World Governments Catching Up With RSS

As RSS adoption continues to grow, governments are catching on and adding feeds that offer their citizens fast and easy access to content they need. With RSS, governments can become more transparent and open about sharing vital information.

Since RSS feeds can be attached to any document, many governments are realizing that RSS feeds are an easy way to keep basic, necessary information updated for their citizens. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has started a blog that gives people access to all kinds of numbers -- economic indicators, capital expenditures, regional statistics etc. Australia also has a blog that links to documents concerning issues that its Parliament is dealing with, including counter-terrorism, human cloning and border security, among others.

Canada, an early RSS adopter, now has feeds that link to each of its regional governments and ministries, plus blogs about jobs, housing, education, transportation, health and finance. South Africa, Ireland, Scotland and England all have basic RSS feeds for information.

Our editors have added feeds in those countries and others. To find and subscribe in NewsGator Online, click Add Feeds in your Web Reader, then click Government to find subcategories for individual country feeds.

While you are there, you will notice a lot of U.S. government RSS feeds, from defense contracts to the census bureau statistics, Food and Drug Administration warnings and blogs from the Departments of Education, State, Forest Service, Immigration and more. There is even a feed for the White House news and press briefings.

Beta Mania

It's that time of year again! We have a few treats for you heading into December. First, we're happy to announce that the second piece of the NewsGator Go! family has been released into beta. NewsGator Go! for J2ME is available for your testing pleasure. We've seen great demand for its Windows Mobile counterpart, and now you can get the same great functionality on Java-based devices such as Blackberries and Treos as well as most phones from Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG. We developed this in partnership with Free Range Communications and it is a great way to quickly keep up with your favorite fees when you are on a train, plane or standing in line at Starbucks. You can download the beta here. For more information, see Kevin Cawley's (NewsGator Director of Mobile Development) blog post.

Speaking of beta, we're getting close to starting a beta program for NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand, the Software-as-a-Service version of NewsGator Enterprise Server. We were initially keeping rather quiet about this as the first beta will be limited to a handful of customers, but a number of people including Prasanth Rai and Charlie Wood blogged about it, so why not talk about it here? We're currently accepting sign-ups for the beta program. The application delivers the benefits of a centrally-managed reader and works with all of the NewsGator client products, but spares you from the responsibility of procuring or managing the hardware and software. If you are interested in seeing how this can work for your organization, you can get your name on the list by going here. If you don't make it into the first round, we'll open up a larger second round a few weeks later.

Keep an eye on this feed for other exciting beta news in the coming weeks.

Technorati Tags: mobile+rss, enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator,

Seeing’s Believing: Videoblogs on the Rise

On Nov. 4, the Vloggies awards ceremony was held in San Francisco to celebrate the best of Video weblogs, or Vlogs.

And while they aren’t as popular as the written kind, vlogs, riding the wave of digital cameras and editing software, are coming of age. To reflect that, our editors added some of the best video weblogs to a new Video Blogs/Vlogs category in NewsGator Online.

Vlogs are all over the blogging map. For kids, there is “The JETSET Show," with reports from youthful correspondents around the country on subjects as varied as popularity, tennis-shoe art and music. “Goodnight Burbank” spoofs news in the post-“Daily Show” world. (And the site is trolling for fake-news correspondents.) “The Show with ZeFrank” (pronounced ZayFrank) features the aforementioned ZeFrank with his own unique perspectives on everything from putting fruit on your fingers to what you can do with newspapers after you read them. Not for the squeamish.

“WineLibraryTV” is just that, offering suggestions on which Beaujolais Nouveau is to die for or what wines to serve for the Thanksgiving Day feast. Amanda Congdon, the original host of “Rocketboom,” an early entry in the Vlog sweepstakes, and who just signed with ABCnews.com, is blogging her way around the country via “AmandaAcrossAmerica.” The episode we caught was an interview with technology guru Doc Searls. And political junkies can get their fix from “Bloggingheadstv,” where commentators and bloggers of various stripes argue their positions.

From your web reader, click to Add Feeds and look for the Video Blogs/Vlogs category. If you know of a favorite vlog (or have your own) that isn’t on the list, click on the “Want to add your content to our feeds list?” below the Enter a Search Term function.

NewsGator Enterprise Server Wins InfoWorld Test Center Shooutout

For several months now, we have been talking about the increased adoption of NewsGator Enterprise Server and the maturing of the market for Enterprise RSS Solutions. One of the reasons that we have seen significant adoption (the product has twice as many deployments as the rest of the offerings combined) from companies of all sizes across a wide range of industries, is that we both listen to our customers and also introduce innovative features in advance of broad market requirements.

This approach was not only validated by the rigorous selection process that Intel undertook in choosing technologies for the recently announced SuiteTwo Enterprise 2.0 solution, but also in a newly published review of Enterprise RSS Servers by Mike Heck of InfoWorld Labs. The InfoWorld review notes our leadership in several categories that are important to ensuring a succesful project and rapid ROI. They include:

• Centralized Managment of Groups, Users and Subscriptions- "NGES user management went quickly. After selecting a user group, clicking one button allowed me to subscribe users to a default set of feeds, block feeds and podcasts through a blacklist, and perform other tasks, such as managing log-ins for secure and premium feeds."
• Security- "Of note, NGES’s developers understand this security part well. For instance, they’ve included their own routines to detect and remove malicious attack code that could be contained within RSS feeds. And in Windows 2003 domains, secure feeds are retrieved on behalf of users without needing to access or store users’ passwords."
• Platform and Device Options- "Another NGES distinction is its many possible interfaces. Power users have a plug-in for Outlook that integrates feeds from the Enterprise Server, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator Inbox. NewsGator Enterprise Server balances needs across your organization."
• Customized Taxonomy- "Using NGES’s Web Administration site, I found the existing folder taxonomy -- which includes typical departments such as HR and legal -- to be a straightforward starting point, and I customized it to match my organization structure."
• User Discovery of Feeds- "NewsGator helps you quickly find information from potentially thousands of feeds. There’s a standard category filter to discover relevant articles within a feed or folder -- and a handy search form for locating feeds using keywords. These worked well, but I often relied on the innovative Recommend feature within search; it provided extra precision by ranking results based on what feeds others in my group subscribe to, along with their rating. Last, Smart Feeds pull back content-matching keywords into custom feeds."
• Reporting- "The NewsGator server logs and reports activity, such as who uses the system and the most-read feeds. As my testing progressed, this information proved valuable in discovering both feeds of little interest, which I removed, and popular ones, which I made sure were added to every group’s default package."

The point here is that we strove to create a product that would provide the most value to the most companies, not just create the prettiest interface to a particular application. Heck sums up our philosophy nicely when he notes, "NewsGator Enterprise Server balances needs across your organization. It’s easy to administer, especially getting relevant information to casual users through Outlook; in fact, they don’t even need to know what RSS means. Yet power users get their choice of interfaces, such as FeedDemon, synchronized to NGES."

On the whole, he gave NGES an 8.8 out of a possible 10 rating, the only product that received an "Excellent" designation.

For more insight on this topic and the review, please read our Founder and CTO Greg Reinacker's blog post.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, Newsgator,

Bringing Web 2.0 to the Enterprise with SuiteTwo

This afternoon, in conjunction with Intel Capital, SpikeSource, SixApart, SocialText and SimpleFeed, we introduced a suite of Enterprise 2.0 products called Suite Two. This collaboration, which was organized by Intel Capital, brings together all of the essential ingredients for an organization to improve the way they communicate and collaborate through Web 2.0 technologies. SixApart's Moveable Type application provides the corporate blogging tools and SocialText provides the wikis to help in the creation of the content. NewsGator Enterprise Server handles the dissemination and aggregation of the updates and for organizations that want to publish the content as RSS feeds externally, they can do that with SimpleFeed. SpikeSource is handling the integration, maintenance and support.

Intel Capital evaluated several different vendors across the differnet categories and selected the best-of-breed ones, in the case of enterrpise RSS solutions, it was NewsGator.The value of NewsGator Enterprise Server increases in many organizations when internal content is created and SuiteTwo enables makes it very easy to both create and consume content. As a practical example, during the last month, we used SocialText's wiki product to manage the product launch. Besides Wikipedia, I didn't have much exposure to wikis, but I found it to be a great way to easily collaborate with others. There were a lot of folks working on this and frequent updates, so being able to subscribe to updates via RSS feeds saved me a lot of time and meant that nothing got lost in my e-mail inbox.

SuiteTwo doesn't just bundle technologies together, but integrates them in useful ways. For example, there is a single sign-on mechanism so you can easily switch back and forth between applications and there is a "home page" concept that shows relevant information- blog posts, project changes, news feeds and other items in one place.

The product will be available early next year from  Intel's global channel of OEMs, distributors and resellers such as NEC, Dell and TechData, as well as SpikeSource and the ISVs. If you want to get more information and find out how to pre-order the product, you can visit the SuiteTwo Web site.

On another front- Seth Sutel AP ran a great column that is sort of a primer for RSS feeds. You can read it here

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, Newsgator,