Nick Bradbury

Lately the geekosphere has been buzzing about how RSS is being replaced by the real-time stream. Instead of getting our information from syndicated blog feeds, we’re now getting it via streams from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, et al. This isn’t new. The only thing that’s new is that “A-list” bloggers are finally getting wise to it. Outside the geekosphere, people have... [read more]

Dare Obasanjo believes that RSS readers which are modeled after email clients are broken: “…it seems to me that the way we think of RSS readers needs to fundamentally change. Presenting information as a news feed where the user isn’t pressured to read every item or feel like a failure is one way to move the needle on the user... [read more]

It has been fun watching the news spread about the latest FeedDemon 3.0 Beta even though I never “officially” announced it. It started with a couple tweets from me, then spread to Twitter at large and on to web sites like Digital Inspiration, Shooting at Bubbles and Lifehacker. So, I guess I should make it official now: the first beta... [read more]

About a year ago, I wrote about how link blogs are attention streams. The premise behind that post was that while attention algorithms can uncover what people are paying attention to, the articles people are sharing provide an even better way of determining their attention. As I mentioned in that post, seeing what other people are paying attention to has... [read more]

NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker writes: "We’ve now implemented a persistent APML endpoint in our online platform. What this means is, if you’re using sync with NewsGator Online, there is a well-known URL that represents your APML attention data." At first glance, this may strike you as something that only hard-core geeks would be interested in. After all, it's not as... [read more]

Every now and then I'll see a blog post predicting the future of feed reading, and invariably it's written by someone who spends every waking moment reading their feeds. Which is fine, of course - we certainly want to know what power users expect from the future of RSS. But predictions from these folks are usually based on what they... [read more]

Greg Reinacker recently blogged about NewsGator feed retrieval intervals. For me, the money quote is this one: "One of the more common questions/complaints we get is something about a feed not appearing to update in a timely manner. 99% of the time, it’s actually a problem with the feed." I can certainly attest to the fact that we receive frequent... [read more]

Among the many responses to yesterday's announcement about FeedDemon being free, I spotted a number of people asking why anyone would use a desktop RSS reader. These comments generally focused on two points: Web-based readers are also free, and unlike desktop apps, you can access them from anywhere Desktop readers have to constantly retrieve feeds, causing unnecessary bandwidth burden on... [read more]

Leland Rucker on 3 Things You Should Know About NewsGator: "Our datacenter processes over 1.8 million feeds daily, resulting in over 7 million new content items. We archive content and have 3 terabytes of content that we make available to our partners. The archive content is increasingly being used to power features for discovery and relevancy of content." [read more]

In a recent blog comment, Paul M. Watson asked: "I'd be interested in more detail on how you compute the scores [which determine a feed's attention]. Nothing that gives away your competitive edge of course but just some generalizations of what you are tracking that amounts to attention." FeedDemon's algorithm for determining a feed's attention rank has changed since I... [read more]