Rss News & Articles

In what looks like an attempt to make RSS more fun, Google has released a little tool called Google Reader Play. The Google Reader alternative allows users to browse headlines one at a time in an image-heavy environment, rather than wade through streams of text. 

Some say Twitter has replaced the need for RSS feeds, but we think they’ve still got some life left in them. Seemingly on the same page, WordPress.com (news, site) now supports PubSubHubbub (PuSH), a service that "pushes" updates from the 10.5 million WordPress.com blogs to RSS readers in near real-time.  

When Dries Buytaert founded Drupal (news, site), he intended it in part to be a platform where he could test out and play with new technologies. Drupal, for example, was an early adopter of RSS. With the pending release of Drupal 7, this goal isn't changing, and the Drupal 7 team is asking for feedback from the "pedantic web community" on how its implemented some new features.

CMS/Groupware team TikiWiki (news, site) packs in the upgrades and improvements in the latest release of its wiki open-source super-tool.

The new version of SamePage (news, site) adds a host of features designed for both the remote employee and those who live on their company intranet.

There's always hype around the web and related technologies. If it's not Web 2.0 then it's Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or any number of new protocols, trends and standards that have someone convinced that a massive paradigm change is just around the corner.

As you might fear, there's a new kid on the block: the Pushbutton Web. How is this any different from the point and click web we already know so well? Read on.

The announcement that Kapow Technologies (news, site) has just put the latest version of its Web Data Server -- better known as its  Mashup Server -- on general release should be of interest to anyone who is looking at their Web 2.0 apps for cost savings.

While a lot of companies claim a lot of things about their products, Kapow Technologies' financial success and growth over the past two years has backed up those claims principally as a result of some very serious software.

With the v7.0 release Mashup Server boasts enhanced scalability and performance -- and there are few other interesting bonuses as well.

Google Chrome is a good browser. A speedy, delightful little browser. Sure, the themes and fancy applications that Mozilla offers aren’t there, but the crash rate is much lower, the dynamic tabs are sweet and you’re warned when you may be visiting a harmful website. In fact, perhaps it’s the no-frills approach that has kept Chrome as functional as it is.

Whatever the case, no-frills is still no-frills, and in an era of endless options there will always be those that try to add a little “flava” to the things that lack it. As a result, add-ons to Chrome are available via browser bookmarklets. Because of popular demand, you can now even employ them in order to manage two new ways to work with RSS feeds.

Social media is one of the fastest growing marketing areas on the Internet today. It allows marketers and business owners to advertise and market in ways that were unheard of 5-10 years ago. Every major corporation (and many small businesses and start-ups) out there is currently using social media.

The problem inherent with social media is the fact that a proper social media campaign can be extremely time-consuming, very costly and may require a large team of people. Let’s face it — most of us already know that there is an insane amount of sites, software, services and methods out there. A social media campaign can be exhausting. Enter Shoutlet, a tool that makes managing all your social marketing campaigns a snap.

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This Week:

• Embedded GMail Video is Deeper than you Think
• Reference Extract: Google, Except by Smart People
• Apple Building a Search Engine?
• Twingr— Make Your Own Twitter
• 30 Different Uses for RSS
  
  

Embedded GMail Video is Deeper than you Think

You may or may not have noticed a new feature in your GMail account: embedded video chat. It launched a couple of days ago to high acclaim. (Mashable came up with the best summation, calling it the “anti-Skype”).

It’s primarily noteworthy because there’s hardly any reason to leave GMail anymore for your communication needs. IM, email, and now video/audio can now all be accessed from the GMail interface. Which is quite remarkable, when you think that all this is being done from the browser. Imagine if we’d frozen Scoble a couple of years ago and thawed him out this week to see this— he’d fall over backwards. (Which would give us a good opportunity to throw him back into the deep-freeze for another decade or three.)

What happens when you take Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, chat rooms, video conferencing and forums; mix them with a popular open-source CMS and apply this solution to the education environment?

This is exactly what Social Media Classroom (SMC) is doing in hopes of bringing two-way dialogue and interaction to the education field.

Flock, the self-proclaimed Social Web browser, recently released version 2.0 with a few notable upgrades, including the integration of their most requested service, MySpace.

That’s right, you read that correctly, the browser that relies on social networking for popularity and downloads just integrated the biggest social network of all.

Not as Web-savvy as you’d like to be? Well, GoDaddy just solved that problem with the release of SmartSpace — an inexpensive, no-skills-needed tool for building instant Web sites complete with your popular social media widgets of choice.

Microsoft released Silverlight 2, a new version of its solution for creation and delivery of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) through a Web browser.

Silverlight 2 — presented under the motto of creating “next-generation Web experiences” — comes packed with a variety of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible and more secure user experiences.

Ever wanted to stay on top of Google search results in an easy and manageable way? Google has long offered its users the ability to subscribe to search results via email. The company has recently announced its intention to soon offer search results via RSS feeds as well. It will be an extension of Google Alerts.