Yahoo News Rocks! Here's Why... (Plus a Question For All) Options

[Grumpus]

Okay, I am thinking we need a forum on RSS (or rather, to expand an existing forum to cover it - I'm just not sure which one...)

I finally got around to checking up on all the way cool stuff Y!'s been doing with RSS of late. I'm still sitting here shaking my head in awe at all of this... Firstly, within a matter of moments of playing around I stumbled upon my earthshattering news of the day. But even beyond that, there's just so much going on that I'm still discovering stuff. I was going to make a Cre8ative Flow Blog entry on this, but there's so much here that I'm sure a discussion will start about it.

Okay. First things first.

A little while back, Yahoo started a "My Yahoo Rss Feed" deal. If you have a Yahoo account, you can go to my.yahoo.com and turn it on. You then either type in the URL of the feed you'd like to show or enter a keyword and it'll suggest feeds for you. (Yahoo Slurp seems to discover feeds and index them accordingly - a search for the term "cre8asite" brought up our blog feed in the results). After adding the cre8asite feed and the highrankings feed (also found via a keyword search) I clicked the "suggest more feeds based upon the ones you've already selected" link and it suggested the webmasterworld feed!!! (I haven't found it in there, yet, but an article I was reading suggested that there was a way to see how many Y! people are subscribing to your feed. I'll look more later on and let you know if I find it).

So, once you're done with picking out your feeds, you go back to your my.yahoo page and it lists everything right there so you can see everything at a glance. Way Cool.

- side note question as promised in this thread title: I've been considering doing something like this at Cre8asite.net for a while now. Basically, you'd create an account there and when you go to your Control Panel page (a page that you can bookmark or make as your browser start page). From there, you'd be able to subscribe to (and view in HTML format) any RSS feeds. We'd keep a master list of web related ones and a list of "non web related ones so it'll be easy to go in and find new ones based upon the ones that other people add. It is a service that would be ad supported (probably Google adwords and some relevant products from the Amazon shop we have over there). My question is: Is this something that folks would find useful and interesting? If so, let me know and the more votes I get, the higher it'll get on my to-do list.

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Now, for the second, even cooler aspect of Yahoo's RSS feed ventures is Yahoo News RSS stuff. All of the top general news categories have their own feeds. There are like 20 specialized feeds in the technology section including the RSS and Blogs Feed Feed that details news in the Blogging and RSS areas.

Now, even cooler than that is the ability to make your own custom feed. For example, I made one for myself that will keep me abreast of all the latest Farscape News. Since the format of the feed is a little odd, Jeremy Zadowny has created a little Yahoo RSS URL generator that'll do the job for you. Plug in a keyword/term and it'll show you every news article containing it. (Hint: you can put in a company's stock symbol and get all the news about that company, too!)

So, there aren't really any comprehensive news feeds out there specifically dealing with "Usability," are there? Well, there is now and you can see the usability news feed right here. WAY COOL!

Yeah, Yahoo!'s in it to make money, but every so often, they provide you with proof that they're doing something good with that money!

G.

P.S. Please let me know your thoughts on a personalized web feed reader at Cre8asite.net.

[Grumpus]

Ahhh - I figured out how you can find out how many subscribers you have on Yahoo's RSS thingamajig... It shows up in your site logs in the User Agent. Something like this:

CODE

66.218.65.52 - - [23/Mar/2004:08:13:30 -0800] "GET /blog/rss2.xml

HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0;

MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html; users 236; views

36994)"

That's Jeremy Zawodney's referer agent listing for his blog. As you can see, 236 people have signed up for it and his feed's been viewed from yahoo 36944 times.

Now, the tracking analyzer software I have for our cre8tive flow blog sucks and only lists top user agents, so I'll have to go dig on my own if I want to see yahoo's, but I did notice this one in there:

CODE

Bloglines/2.0+(http://www.bloglines.com;+2+subscribers)

So, it looks like it's common practice for blog spiders to leave this kind of reference in your logs. (I've never had a blog site to manage before, so this may be old news to most of you bloggers, but hey, what do I know...)

Anyway, there it is...

G.

[Jonathan]

P.S. Please let me know your thoughts on a personalized web feed reader at Cre8asite.net.

Sounds good to me.

[Ruud]

Yes, RSS is way nice. And that Yahoo is bringing it into the public eye this way is excellent.

The cre8te RSS reader might be nice for the people who haven't come around yet to discovering the joys of RSS. As for myself, I'm a NewsGator addict: a RSS reader that plugs into, and becomes part of, Outlook.

Ruud

[Grumpus]

Oh yes - it's definitely something for the "unitiated". Opera's got one built into it now, too. (I think it's a part of the mail reader too - similar to how UseNet groups are set up in mail readers, I'd imagine).

They are definitely becoming more mainstream. The main idea with my "vision" of that personal start-page is to give a place that someone in the web industry can go and get a "snapshot" of everything that goes on in the industry. (Well, as much of it as we can fit onto a page). It's a massive project (not as big as the directory itself, but big) and RSS is a good start at being able to cover a lot of ground in a small space.

After spending a few more ours playing with Y! feeds the other day, I actually ended up changing my gameplan a bit. I'm not sure the "end-user" product is the way to go. It's the "middle user" product where the value lies. I'll be experimenting with this over the coming weeks and months and hopefully I'll have some things for folks to play with before too, too long. (And yeah, Ruud, it oughtta work in your NewsGator, too. )

G.

[Adrian]

I'm thinking one of the main areas RSS feedreaders need to be proficient in, is tracking a persons feeds and letting them know as and when its updated. A bit like we have here, links like 'view messages since your last visit' and that kind of thing. I have Feed Demon at home, but to be honest, haven't used it a great deal because of that. Whether its just me not knowing how to use it properly or not, I don't know. I just found it difficult knowing what I'd read and what I hadn't.

I'm guessing tracking updates to a feed since someone last read it shouldn't be too difficult for people 'logging in' in some fashion G?

[Grumpus]

Sort of, yeah. Some feeds list when each "article" was posted. Some don't, they just list the last time the entire feed was updated. It doesn't necessarily mean that anything has changed, either - someone, for example, may have fixed a spelling mistake in the post from three days ago.

The trick, then, is to not just cache the feeds, but to actually archive each article with a stamp of "when the system found the post". That could be done.

G.

[elenore]

This would be perfect for our website. However, I wonder how I can get the feed to show at our website.

We have two different sites. One in PHP and one created in frontpage.

I have searched for several hours to find information about this but I can't just not find a good source.

Hence, how can I get the yahoo news feed or the new RSS Google feed to show up on my website in a professional looking manner? Are there any simple programs that I can use or what do???

Thanks for your help.