I just read a great post over at Google Blogoscoped on the currently experimental “Offline” feature that is currently being tested with Google Docs. I was hoping this type of functionality and in a previous post mentioned that through Google Gears, they were setting the stage for this.

The downside, though, is that I don’t have access to the page that where he found the option to go offline. He mentioned that it’s not an option that will be available soon. If anyone does notice the feature, let me know.

I was reading through my feed reader tonight and ran across a particularly interesting story from Nick O’Neill. He reported yesterday that Facebook made some changes to their application developement platform that enabled the use of your created applications on your own website. The Javascript client library update they released enables not only the existence of Facebook applications outside of the Facebook website, but it also enables the use of cookies to access user data.

This just on the heels of Facebook joining the DataPortability Work Group, a group that’s sole focus is to increase the “sharability” of data between services and organizations across the web. (It’s also a group that boasts some very big names like Microsoft, Myspace, LinkedIn and more).

I’ll be watching this one pretty closely.

Among many things that I do, I also try to make time to test out some of the new online services that are made available. Pownce is a service that has been in beta for some time and just recently opened their doors to the public. It’s an online service that allows you to send stuff to your friends online.

What can you send, you might ask?

Just about anything. Music, links, photos, messages, events to your friends and even to the general public.

It’s a software that seemlessly integrates into your existing social networks (it offers support for Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and Flickr, and also allows you to search your email contacts to find others who might already be utilizing Pownce).

The application of this is great if you’re wanting to send various things to a lot of people but don’t have the time to keep up with the different email addresses of your friends.

For those that have been following the service, it was rumored that it was headed for its end shortly before their public launch. You can read more about it on Techcrunch here and here

Also, note that Leah Culver is the lead developer on the project who is also in my blogroll.

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:

This has to take some time and dedication, but is very cool…

Last night Techcrunch held their annual Crunchies awards. The recap is here (they should have video live soon). Below are the websites that I use that were awarded last night. Congrats to all of them:

Best Overall: Facebook

– I said not too long ago that social networking would be huge in 2008. I believe that not only will Facebook lead the way, they’ll top Myspace in 2008 (just my opinion).

Best Video Startup: Hulu

– I agree completely with this one. They had a slow and rough start, but the service is very cool.

Best International Startup: Netvibes

– This has got to be one of the best sites for organizing external content feeds.

Best Mobile Startup: Twitter

– This service I rarely use (mainly because of time constraints), but the concept behind it is great.

Best Consumer Startup: Meebo

– I love this service, mainly because it allows for the use of multiple chat platforms using an online webtop.

Best Enterprise Startup: Zoho

– Zoho made the list of websites that I use quite frequently. Their Zoho Creator service is extremely useful for creating custom applications and can now even be used as the backbone database for existing emterprise applications.

Most Likely to Succeed: Automattic (Wordpress)

– In case you’re wondering… this is a Wordpress blog and a lot of professional bloggers use Wordpress as the backbone of their blogging system.

Again, congratulations to everyone that received an award last night.

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.

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.

I saw this on TechCrunch this morning. Very creative… just had to share.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I]

side note: Apparently from news from Saturday, the video has been removed from Youtube at the photographers request. Boo! I really liked that one!

new side note: The video is now back. So enjoy!

I just got my private invitation to Hulu tonight. Hulu is a service in private beta that offers videos and clips from your Favorite NBC and Fox shows like Heroes and 24.

The feature I love the most is the embed feature. See, I can take an entire episode and embed it on my blog, or I can add custom sized clips like the one below.

Love it!

[flash http://www.hulu.com/embed/aYYJeUSy90x283gEyIJ-lb3re3K3xDm9 w=480 h=272 flashvars=st=144&et=233]