So far, I’ve received several positive comments on the post I made several days ago on RSS feeds. So much so, that I have considered making more posts like it.

But I need your help!

I want to know what you’d like to read about. Is it blogs, web technologies, website startup news? Or do you have something in particular that you want to read about.

I want to know, because it’s important to you!

Post a comment or send me an email through my contact form.

For many of my clients, this post may seem a little too simple. More and more, I get questions on the basics of RSS feeds and how they are used to benefit blogs and news sites and the general blog reader. My goal with this post is to help answer some of those questions and to help proliferate the use of RSS feeds.

RSS Feeds. I love them. They organize my popular websites, improve my productivity, give me only the information that I want to see and help spread the content from my blog further.

So, what is RSS? In short, it’s called Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary or Atom depending on who you get your information from). RSS is a way to syndicate content from your website, blog, etc and make it available for others to access using an RSS reader. Most blogs (in fact almost all, including mine) come with an RSS feed with it that helps to syndicate the content you make on your blog for readers.

For example, say I went to a website like Techcrunch.com and I don’t want to have to go back to their website everytime I want to view their content, so I access their RSS feed and give that web address to my RSS feed reader (in my case, I use Google Reader). This funnels all of my news sources and blogs into one source so that I can get all of my updates quickly without having to visit every single website.

In addition, RSS feeds help me to distribute my content faster and better. You see, when I make a post to my blog, it automatically updates the RSS feed that my readers subscribe to, allowing them almostinstantaneous access to the content I posted.

A common misconception with RSS Feeds

There is also a little bit of confusion with RSS feeds, particularly when readers first look at a feed, often times all they see is code. For example, look at the sample below from my own RSS feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~d/styles/rss2full.xsl" type="text/xsl" media="screen"?><?xml-stylesheet href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~d/styles/itemcontent.css" type="text/css" media="screen"?><!-- generator="wordpress/2.1" --><rss xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0">

<channel>
	<title>InspireMedia Blog</title>
	<link>http://inspiremediablog.com</link>
	<description>The mind of John Wooton</description>
	<pubDate>Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:13:21 +0000</pubDate>
	<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.1</generator>

	<language>en</language>
			<atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="self" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/InspiremediaBlog" type="application/rss+xml" /><item>
		<title>Tetris Revamped</title>
		<link>http://inspiremediablog.com/2008/01/19/tetris-revamped/</link>
		<comments>http://inspiremediablog.com/2008/01/19/tetris-revamped/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:34:29 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>John</dc:creator>

		<category><![CDATA[Links]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Websites]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://inspiremediablog.com/2008/01/19/tetris-revamped/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This has to take some time and dedication, but is very cool…

The code you see is not any error, the code is the RSS feed. You see, RSS is written in a XML programming language. XML is meant to be read and interpreted by a browser or RSS Feed Reader. What you should do is ignore the code and copy and paste the web address of the feed in the browser into a RSS feed reader like Google Reader. The feed reader will read the XML code and spit out a readable format that you can read.

Take a look at the screen shot of my blog from Google Reader:

Google released a new user interface for the iPhone/iPod Touch the other day (they prelaunched this very thing in early December, but this was a full release).  The design is reminiscent of the Facebook iPod/iPhone UI released last year. I’ve included a screenshot below.

Get in touch with your inner geek… I will.

I discovered these this afternoon and had a blast going through them. All of these images are courtesy of thinkgeek.com. If you click on the images, you can get more information. Here are some of my favorites:

Ha!

Creative… it’s a caffeine molecule

For the spouses…

I believe you have my stapler

A little over-used, but still one of my favorites.

My absolute favorite. It’s a real wifi detector!

I know… I’m a…

Hey everyone,
I’m testing out mobile blogging using my new iPod touch. I hope to use this to post a little more often and from different locations.

Need I say more?

Over the past several days, I have seen more and more websites posting their 2007 reviews on tech news and startups. No doubt 2007 has brought a lot of turmoil to the tech world. My most viewed reviews comes from TechCrunch where they showcase their most popular headlines of 2007.

So, how will 2008 go? I think there will be two topics that will prevail amongst any other topics out there: mobile development and social development.

2007 was a very big year for mobile development with the release of the Apple iPhone. Google is in development of a new open-source mobile platform that will no doubt extend their reach further into the mobile arena (I think allowing them to then enable search marketing to those using the platform). New startups are beginning to focus their attention, also, to the mobile arena, developing their platforms to function with smaller devices. Facebook has already created an interface specific to the iPhone. Many services like Jaiku and Twitter also allow you to make mini posts (sort of like status updates) from your mobile devices. And technology is increasingly allowing users to do more with their smaller devices.

Social development has been a very big topic in 2007 with the news centering around Facebook and their controversial new ad-network. Facebook made the announcement in 2007 that they will allow targeted advertising. I had a chance to try out this targeted platform and while it didn’t do much for me, it was a breath of fresh air for online advertisers. (Honestly, though, it is a big leap forward. With the amount of social data that Facebook manages it seems fitting for them to create an ad network that would harness the information they store). Facebook also released an interesting ad network called Beacon. The release of Beacon, although controversial for it’s lack of opt-out support, allowed external websites to post in a users updates feed when they performed a particular task on their website. For instance, Blockbuster might post in my update feed that I added “24 - Season 6″ to my movies queue. The power of the service allows for the creative marketing of actions that occur outside of social networks. While there was some initial backlash on the service from the consumer standpoint, the idea is novel and powerful. I expect this to be a big player in ‘08.

Google has also been a big news maker in the social arena. Earlier this year, they released the OpenSocial platform creating a new medium with which to aggregate social network applications across a variety of various social networks. The launch of the service inclued an impressive number of social networks participating with the API including hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn. A few days later, MySpace made the announcement that they will participate bringing pressure to the table for Facebook which uses it’s own fbml programming language to create applications for it’s users. The software was unimpressive at first being hacked withing 45 minutes. Improvements have been made with the software with their 0.6 release. This software is very much still in beta and will be a very big power-player in 2008.

Ning has also been a big playing the social arena in 2007. They reached a milestone by adding their 100,000th social network and have just recently announced that an major update to their service will make social networks more centric based allowing for news and information to be displayed from individual social networks rather than all social network news to be generated from the entire community at large. There is big popularity having the ability to create your own social network and as the web grows into more a platform, this ability will be key to generating impressive numbers of social data for small to medium businesses.

All this is in addition to the continued growth of social mediums like Youtube will make 2008 a very big year for social marketing.

To everyone… Have a very Merry Christmas. We hope you enjoy time with friends and family.

Here’s a little video to get you in the mood this week!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fe11OlMiz8]

Many in the blogosphere have taken steps to give you another method to subscribe and access their unique content dubbed vlogging. Vlogging or video blogging is just what it sounds like. Blog authors create videos as their posts and add them to their blog or upload them via a third party software service like YouTube. It adds a new creative medium into the web 2.0 world that is expanding almost daily. And with blogging technology the way it is currently, it is simple to add videos to your blog.

Traditional blogging is nice because it allows you to create content that can help you compete for keywords.

Vlogging is nice because while often times bloggers begin blogging because they hope to show their consumers a “different side” of their business, vlogging offers the consumer the chance to know you better. Vlogging allows the consumer to see you, your mannerisms, personality and charisma. With blogging, the consumer has to put the peices together as they read along. Plus, it’s now easier than ever to begin to embed video ads into your content. This allows you to generate ad revenue on videos that you create. Third party software doesn’t yet allow the addition of custom ads into your content, but the technology is fast being developed to allows you to create the video and control the advertising content in the video you post, netting you valuable ad revenue dollars, especially if a video goes viral such as the bubble video I posted a little while ago.

The downside to vlogging is the loss of valuable content that helps you compete with other websites for the keywords and search traffic that can add a significant amount to your bottom line. This can make vlogging a good and bad thing.

But if you’re not worried about search traffic and you want to give it a try. Check out a few video podcasts on iTunes and find a few video blogs that you like and try it out for yourself. Most vloggers that I have come across will upload their videos to YouTube and use the code generated or the link to the video to embed it into their website or blog.

And if you have questions about vlogging or need help learning how to do it, send me a email through my contact form, here.

It’s a known fact that web developers often work from multiple computers. Whether it’s a Vista PC at home or a Mac at the office, it can be tedious to keep up with your documents and finding the most current version. Using a flash drive is convenient, but can easily fall out of your pocket or get lost. So earlier this year, I started using Google Docs, Google’s new online Office competitor.

Google got an early hold on this market when they bought Writely, one of the first services to take word processing online. Since then, they’ve integrated it into their system as Google Docs and Spreadsheets. All users who have a Google account can access the service for free.

The one thing I love about Google Docs, (besides the fact that I can access my docs online from any PC) is the sharing feature. My wife and I share documents back and forth and it makes it very simple to coordinate on projects. In fact, I can include a group of collaborators in on the same doc making coordination of projects very simple. You can even publish it to let the public at large view a doc.

Another feature that I love that really made me finally switch from working offline is the revisions feature. I can go back to every saved revision of a document and either restore it or copy and paste from it to the current working revision. I know many would like this in Word, and granted there are programs out there that can track versions of programs on you’re desktop. Many who are working with the new Mac OS have discovered this same type of feature, but it’s a long process and the revisions aren’t integrated into the software you’re working with. Google Docs integrates it and with one click you can see the various revisions of your docs online.

In fact, with Google’s current technology in development (I’m referring to Google Gears - I’ll talk about it in a later post), Google is setting the stage for both online and offline functionality with Google Docs (although not yet available).

Google Docs can also handle all of your current documents and allows you to upload from a myriad of different word processing programs whether it be text files, rtf, doc, or odt as well as spreadsheet docs. And it can also export to a myriad of doc formats, including PDF (very helpful to those people like me who need to save a doc as pdf and don’t want to install pdf995 or use a third party program).

Is it a perfect solution, not entirely. With Google Docs, you have to get used to the formatting of documents and it can be a challenge to use initially, but the benefits far outweigh anything else. If you have a Google account or use Gmail like me, you can access Google Docs by simply clicking on the Documents link at the very top left of your screen when you’re logged in.