Friday, January 02, 2004

The Top 100 feeds of members of the RSS-User list. 

An idea for a new Top Level Domain, that behaves a little differently, from a technical and economic standpoint, than the other TLDs. 

Jay Rosen: "Let the record reflect that on the first day of 2004, Adam Nagourney, political reporter for the New York Times, wrote an assessment of the campaign for president and the word Internet did not appear once." 

Ross Mayfield: "Patriot Act II has still yet to be covered by the mainstream media." 

New feature: "If you're a member, have uploaded your subscriptions, and are logged in, when you display the Top 100 page, each item will have a checkbox indicating whether or not you're subscribed." 

Something must be wrong with me. I just glanced out the window and it's snowing. What's wrong? It makes me happy to see the snow. I guess it's still early in the season.  

Philip Miseldine: OPML in 2004. 

Next step -- invite people who read this site to participate. If your aggregator can export an OPML list of the feeds you're subscribed to (most can) then become a member of the feeds site, and either upload your OPML, or enter a URL where the OPML can be read. 23 people are participating at the beginning of the day; I'd like to see 100 people by the end. I'm going to write some more code today and fix bugs, as they come up. So far we've tested it with quite a few aggregators, esp NetNewsWire and BlogLines, but I'm sure there are more interesting ways to export OPML that we've yet to discover. I'm going to publish the souce for the parser so there are no mysteries, using a very liberal open source license. If you have trouble, if you can provide the full OPML that would be great. Read the FAQ for details. 

Thanks to Chuck Welch for explaining how to export OPML subscription lists from FeedDemon.  

Thanks to Steven Garrity for explaining how to export from Straw.  

Tim O'Reilly's 2004 wish list. 

Search for cute animals on Google.  

In a bid to get his blog to validate, Scoble removed the Trackback feature. Apparently the W3C, a big booster of RDF, doesn't like it when you include it for Trackback? It'll be interesting to learn why this is. 

Scoble: "Insert evil laugh here." 

The Top 100 list itself is available in OPML. Note that I included the counts, so that different communities can be added together to form a super-top-100 list. I'm already thinking that our weblog server at Harvard might produce one of these files. No need to do the work in two places. 

BTW, to people who keep weblogs at Harvard, I was surprised to find that Manila already exports subscriptions in OPML; and Radio was the original OPML exporter. I started a list of aggregators and how they export OPML. If you have a favorite, please post an explanation on your blog and send me a pointer. Screen shots are generally very helpful.  

Modulo 26 on how to indicate changes in your RSS feed. Actually RSS 2.0 has a beautiful (and simple) way of doing this, so people who subscribe to your feed won't even see the minor spelling and grammar changes. Ask the developer of your weblog tool to support it. Most aggregators already do. For an example look at the feed for this weblog. 

Chris Heilman: Venus, menorah and a faux western town.