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29/02/2008
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Fav.or.it to show the way ahead for blogs, RSS and comments?
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Fav.or.it, a service that has piqued my interest since it was first announced, has entered its invitation only beta stage and promises to be so much more than the RSS readers we have at present.
When I discussed how RSS needs to change to enable us to get the full conversation I mentioned that RSS readers will need to alter in order to support the way ahead, fav.or.it is heading in the right direction as it allows you to write comments on posts directly from the site itself using the fav.or.it API. Reports also mentioned that fav.or.it would be able to work with the disqus comment system.
It's not yet the ability to post comments back to any blog directly from your feed reader but it's a good start (unfortunately, I haven't got an invitation yet so haven't been able to test it) and an indication of the way things are heading.
As well as the feed readers needing to change to accommodate distributed commenting it is obvious that blogs will need to as well, whether it be implementing something like disqus or a complete change to the native commenting system to work with an API. Fav.or.it proves that the days of distributed commenting are closer than we thought.
Related Posts
26/02/2008
 Interesting discussion has taken place recently and I wanted to add my take. Some great minds have been looking at the issue of blogs, their RSS feeds and the comments; the current state of affairs appears to be a bit lacking.
A big part of blogging is the conversation and, as we all know, a conversation has two sides and is incomplete without one of them. As Chris Brogan explains the comments to any given post are just as, if not more, important than the post itself but the current means of being kept to date with those comments are not working.
The options we have at present are as follows:
- email notification of new comments
- a general comments RSS feed
- an RSS feed specific to one post
not a desirable position, I think you'll agree.
Louis Gray touched on this problem almost a whole year ago - forward thinking indeed - with his post The Trouble With RSS: I'm Not Involved. We spend so much time looking at the way we consume our RSS feeds that we lose everything that surrounds the content and as Louis says lose the participatory role.
There is no easy solution to this problem, however.
 It has been suggested that something like could fill the void and provide us better options when consuming our feeds. At its simplest level you could combine both a posts and comments feed in to one and just subscribe to that but this is messy and not a great way to consume content.
What is needed is a way to combine both the posts and comments, filtering the comments to the relevant post and displaying them in the correct order. We run the danger, however, of information overload so an option to opt in to comments for any given post is in order. As Chris suggests, perhaps some kind of toggle to select only those posts whose full conversation you wish to follow.
How do we then consume such a feed?
Are we forced to visit the site to select an option, or are we looking at some kind of extension to RSS to feed back to the site the content we wish to consume? Are we looking at something like Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for ways to communicate back to the site in question?
The overview for SSE says:
"The scope of Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is to define the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely-cooperating applications to use XML-based container formats such as Atom and RSS as the basis for item sharing – that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous synchronization of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds."
Sounds right on the money, but this kind of feed consumption will require new feed readers that support the new extensions.
How far could this be taken? Could we get to the point where you can comment directly on the post from within your feed reader?
What do you think?
30/04/2007
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Feed should now be okay on Bloglines.
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I received an second mail back from Bloglines over the weekend and (the other) Colins comment would tend to back up that the feed is now updating correctly in the Bloglines aggregator. If you get any issues please let me know.
26/04/2007
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Post to test feed updates.
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I use Bloglines as my online RSS aggregator of choice - I prefer it to Google Reader, especially on my Windows Mobile device.
I had, however, been experiencing a problem with my feed not updating correctly since moving to WSSv3 as my platform. Google Reader handled it correctly so I wondered if the URL format was causing Bloglines an issue.
Bloglines have got back to me and reset the feed so this post is to test that the feed updates and to explain the need for the post rather than just posting "Test!"
If you use Bloglines please let me know if you've been having a problem and, if so, has this solved it.
01/03/2007
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Friends, bloggers, countrymen, lend me your feeds!
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OK folks, it's audience participation time.
I know you hate when when the scary man stands up on stage and asks you all to shout out but I'd appreciate your assistance.
I'm looking at giving my RSS subscriptions an overhaul and need new feeds. If you've got a blog and you think I'd be interested in it (based mainly on the content of this one) then drop me a comment and let me know the URL and/or feed address.
Even if you haven't got your own blog let me know your favourites just in case there's something out there that I've missed.
Thanks in advance.
31/01/2007
You may recall that I was experiencing an issue with RSS feeds in Outlook 2007 where most of the subscriptions became 'lost' and only about 20 remained.
As such, I decided to keep only my 20 favourite feeds in Outlook and then my full OPML in Bloglines.
Well, not any more. I have decided to drop RSS collection from Outlook altogether and stick with Bloglines for everything. Here's the reasons why:
- saves having to have Outlook open at home all the time if I want feeds up to date
- keeps mailbox size down
- avoids duplication between Outlook and Bloglines
- even on the mobile, Bloglines presents feeds correctly without long strings of code where images would be
Also, should I move to Exchange 2007 at some point, reading the feeds on the mobile will be harder work as there is no OMA.
Reading all feeds directly on the web is truly portable so, in the absence of a better solution, is how I'm going to keep it.
15/01/2007
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How do you consume yours?
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Looking at my IIS logs for the past few days has been quite an eye opener. For one thing, it has made me aware of a number of RSS Reader platforms out there that I just didn't know about. It has also helped me get to grips with the various usage stats I had been seeing.
I posted a while back that Mozilla 5 and Linux were beating IE and Windows in my stats, the logs have helped to realise that frequent hits from Tailrank are skewing this data as Mozilla on Linux appears to be the platform of choice for their crawler (based on the user agent string recorded).
It is always interesting when you see something a bit unusual, someone has been visiting the site using a Nokia 6610 phone. I'm not sure what the user experience would be like but thanks for visiting all the same. I presume that this visitor is also using Litefeeds which I mentioned before - if this is you why not drop me a line (you can use the mail link in the right hand column).
As yesterday was the first full day after putting the redirection for the old RSS feeds in place I had a quick look this morning at the overall impact of the change by performing a comparison with the log from a few days ago. On the 11th Jan, the number of hits recorded for the main posts RSS feed was 338, after the changes the feed recorded a massive 1172 hits yesterday. Even better than I'd imagined.
14/01/2007
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RSS redirection - the results.
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I just thought I'd check the results of the redirections in IIS by looking at today's log so far.
The feedfetcher from Google took a while to update but eventually caught up and is treating it as a proper redirection. Numerous other platforms seem to have been okay straight away.
Looking at the logs, the only place that does not respond to the redirection correctly is RSSFwd which gives an error " Unable to process the url! Are you sure its a RSS/Atom page?" still, there was only one request in the log from this source so the impact is minimal.
To all those who have suddenly seen items appear in their feed readers, welcome back!
UPDATE: well, it looks like RSSFwd doesn't want to read my feed anyway, but there is still no evidence of redirection from the logs.
13/01/2007
After my post the other day about the old RSS feeds getting a large number of hits I thought I'd have a look at possible methods of automatic redirection. Alas, I've not been able to do it.
The first thing I came across was an XML redirect as posted by Dave Winer back in 2002. This suggested placing the following in the old feed:
This doesn't want to work as the original feed was using Maurice Prather's Syndication Generator so added "?Channel=Randomelements%20::%20Blog" to URL in order to get the feed.
When replacing the current (manually created) default.aspx with the above XML and trying to subscribe to the feed above gives an error that there is no valid feed at that address. I'm not even definite that this method is supported by all feed readers, although it does pop up all over the place.
Another possibility was forcing a HTTP 301 response with a redirect as described here but SharePoint won't let you do this as you get the error "Code blocks are not allowed in this file" - understandably.
So, I'm stumped.
Does anyone have an idea how I could achieve for any reference to /blog/default.aspx including those with parameters passed in the URL?
UPDATE: okay, ignore me. I was being a being a bit silly and not seeing what was right infront of me. Instead of trying to do it from within SharePoint itself I just created a new virtual directory within the website in IIS and then placed a permanent redirect on both default.aspx and feeds.aspx in that location to the new feed address. Simple really!
02/01/2007
My initial impressions of may not have been great but it appears that Google are listening and want to improve the experience.
I blogged that I had issues with it including the inability to import my OPML file that had been exported from Outlook 2007 and was then surprised to receive a comment from Mihai Parparita, a Google Reader Engineer, offering to help diagnose the problem.
Google have been getting a bit of stick lately over their search tips but you can't fault customer service like this.
I'm going to drop Mihai an email and see how we go.
31/12/2006
With such evangelism by the likes of Robert Scoble and Kevin Tofel you can see why. In fact, Google reader has gone from nowhere in November to being the top referrer in my stats for December - tells you something.
So, I thought I'd give it a spin.
I normally keep my 20 favourite feeds in Outlook 2007 using the built in RSS functionality and then have my full list in Bloglines. Why only 20 in Outlook? Well, I'm still experiencing the problems with feeds getting "removed" from my Outlook profile when there are more than about 20 in the list .
For some reason Google Reader won't import my old OPML that was exported from Outlook so I exported my feeds from Bloglines and imported that OPML in instead.
First impressions:
I don't know what it is but I just don't like the interface - I don't know why but it just doesn't feel comfortable. One of the main reasons people tend to like Google Reader is the keyboard shortcuts - especially using J + K for Next Post/Previous post. To me it just feels back to front - I keep hitting K when I should be hitting J.
Perhaps I need to spend a bit more time with it and muck about with the view settings.
The other thing I've noticed is that it seems to be a lot slower to update than Bloglines. In the time I had 12 updates on Bloglines I had only received 1 on Google Reader.
Maybe I just need to get used to the platform but, so far, I'm unimpressed.
UPDATE:
Just for reference purposes, the stats for December (up until yesterday) were
1st - Google Reader - 132 referrals
2nd - Live Search results - 126
17/10/2006
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Images in RSS feed - bug update
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I have had a response with regards to the issue of images within the RSS feed not always showing in your feed reader of choice.
To recap, with a WSSv3 blog, if you use images in the standard Photos library the URL for the image is converted to a relative address rather than an absolute address so breaks if viewed from many readers as they cannot find /Lists/Photos/{filename.jpg} as there is no point of reference.
Well, the official response is that, as this "has a potentially large impact" it will be considered beyond the beta timeframe as the "Product team is not able to fix this issue for RTM".
MS will, however, "publish a KB article to document the limitation".
12/10/2006
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Final word on the Outlook RSS issue.
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I've been meaning to post this for a few days but just not gotten round to it.
So, what's the upshot of the issues? First, let me summarise for those that have come to the story (saga) late:
- upgrading to the B2TR build of Office can cause Outlook issues with your RSS feeds
Despite taking the steps advised by Michael, I still experience a problem where Outlook only wants to retain about 20 feeds when they are being delivered to my Exchange mailbox.
I have had a good 'back and forth' conversation with Greg Mansius (poster to the Exchange Team Blog) and it does look as though there is an issue which should be resolved come RTM.
Outlook does not have a problem when delivering RSS feeds to a PST and you can force this even when using an Exchange Server by adding the registry key:
Key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\RSS
DWORD: DisableRoaming
Value: 1
Thanks to Greg for the great deal of time he gave to looking at this, and roll on RTM!
22/09/2006
My bug report was closed with the standard "not reproducible" but the problem still occurs.
Due to repeatedly clearing out about 200 folders and 2500+ items the Exchange database had swollen somewhat so I decided to do an offline defrag with eseutil - this brought the databse size down from 849MB to 146. Not bad!
It just seems that in my environment Outlook or Exchange has an issue checking and retaining this many feeds. This may also be manifesting itself in another way. After importing the full list of feeds Outlook takes a long time to be fully usable. if you try to go to Tools - Account Settings you are warned that Outlook is still trying to find shared folders and takes a while to settle down.
Anyone else having similar problems?
20/09/2006
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Outlook 2007 RSS bug resolved - or maybe not!
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I blogged a few days ago that the upgrade to the Outlook Beta 2 Tech Refresh had screwed up my RSS feeds - culling them from about 200 to 21. I had bugged the issue and later the same day received a response pointing me to Michael Affronti's blog (Microsoft Outlook Program Manager).
He explains that Microsoft have "made a significant amount of changes to the way that are RSS Feeds are stored internally inside of Outlook" and this causes all sorts of problems requiring you to clear out your Feeds using the Outlook /cleansharing switch. The only downside is the need to remove your existing RSS folders prior to reimporting your feed list.
My feeds are now all being retained and updating correctly.
UPDATE: I spoke too soon, the problem happened again last night so I've created a new MAPI profile and gone back through the steps advised so we'll see what happens.
19/07/2006
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Images in RSS feed - an update.
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In an earlier post I explained why you are not seeing images in the RSS feed. Essentially, WSSv3 is changing all links to the Photos list to a relative address (/lists/photos/) rather than keeping them as an absolute address.
Well, I've figured out a quick and simple way round it: by adding the additional host header " randomelements.me.uk" to the IIS site hosting the blog and then linking all images using the www prefix will force WSS to keep the link as an absolute link which can therefore be seen correctly externally from the site.
Needless to say, you will experience a number of duplicates today as I change all of the URLs in any posts with images. At least it will make things better.
UPDATE: this is now done so normal service will now be resumed. The main issue now is that the links back to the posts from the feed are generated incorrectly but I don't think I'm going to be able to do anything about this.
17/07/2006
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How do you consume your RSS?
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A debate is currently running in various circles over the "best" method to consume RSS feeds. Robert Scoble and Michael Gartenberg, amongst others have given their opinion as to whether a "river of news" or a structured, folder based view is preferred (as provided by NewsGator's integration with Outlook).
Marc Orchant has recently converted back to FeedDemon due to its flexibility and its ability to synch with NewsGator Online.
Personally, while Beta 2 of Outlook 2007 still has a number of issues around RSS collection, I have dropped NewsGator altogether have an running solely with the built-in Outlook functionality.
Why? Two main reasons:
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Going beyond the folder structure
As well as having your feehs organised in a nice folder structure rather than as a "river of news" you have the advantage of Search Folders within Outlook. I, personally employ, a number of Search Folders based on my RSS feeds such as Unread (total), Unread Today, then specific content searches should I need them.
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Available anywhere
because my feeds are stored in my Exchange mailbox I can access them anywhere I can get my mail using Outlook Web Access and everything is located in the same place (even the search folders). On a managed office PC I do not have the option of installing other hardware so OWA gives me the ability to check my feeds during my lunch break etc.
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