Really Simple Savings

A lot is being written about how RSS can save businesses money by giving their employees access to updated information, but as an article this week in the Hartford Courant points out, RSS can save consumers money, too.

Writer Gregory Karp includes links to financial institutions and bloggers who offer content and advice on how to save money, use credit or buy a home. Since RSS brings you every update, you don't have to keep checking back to get the latest stock information or mortgage rate -- they come to your reader.

There are plenty of sources aimed at all age and income levels, from twentysomethings to those facing retirement, and they are come from well-known MSM sources like Consumer Reports as well as individual bloggers of all ages and backgrounds.

NewsGator subscribers have access to those financial feeds as well as many others. Go to Add Feeds in your reader. You will get a page that lists categories. Click on Business and then Personal Finance/Investment and subscribe to anything that looks interesting. You will also see categories for Real Estate, Home Business and Sales/Deals, if you're interested in those subjects.

The Debut of NewsGator Today

Last night, we introduced a new feature on our site and within NewsGator Online called NewsGator Today. If you are an existing user, you'll see folder called “NewsGator Today” at the top of your folder list.  If you click on it, you’ll see some new content that our editors have selected presented in a little different layout than the existing reader If you come to our home page, there is now a link that says "Try Now," replacing "Create Account."

We developed NewsGator today for three primary reasons:

• This is the entry point for new users trying out NewsGator or RSS aggreators in general. We did this so people who are trying RSS for the first time cab get an easy introduction with high-quality content.
• For existing users, this is a place for us to feature content to existing users.  We’ve found with our Yahoo! Messenger plug-in for example, that some users really enjoy having NewsGator editors looking for great feeds and stories for them.
• This page provides us an opportunity to try out new reader layouts and reading experiences.

In this coming weeks, we have some really exciting additions and changes to our online reader and we are looking forward to bringing them to you and getting your feedback. Your comments and suggestions are extremely valuable, so we encourage you to visit our user forms to pass on any feedback for NewsGator Today and thew upcoming changes.

Technorati Tags: NewsGator+Online, rss, NewsGator,

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 Everywhere

For those of you who have been following NewsGator for a while, you'll have undoubtedly heard or seen us talking about the concept of NewsGator Everywhere. What this boils down to is delivering any RSS content to any platform or device where people would want to access it, with everything being synchronized. This started out as Web sites, Microsoft Outlook, desktops (both Windows and Mac), HTML-capable mobile devices and Windows Media Center. But over the last year, we've extended that to additional mobile devices (Windows Mobile), Microsoft SharePoint portals. toolbars, and Yahoo! IM. Additional ways of accessing content via NewsGator aggregators will be discussed in this space soon, but we wanted to remind everyone about how they can access some of our newer offerings.

• NewsGator for Yahoo! Messenger (a.k.a. Podcasts and Buzz)- Our friends at Yahoo! declared this one of their Editors Picks this week. Click here to download the free plug-in.
• NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile- We unveiled this a few weeks ago and the product is receiving rave reviews from Windows Mobile fans. You can purchase a subscription for $29.95 or try it out free for 30 days by going here.
• Windows Live Writer posting plug-in for NewsGator Inbox- For those of you who use Live Writer as your blogging platform, you can create new posts from inside of NewsGator Inbox. You can find out more about it here.
• NewsGator Desktop Sync (beta)- This nifty little system tray application synchronizes feeds that you subscribe to in IE7 with your NewsGator Online (and other NG applications) account. Find out more about it here.
• NewsGator Toolbars for IE7 and Firefox- These toolbars let you search for and subscribe to feeds right from your browsers. Learn more here.

On a totally unrelated note, we're at Gartner IT Expo in Orlando this week and we've definitely seen an increase in awareness around the benefits of RSS and Enterprise RSS in particular over the show last year and even this Spring. If you happen to be at  the show, feel free to stop by our booth (#513).

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Windows Mobile, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Newsgator

It's Go! Time for Windows Mobile Devices

As TechCrunch reported yesterday and we announced this morning, NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile is now generally available. The product, which you can purchase for $29.95 on our Web site, is the latest addition to our family of RSS aggregators that includes Web, Outlook, Windows, Mac, and Media Center Edition versions.

NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile allows users to read content and manage subscriptions directly from any device running the Windows Mobile 2003 or Windows Mobile 5.0 or later operating systems, including the Palm Treo 700w, Motorola Q, Cingular 2125 and HP iPaqs. Content including feeds and links is automatically formatted for the devices and gets cached and stored locally so you can read it when you are not connected to the Internet. As is the case with all of our RSS aggregators, there is full synchronization between NewsGator Go!, NewsGator Online and the client-based products, meaning that users won't see articles reappearing as new every time they switch interfaces. Subscriptions for NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile can also be managed within the locations section of NewsGator Online, allowing users to specify which feeds they want to appear on the device.

While a certain subset of our users switch between several different platforms on a daily basis, the bulk of our users, particularly those who have purchased a client-based product, tend to do the bulk of their reading in NewsGator Inbox, FeedDemon or NetNewsWire. Virtually all of them are away from their computers at some point in time and business users in particular can really benefit from a rich client product to access critical feeds while they are commuting to work, on the road or even waiting in line to get their daily caffeine fix. On that front, we're currently working on integrating NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile with NewsGator Enterprise Server. Also keep an eye out for an announcement of the counterpart for J2ME-capable devices going into beta in the near future

A couple of other things to report about. Nick Harris, one of our rock-star client product architects, announced a pre-release of a nifty utility called NewsGator Desktop Sync. Originally demonstrated back in March at the Mix '06 conference, NewsGator Desktop Sync is a system tray application that keeps your feeds, folders and read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform (Windows Vista, IE7).  This means that any application that uses the Windows RSS Platform will be automatically synchronized with a NewsGator Online account. March Orchant of ZDNet has a nice blog post that describes the benefit. Finally, for those of you interested in learning more how RSS technology is being used inside of organizations from a centrally-managed perspective, we have a new sign-up form for our Webinars.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Windows Mobile,

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.

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,

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