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Youtube Video: RSS Beyond Blogging

Today at ETech, Amit Sharma (one of the smartest guys at /n software) did a short presentation about RSSBus called "RSS Beyond Blogging: Connecting Applications with Feeds". The presentation went very well, and below is the YouTube version of the video that Amit started the presentation with.

We worked on this video together using Camtasia Studio, and although it was an interesting and sometimes frustrating process working with Camtasia Studio, the final product looks great. Its hard to tell in this lower-quality, youtube-ized version, but here it is anyway. Please comment on it and let me know what you think!

posted @ Tuesday, March 27, 2007 10:18 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ RSSBus ]

RSSBus new beta - rsb:pipe

A minor beta update has been announced on the RSSBus blog (read about it here). Last summer I talked about how RSSBus gives you the ability to pipe together feeds and items from feeds. One of the really cool features of this new beta update is a new RSSBus script keyword: <rsb:pipe>. This new keyword simplifies the piping of feeds. I no longer have to use nested <rsb:call>'s, instead I can just put a series of calls inside the pipe and they are automatically connected and what comes out the end of the pipe is automatically pushed out to the resulting feed by RSSBus.

As a quick example, consider the script I posted last month about how to get a list of Amazon wishlist items for the top emailers in your inbox. That script looked like this:

<rsb:call save="mail" op="imapSearch?server=myserver&searchcriteria=ALL" /> 
<rsb:call save="union" op="rsbFeedUnion?feed=[_feeds.mail | urlencode]&filter=imap:fromemail" /> 
<rsb:call op="rsbSort?feed=[_feeds.union | urlencode]&sortby=rsb:count&type=numeric"> 
  <rsb:call op="amazonListSearch?email=[imap:fromemail]&type=wish"> 
    <rsb:push /> 
  </rsb:call> 
</rsb:call> 

Now that script is not difficult to read and is fairly straight forward: search for mailers, save the results, union the results to filter duplicates, sort the results, and retrieve wishlist info for the results. Pretty easy.

But now its easier. With <rsb:pipe>, I can now get the same result feed without the nested call. Here is an example of <rsb:pipe> that works similarly to the above script, except for this example I'll change two things:

1. I'll get the wishlists of my Google Talk buddies instead of my top emailers.
2. I'll not only get the wishlist details, but I'll get the details of each item in the wishlists as well.

So now I'm piping together a list of Google Talk buddies with an Amazon wishlist search with an Amazon wishlist retrieval, and finally customizing the rss title and description of each result.

<rsb:pipe>
  <rsb:call op="gtalkBuddies" />
  <rsb:call op="amazonListSearch?email=[gtalk:id]" />
  <rsb:call op="amazonListGet?listid=[amz:listid]" />
  <rsb:set attr="rss:title" value="From [amz:customername]'s wishlist ([amz:listname])"/>
  <rsb:set attr="rss:description">
    From [amz:customername]'s wishlist ([amz:listname])<br />
    [amz:title]<br />
    <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/[amz:asin]"><img src="[amz:imgurl]"/></a>
  </rsb:set>
</rsb:pipe>

Technorati : amazon ecs, ecs, mashup, pipes, rss, rssbus

posted @ Friday, March 23, 2007 4:11 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ RSSBus ]

Upcoming conferences: Etech, MMS, Web 2.0

/n software will be at several upcoming conferences, including the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, the Microsoft Management Summit, and the Web 2.0 Expo. If you will be there, stop by and say "Hi!".

posted @ Tuesday, March 20, 2007 9:26 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ RSSBus ]

How to fix Technorati, CoComment, Twitter, and on and on...

Andy Beard, on his blog with more eye-cringing flair than any I've seen in recent memory, touches on a very important subject:

"Technorati simply can't cope with new forms of blogging and RSS feed generation."

This is only going to get worse for Technorati and many other services that use (not just track) RSS feeds. But I don't think the question is "how to fix Technorati?", as Andy suggests. I think the question is how to fix Technorati AND CoComment, Twitter, and the like. Fortunately the answer is very simple. Really simple. Just like RSS.

RSS feed producers need to use appropriate meta data to describe what type of content they are syndicating. If CoComment defined their own namespace and used a prefix on their RSS item elements, Technorati would be able to use those feeds to take advantage of such powerful metadata and improve their service as well as CoComment's usefulness to the community as a whole.

On a side note, one thing Andy mentioned is just plain wrong:

"Technorati could use coComment as a way to filter out splogs, because blogs that don't get comments might be a good indication of splogs and reblogs."

Andy, are you telling me that "sploggers" are not smart enough to catch on to such a thing and add comments to their splogs? Are you telling me that a blog without any comments doesn't contain useful information? No, and no.

Technorati : cocomment, rss, rssbus, technorati, twitter

posted @ Tuesday, March 13, 2007 2:46 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ RSSBus ]