NewsGator's very own Brent Simmons -- creator of NetNewsWire -- has is own take on the just released, cool new Variety.com iPhone app, which is built and powered by NewsGator, that I mentioned yesterday.  His interest in this app should not be a huge surprise given that it's based on NetNewsWire 2.0 (which, in turn, is the basis for our iPhone media app framework.)

Brent's got some great insight into his perspective on the importance and changing nature of RSS, even as it's in some ways becoming less and less explicitly visible, as well as our iPhone media app framework and the context and background behind it.

I might be a little biased, but I think it's a very interesting and worthwhile blog post to read.

You can view it here.

We've put up a new page on Newsgatorwidgets where you can visit all of the past webinars that we've had!  This includes recent ones we've had on our related content services as well as our branded iPhone apps, among others.

You can view all of our past webinars here.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know from previous posts that the US government worked with NewsGator to implement changes to their online site –- USA.gov –- in order to make it more interactive and expand its Web 2.0 capabilities. USA.gov worked with NewsGator to create a Government News Aggregator with multiple content categories, along with shareable widgets.

Earlier this month, Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator Media & Consumer products, had a conversation with Bev Godwin (Director of USA.gov & Web Best Practices) discussing the new Web 2.0 tools on USA.gov, their applications, and how these tools are changing the government’s relationship with its constituents.   

We made this conversation into a 15-minute podcast which we hope you'll find insightful and informative. 

You may access the podcast here. Simply scroll down to the bottom of the page, complete the registration, and you'll be able to access the to the podcast right away. 

Last month, I introduced you to our innovative new advertising solution called AdBurner, which optimizes ad placement, management and revenue across any platform.  I also explained that this program is the result of an impressive collaboration with the following partners: Technorati, Admeld, Gigya, Medialets, and Tremor Media.

As a reminder, the premise behind our creation of AdBurner is the realization that a significant roadblock for media companies attempting to monetize social media and mobile applications has been the lack of process standards and optimization methods for inserting and tracking ad placements.  NewsGator's announcement today brings welcome relief to media clients struggling with explosive ad inventory growth and literally hundreds of online ad networks complementing their own internal ad sales efforts.

With AdBurner, NewsGator's premium publisher clients can choose to monetize via high value display ads, video pre-roll and overlays, widget ads, and iPhone display ads through an integrated process engine and a single management console.   And, in addition to managing ad units inserted into products that NewsGator provides to publishers, the process integration extends to unrelated online ad inventory.

I wanted to let you know that we have a new page up on AdBurner that includes a spiffy graphic which much better demonstrates the power of our new advertising solution than me simply telling you about it.  You can view this new content on AdBurner here, and the graphic we've included along with that new information -- above. 

The technical wizards (of which I'm definitely not) at NewsGator Widgets have come up with a very handy tool to simply and very quickly analyze RSS feed content information.  As Jenny, one of our Technical Support Engineers says,

"I made a bookmarklet for it, so you when you are viewing a feed in your browser you can just click a link to see the post content. This even works on regular websites: for instance, if you are visiting http://www.cnn.com, our system will be able to determine the RSS feed for that site and pull up the content. Go ahead an click on it to see what happens!"

I can attest to its ease of use since I got it up and working in mere seconds.  Check it out!  Plus, Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion picked up the post, calling it the feed analyzer "a handy little tool."

See her post on the NewsGator Technical Blog to access the bookmarklet.

Newspaper & Technology has just published an interview with NewsGator's President & CEO, J.B. Holston.  The interview covers a range of topics related to the (online) newspaper industry.  Here are a couple of the key points he makes, as I see it.

On how newspapers can maintain or even add to their online readership base:

"Newspapers will maintain and grow readership as long as they are true to their sustainable competitive brand advantages — in particular, presenting curated content that is timely and relevant to a local audience. More sources highly curated; richer media; broadest possible syndication and distribution; and ease with that which are available to readers are all vital. Finally, local, local, local; newspapers are the trusted brands for collecting, curating, and disseminating the news that matters to and from my locale. Make it as easy as possible for me to get and interact with that, and I’m yours."

On related content:

"The most significant recent trend has been around related content. What related content products allow publishers to do is to associate and promote content that is related on their  site. Audiences will be encouraged to discover additional content through implied intention — meaning if the end user is reading an article about Hillary Clinton, they will be shown additional articles about Hillary Clinton, whether they live in the politics section or the entertainment section of the paper. Our experience has shown that showing related articles drive significantly higher interaction rates."

Needless to say, the entire interview is quite elucidating and explains a lot of the reasoning behind what we're doing here at Newsgatorwidgets.  You can read the entire Q & A here.

USA.gov apparently is not the only government site making the major (and overdue?) leap into the modern Web 2.0 world by adding more accessible, interactive and sharable content and features such as news aggregators, widgets, tag clouds, and the like to their site.  I read on Slate's "Big Money" blog today, in an post rather interestingly called, "Social Media Saves Lives," that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, CDC.gov, is making many of these same moves.

Or, as Dan Mitchell, the author of the post, says, the CDC,

"is getting all Web 2.0 on us with a "Social Media Page" that provides all kinds of tools—ranging from highly useful to quite silly—for tracking information about the peanut recalls.  The page...includes blogs, databases of recalled products, widgets of various kinds for outside bloggers to use, links to YouTube channels, podcasts, links to Twitter feeds and the like."

It's encouraging to know that multiple government sites are finally beginning to embrace the social media web world by making their content more accessible, interactive, and shareable -- in other words, er...Web 2.0-able.  I hope to see this trend continue not just on national government sites but also on more regional & local ones too. (You may recall, for instance, an earlier post on this blog where I explained, and applauded, the fact that Schwarzenegger, on the California US Governor's page, has begun to implement widgets an the like).

Perhaps Steve Rubel's recent post on Micro Persuasion, titled "All Media is Social, All Social is Media" is all the more apropros.