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.

Editor's note: the following is a guest post by Jeff Jarvis on the subject of reverse syndication; this post post appeared on his blog, BuzzMachine.

In the story about their layoffs today, the New York Times mentioned, as it often does, that the Baghdad bureau costs them $3 million a year.

I’ve been wondering about a new way to help support that bureau: reverse syndication.

Now, the Times supports that work not with advertising associated with it directly — who wants to associated a brand with war? — but by doing the other things — food, entertainment, autos, homes — that bring in the money. And it runs a syndicate in which it sells its stories to other news organizations. But I know from my time in newspaper online sites that syndication is a dying business as newspapers cut back all the costs they can and as the web link pretty much obsoletes the model: Why buy the content when people can get it to already online?

So how about turning that model around: Let’s say the Times says to Tribune company that it will provide all the reporting on Iraq for Tribune’s readers. But instead of charging Tribune for syndication, the Times pays Tribune a share of the ad revenue it gets from traffic Tribune sends to the Times. Tribune, which is also engaging in layoffs, can’t afford to do everything anymore and so it has to do what it does best and link to the rest. Granted that the ad revenue on a Baghdad story won’t be great but added traffic would add revenue and would help.

And if this model works, wouldn’t Tribune also want to link to Wall Street coverage from the Times. Or the Wall Street Journal and Reuters could compete for that traffic. There’s a church-state question here: Would Tribune be motivated to link to any of these three because they have the best coverage or because they pay the best commission? Given equal quality, the best commission will win. But Tribune has to give its readers the best links to the best coverage or its readers will seek those links elsewhere. So I think quality will succeed.

(This is the first of two posts exploring new models for the business of news — I’d love to see you explore more. I also want to give credit for inspiring this to Jim Kennedy, the head of strategy at the Associated Press, who drew a similar model when I first brought Daylife to meet him as he tried to figure out how we as an industry could help support quality coverage from local papers that right now aren’t motivated to take national traffic since they can’t monetize it well. This may be a model that addresses that.)

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post from Craig Cmehil, a technology and community evangelist at SAP.

SAP's developer community and their business process communities signed on board with NewsGator just a few short weeks ago. It's an exciting time for our communities and thanks to NewsGator it's getting even more exciting!

The SAP Developer Network (SDN), SAP's developer community of over a million of our customers, partners and employees joined together to discuss and collaborate around SAP technologies, products and our NetWeaver platform have excelled at generating content, millions of forum posts, thousands of wiki pages, tens of thousands of blog posts, articles, eLearning and more. Parallel to that the Business Process Expert Community (BPX) quickly growing and expanding at astounding speeds is beginning to generate enormous amounts of content of their own including the recently published "Process First", created and collaborated on by the community within a wiki. To top that off recently the addition of the Business Objects Community (BOC) has caused a content explosion that needs to be handled, optimized and sorted to continue to provide our combined 1.4 million and growing user base with the information they need in ways they can consume regardless of where they choose to start their day.

Over the years we've explored various means of getting our content into the hands of those who can most benefit from it, popular but still not main stream our RSS feed activity has seen remarkable growth since we began broad use back in 2006 and our own widget activities have been extremely popular so it seemed a logical choice to research available viral widget options in the market.

It didn't take us a long before we realized that when you want quality, scaleability and extreme flexibility NewsGator was the name we continuously came across. We did at one point even considering using our own considerable resources and building a solution but it was NewsGator's millions of feeds and content that also interested us, not to mention their attention to detail and professionalism!

The team I was put in contact with to help me work through whether or not this was the right solution for us, if it would work with our platform, what about security issues and an seemingly endless number of other questions that their team patiently addressed, answered, found a solution for and kept on in a highly motivated fashion. It was a great experience working with the folks at NewsGator (Craig, Walker, Jeff and others) that I found it hard after we ran out of the technical stuff, the legal stuff and everything else to find a single reason to even hesitate. It was a week or so after we worked through everything that I cornered several of my management folks at one of our events and through dinner, cocktails (an entire evening event) I spoke about the potential use cases for the community, the ROI, the simple value proposition.

The next day I was nothing but smiles as a decision had already been made, money allocated PO's approved and we were ready for contract negotiations.

We've officially completed those negotiations and we've had amazing results from our very first pilot widget, so when the NewsGator team asked if I was interested in sharing a bit of our still very new story I jumped at the chance! Our first pilot widget was associated with our 80 SAP mentors, a program started not so very long ago itself to highlight the top 1% of our SAP ecosystem. Those individuals in our ecosystem that question, critic, support, give feedback, push back and pull forward; these are the folks that we look to in order to ensure we are listening, acting and changing when and where necessary to continue to give our customers the highest quality of product and services possible. We asked several of our Mentors if they would be interested in a small experiment, simply give us their RSS feed for their blogs, we had the ones from within our own environment already and wanted to see how the system worked with a good mixture of content. Several of those we asked agreed and we created a simple widget, not much to look at from design but the content was of course top notch.

The widget we placed on my personal weblog, Craig's Rantings..., and waited to see what would happen. We didn't advertise, simply told one or two community members to see what would happen. Over the course of several weeks we came to have 14 descendants and over 50,000 widget impressions. A solid test, better than I could have hoped for! Now armed with our full team ready to go we have begun to explore together with the NewsGator team the various options available in our "Editor's Desk", extremely user friendly interface giving us total control over our widgets. Our graphic folks are experimenting with the design and layout options and our platform team are busy building in standard and easy ways to add the widgets with little effort to our standard SAP NetWeaver Portal which is the backbone of all our community sites.

We also tied this to another experiment we have around the Facebook platform and were amazed to see this widget being used by almost 300 users with an average of almost 100 daily! Actually within Facebook we have a group, fan page and a few other things as well, so these feature was a perfect fit.

We've added a couple of more for our tests and have begun to explore the styling options as well.

• SAP mentors - View your widget in the NewsGator gallery
• Community TV - View your widget in the NewsGator gallery
• SAP TechEd - View your widget in the NewsGator gallery

One of our main hopes or wishes behind such a move is to fulfill a request from our own communities, many tell us,

"I login to my computer in the morning and I'm on my Yahoo homepage, why can't I get my SAP updates there as well?"

Our first reaction to this was, "but you can", after talking to more and more of the community members we came to realize that the shear mass of great information within our communities was simply spread across to many different mediums and they didn't want to have to add multiple different input feeds but they rather wanted a collective. We worked out a solution to combine our own feeds together but we felt there was still something simply not there, something that was missing.

NewsGator gave us the answer, we can now give our community the ability to "take the community with them", what they want and how they want it - where ever they want it! 

[Editor's note: the following is one of a serious of guest posts to appear on this blog; here, NewsGator's Brent Simmons provides you an inside look into NetNewsWire.]

1. The space bar is your friend

NetNewsWire was designed to be read with a cup of coffee in one hand while the other drives the keyboard.

You can go through all your unread news just by tapping the space bar -- it scrolls the current item if it needs scrolling, or goes to the next unread item.

2. It's easy to switch tabs, or go back to the News Items tab

Here are three of my favorite keyboard shortcuts: 9 goes to the previous tab, 0 goes to the next tab, and \ takes you back to the News Items tab.

There are plenty more single-key shortcuts: choose Keyboard Shortcuts from the Help menu to see the list.

3. NetNewsWire plays Flash videos

It doesn't play Flash by default -- it's turned off because Flash is a bit crashy. But you can turn Flash on. Open the preferences window, click the Browsing icon, then click the Web Pages tab. Make sure Enable plug-ins is checked.

If you also want to play Flash videos in news items, click the News Items tab in the same window and again make sure Enable plug-ins is checked.

4. You can validate feeds

If you think a feed is mis-behaving -- especially if it's one of your own feeds -- it can be useful to find out what's wrong.

You can use the online feed validator from within NetNewsWire: just ctrl-click (or right-click) on the feed, then choose Validate this Feed from the contextual menu.

A web page will open that shows the problems, if any, in the feed.

5. Some history: NetNewsWire is six years old

The first public betas of NetNewsWire Lite appeared in 2002. The current OS was Mac OS X 10.1. There was no Safari yet, much less WebKit -- Macs still shipped with Internet Explorer as the default browser!

One of the original discarded names was AquaReader -- here's an old screenshot of the main.m file.

NetNewsWire's immediate predecessor was MacNewsWire, a very simple RSS reader that showed only Mac news. You couldn't add or remove feeds. Here's a screenshot.

Here's what the original, pre-1.0 icon looked like:

Here's what 1.0 looked like.

NetNewsWire 1.0 included a weblog editor (screenshot) that later got split out into MarsEdit, which was later acquired (and wonderfully improved) by Red Sweater Software.

NetNewsWire 2.0 (screenshot) was one of the first apps outside Apple to dispense with the left and right margins. No matter what the Human Interface Guidelines said!

By the time 2.0 came out, I was already ripping off features from my friend Nick Bradbury, whose FeedDemon was such a good app that I figured he was a Mac developer at heart. (Later we became co-workers here at NewsGator.)

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by Nick Bradbury, creator of NewsGator's FeedDemon; it is one of a series of ongoing guest posts that will appear on this blog.  Enjoy!

One of the more challenging tasks developers face – regardless of whether they develop desktop applications, web applications or even widgets – is designing a feature in a way that not only hides the technical details, but also respects the end user by not asking them to do too much work.

When I consider adding a new feature, I look at other applications that offer something similar – not just to see what they did right, but also what they did wrong.  Most importantly, I see what work they require from their customers in order to use that feature, and then I figure out how to do that work for them.

That was my approach when I designed the tagging features for the next release of FeedDemon.  Techies such as myself like to think that tagging is mainstream thanks to sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, but the truth is, it’s still pretty geeky.  And even on popular tag-centric sites, it’s still more work than it needs to be.

For example, some sites do nothing more than provide a basic textbox for you to type a tag into – that’s it.  Other sites go the extra mile and enable you to select from a list of tags you’ve already used, but the list closes when you select a tag (a real pain when you want to apply multiple tags).  If you’re an experienced “tagger,” managing all your tags can be tricky at best.  And if you’re brand new to tagging and don’t even know what to use as a tag, you’re out of luck.

I tried to tackle those shortcomings in FeedDemon, most obviously in the dialog which enables tagging a post:

Beyond the basic textbox, there’s a list of tags you’ve already used that you can select from, and it’s easy to apply multiple tags because the list doesn’t disappear after you click in it.  And to help the tag-challenged among us, there’s also a list of suggested tags which is generated from both your existing tags and tags assigned by the publisher.

Managing tags was likewise designed to do the work for you – just select a tag, then rename or delete it entirely:

Renaming a tag goes a step further than normal renaming features by enabling you to rename one existing tag to another existing tag (basically moving all posts from one tag to another, a task that’s far too difficult in some tagging tools):

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that there’s nothing earth-shattering here.  But I hope it illustrates that when designing a feature, you need to think about the extra work you’d require of your customers if you didn’t design it correctly.  Chances are, your customers have enough work to do – so do them a favor, and don’t add to their workload.

[Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by NewsGator's Brent Simmons.]

When I first started working on the iPhone version of NetNewsWire last spring, I expected to be able to use code from the Mac version. After all, Macs and iPhones are very similar.

But it turned out that I used almost no code from the Mac version in the iPhone version. And the code I did use had to be modified.

What I didn't expect was that the reverse would happen, that I would end up bringing iPhone code back to the Mac version, but that's what happened. Here's the story...

One of the first things I noticed when I started working on NetNewsWire for iPhone was that I couldn't use the XML parser that I used in the Mac version. It doesn't exist on the iPhone.

So I had to look at the XML parsers that do exist on the iPhone, and, after doing some research, I finally settled on libxml2. I built a new RSS parser using libxml2, and I was very pleased with the performance on iPhone. All was well.

But then I got curious and I wondered how this new RSS parser would compare to the old one in the Mac version.

I brought the new code into the Mac version and did some tests. It turned out that the new version was more than four times faster than the old version -- and it used one-third the memory.

(You can now pause to imagine my diabolical laughter.)

It's not every day a developer has an experience like this. Usually you get to choose just one: faster, or uses less memory -- but not both. But this time? Both.

The new fast RSS parser will appear in NetNewsWire 3.2, which I'm working on now. An early version is in the hands of beta testers, but there's still some other work to do. (A few new features, a bunch of bug fixes.)

Now, of course, RSS parser performance isn't the whole story of performance: there's data storage and networking and a bunch of other things. But, still, I'm delighted. I just love that the iPhone is helping out the Mac version -- and I can hardly wait to get it finished and released.

This is the first of a series of monthly guest posts which will include content from people working both inside and outside of NewsGator as well as in the widget/tech space in general.  This week, we're lucky to have mSpoke's Sean Ammirati write on our collaborative Related Content Widget.

Over the last several months, NewsGator has partnered with mSpoke on several initiatives. Our first jointly-developed product "the Related Content widget" is now coming to market.  While many companies can recommend related articles, we provide a superior experience by combining NewsGator's attention data and reporting with mSpoke's content analysis capabilities. In this post, I'll give a quick overview of how the Related Content Widget works and some of the highlights of our unique approach.

How Does it Work?

On page-load, the Related Content widget displays other related articles. As the publisher, you can choose to recommend related articles from either across the web (which allows you to blacklist some sources), a defined set of white-listed sources, or exclusively from your own content.  You also can monetize this directly by including an advertisement or other sponsored content as part of the widget.

As with most widgets, the installation is simple. Select the sources to be considered for recommendations, then add a little HTML snippet to the sidebar of your template. The widget will then automatically recommend appropriate related articles for each item.

Why Do We Believe Our Approach is Better?

We all know this isn't a new use case as many solutions exist for recommending related content for articles. Yet intuitively we also know most of these solutions could provide better recommendations.  Our Related Content Widget will deliver that experience using a superior approach built on four unique properties:

• Richer understanding of the concepts in an article
• Improved measures of an article's popularity
• Flexibility to recommend multiple types of content
• Detailed reports on visitor usage and interaction
• A number of flexible display options

Richer Understanding of the Concepts in an Article

Leveraging the mSpoke's platform lets us annotate both an article and the sources available for related recommendations with appropriate metadata. For our widget, mSpoke tags articles with three different types of content attributes: 

• Categories: a modified subset of the Wikipedia categories which reasonably reflect the kinds of material often found in RSS feed items;
• Topics: events or ideas that have been mentioned in multiple feed items in recent days or weeks. Each topic is algorithmically identified and named; and
• Named Entities: identify the people, organizations, and locations mentioned in each article.

For example, the article "Build A Custom Search Engine Using Your Social Bookmarks" written by Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb would be annotated with the following pieces of metadata:

Content Attributes

Categories :: social bookmarking & SEO

Topic :: "bookmarks"

Named entity :: Google

The Related Content widget would then consider other articles identified as being about Social Bookmarking, Search Engine Optimization, bookmarks and Google  for recommendation.

Improved Measures of an Article's Popularity

In addition to the meaning of an article, we need to understand the popularity of the content being considered for recommendation. At mSpoke, we have investigated many different measures of an item's popularity. We have found the aggregate attention scores across the NewsGator platform to be far more predictive than any other single measure of popularity for relevance. The Related Content widget uses the NewsGator attention scores to evaluate the popularity of any article being considered for recommendation.   

Side Note! We have been so impressed with the predictive power of the NewsGator's attention scores that we are incorporating them into our demo application, FeedHub. For those of you who aren't familiar with FeedHub, it allows anyone using an RSS reader (including NewsGator Online, NetNewsWire or FeedDemon) to filter the most relevant set of articles from a set of feeds chosen by the individual.  (For example, the set of feeds you just can't keep up with and ever few weeks mark as read.)  FeedHub provides each user with a personalized feed they can subscribe to in the RSS reader they choose. Each FeedHub user has their own set of memes (or content preferences) which automatically adjust based on what content attributes are most predictive for them.  In the next few weeks, we'll be adding a NewsGator meme. So, go ahead, create a FeedHub account now, and watch as the new NewsGator meme starts recommending popular content.  We think you'll find the NewsGator meme very predictive for you!

Flexibility to Recommend Multiple Types of Content

Beyond targeting related articles, many publishers want to provide hyper-relevant commercial content to their readers by using the Related Content widget. This can be advertisements we provide and share part of the revenue with the publisher, or a publisher may have their own ads, sponsored white-papers, or other content they''d like to promote. Either way, our system can attach appropriate metadata to this commercial content, increasing visitors' interaction with both the recommended articles and the sponsored material.

Detailed Reports on Visitor Interaction

If you have used any of the NewsGator widgets, you already know that the level of transparency provided in their reports on visitor interaction is second to none. We are very excited that publishers using the Related Content widget will get that same level of insight into reader behavior.

Conclusion

We hope you have enjoyed seeing how the Related Content widget can help you increase visitor interaction and loyalty by providing superior related content.  At this time, we have a few pilot publisher's in the process of deploying the widget.  We will certainly announce here and on the mSpoke blog as they launch. If you would like to incorporate this functionality on your site, please contact us or leave a comment below.