Vitamin reports that UK-based Idiomag is due for launch. Styled as a personal online magazine which combines ‘glossy RSS’ with tagging, weighting and rating, TechChrunch US reported recently, Idiomag is Angel funded. It’s good to see this kind of approach to media which combines social media with more traditional publishing.

idiomag plans to accept content “via direct input through the content providers administration section and via RSS.” Digital design and music will be the first focus, but the magazine plans to aggregate licensed content from other publishers delivering “an individually personalized magazine to each user”.

Perhaps this is not so heard these days, but what’s different is that this tagged content will be presented via Flash which means microsites and rich-media ads are possible. The business model is to share ad revenue with content providers. Thus Idio provides a user-friendly face to RSS content which monetises RSS more efficiently for the publisher than banners inside feeds.
I can’t say I haven’t seen a Flash magazine before, but it’s interesting to see an independent publisher putting a Flash filter on onto a social media tagging approach.

Today’s tedious PR-release-written-as-news comes from the little known Manchester-based Employment Law Advisory Services (ELAS) which has the Telegraph today reporting that office workers who buy their Christmas presents online from their desks cost £7.25 billion in lost work time.

“For many employers, every hour a member of staff spends looking for Christmas presents online is an hour they should have spent working,” says killjoy Peter Mooney of the ELAS. He advised businesses to set guidelines for the amount of time that staff spend online. I assume the subtext of this is also ‘employ us to sue workers who surf’.

However, what this cod-research suggests is that the market for improving both a pure-play retail search engine and adding smarter tagging and search-based RSS feeds to a site could a) improve its sales because customers would find things faster and more efficiently and b) create a more productive workforce who don’t need to spend so much of their employers time surfing after-all.

A more logical approach by employers would not be to “set guidelines for the amount of time that staff spend online” but instead recognise that they are going to do it, then give them a list of the best and quickest sites to go to for online shopping, thus saving hours on Google. And let’s not even go into how employees usually end up having smarter ideas about business when they can roam unimpeded.

A snapshot look at Kelkoo and Pricerunner suggests that Web 2.0 principles haven’t penetrated that deeply into the price comparison market on this side of the pond. Ok, both sites feature user-generated revues, but neither allow you to pull an RSS feed out based on a search term which one might be able to plug into a Google/Yahoo/Pageflakes start page.

So who wants to kick off the best and fastest places to find what you need this Christmas, a la Web 2.0?

Thursday night I was in Soho, London for the monthly Beers and Innovation event organised by NMK’s Deirdre Molloy. The topic of the debate was “the future of RSS”. On the distinguished panel were Richard Edwards of MyZebra, Peter Nixey from Webkitchen along with Ivan Pope from Snipperoo.

In summation, all the speakers unanimously agreed that RSS is great, as did most of the audience. Some people even spoke about how RSS had changed their lives. So surprisingly during the Q&A session some idiot had the audacity to proclaim that RSS is dead! Oh yes now I remember (strong stuff that beer) that idiot was me.

What was I thinking? Why would I commit such as a faux pas in a room full of my peers and why would I further compound the issue by blogging about it here? I could have simply buried the bad news and hoped no-one else in the room remembered or worse still blogged about my stupid rash statement. Obviously that was never going to happen, after all this is the blogosphere.

So why did I make so bold and bonkers a statement? In my defence there are a couple of valid reasons which I would like to elaborate on here. Firstly I wanted to be controversial and spark a debate in the room and secondly and more importantly, I struggle to see where RSS 2.0 is heading (the most commonly used version today) which is presumably why I attended the B&I event in the first place.

Right now RSS 3.0 is not something we should expect to see any time soon; no-one is working on it! Dave Winer the author of RSS 2.0, is currently focused on his “river of news” idea and has even stated that as far as he is concerned “the RSS 2.0 spec itself is now frozen” but of course new features can still be added to extend RSS using namespace modules, for example the Yahoo! media module – mRSS.

In fact for many people the Atom 1.0 spec could be considered RSS 3.0, if you are interested and would like to read more about Atom 1.0, Dave Johnson gave an excellent talk on the differences between the two feed formats and the forth coming Atom Publishing Protocol.

But do we even need another version of Atom or RSS? For many subscribers the adage seems to be “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Personally I think RSS is great because, unlike email newsletters, I can anonymously subscribe to content and then choose to read it when or how I like. And better still, if I don’t like the content, I can simply and anonymously unsubscribe. So given this use case, RSS is great and “news of it’s death may have been greatly exaggerated”.

So what’s the problem? Well in this age of ad-supported free web content and free applications, advertisers see it differently and may prefer to use another adage instead to describe RSS “if you can’t measure it, you can’t monetise it”. And as a publisher, if we are not to kill this golden goose, then it is vital to provide the right type of feedback information to advertisers but worryingly there are very few reporting tools out there right now that can help do so. i.e how can I report how many people read the RSS feed and which channels/posts they read or ignored?

This reporting problem is not new, over two years ago Alex Barnett was asking the very same questions about RSS metrics but this probelm was never properly addressed but may need to be now because Dave Winer is once again questioning how publishers “measure rss” traffic.

TechCrunch’s reader statistics are determined by FeedBurner because it has the widest possible breadth of browser and aggregator support needed to help best measure and report on our RSS traffic. This report by Feedburner explains in depth how TechCrunch.com recently exceeded 100k subscribed readers.

But given the wide and varied ways people can now subscribe to a RSS feeds – i.e autodiscovery in IE7, Firefox and via other aggregators (Attensa, PageFlakes, Live.com, NetVibes etc) accuratley measuring how many people subscribe to your RSS feed is tricky and at best only a guesstimate.

For example I read TechCrunch.com via my Attensa RSS Reader in Outlook which is not supported by FeedBurner which in turn means I am not counted in the 100k+ user statistics. [note: Attempts were made by the industry to create a universal subscriber method (USM) but these seem to have died.]

But are advertisers really interested in subscription numbers alone and is this the best measure of content value? I have lots of subscribed feeds in my aggregator(s) that are unread, partly due to time constraints and partly due to the fact that only one or two of the actual post items are of interest to me. The rest remain unread and will be automatically deleted after 30 days.

So I believe that it is the actual number of readers that consume RSS content rather than the number of subscribers which advertisers and publishers would prefer to measure.

Maybe what is needed instead is a new RSS ping service that reports when a feed item has been read/viewed. Therefore it won’t matter what client aggregator is used to subscribe to the feed. In many ways this would be similar to the read notification functionality found in many email clients i.e when someone reads an email of mine, I can setup the email client to alert me with a read notification message. With a RSS ping reporting service built into RSS aggregators, it could achieve the same thing whilst still maintaining my anonymity as an RSS reader by not passing back any of my personal details to the ping server. In fact blog tracking sites like Technorati work in much the same way. Every time I post a blog entry it alerts a ping server via XML-RPC that I have a new post I wish it to index.

In many ways ping services like pingomatic and/or pingerati are already capable of supporting this type of RSS ping “reproting” service today. All that is needed is for RSS publishers to write their feeds in the manner as shown below.

So is RSS really dead? In some ways yes because what RSS needs is a new injection of life to help it develop to the next level. As a purist I am saddened to see advertising within my RSS feeds but as advertisers and publishers begin to realise that less of us read websites/blogs where their adverts are displayed and more of us read the content via our RSS aggregators, advertising in the RSS feeds is inevitable.

I could of course choose to unsubscribe in protest to any RSS feed with adverts but that would be cutting of my nose to spit myself because more often than not the content I want is contained within the very same RSS feed and as a publisher I need to monetise my content in order to ensure it remains free for subscribers. Right now I do not have adverts within my RSS feed.

So I believe the future of RSS is better reporting via a ping service that enables advertisers to include contextual advertising within the RSS feed. RSS 2.0 doesn’t natively provide this capability today. A proposed RSS module does enable this functionality to be added but I would like to see this as a standard component of RSS which is why I said RSS 2.0 is dead at the B&I event.

Maybe I would have been better of to have said its dead Jim but not as we know it?

Personally I would like to see this functionality also included inside of the Atom 1.0 Publishing protocol which hopefully will replace the metaweblog API and XML-RPC. Of course there might be an alternative method to update publishers, and thus report to advertisers in turn as to how many feeds and post items have been read, using Microsoft’s bi-directional RSS extension called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE)?

Either way RSS cannot remain the same. It needs to evolve and to include better reporting capabilites. RSS 2.0 is dead, long live the next version!

Of late Dave Winer has been talking about rivers of news. i.e the analogy of standing on the bank of a river as it flows past but instead of water Dave is seeing RSS feeds with information passing him.  Where’s this idea come from, well Dave recently got a blackberry and has found the side-scroll button which enables him to quickly move up and down an email or webpage.  

So using his OPML editor Dave developed a number of “mobile” rivers which he could view on his Blackberry and unlike most RSS aggregators the river is not structured into folders, so there is no hierarchy to click through.  e.g BBC , NYTimes, Digg

Like most of Dave’s ideas, they take time to catch-on (1999) but eventually they do. e.g Blogging, RSS 2.0, XML-RPC, Podcasting, OPML and now rivers. So it was good to come across fwicki a web 2.0 (Ajax) application which can mashup RSS feeds from multiple sources to create a single “river”.

I decided to create a TechCrunch Global river for myself. I simply added the RSS feeds for TechCrunch.com, UK, CrunchNotes, CrunchGear and MobileCrunch into fwicki and then asked it to create my river.  I gave it a title, tags and sorted it by date order. Seconds later I had my own fwicki and unique url.

Fwicki is the brainchild of two web enthusiasts who met in early 2006 – David Ridge and Justin Barone – they built fwicki because they couldn’t find an easy way to create a mashup river, so they created fwicki for themselves.

“The beauty of this application is in its simplicity. With an integrated smart video help system, fwicki is extremely easy to use and you don’t have to be a “techie” to take advantage of its features. Users can quickly and easily create their own fwicki which contains unique news and content based on the feeds of their choice. Fwicki also supplies users with a unique fwicki page that is hosted online at no cost. Fwicki provides a header and footer modification mechanism that allows users to customize the look and feel of their fwicki. The header and footer mechanism can also be used to monetize the Fwicki with Google Ads. This allows new Internet users to get a free fwicki with hosting included and launch their first entrepreneurial web venture at no cost.”

Fwicki is the first of several applications set to be released by Justin and David. If you use RSS and want a killer AJAX application that will take your RSS experience to the next level, then fwicki is for you.

But where is this mashup river taking us? 

At the moment fwicki only lets you sort by date but I also wanted to sort/filter by author or a particular category tag. This might come in a future fwicki release but instead of waiting, I took the RSS feed URL and opened the URL with Internet Explorer 7.  And because IE7 supports ”Simple List Extensions” which allow RSS and Atom feeds to be sorted/filtered into what Microsoft call “list semantics”, I was able to further filter the feed by a particular tag dynamically to see only what I wanted.

For example if there was a consistent/agreed tag folksonomy used across all of the TechCrunch sites, then I could have first sorted the mashup river by date and then further filtered it to see just a “group” of posts that used the same tag moniker. i.e Google. This would have let me quickly see what TechCrunch was saying about Google across all of our sites.

Of course I could have chosen instead to create a fwicki river with other sites i.e Digg, TechMeme, Scoble, Battelle etc. Then I could easily see what was being said on a particular tag “topic” across the blogosphere.   I think this is a very powerful idea and again it all started with Dave Winer.

Companies can now pick their favourite feeds, create a river of news and then further filter it by their own company tag to get an RSS alert watch across the web. The only fly in the ointment is the inconsistency and potential clashes with ownership of tag names. For example I would like to use the tag TCUK for the TechCrunch UK site except. TCUK is also the name of a builders merchant in the UK? So using traditional search engines doesn’t help when I type in TCUK but what if someone else wants to also use TCUK as their tag moniker, how do we resolve the conflict?                

One option is to state at the top of this site that I wish to own the tag moniker TCUK and would people please tag their posts about TechCrunch UK with rel=”TCUK”. If this did happen I could then use a service like Pingerati, Pingomatic or Technorati to track TechCrunch UK by this specific TCUK tag. Right now there is only one post tagged with TCUK on Technorati.

So imagine if your company owned a specific tag brand and people consistently used the right tag when they posted about you.  You could then create your own river and watch the information flow past across the whole of the web. How you view and where you view will also become vey interesting.

Dave Winer’s rivers are purposely sparse so that they can be viewed quickly on a mobile device. The XSLT template in IE7 gives another view which is a little richer.  This standard XSLT file can be swapped for a branded template that enhances the reading even further. Microsoft Max was launched a few days ago and intially I didn’t understand it other than it was a demo of the Microsoft’s forthcoming .NET3 platform.  But thinking about it more I decided to add in the TechCrunch river and now using Microsoft Max I can view it more like a newspaper and like a newspaper I could view multiple pages filtered by a tag topic.   

So is this one possible future.  Mashup rivers viewed in a newspaper style which the user can dynamically tag by date, topic or other criteria and then possibly viewed on a UMPC whilst on the train or toilet? 

Fedafi is a Glasgow based, UK company - pronounced fee·da·fi (’fi’ as in hifi)  – aims to democratize RSS by making it possible for anyone to create, manage, market and track valid RSS and Podcast feeds, as part of their business strategy.

Fedafi is a self-funded startup with just two people right now. Fedafi hope to grow their business by providing the basic tools that every business needs to adopt RSS as a viable marketing and communication channel.

Currently a lot of companies still send out emails as part of their marketing campaign. I have a couple of issues with email marketing.  Firstly it’s very web 1.0, it’s often costly to buy in email listings, more often than not they are out of date and thirdly if its unsolicited it’s illegal spam.

Often marketers will happily report they have sent out thousands of bulk emails but how many are actually read by the intended recipient? My anti-spam filter thankfully traps most of them at the server level and my desktop email filter has a second go by dumping them into my junk folder. Even assuming that I do get the spam email newsletter in my inbox, then my human filter does the rest and just deletes it.

On the other hand RSS is a much better way of marketing communication. As the customer, I choose to receive the information I want, so it is not treated as spam by me. The information is delivered where I want it and when I want it, either in my integrated email reader or browser reader or standalone RSS reader and if I don’t like it I can simple unsubscribe from the feed.

From a marketers perspective reporting the number active subscribers is a better metric of success. Fedafi offer two versions of their product that differ slightly as the table below  shows.