Since all of our widgets here at NewsGator are powered by RSS, we're continually staying abreast of changes related to all things RSS.  One of those changes is the advent of a federated distribution model for RSS.

As Dave Winer over at RSSCloud.org rightly says, "In the early days of RSS, we had the idea that instantaneous updates would be the next step. That was 2001. It took a little longer than we thought..."  He says this in reference to the fact that up until recently, the idea of instantaneous RSS updates (instead of the current "push/pull" method) was not fully banked.

But NewsGator is looking into cool new things that are developing in the RSS space, and at the moment we've got our eyes on the promise of instantaneous RSS updates via a federated distribution model. 

There are two different options we're following: Winer's RSSCloud and Google's interestingly-named Pubsubhubbub.  Though both are still in their early stages, they are both attempting to address basically the same issue.

In the future, we'll probably end up supporting both -- which would be a benefit to both the owners and end users of NewsGator-powered widgets.

Last month, NewsGator's Walker Fenton, General Manager of Media & Data Services, and Sean Ammirati of mSpoke (a NewsGator partner), were invited by Professor Andreas Weigend, an expert in data mining and E-business, to a discussion at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

There the three of them discussed, in front of a class, the atomization of online data (such as RSS), the impact of Twitter on traditional media and businesses, the way "conversational media" is developing, and other topics.

In particular, Walker spoke about how NewsGator collects relevant attention streams/data; for example, every time someone clicks, rates, shares or interacts in any other way with content on our system -- whether through widgets or RSS feeds -- we collect this data.  And Sean spoke about how mSpoke then uses this data (which we share with them) to help power NewsGator's various Related Content offerings  for publishers -- covered here, here and here on this blog.

If you're interested in widgets, attention data, RSS, and ways data can be repurposed online, you'll want to check out the video above (click on it to play).

Enjoy!

Over at the NewsGator Technical Blog, one of our Technical Support Engineers introduces you to a cool new feature on Editor's Desk, our powerful, easy-to-use widget creation platform.  As she says:

"If you're a regular reader of this blog, I hope a lot of the articles have empowered you to make the snazziest widgets possible using our highly-configurable framework. One thing I find myself struggling with, and something that I haven't touched on much before, is the best possible way to find the richest and most relevant content for your widget (or your reader)."

So if you're interested in learning more about improving the quality and relevancy of content for your widgets, you should definitely check out this post.

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.

If you swing on over to our NewsGator Technical Blog, you'll find a truly elucidating post about our related content widgets from our technical support engineers. 

You'll learn, among other things, how the widget actually finds related content -- with crucial help from our friends over at mSpoke, the best locations to place these widgets, and ensuring that your widget gets the highest quality related content.  They also, quite helpfully, troubleshoot a few potential stumbling blocks you might encounter along the way.

It's definitely a must read if you're interested in our related content offerings.  Read the whole post here.

Our ever-helpful technical support engineers have added 2 posts today to the NewsGator Technical Blog.  If you're at all technically inclined, you may find them helpful. 

The first post, dealing with bookmarklets, is geared towards developers and technical users in general, and is not only useful info for widget development but for just about any web application.  The second post explains how to show FavIcons for individual posts within your widgets; this is a handy way to show the feed source in an attractive way.

Check out the NewsGator Technical Blog today.

Our friends over at mSpoke -- with whom we're collaborating for related content and post-popularity data -- have a very interesting post up on their blog called "What Makes a Blog Post Popular?" 

In this illuminating post, mSpoke's Paul Ogilvie teases apart what aspects of feed items correlate to their popularity; specifcially, he dives deeply into NewsGator attention data and makes some very interesting and incisive conclusions (one of which can be seen at right).  I hope you'll take a look at this excellent post.

At the moment our Technical Support Engineers here at NewsGator Media & Consumer Products are fast at work on a new blog that will specifically addresses issues of a more technical nature regarding widget development and deployment; I'll let you know as soon as it launches -- which should happen any day now.

In the mean time, I wanted point your attention to a new article in our Widgets Wiki.  (If you're not already familiar with this Wiki, you should check it out as it is a valuable source of tips, information, and tricks maintained by our aforementioned trusty Technical Support Engineers -- Dan & Jenny.)

This article in the Wiki will walk you through how to put HTML into an RSS post, because sometimes as a widget publisher you need to format your posts to be something other than just a string of text.  Maybe you have some data that you want to present in a table, or maybe you just want to provide a link to another webpage.  In any case, this Wiki Article will show you how!