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Google Businesses The Internet The Media

Google News Now Providing RSS and Atom Feeds 157

Posted by timothy from the sky-not-falling dept.
Avery writes "Several sites are reporting that Google has announced in their blog today that they will provide RSS and Atom feeds in their news section. Previously the only way to get RSS/Atom feeds from Google news was through third party scrapers. Now, you can get feeds for any of Google's news areas as well as feeds for a news search. (The news search is basically the same concept as Google news alerts, only in RSS.)"
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Google News Now Providing RSS and Atom Feeds More

Google News Now Providing RSS and Atom Feeds

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  • It seems that Slashdot.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by speights_pride! ( 898232 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:05AM (#13284582)
    ..has always been plugged into the RSS feed anyway ;-)
    • Yeah, and at times all that was shown was Slashdots inane "you have accessed the rss feed too often". ;)
      • I've seen that for a while now, beyond news. Google requests (not only popular) feeds every 15 minutes, often several fetches per second come from the same IP (probably another instance). It seems that Ms. Googlebot now actively collects feed URIs within her regular crawling, harvests feeds from personalized home pages etc. Once a feed is known, it gets fetched way too often. Although Google has implemented pinging (sitemap resubmission), it does not make use of it for feeds. http://feeds.google.com/ping? [google.com]
      • multiple IPs from NTL's proxies have been banned from /. The insane thing is that if you change proxy to another in your area, you're still in the same subnet, so you're still unable to post.

  • What is the point of RSS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jaruzel ( 804522 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:05AM (#13284583) Homepage Journal
    So far, I have failed to see the point of RSS.

    It was originally touted as a low-bandwidth solution, but this in most cases is false. If 10,000 people subscribe to a sites' RSS feed and set their RSS aggregators to 'refresh' that feed every 5 mins or so, the bandwidth usage very quickly mounts up. Most sites use dyanamically created pages even for the feeds, so pre checking the age of the page doesn't help.

    I installed an RSS reader on my PDA, I thought it would be great for offline news browsing, but I quickly found that I was crippled by most of the feeds because they at very least just showed the news titles, and at most showed only the first paragraph of the articles. If I wanted to read more, I had to go online. If I'm going online I might as well just browse the web normally.

    I'm sure RSS has niche uses (such as the slashboxes here on /.), but in general I fail to see why the whole community is hailing RSS as the second coming of the Internet.

    Just my 2p's worth.

    -Jar.

    • Re:What is the point of RSS? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:11AM (#13284597)
      Well, it's not that RSS doesn't have a point (it does), it just gets awfully misused. Take podcasts, for example; why bother setting up an RSS/Atom feed with mp3 files when you could do it as easily with a simple web page?

      • Re:What is the point of RSS? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by the_unknown_soldier ( 675161 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:17AM (#13284604)
        Don't be silly. The op had a point but the only exception to it that I have found IS podcasting. I don't want to have to click to download an mp3, and drag it into my player and then onto my dap, i want it to be automatic so that when i wake up my dap is updated with the latest. Rss makes this a far simpler process.

        Opening my rss agregator is just as easy as opening my web browser, only my browser gives me more information.
        • Mmm good point, it eluded me completely (maybe it's because of my disgust for podcasts to begin with :).

          Still, RSS is overdoing it: even while it might be well suited to the task, the idea behind RSS is that you recive updated information about something as soon as it's avaliable while using as little bandwidth as possible. I've seen a lot of sites, like the op mentioned, that miss the point completely: either they deliver a lot of data through it or very brief headline-like updates, which
          • Delivering links through RSS for FTP/WWW downloads would be a better way of Podcasting, but i doubt it'd ever catch on.

            Someone better tell Dave Winer! He needs to add a link portion to each channel item. It should be called an enclosure tag. And just to make thing easier on the aggregator, we'll include the MIME type, and number of bytes this other file will be!

            What? They already are?! But Lisandro said that he doesn't think it'd catch on... Since 2001 you say? And that's the mechanism used by all podcasts.
          • Mmm good point, it eluded me completely (maybe it's because of my disgust for podcasts to begin with :)

            Just curious, what's wrong with podcasts? Do you not like NPR's Science Friday with Ira Flatow? Or getting Battlestar Galactica episode commentaries for free?

      • Syndication. You do it for the same reason you use a TiVo to get new television content instead of a VCR. I don't want to manually check a page for new files and then manually download the new ones, just like I don't want to manually program a VCR and load a tape. I want a feed that iTunes can check for new content, then download said content for me and then update my iPod with the new content. Waking up to fresh content on my iPod in the morning versus spending an hour at work downloading files and updatin

    • I installed an RSS reader on my PDA

      I'm happy with AvantGo; it may not be perfect for content creators (since they have to pay for a channel), but as a user I get quite a nice bunch of information. Replaces a daily newspaper.

      As for RSS feeds... it would be interesting to see the most recent/most searched queries on Google. And maybe the results (including pictures *g*).

      • I'm happy with AvantGo; it may not be perfect for content creators (since they have to pay for a channel), but as a user I get quite a nice bunch of information. Replaces a daily newspaper.

        AvantGo has LONG been surpassed by better, smaller, faster, more-capable, feature-rich, free tools.

        Take a look at Plucker [plkr.org] for the current leader in this space. Runs on everything (Windows, Linux, OSX) and on PalmOS, PocketPC, Linux PDAs. Has Python, perl, Java, C++ distillers, dozens more options than AvantGo, lots

    • Re:What is the point of RSS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheFlyingGoat ( 161967 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:32AM (#13284635) Homepage Journal
      On my HTPC, I pull RSS feeds of news and sports scores each night. It gives me a quick and easy way to get the daily headlines all in one spot. Same as people who use aggregators... it's all about convenience.

      Your bandwidth example is faulty. First of all, most people don't have their aggregators set to update every 5 minutes. Second, if you've ever ran a website that gets a decent amount of traffic, you'd know that content takes very little bandwidth compared to images and markup code. Third, a smart site operator would have a script set up that would create a static rss feed instead of a dynamic one, perhaps running it each minute. For a popular site, the processing savings would be significant.

      PDA applications are a great example of RSS put to good use. Sure, you have to connect to read the full content, but the headlines are presented in a simple manner that even crappy PDAs can handle. Far better than downloading ALL of the content on a site, or requiring a constant connection to the Internet.

      There's MANY niche environments that RSS feeds are perfectly suited for. They're easy to set up on a site. They're easy to use as a client. Why NOT have them around?
      • Yeah, pulling sports scores is a perfect example of a practical use of XML. It doesn't say much for RSS though. Pulling news, sure, that's the point, but then again, that's what Google's doing here too.
      • if you've ever ran a website that gets a decent amount of traffic

        I do, and your wrong. Regardless, pulling data is fundamentally less efficient than pushing.

        Third, a smart site operator would have a script set up that would create a static rss feed instead of a dynamic one, perhaps running it each minute.

        I would imagine the smart site operator would just update the rss feed whenever the data is changed.

        They're easy to set up on a site. They're easy to use as a client.

        I'd say about that's the only reason fo

    • Re:What is the point of RSS? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by strider44 ( 650833 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:35AM (#13284643)
      Because it's a standard way of syndicating information in a way that can be reformatted. With an RSS feed the information can be placed inside a browser, a news ticker or a widget on Karamba with equal ease. Each of these have wildly different formatting and RSS is used to accomplish this, whereas with HTML it's either impossible or very hard, having to write a manual script for each and every site which would break as soon as the site is changed.
      • "...that can be reformatted..."

        That's the part that really interests me, and I've been doing that in my new app, Bitty Browser [bitty.com].

        If interested, try this:

        1) go to http://www.bitty.com/editor [bitty.com]

        2) Choose "RSS feed URL" (2nd in the scrolling list)

        3) Enter http://slashdot.org/index.rss [slashdot.org] (that's Slashdot's RSS)

        4) Enter Slashdot for the title

        Then skip to the bottom and click Continue -- on the next page you'll see a preview embedded Bitty Browser with Slashdot. If you Continue again from there, you can c

      • I agree with Strider44 on the problems of HTML embedded in RSS.

        Google has provided a feed, but the next step is to provide b>all the data in a structured format (either using RSS 2.0 extensions or more tags in Atom). The current feed is good, but only goes half-way.

        Want to see what is possible with more structured data? Check out Serence's Google Kilp, which parses the HTML to give you the ability to choose language, topic, and pop-up alerts.

        Google news Klip [klipfarm.com] (This is a Klip that in the KlipFolio

    • I'm glad somebody else thinks this way. After hearing all the buzz with RSS I finally decided to give it a try. I had just finshed building my MythTV box and one of the Myth plugins is MythNews, an RSS aggregator. Great, I thought.

      I installed it, selected a few feeds, and tried it out. What a waste! The program worked well enough, but the information content was so minimal, I was almost better off not knowing.

      This lack of content wasn't MythNews' fault, of course, but content-free news seems to b
      • Content-free news is an epidemic in the news world buddy, at least it is in the US.
        The trick is finding sources that provide rich content. The feed for Slashdot includes the full post text, including the links to TFA. That way, I can hit up the news I want without being tempted to read comments and post replies (I save that for killing time at work, like, oh, now).
        Another rich feed is that of the comic strip Goats [goats.com]. Unlike many strips, which only feed the comic title, or the fact that it has been posted
    • Well, since RSS stands for Really Short attentionSpan, I think it is pretty clear.
      The whole goal of RSS is to get people who have a short attention span to become totally unproductive since they now have the RSS feed to break up the last bits on concentration they have. Complementary you can install chat software with annoying blinking icons to divide the attention between RSS and chat/messaging

      • Actually, RSS has made me slightly more productive at work. Before, when I was feeling lazy, I would often take a break by refreshing a folder full of news sites and waiting for them to load. And then, ten minutes later, I might do it again - just in case something terribly exciting had happened while I wasn't looking. Now that I have feeds, I am notified when updates happen, and I can't keep reloading all the feeds I'm watching before the refresh interval is up because then I might get my IP banned from

        • Interesting effect. I tend to be distracted by flashing things. Being bored however makes me open the same sites 10 times too to see that nothing or little has changed in the last hour.

          • This isn't a flashing thing. I don't have pop-ups or other intrusive notification mechanisms to tell me that the feed reader has a new update. It just does its stuff silently, and I have a look whenever I'm feeling bored. It's kind of like email.

    • Re:What is the point of RSS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by aussie_a ( 778472 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:50AM (#13284673) Journal
      I have failed to see the point of RSS.

      I don't know what the "official point" of it is, but I have a great many uses for it. One main use I have is I have several feeds on my homepage [google.com] and I can at a glance see if they've updated and/or see if I might be interested in their update.

      Another use for it is to open up one program and it will tell me if any blogs I read (and there are many that I do) have updated since I last checked. Instead of having to open up over 20 pages (most of which remain unupdated for months at a time), I just open up "one page".

      Another use is I keep track of new e-books on this site [fictionwise.com] and I'll keep the items in my reader. Once a week or so, I go through all the items, delete most of them, keep the items for books that sound interesting*. That way whenever I want to buy a book, I can just open up my client and look through the items I've saved (which are obvious as they're unread).

      * Actually I lie. I put the ones that sound interesting in a relational database. But you don't HAVE to do that, I'm just anal like that. Well, that and trying to keep track of my free e-books is very, very difficult.

    • Re:What is the point of RSS? (Score:4, Informative)

      by isorox ( 205688 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:58AM (#13284684) Homepage Journal
      One word: Live Bookmarks.

      Clik the orange blob in the bottom right, subscribe to the slashdot RSS feed, and drop it in your bookmarks (or on your toolbar). No need to visit slashdot to see if there's any interesting stories, as they'll be in your bookmarks.

      I do the same with BBC News too, I can get an idea of what's happening by simply dropping down a list and checking the headlines. If a story grabs my attention I click it and go straight to the story - no need to navigate the horrendus news.bbc.co.uk site (fine for the top 5-10 stories, but after that it's easy to miss stuff)
    • Caching? Doesn't anybody cache anymore? All you need to do is check the date stamp, or the filesize, or have a 2 byte hash somewhere, so the 20k page gets reduced to a 2k rss feed, which gets reduced to a 2B hash. Surely there'd be a bandwidth saving there?

    • How many websites do you visit on a regular basis? How many times have you visited them and not found anything new? Atom and RSS stop you wasting your time.

      How many times have you visited a site and realised that it's been that long since you last visited it, you've missed quite a lot? Atom and RSS help you keep tabs on a large number of websites without having to visit them all the time. Atom and RSS make more efficient use of your time.

      This isn't about saving bandwidth or being able to browse o

    • So far, I have failed to see the point of RSS

      Recently I bought a new Palm Pilot. I looked at AvantGo, but it doesn't support Linux. I installed plucker, but I still needed a source of information.

      I wrote a short (10 line) script which grabs the RSS feed from abc.net.au, uses xslt to extract the links, loops through the links downloading each html file, installs them in plucker and runs pilot-xfer.

      The whole thing takes about 20 seconds to run and gives me news to read on the tram in the morning when I go

      • I'm with you on this : Plucker is the way to go, and it can pull in regular HTML with small images : try finding the mobile content for PDAs which is HTML with small images and otherwise text only. For example the BBC PDA site [bbc.co.uk]. Works like a charm with Plucker, and no RSS parsing needed.

        RSS is for syndication. Aggregators are useful for those kinds of people who like "My Yahoo!" and similar, and it looks like RSS will be the tech of choice for this kind of site in the future. That's the point of RSS, it's

      • I looked at AvantGo, but it doesn't support Linux.

        Probably depends on your PDA. I'm using a (rather old) m515 with Linux & J-Pilot. Get the client for the PDA from AvantGo [avantgo.com] (the last files contain the .PRCs), then J-Pilot, and finally the MAL plugin [att.net] (which might be already included in your distribution). Don't forget to enable the conduit in J-Pilot :)

    • Re:What is the point of RSS? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hachete ( 473378 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @06:16AM (#13284813) Homepage Journal
      I use the RSS feeds in Firefox to check the status of news items from Le Figaro, BBC and the New York Times.

      I also use it to check if there are new items from Slashdot, PennyArcade and Megatokyo. The headlines are usually explicit enough to tell me if I want to go to the website or not, which saves me an important amount of time given that PennyArcade and MegaTokyo both take a while to download even on a corporate network.

      Works for me. To me it's just a dynamic bookmark folder in Firefox, think of it like a news-ticker. I agree that RSS is not the second coming, just like "blogs" are just over-inflated home-pages. Although to hear the combatants of Atom V RSS (sometimes boiled down to one mega-corporation against one millionaire), you'd think that the lives of millions were at stake, particularly from the Atom camp. *sigh*

      The interesting one is Slashdot. The feed from my work machine works. The feed to to my home machine worked a couple of times and has now stopped, in spite of the crap spouted on the Slashdot apology page on "why the Slashdot RSS feed isn't working for you". Maybe "they" only allow one nibble at a time?

    • The point is Syndication (Score:5, Insightful)

      by danila ( 69889 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @06:56AM (#13284906) Homepage
      RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, Syndication being the key word. You can automatically move the news items around and do anything you want with them. You are no longer a hostage to the website designer.

      For example, you can label stories as Todo or Check later in your mailer (such as M2), you can integrate stories from different sources in one interface, you can search many feeds at one, you can display the news in many innovative ways, from a newspaper-like interface to tag clouds. You can choose how often to read the new stories and not have to endure complex archive navigation at each site.

      If you are only getting your information from a few sources, one or two mailing lists and a few sites, you can just read your e-mail from inbox, bookmark the sites and check them manually. But if you want to know everything about foobar and aren't content simply with visiting only www.foobarnews.com, only RSS can help.

      RSS can provide you with the same level of service that used to cost real money (thousands of 000) when it was provided by marketing companies under the name of media monitoring.

      RSS is the shadow of the future power of Semantic Web already available in one particular area - news and new materials online. It's not intended for reading only, it's intended for processing and organising. With RSS you can automatically process all kinds of content, from slashdot articles, to search alerts to CNN news, to articles on rarely updated niche site, to del.icio.us links and flickr photos. You don't have to do it manually, your browser (RSS reader) and a bunch of web apps can do it for you.

      If you really don't see why RSS is important, your opionion is not even worth 2p. You should have politely asked "please explain to me, why am I missing here", not offered your opinion, which was uninformed and stupid.
      • You were doing really well there, until you insulted me.

        It's a free world, and I'm allowed to offer my opinion according the the Universal Rules of Earth.

        I'm surprised my comment has sparked such an active thread, but I have now learnt much about RSS that I had hitherto not considered. Many thanks to those that replied (including you).

        My main opinion point still stands, RSS is _not_ the second coming, well not for me anyway.

        -Jar.
        • I didn't insult you, I called your opinion stupid. You deserved that harsh comment - you have the right to offer your opinion, but should be ready that other people may make a public value judgment.

          BTW, your post was OK, until you offered your opinion again. :) You see, noone actually called RSS "the second coming", so your statement is obvious, banal and irrelevant. What people called RSS is "cool technology with tons of uses for many people". Dissing it just because you don't need it is like dissing hygie
    • So far, I have failed to see the point of RSS.
      The main point is that it is a kind of standard. You can fetch tens of news sources, sort them and read fresh news all the time without having to visit all the sites.

      I never even thought of RSS being a solution for bandwidth usage.
    • The point of RSS is simple... you can check a whole bunch of site from one place (your feed reader). I don't want to have to load ever webpage/newsservice/blog that I check frequently when I want to see if there's something new.

    • RSS is not primarily intended for offline browsing[1]. It's a mechanism for notifying you when a page has changed.

      I don't want to have to reload the huge group of news sites, blogs and other periodically updated pages that I find interesting in my browser every hour to see if anything has changed. It's a waste of time and a waste of bandwidth, since there's a good chance that half of them haven't been updated at any given time.

      I recently set up a feed reader. Every now and then I go past the workspac

    • The point is that now 10,000 more webmasters are going to be aggregating google news, furthermore polluting the web.
    • If 10,000 people subscribe to a sites' RSS feed and set their RSS aggregators to 'refresh' that feed every 5 mins or so, the bandwidth usage very quickly mounts up. Most sites use dyanamically created pages even for the feeds, so pre checking the age of the page doesn't help.

      That depends on how smart the code that dynamically creates the RSS is. A sensible implementation will understand the "If-modified-since:" header, will perform a very cheap database request for items newer than that, and if there are no

    • The point is XML (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Kamiza Ikioi ( 893310 )
      It's more about XML, I believe. News is a unique content source, as opposed to static content. For instance, Moby Dick is static content. Moby Dick in XML might not be that useful. RSS, or xml, on the other hand is raw annotated content. Unlike a webpage, it doesn't need an html interpreter (browser) to read, but can feed directly into applications, including offline readers (I recommend Avantgo if you really want mobile news... it installs on most palm/pocket pc devices).

      The advantage is that rss is r

    • My RSS reader (feedreader [sourceforge.net]) Is currently configured for 3-4 dozen different RSS feeds, some news sites, some home pages ("blogs"). Some of them are updated multiple times a day, some updated daily, some updated infrequently.

      Really I don't have time to check all of them even once a day but with an RSS reader I just have to start and tell it to check all the feeds and I know where there is new stuff.

      Then I can look at the subject lines and see what looks interesting, then I look at the summaries and then

    • You should try out bloglines.com. Install the firefox extension for bloglines while you are at it. For me, it is an easy way to keep tabs on over 100 blogs/sites without having to pull up over 100 different URLs. It is immediately obvious to me on a single page which ones have been updated and I can pick and choose which to read. I'm a big believer in RSS, hence my site: dodgeit.com
    • I have been mystified too by the success of RSS since its early proponents claimed it was a "push" technology.

      A TRUE push technology would have made enormous sense. You update your website, your website automatically notifies aggregators such as Bloglines and search engines such as google that it has been updates, the big players talk among themselves and spread the word.

      Instead the feed mechanism has turned into something that consumes more bandwidth than th eoriginal HTML ever did. The fact that you ar
    • You know, I'm starting to see Slashdot in a different light. I used to think it was the place to learn about/discuss cutting edge new technologies. Instead, I'm increasingly finding there to be a conservative, hostile view towards new technologies.

      Bah humbug. I don't see the point of technology XYZ. Why can't we do it like we used to. When I was a boy we used simple web pages coded in HTML 1.0 by hand. And liked it!

      I don't see many posters using RSS or things like del.ici.ous even though they are becomi

    • I incorporated an RSS aggregator (magpie rss [sourceforge.net]) into my website [warrenmyers.com] for subscribing to sites I normally visit heavily. It's reduced my load on several sites, only loading the headlines that interest me, instead of the whole site, then the ehadlines (a la CNN, InfoWorld, Slashdot, etc).

      Sure, it's not a perfect fix, but it's a nice start towards finding what I want to see.

  • Very cool (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ReformedExCon ( 897248 ) <reformed.excon@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:05AM (#13284584)
    A data scrape of an info amalgamation. Mmm.. sounds like it should be treated with some Bactine and a bandage.

    This seemed like an easy and logical step for Google News. They've already got something similar for their blogspot service.

    Check out their in-string wildcard searches, though. Cool!

  • Good thing (Score:3, Funny)

    by kihjin ( 866070 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:08AM (#13284587)
    FTGB: "And since feed reading can be addictive, don't forget to feed yourself after feeding your reader."

    Well then, it seems having a refrigerator next to me will finally start paying off!

  • Wow! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Too Much Noise ( 755847 )
    What's next, Google News Beta becoming Google News RC1?

    The world has gone crazy, I kid you not!

  • Google's Atom Feed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pyrrhonist ( 701154 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:11AM (#13284595)

    Incidentally, does anyone know why the first entry in the Atom feed is always a link to the Google News front page?

    Since the same information is in the feed's link, it's kind of superfluous. Is there some reason for this or is it just a mistake?
    They appear to use NFE for the feeds. Is this a default in NFE?

    The RSS feed does not appear to have this issue.

    • More than that, these are the only feeds that somehow are messing up Akregator's "Keep Article" and "Mark articles as read" features. I have no idea why, but I'm curious if they are feeding misformatted feeds.

      --
      Evan

      • Ah - as an update to anybody reading this, I figured it out. Those URLs are incredibly long with some sort of packed or hashed data in a single get variable. Akregator must store some sort of index by the url, but these urls are too long to use. The feeds work fine without that variable on them, so I just stripped them off the url for the feed and it works.

        --
        Evan

  • Yahoo's had this for months now... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:29AM (#13284627) Homepage Journal
    Yahoo news , my.yahoo.com , search and alerts .. have all been RSS for quite some time.

    I can imagine the irony of reading google news on my.yahoo.com (too bad /. banned my.yahoo).
    • Incidentally, I found out about Google News' RSS feeds from an item in my Yahoo News feed that I subscribed to solely because Google News didn't have an RSS feed. Now I can get rid of it. Thanks Yahoo!

      After using the Google and Yahoo RSS feeds side by side for a day, I'm definitely sticking with the Google one. There are a wider variety of sources, unlike Yahoo's content partners or whatever's going on there. Pretty pictures inside the feed help as well. What really put Google over th edge is that I can get my own customized feed that has the entertainment section stripped out, and more interesting stuff in it's place. Can My Yahoo do this? I'd never actually played around with it until just now. It'd probably be a better idea to integrate some of the customization features from My Yahoo into the main Yahoo News site so it's a bit more discoverable.
    • The difference of course, was that slashdot didn't announce it when Yahoo added that feature. I'm frankly surprised the Google blog entry about "those freakonomics guys" didn't get posted here. No doubt at least 50 people submitted it as a story idea though.
    • I like how under google's fun section, there's a feed for Ask Yahoo!

  • In case of Slashdotting (Score:4, Funny)

    by CleverNickedName ( 644160 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @04:42AM (#13284654) Journal
    Here's the cache [64.233.183.104].

  • Advertising? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zaguar ( 881743 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @05:08AM (#13284702)
    Anyone else remember Google patenting RSS advertising?

    http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/30/14 41249&tid=217&tid=95&tid=155 [slashdot.org]

    But that would mean...

    -Head Explodes-

  • So heres hoping they do it RIGHT!! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MrBandersnatch ( 544818 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @05:25AM (#13284732)
    Ive been playing with RSS feeds a lot of late and seen a lot of half-assed solutions. Its ****** annoying to find an RSS feed for an area/site only to find they have commited one of the following ?-ups :-

    1) No option to specify the number of results returned, returning to few results by default and putting a low cap on the max.
    2) A feed but no "feed from search facility"
    3) No pubDate information.
    4) Feed intermitantly breaks because someone forgets to encode '&' or '' etc. in one or other fields.
    5) Piling a **** load of HTML into the descripiton field (often leads to 4)

    and theres more but those are the most annoying sins Ive seen recently.

    Anyways this IS Google so I fully expect them to do it technically right...but I also fully expect them to limit the result set to 100 results - which is going to be useless to me and many others who might want RSS off google for more than just sticking into a aggregator!!

  • Not working well yet (Score:2, Informative)

    by GeekNJ ( 850046 )
    Saw this yesterday and added a couple of News keywords as RSS feeds to my aggregator. Seems that a lot of the same entries are showing up multiple times as new entries. Appears to be the same title/date & time. I don't think it's my RSS reader as it's handling 30+ other feeds fine.

  • What? No link rel="alternate"? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 200_success ( 623160 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @06:44AM (#13284870)

    When I go to news.google.com [google.com], the page doesn't have a

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="..." href="...">

    element in the <head>. That means that browsers cannot automatically announce the existence of an RSS feed. It would be nice if I could use such a link to get an equivalent RSS/Atom feed that matches my customized news topic selection. (The RSS/Atom links on the left side of the page don't reflect my customizations.)

    I'm a bit surprised at that, since Google has a reputation for making things as standard and user-friendly as possible. Perhaps that's why it's still Beta. (Where do I post feedback? Does Google have a crawler that indexes this gripe and reports it to their developers?)

  • Looks great in Plucker! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hacker ( 14635 ) <hacker@gnu-designs.com> on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @07:14AM (#13284954)

    The new feeds [google.com] look GREAT in Plucker [plkr.org] on my PDA. I wrote a little web-based tool that takes any rss/rdf/atom/opml/nntp resource and converts it to validated HTML, which I can then directly manipulate (and in my case, turn into Plucker format).

    You can see some screenshots [plkr.org] of what it looks like on my Palm.

  • Why is RSS HTTP? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by el_womble ( 779715 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @07:22AM (#13284984) Homepage
    Subscribing to an RSS stream has always struck me as a misnoma. You're still using HTTP, so you're still having to request the data, rather than sit back and let the data come to you. Why can't the site tell me that the content is ready and ship it to me? If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?

    Couldn't this technology then be used to allow software updates etc as well as podcasts and news feeds?

    In terms of a security risk, its only as bad as bittorrent. Sure somebody could modify their client to suck up the IPs of everyone that is interested in that information. Worse, somebody will probably figure out a way of adding a payload (although again, with proper hashing, and encryption that becomes increasingly difficult).

    Could this be the killer app that gets us all hooked on IPv6?
    • If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?

      I know someone who is working on RSS/Bittorrent integration. Will mostly help podcasters save bandwidth...hold your breath.
    • Subscribing to an RSS stream has always struck me as a misnoma. You're still using HTTP, so you're still having to request the data, rather than sit back and let the data come to you. Why can't the site tell me that the content is ready and ship it to me? If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?

      I too was disappointed to find you had to poll for RSS -- but when I gave it some thought, I accepted it. Polling is simple, a

    • I think its advantage is it is very simple to impliment. The RSS feed is just an xml file on the webserver. No new technology is needed to set it up, no new protocols or software.

      I think that is why it was caught on. Remember previous attempts at "push" technology on the web were supposed to be the next big thing, and never went anywhere becuase nobody set them up.

      I'm not sure why IPv6 would have any impact. It's just more IP addresses available.

      • I figured... and I expect I'm wrong one of the reasons push technologies fail is because you have to work through NAT, firewalls and dynamic IP addresses all work against having a listeners on end users machines.

        Maybe it could be done if it was handled by a system similar to Skype. With the data transmitted via HTTP with you machine acting like a web server, updating a distributed registry every time your IP is updated?
    • Use any other protocol and it's going to be block, reducing it's adoption.

      If you want it to "push" data to your client, that's even worse because then you have to poke holes in firewalls to talk to each client, so these feeds will most likely not work behind any corporate firewall.
      • What does this say about our industry?

        I'm not saying your wrong, in fact I completely agree with you. I'm reminded of:

        'When all you've got is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail'

        The current mentality seems to be, everybodys got a hammer, so make nails - we understand that some people like the idea of screws, but that will upset the people that make hammers. If your nails don't work use more nails, or make bigger nails. If that doesn't work we'll make a bigger hammer. No screws allowed.

  • Adding the Google Feed into Firefox (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pablo El Vagabundo ( 775863 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @07:43AM (#13285049)

    Google does not tell Firefox it has a feed, here is how to add it (ripped from the mozilla site):

    Some sites don't tell Firefox that they support Live Bookmarks, even though they actually do. If you know the URL of a site's RSS feed (url ends with .rdf or .xml), you can manually create a Live Bookmark for the site. Go to the Bookmarks menu and select 'Manage Bookmarks'. Under the 'File Menu', select 'New Live Bookmark'. Create a name for the Live Bookmark and add the URL. New articles from that site will appear as Live Bookmarks in Firefox.

    Pablo
  • I use RSS for all my bookmarks, via del.icio.us [del.icio.us]. No more need to carry around my Firefox profile to have my bookmarks on me - if I have internet access, I have all my bookmarks.

  • Try a wget... (Score:2, Informative)

    by $0 31337 ( 225572 )
    ... And you get a 403 forbidden error
  • I tried all rss search engines and at the end i wrote my own because of general dissatisfaction ....

    My problem was this: others did not allow filtering the way I wanted, so I created one, that allows url filtering

    1.URL must/must not contain
    2.Must contin at least one of these
    3. AND at least ove of these
    4. Can not contain any of these

    While a bit afraid of being ./ -ed since the server is already overloaded i post the URL here
    please avoid "archive search" and note that it is a "hobby project" for me so it has

  • Yahoo News has it for months (Score:3, Interesting)

    by neves ( 324086 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @03:25PM (#13288359) Homepage
    We should note that Yahoo news [yahoo.com] has implemented this features months ago. Just make a search and the orange xml button will appear in the results page. You can even use rss auto-discovery (the rss feed in describe in the html meta tags). If you are a bloglines [bloglines.com] user, you can click in their bookmarklet, and automagically subscribe to the feed.

  • Depends on the content providers.

    But if you're browsing with Mozilla/Firefox, check out Sage [mozdev.org]. I find it quite useful for floating over feeds from MarketWatch.com, Reuters, freshmeat.

    Looking at how RSS works, though, I have to wonder why RFC 822 Mail Subject headers aren't fed into RSS as an option for gmail.

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