aggregation, xml feed, rss, rss feed, atom, news, blog, blogging
This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.
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