Create Your Own YouTube Video Feeds

One of the biggest stories of 2006 has to be the ascendancy of YouTube, the website (http://www.youtube.com) where anyone can upload digital content to the Internet. In August of 2005, YouTube claimed 58,000 visitors; one year later the site boasts 20 million unique visitors in August. In June, more than two billion videos were viewed on YouTube. Just a few months ago, NBC forced YouTube to take down a Saturday Night Live segment; last month the network signed a deal to showcase network previews and archival content. Some observers are saying that YouTube could be worth a billion dollars to the right buyer.

Most of us don’t really care about the staggering numbers or how rich the owners will be when they sell; we just want to watch cool videos. And YouTube serves up an astounding array of video content. I have found cereal commercials from the 1950s (keyword: Maypo) videos of nearly every rock/rap band in existence and history (and some, like Spinal Tap, that aren’t), old television clips, archival historical footage and film clips of people embarrassing or otherwise hurting themselves – falling off bicycles or skateboards, giving wedgies, punching walls – that are the site’s bread-and-butter. There is most certainly something for any age or taste.

The way users tag (or classify) YouTube videos can take some getting used to. A short video of a person falling off his bicycle might be tagged “bicycle,” “fall,” "hurt" or “hilarious.” But if you’re looking for something specific, you can create an RSS feed for any tag or word in YouTube and keep up with in your NewsGator Web Reader.

First find a tag you like – for instance “Beatles” or “Gnarls Barkley.” From the Web Reader, click on Add Feeds and then URL & Import. If you want “beatles,” for instance, type: http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/Beatles.rss into the box that says Feed URL. Type in the keyword into this string where it says “Beatles,” and that feed will appear in your Web Reader. If it’s two words, leave a space between them: http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/Gnarls Barkley.rss.

We couldn’t find another video service that allows tags on words or phrases, but other video services offer RSS feeds for their most popular content. Google Video (http://video.google.com/) allows you to put an RSS feed on its Top 100 New Videos (“How to Cut Class” and “Incredible Warrior Tricks” were the first posts I found).

Other video sites, like Ebaum’s World (http://ebaumsworld.com/), iFilm (http://www.ifilm.com/), Metacafe (http://www.metacafe.com/) and Grouper (http://www.grouper.com/), which was just purchased earlier this week by Sony for $65 million, all let you to put an RSS feed on Most Popular or New Videos or on channels of specific content.

Introducing NewsGator Enterprise Server 1.4.1

Yesterday afternoon, we released NewsGator Enterprise Server 1.4.1 for general availability. Despite the "two dot" name, (1.4 was actually the version we sent to our partner GMO in Japan, so we gave this the 1.4.1 moniker) there are some significant enhancements here, most notably integration with our popular client software.  The highlights of the release include:

• Synchronization with NewsGator Client Software- NGES now synchronizes subscriptions and read states with NewsGator Inbox, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire. The benefits are pretty dramatic. On the Microsoft Outlook side, companies can choose to deploy client-less (via Exchange integration) or install the Inbox plug-in. While the latter requires software installation, it has some cool bells and whistles (which I why I use it) and removes the need to talk to Exchange (or the Exchange admin). For the knowledge workers more familiar with RSS, they can now use FeedDemon or NetNewsWire as their main interface, while the more casual RSS user can access feeds from Outlook or a company portal.
• Enhanced Directory Server Integration- With the release of NGES 1.3, we added support for LDAP-compliant directory servers. We not only made that integration tighter, but we added tools for the administrator to specify the exact groups and users to import and synchronize (and control allowable user types to import).
• Improved Podcast Support- The NGES web interface now automatically detects podcast enclosures and highlights them for users.
  
  
  
  With a single click of the “Add to My Podcasts” link, the “My Podcasts” folder is automatically created (if necessary) and the article is stored.  With the optional FeedStation client, podcasts can be downloaded automatically and stored on user computers or loaded onto mp3 players.
• Category Filtering- The NGES web interface offers a great addition for finding relevant content with the Category Filter.
  
  
  
  Selecting a category will filter the display to show only articles that contain that category. If you pick a category that relates to other categories, a magnifying glass icon is displayed.
  
  
• Additional Reports- Based on requests from several customers, we added some additional reports to the Reporting tab of the Administration section.
• Security Modifications- Last, but certainly not least, we made some modifications on the security front. SSL certificates are no longer required for AD-integrated installations as the Exchange username and password have been removed from the administrative screens and are now modified with the configuration wizard. Usernames and passwords for the SQL Server account are now stored in encrypted format for extra security. Finally, potentially      harmful enclosure tags are automatically removed from posts and prevented from      displaying.

Thanks again to all of the customers, new and old, that participated in the beta process.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, Newsgator,

Finding Snakes on a Plane in NewsGator

When people sign up for NewsGator, they often ask, "now what?"

To help you better find content relevant to your interests, there are several ways within NewsGator's Web Reader to search for feeds of interest.

In the upper left corner of your Web Reader is the Add Feeds tab. Clicking on this takes you to a page that offers two ways to find feeds. First you will see a list of categories, which is known as a taxonomy, a top-down hierarchy of subjects.

There are more than twenty basic categories to choose from, and clicking on one will often show more subcategories below to help hone in on content you really want. Some categories don’t have subcategories; others, like Sports, have numerous subcategories that allow you to better locate your area of interest.

Once you get into a category or sub-category of interest, you will be presented with a page of feeds and the chance to subscribe by clicking on the link on the right side of the page. Subscribe to any feeds that look interesting. (If a feed winds up being not what you want, you can unsubscribe by placing your mouse over the feed in the web reader, right-clicking and clicking Unsubscribe.)

So let’s say you are looking for feeds that feature news commentary. Click on the News category and you’ll see a list of sub-categories. One of those is News/Pundits-Blogs. Click on that, and you will be presented with a list of bloggers who work both sides of the political scene.

Another way to find the feeds you want is by using the NewsGator search function. Type in a keyword or phrase (ie. Snakes on a Plane), and NewsGator will serve up any feeds in our system that correspond to your search term. (You’ll find a funny account of one person to attend a screening of the film, a recurring comic strip, blogs and official merchandise, among other feeds.)

On the left side of the page, below the Web Reader, is NewsGator Latest Buzz, which lists the most talked-about articles according to NewsGator users. It’s a good barometer of popular topics on the Web.

Finally, you can also click on Recommended Feeds, which takes you to a page titled Editor’s Choice. There you will find a list of posts from feeds in our taxonomy and the chance to subscribe to any feed with a single click.

Happy hunting.

FYI: Security concerns about RSS feeds were brought up at the recent Black Hat USA Conference. In response to the concerns, NewsGator this week added some additional security measures. You can read more about this here

Technorati Tags: rss, Newsgator,

Further Market Expansion into Japan

This morning we announced a further expansion into the Japanese market through a partnership with Agrex, one of the leading IT services firms in that country. Back in June, we announced a partnership with GMO Group to provide a hosted version of NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) to that market. Through our partnership with Agrex, we will offer an behind-the-firewall solution. The two partnerships give customers the ability to get the leading enterprise RSS solution, translated and localized for their market, in whatever deployment model makes the most sense for them.

As we noted in the GMO annoucement, Japan has the second largest number of blogs and RSS feeds (according to Technorati) making that market a natural fit for a product such as NGES. Look for more announcements in the future from us as we continue to expand our reach both domestically and abroad.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, Newsgator,

NewsGator Toolbars for Firefox and IE

In the next evolution of the NewsGator Everywhere story, Nick Harris, our Inbox guru, took a break from the Microsoft Outlook world and whipped up great toolbars for Firefox and Internet Explorer. They went into beta last night. As he notes in his blog post, there are a lot of great features:

Discover and subscribe to new feeds, straight from your browser, into NewsGator Online, NewsGator Inbox, or FeedDemon.

Autodiscover feeds as you browse the web and get information - like the number of NewsGator subscribers – or preview the feed before you subscribe.

Right click “Subscribe with NewsGator” context menu in both IE and FireFox.

Search for new feeds by keyword.

See who’s linking to the pages you’re browsing and read what they have to say about it.

You can download the beta here: http://www.newsgator.com/download/toolbar/ngtoolbarsetup.exe

FYI, a beta for toolbars that synchronize to NewsGator Enterprise Server is being finalized as I write this post. I've been using the Alpha versions of the toolbars for NGES and they are great. If your company is a NGES customer and you want to try this out, ask the person who manages the NewsGator relationship to contact their client services representative.

Technorati Tags: rss, Newsgator, feeddemon, firefox,

Feed Demon Security

There has been some discussion over the last few days in the press and the blogosphere from the Black Hat USA conference about possible security vulnerabilities with some feed readers. FeedDemon, one our products, was mistakenly included in the list of readers with signifcant vulnerability. We felt it was worth discussing in this venue, the feed security features that are inherent to FeedDemon. Nick Bradbury, the creator of Feed Demon, explains this in more detail in his blog post. Greg Reinacker, NewsGator's Founder and CTO also weigns in.

As Greg notes, bottom line, current versions of FeedDemon is not vulnerable to any of the signicant security flaws that were brought up in the report.

Technorati Tags: Newsgator, feeddemon

Indvidual Readers vs. Enterprise RSS solutions

As promised in the post on Friday, we're going to use this space to help spur a broader discussion of important issues. Later this week, we'll talk about interesting use cases for enterprise RSS and discuss some of the less obvious applications that are benefiting from the personalization, syndication and community tools from our Private Label Platform. In the coming weeks, we'll also take a wide-ranging look at the idea of relevancy. However, in this morning's post, we'll be addressing the question that comes up most frequently in discussions with customers and prospects, during Webinars and at trade shows- when does an enterprise solution (like NewsGator Enterprise Server) make more sense than using individual readers?

Putting some perspective around this for a moment before going into specifics, NewsGator offers a wide range of aggregators for consumers and small businesses including NewsGator Online, Inbox, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire. There are also dozens of free and low-cost readers from other companies. Individuals typically purchase (or sign-up for in the case of free readers) them, for either personal or business use, although often without corporate sponsorship (in the form of reimbursement). However, it's not uncommon for small offices to purchase five, ten or twenty of one of those products. Less frequently, the purchases number into the hundreds or even thousands for one organization.

Although passing around an OPML file from user to user is an option, implicit in these products is the idea that individual users will take responsibility for finding and subscribing to feeds on their own. Now when you get to a point where you have an organization (either company or department) where information typically flows from an individual or set of individuals out to a bigger set of recipients, then that model doesn't work as well. Think of librarians or knowledge managers or perhaps competitive intelligence and internal communications from the marketing department as examples. In these cases, the option is to use RSS as an alternative information delivery platform to getting information to portals or e-mail.

This is where something like NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) comes in. The group administration function (either organization wide or delegated down to a department) allows the administrator to automatically subscribe users to relevant feeds such as those from premium content providers (Thomson, LexisNexis) keyword/phrase alerts and searches or the executive staff. Assuming that you want to offer the ability for users to get feeds on their own, then the discovery capabilities also play a role. Customizing the taxonomy (the categories of feeds) is a way to make important content easily accessible via logical categories (business units, functions, geographies etc;). NGES' searchable central index and search filtering capabilities also help in this regard.

In addition, to administration and discovery, there are some other capabilities that you wouldn't get with an individual reader. Included in that list are the ability to take non-RSS content from e-mails (such as newsletters) and forwarded them to an address that creates an RSS feed. This is a feature we built at the request of librarians. Another feature is the ability to deliver to a wide range of interfaces and devices (intranet, portal, Microsoft Outlook, mobile etc;), let the users pick which ones they want to use, even at the level of specific feed and then synchronize the read states. A third feature important feature is reporting. If you have individual use readers, you get no view into what people are subscribing to or reading and where improvements can be made to ensure better uptake of important information. Finally, there is the bandwidth savings, an important concern to IT departments. Instead of every reader polling every publisher independently, NGES grabs a feed once and distributes new items to the individual subscribers.i

So how important is size of organization? From our perspective, something like NewsGator Enterprise Server makes sense at around 50 users or so. An organization or department with far fewer users, say 5-10, would likely benefit from NGES, but the fact they need IT's involvement to deploy and manage the system (a problem when there is no IT staff) makes it a little harder. However, when we come out with a hosted version later this year, which Greg Reinacker discussed a little while back, this eliminates the IT issue.

Everyone has different needs and different criteria for evaluating RSS solutions. The drivers for purchasing a particular product are different based on the buyer- librarian vs. IT vs. business department.If you have any questions on whether your particular organization would benefit from an enterprise solution, let us know.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, Newsgator, feeddemon, netnewswire,

Where to Find NewsGator

It's been a while since we last posted. Summer tends to be a quiet time from a news perspective, so instead of going long stretches without posting, we decided to broaden the focus of this blog. The NewsGator Daily will still be the place to find out about the latest NewsGator news, buzz and happenings. But, this blog will also include any information that we run across that we think might be of interest to our more than 40,000 subscribers. Some of it will be NewsGator specific, some will discuss industry trends, and some will be about stories we just want to share. Here's the first one.

Where Can You Find NewsGator?
The event calendar is filling up fast and furiously.  Here's the highlights so far:

• WWDC Webloggers Party- Aug 7th- 8:00 PM, San Francisco- NewsGator is sponsoring this annual party for Mac bloggers. Brent Simmons will be showing a sneak preview of NetNewsWire 3.0. If you are a Mac blogger, this is the place to be.
• 2006 SLA Great Lakes Regional Conference- September 6th-8th, Indianapolis- We'll be presenting and exhibiting here. More booth and presentation details to come in the near future.
• Legal Marketing Association - Bay Area's 8th Annual Technology Program - September 14th, San Francisco. We're exhibiting and sponsoring this event for legal marketers.
• Gartner Symposium- IT Expo- Orlando, October 8th-13th. Come find us in booth #513 at the premier technology event of the season.
• Internet Librarian 2006- October 24th-26th, Monterrey, CA. We're in booth #407 and you'll be able to see what our crack NGES development team has been up to.
• KM World and Intranets 2006- San Jose, October 31st-November 2nd. We're in booth #125 at this event. Our Director of Product Management, Brian Kellner, will be on a panel called "Creative Content Strategies" on Aug 2nd.

As you can see, we're going to be spending a lot of time in front of librarians and knowledge managers over the next few months. We had pretty large crowds at the recent SLA and AALL shows. The reason is that for most corporate librarians and knowledge managers, it's really challenging to ensure that important, relevant content gets read by the people they support across their organizations. By allowing them to deliver RSS content automatically to folders in Outlook or to a portal would make their lives much easier and increase the chances of the information getting read and acted upon.

If you're not going to be attending these shows, but you happen to be in one of those locales, let us know. We'll be happy to stop by and give you a demonstration of NewsGator Enterprise Server or Private Label Platform. As a reminder, we're also doing regular Webinars on a general basis and for specific industries. Just e-mail if you want more details.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, Newsgator