Richard MacManus

Bloglines latest press release left me a bit puzzled at first. In the press release Bloglines congratulates itself on having reached half a billion blog and news feed articles in their database, concluding that it makes them “the strongest blog resource on the Internet.” Fair enough, but I wonder why have they are suddenly re-focusing … Read more

Steve Rider is one of the developers of Microsoft’s Start.com and he gives us an insight to the development plans for Microsoft’s nascent Web-based RSS Aggregator / portal homepage. I think it’s fantastic btw that Steve is willing to share his thoughts – and more importantly, that Microsoft lets him. Google could learn a thing … Read more

My posts about RSS Ripoff Merchants stirred up a lot of controversy and, somewhat surprisingly, it seems I’ve come out of it as The Bad Guy. I kind of feel like Lars Ulrich of Metellica in the Napster case – defender of artists rights 🙂 Anyhow, I wanted my posts to specifically address the issue … Read more

sponsored by: This week: RSS Ripoff Merchants summary, Web 2.0 for teachers, Open Source Radio talks about Web 2.0, EPIC II, search engines with RSS output. RSS Ripoff Merchants summary Well my follow-up post about RSS Ripoff Merchants certainly struck a few raw nerves, including for me. It attracted 55 comments, before I was forced … Read more

The latest version of Microsoft’s Web-based RSS Aggregator, Start.com, has just been released. Microsoft first released a prototype in early March 2005 – my coverage here. Start.com is like a mix between MyYahoo and the new Google Personalized Homepage. It enables users to subscribe to RSS feeds and it is closely integrated with search. Here … Read more

To summarise the issue so far…

Chris Lydon’s new public radio show, Open Source, goes live. First show is on Web 2.0! Chris wrote afterwards: “‘The revenge of the sources’ was a great line from Dave Winera powerful capsule of the driving energy in Web expressionism.” Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

Mitch Kapor demos Chandler at the D Conference Chandler is an Open Source PIM (Personal Information Mgmt) app. I’ve been following its progress for at least 3 years now. Progress has been slow, but Mitch Kapor showed off calendaring and some Web 2.0 plug-ins (utilising Amazon and Flickr API’s) at D. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb … Read more

Excellent techie tips from O’Reilly Radar: “A longer-term solution is to build your business model into the API. In my mind the most successful APIs for the company providing the APIs are those from Amazon and eBay.” Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

Always good to read how non techies are using Web 2.0: Teachers need to give Web 2.0 tools “to students and to members of our community, to stop speaking only to other teachers, to stop behaving as an expert class, and to find a way to have a stake in the interests and knowledge of … Read more

kuro5hin.org: “By acquiring a Print-on-Demand (POD) company and an ebook software company, Amazon.com is retooling itself to offer a complete publishing solution to authors disenchanted with the current state of publishing.” Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

NB: This is a re-posting, slightly edited. What would you do if someone was ripping your RSS feed off – that is, copying every single post into their website? And what would you think if some software companies actively encouraged this activity? I call these people RSS Ripoff Merchants. (a sidenote: I’m absolutely not talking … Read more

sponsored by: This week: the future of Web sites in a world of RSS, highlights from ION RSS, new Web 2.0 developments, Techie post of the week. Future of Web sites Matt McAlister, VP & General Manager, Online for InfoWorld, wrote this week that RSS is disintermediating InfoWorld’s Web site. In other words, RSS is … Read more

Google has just released its beta book search product Google Print (hat tip Diablo). The new service lets people search within the text of a book. Interestingly, I note that Amazon has a search inside this book feature too (how long has that been live? first time I’ve seen it). Both Google and Amazon searches … Read more

I have a theory about ads in RSS. It’s based on my assumption that people won’t click on ads in feeds enough for publishers to make much money. So I think we may be looking at the whole ads in feeds issue the wrong way. Allow me to explain… When someone subscribes to your RSS … Read more