After 7 days of trials and a lifetime of training; FC-AFC Adams Acres Cherokee Rose, handled by John Russell, is the new National Amateur Retriever Champion. I know next to nothing about retrieving and retrievers; but I am pleased to say that AFC Freeridin Wowie Zowie, owned and handled by Ted Shih, was a finalist in this competition. An excellent result in their first national championship event.

If you have no options, then you’ll take whatever you can get. But once you have options, then you start getting fussy about what you use. My current aggregator rotation consists of Radio Userland, NewsGator, and NetNewsWire Lite. Radio is my primary reader, NewsGator is in the mix to archive RSS with email, and I use NetNewsWire Lite for traditional news (BBC, New York Times, et al.).

Radio does a great job in presenting RSS items (example here via Scripting News). It is the easiest way for me to read. I skim down the page, opening up new tabs as I go and deleting items last. The combined view in NetNewsWire 1.0.3b1 opening pages in the background is getting close, but Radio still has the edge.

I’m still working on the coordination between Radio Userland and NewsGator, but the leading contender uses Radio Userland to post to a category and NewsGator to archive that category. If I didn’t want to use Outlook, I could use Graeme Foster’s RSS→Pop3 gateway [via Scripting News] in place of NewsGator.

I split off traditional news because who wants to read yesterday’s news? The split allows me to apply more aggresive rules to traditional news - marking everything as read when downloaded and discarding read items on exit.

My advice to RSS aggregator authors:

• Combined view a la Radio and NetNewsWire is a winner.
• Item management is easier when you can mark an item for deletion and leave it displayed.
• Different feeds need different deletion rules.
• Shared archive with email is a must.

19 June: Mac OS X is my primary personal OS. I like NewsGator enough to buy it for my secondary OS. But because it’s MS Windows only, it’s never been fully exercised as my primary RSS reader.

Ok, you buy into my premise that RSS should be archived with email. But NewsGator has pretty much cornered the market for Outlook RSS integration, and you have no desire to write the next great email client. Well, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve got some options for you to consider.

• mbox export: Allow RSS items to be exported in a mbox format.
• email this item: Add a button for one click email to myself.
• RSS to email bridge: What the heck, just email everything (bad choice - only included for completeness).
• mail server emulation: Let your aggregator emulate a POP3 or IMAP server. The IMAP approach will expose folder hierarchy as well as contents.
• IMAP client: Let your aggregator store RSS on an IMAP server. A member IMAP account from FastMail is available for a one time charge of $14.95.

Dave Winer absolutely [doesn’t] agree that the most powerful application of RSS is to flow it through mail readers. I suspect that is because he views RSS as his personal, real time, news feed. And news has a very short life time. After all, who wants to read yesterday’s news?

But RSS isn’t just for news. RSS is for syndicated information, some of which has a lifetime measured in months or years. For example, I’m saving Simon Willison’s posts on CSS and some items from my developerWorks feed. I expect them to remain valuable for some time.

So while I’m flexible on the issue of whether I first read my RSS in my mail program, I absolutely believe in having a single archive for both my RSS and my email. Because it’s a pain to perform the same search twice, simply because you’re stuck with two archives.

And I still believe that if you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t get RSS, then you should try positioning it as broadcast email. Yes, that means that they’re starting out with a more limited vision. But isn’t that better than no vision at all? And doesn’t that just mean that there opportunities to open their eyes to a broader vision in the future?

The problem with the InfoWorld RSS is that they are much too parsimonious with words. Which I don’t quite understand - I’m a long time subscriber to their email newsletters and they’re much more generous with the word count by email. Let’s take a look at an example. Here is an item from the RSS feed:

Sun, Zend push scripting for Java. Sun aims to bring another 7 million Java developers into the fold

And here is the corresponding excerpt from my Application Development Report (I receive the plain text newsletter, I’ve taken the liberty of html-ifying it):

Sun, Zend push scripting for Java Posted June 12, 2003 5:00 AM Pacific Time

SAN FRANCISCO – Sun Microsystems is working with a number of industry partners, including Oracle, Macromedia, and Zend Technologies, to support the use of scripting languages in its Java platform.

Sun and Zend are leading the effort, which, if it is successful, will create a way for developers to write Java applications using popular scripting languages like PHP, ECMAscript, and Active Server Pages.

I sampled the InfoWorld RSS feeds a few months back, but I felt the items were so brief that I couldn’t get a handle on whether it was worth following the link. So I unsubscribed from the RSS and kept the email.

Returning to the ad issue, the real content is so brief that the NewsGator ad really stands out. Here’s the ad for NewsGator:

ADV: Read this news in Outlook with NewsGator. NewsGator is a news aggregator that runs in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to subscribe to various syndicated news feeds (such as weblogs, news sites, etc.) and have news from these sites be delivered right into your Outlook folders. There are thousands of sites that syndicate their content - and more are added every day.

The Radio Userland news aggregator assembles multiple RSS descriptions on a page. So the ad appears with 3 or 4 times the weight of a normal item. I think that is much too strong for the feed. Of course, if InfoWorld were to give their RSS the same excerpt leeway they give their newsletters, then the ad would lose it’s prominence. And I could unsubscribe from the email newsletters (the newsletters also include ads).

16 June: Chad Dickerson of InfoWorld says that they’re working on it.

Rich Miller is keenly interested in the commercial viability of weblogs, but the notion of an ad within an RSS feed just feels wrong (via Corante on Blogging). But while weblogs may be driving the popularity of RSS, it is a mistake to think that Weblogs are synonymous with RSS.

The right model for ad supported RSS is the email newsletter, such as the LangaList or This is True. Each is available in either a ad-supported, abbreviated version or a paid subscription, full version - I’ve been a subscriber to the ad-supported versions of both for years. The war on spam puts all email newsletters at risk, and I think RSS is the best way out. BTW, a financial analysis is available online for a fledgling newsletter: Brian’s Buzz.

I also think that most weblogs are not a suitable platform for advertising. I’d guess that the percentage of ads by number and volume will need to be under 20% to prevent a reader revolt. And I suspect that most weblogs have less than 4 entries a day. So the ads aren’t really going to fit in unless entries are held back and released in a burst.

Thomas Warfield thinks that Microsoft has a problem - because Visual Basic was a great developer platform and VB.Net isn’t. Unfortunately, I don’t think Microsoft really had a choice because VB was just too good.

I’ve always been a server-side kind of guy. I never really got the hang of the NeXT Project Builder in the early 90’s. And I didn’t care much for building interfaces with Motif then either. But Visual Basic in the late 90’s was the first program that I could actually build good user interfaces with. Unfortunately, I had too much company.

Microsoft needed to move us into the world of .Net. And they were willing to drag us kicking and screaming it that’s what it took. It’s probably a win in the Corporate market. And Microsoft isn’t focused on the consumer market right now.

But Thomas, what about REALbasic? It might be a better match for your problem than Delphi. And it might give me some more application choices.

16 June: Thomas is going to take a look at REALbasic. That’s good news, I’d take a good look at Pretty Good Solitare for the Mac.

The Devils won their third Stanley Cup last night in typical Devils style - opportunistic scoring and smothering defense. Stylistically, it was an odd series: all games won by the home team, first two games won by the Devils their way, next two games won by the Ducks their way (in overtime), next two games split with uncharacteristicly high scores, and the final won by the Devils their way again. I was pulling for the Ducks, but my hat’s off for the Devils. Their style may not be pretty, but it has proven effective with Stanley Cups in ‘95, ‘00 and ‘03.

Greg Reinacker is thinking about personalized RSS marketing. Now, I’ve already gone on record with my support for Ad Supported RSS. But I think Greg is being a bit ambitious in his thinking.

I’ve always liked the concept of personalization. But my actual experiences with it have fallen short of the mark. In the first place, personalization doesn’t scale worth beans. So you better be dealing with high value customers. And in the second place, good personalization is hard. Amazon has superb intelligence on my book buying habits and their recommendations are boringly predictable.

Personalizing RSS is contrary to it’s advantages of scalabilty and anonymity. An RSS server always be bandwidth limited because it’s serving up slowly changing, text dominated, static files. And it’s easy to walk away from an RSS subscription because you have so little invested in it. Categories are the reasonable extent of RSS personalization for the next few years.

So while I think we’ll see ad supported RSS, I think that it will appear as an extension of the email newsletter. Not personalized, but focused on a fairly narrow topic. Ads will be tolerated because they’ll match their feed in style and they’ll be on topic.

Tim Bray is in sales mode and wants to know What’s the RSS Soundbite? My advice would be to load up NewsGator and pitch RSS as broadcast email. Email has already achieved pretty near universal acceptance in business. Many people consider their email archives to be their primary information storage vault - and the ones that don’t know people who do. So pitch RSS as broadcast email and don’t give the web a chance to confuse the issue.

My personal peeve with most RSS Aggregators lies in their inability to properly archive articles for later use. So while other aggregators may do a better job with the RSS, I think NewsGator is the clear cut winner for Outlook users. Greg is clearly biased, but I have to agree that when RSS news is as much a part of your day as email, you want them all integrated into a central information management point.

Now, if I someone would just step up to the plate for Mac OS/X.

9 June: I originally referred to both “pull email” and “broadcast email.” After some consideration, I think that broadcast email is the superior term and have modified the text to match.