Enabling Google Gmail Web Clips

I don't have much of an opinion about Google's Gmail Web Clips, so don't consider this to be a recommendation. I am very curious about what Google is up to in general, and Web Clips drew my attention because it revolves around syndicated feeds, and I have just started to look into it. So far it looks heavily slanted toward the display of paid advertising, but I still need to mess with it some more before trashing it.

Enabling Web Clips is easy and reversible. There is a Web Clips tab on the Gmail Settings screen.  It  is also possible to add an RSS feed to the list, but that part hasn't been so easy yet.

And the winner is . . . Koornk

It was three weeks ago today that I began my syndication experiment with this blog, or to spam the universe through an unconscionable misuse of RSS feeds, as some might say. The main purpose of the test was to see through experience how RSS feed syndication worked in practice, using only free online services. A second purpose was to find and reach new audiences that might be interested in my writing. Third in order of discussion was the possibility of self-created back-links to this blog to increase traffic and boost PageRank.

An important issue was the question of indexing the various blogs, quasi-blogs, and micro blogs by Google. The points of interest were: (1) If, (2) When, and (3) What effect?

Today I found out the answer in a small way. My Koornk blog  was the first of my testbeds to have a feed back-link indexed by Google, as shown in this screenshot. The Google search result for Koornk linked to the individual post, and not to the main blog page.  Due to the quirkiness of the system I cobbled together, the back-link is not to this microenterprise blog, it is to an intermediary transmission stage of mine located on Status.net.  Don't ask why.  It's complicated.

Cheapo feed syndication blues

Playing with feed syndication services that meet my specifications has its challenges. My criteria are simple. These requirements for feed syndication service are:

1. They must be totally free.
2. They must be easy to understand and use.
3. They must work at least some of the time.

In point of fact, it's a lot like playing with Leggos where each piece is made by a different factory to slightly different specification. Sometimes the quality control is not six-sigma.

So it goes in cheapo land.

Syndication Notebook entry - Superfeedr.com

Superfeedr.com has been in existence for about a year or so, going by the date of its domain name registration, and I just found out about it today.  At first glance, Superfeedr looks like an answer to my prayer, but it is a bit more technical than most of the services I've looked at recently.  It will take me some time to get with the program, I'm sure, due to the level of technical detail that seems to be involved.  I'm not the swiftest learner on the block, either.

PubSubHubbub stands for PUBlisher-SUBscriber HUB, or PubSubHub. The 'Hubbub' is cute, though.

Part of the specification documentation is hosted on Google Code - here. The reference hub is located on the Google Apps Engine.

This will take me some time to figure out. Best of all, it involves a whole new thing, XMPP, of which I know nothing except XMPP is commonly called 'Jabber."

XMPP.org software libraries

Syndication: Blog RSS to Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us, or delicious.com as Yahoo! calls it, is a social bookmarking site, and the Microenterprise blog RSS feed is now channeled to Bebo like this:

Blogger —> Feedburner —> Twitterfeed —> Status.net —> Ping.fm —> Delicious.com

As you can see, the form of the entry is unacceptable. "Tom Fox (tomwfox)'s status on Sunday" is much less than useful.  It is counter-useful.  Plus, Delicious.com inserts rel="nofollow" in to the anchor tags.

This one is for the dustbin.  Plonk.

Delicious.com's FAQ include the following:

How can I promote my website or advertise on Delicious?

Bookmarking websites in order to promote or advertise them is considered spamming, and that's against our Terms of Service. If you'd like to advertise on Delicious, you can use Yahoo! Search Marketing to be in Sponsored Search results within Delicious.

For what it's worth, the Delicious TOS does not actually say that.

Syndication - RSS feeds to ShoutEm.com

Ordinary RSS feeds cannot be imported into ShoutEm.com created community blogs or lists, as far as I can tell.  ShoutEm.com directly supports conections between it and Twitter or Facebook, but not for any generic RSS feed, unless it is hidden somewhere.

HelloTXT.com lists ShoutEm.com as a candidate as a feed link through it, and it even goes through the motions with me setting it up.  The thing is, ShoutEm.com does not realize it is suppose to honor HelloTXT.com's request.  Nothing happens.  

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

RSS to Ping.fm jury rigged

I'm thinking since Ping.fm was spawned in the micro-blogging Twitter World, and feeds from big-blogs introduce complexity and a level of pesky details previously not encountered by Ping.fm.  Parsing a single XML file type, the Twitter type, is not a big deal, but building a general purpose XML parser capable of dealing with a wide variety of RSS types is a big deal.  Yet, it can be done.  It has already been done by others, and I'm confident Ping.fm will get it right soon.  If not, they should quit.

Anyway, I've re-wired my experimental RSS distribution circuit to avoid any big-blog RSS inputs directly connected to Ping.fm.

This Blogger blog -> Feedburner -> Twitterfeed -> Status.net -> Ping.fm.

In this distribution scheme, Twitterfeed does the parsing of the big-blog RSS and shoves it to Stastus.net which generated the RSS feed that is input now (today - right now) into Ping.fm.

This is not an ideal arrangement, but it might work.  This is the eleventh time I've re-drawn or revised my Blog syndication distribution map. If you look at it tomorrow, it will have probably been changed again.

This post will be my first test of the new channel.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

How well does Ping.fm parse Wordpress blog feeds?

How well does Ping.fm parse Wordpress blog feeds?  It depends on how you look at it, and how long you look at it.  With a statistically insignificant number of samples . . . a grand total of two . . . I'll give the optimistic view of Ping.fm's performance, and give it the benefit of the doubt by saying it got exactly half right. The other half, not so good.

Background:

"The WordPress->Feedburner->Ping.fm did not work any better than the Blogger->Feedburner->Ping.fm did. Maybe the problem is with Feedburner. I just switched to the native WordPress feed of this blog to Ping.fm, just to see what happens next." 

- The Learning Curve - RSS to Ping.fm - Again

The first and most encouraging sample was Ping.fm-feed version of this Wordpress post: Another Ping.fm test

Ping.fm correctly came up with this as its shortened link: http://ping.fm/8m1Jo

The second less than inspiring example is Ping.fm's rendition of #smartmarket test

For this one, Ping.fm came up with a shortened link, http://ping.fm/6D8ie, that incorrectly re-directed to the blog post's comment feed:

feed://tomwfox.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/smartmarket-test/feed/

Ping.fm has a serious problem parsing Feedburner blog feeds and Wordpress blog feeds.  Is it fair of me to think that Ping.fm may have problems with blog feeds in general?

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Snooping Yahoo - RSS syndication feeds and more

Both Yahoo! Pulse and Yahoo! Meme easily allow the importation of external RSS feeds, and display the content, such as a blog post, in a Twitter-like truncated feed, with a shortened link. It is usually displayed as the blog post title, with the shortened link back to the original, and possibly a bit more.

One unexpected find was the fact that Yahoo! Meme posts are automatically sent to Yahoo! Pulse.  So, the same RSS feed sent to both results in duplicate postings, or near duplicate postings, on Yahoo! Pulse.  One comes from the direct RSS feed to Yahoo! Pulse and the other comes from the same feed echoing off of Yahoo! Meme.  Therefore, I eliminate the feed to Yahoo! Pulse, and no harm done.  It gets there anyway.

My personalized Yahoo! Pulse page is not accessible to the general public, and I have no idea if or how it may be visible to another Yahoo! member, or friend, or distant cousin.  In other words, Yahoo! Pulse seems fairly useless to me.

Yahoo! Meme, on the other hand, is nice by providing a unique URL for my page there, which I named Ephemerality (http://meme.yahoo.com/ephemerality/) .

This is the same name I used on Tumblr.com.

Another unrelated discovery was my Yahoo! blog with the unique URL:

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_WNBEBRWQHDKYV2ILHJOCNYKDH4/blog

It's nice to have a unique URL for my totally free Yahoo! blog space, but that URL is ridiculous.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

RSS to Ping.fm works fine except . . .

RSS to Ping.fm works fine except with Google Feedburner RSS.  With them Ping.fm gets the links wrong.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Syndication - RSS to Twitter, et al. flummox

Automated syndication of RSS feeds to social media platforms is in a state of transition and growth.  Add in the fact that several social media sites are in the midst of transitioning user authentication protocols. These things are a little glitchy, at the moment. As a guy doing things on the cheap (meaning free), I can't really complain all that much.  Except possibly about the fact that I'm interested in testing the actual marketing usefulness of these free services in the social media world, and not so much interested in testing if they work right and issuing ticked-off public bug reports..  Nevertheless, that's the way it is. A lot of it just doesn't work right for now.

First — As of this first week of August, 2010, Ping.com allows one RSS feed to directly connect as an input for its services.  Ping.com is new to this.  The other more commonly accepted method for connecting a RSS feed to Ping.com is through Twitterfeed.com.  Twitterfeed.com is the original Twitterizing service.  Ping.com has been a social media distribution service. I opted for the new untested option and used a Feedburner RSS feed for this Mircoenterprise blog in Ping.com.

Second — Twitterizing services shorten links due to the 140 character limit on Twitter. When Ping.com shortens the link to the original Microenterprise blog, it has a difficult time locating the correct link to shorten in the Blogger - Feedburner RSS feed.  Ping.com only gets it right about half the time, and this is annoying.

Third — So, when I get the bright idea to switch the circuit, and use Twitterfeed.com as an input to Ping.com, like everyone else does, and not have a direct connection between Ping.com and Feedburner, it doesn't work. I don't know why it doesn't work, but every time I try, the setup fails.

Note: As of August 6, 2010 afternoon, this notice appears on the Twitterfeed.com signup page for Ping.com:

"Please note that Ping.fm have temporarily suspended the use of twitterfeed with their service. Until they re-instate this functionality, we are unfortunately unable to post to Ping.fm."

Fourth — Then I say to hell with Ping.com, and I start moving all the social media connections already established there and take them over to HelloTxt.com.  HelloTxt.com is working perfectly, as far as I can tell, but now the problem is that HelloTxt.com does not support all of the social media platforms I connected with on Ping.com.  One of them is Yahoo! Meme, which is odd.

Note: As of August 6, 2010 afternoon, the few social media services that I switched from Ping.com to HelloTxt.com are not working . . . yet. Sometimes these things take time.

Therefore, I moved what I could and left the rest on Ping.com.  Ping will get it working soon enough, I hope.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Social media: RSS feed to Koornk.com

Koornk.com displayed the Microenterprise blog RSS feed through Ping.fm without any fuss, as shown in the screenshot of Tom Fox on Koornk. Of the four active links showing, two of them actually work and connect to the appropriate Mircoenterprise blog page. The other two active links go elsewhere, as of now.

The link problem is not with Koornk.com, it is with Ping.com.

The first link shown below, as shortened by Ping.com is: http://ping.fm/rF8DL

Currently, that Ping-shortened link re-directs to:

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/2537874321591363343/posts/default/3400403793792964686?v=2

. . . . which is not correct.  It ought to re-direct to this URL:

http://micro-enterprise.blogspot.com/2010/08/rss-syndication-glitch-no-1.html

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Ping.fm renders RSS input feed links like crap

Note: When I wrote this item, I was confused by Ping.fm's domain. (Dot)FM is the top level domain for the Federated States of Micronesia, and it didn't register in my head. So I erroneously typed it Ping.com throughout. The syndication service I'm talking about is Ping.fm, and not Ping.com. Sorry.

It's a new feature for Ping.fm, this business about taking a RSS feed directly and Twitterizing it for output to various social media platforms. It's a new and experimental undertaking for Ping.com to do this. Right now it limits user's direct input to a single RSS feed only. For experimenting with it.

It's a good thing Ping.com is undertaking, and I have been a Guinna pig for their testing, these past few days. So far, Ping.fm renders RSS input feed links like shit.

Back to the drawing board.

August 6 update: In all fairness, the trouble might not be with Ping.fm. It may be that Google-Blogger-Feedburner feeds are especially difficult to parse. I'll try an entirely different feed source with Ping.fm to see if makes a difference.

Syndication: RSS to Twitter - accessibility or the new spam?

Technology amplifies the good and the bad with equal ease and troublesome indifference. A thousand busy posters can generate a considerable volume of twittering, but consider the potential for an exploding number of tweets flying back and forth when every ambitious internet marketing concern embraces the brute force power of fully automating the process.  Just as automated email pushed spam into your email in-box, RSS-to-Twitter technology may well result in pushing a tide of smarmy promotions into social media.

The essential differences between email and social media will make the inevitable issue of automated social media spam by way of RSS feeds much easier to deal with  Unlike email that can be sent anonymously and from anywhere, automated feeds to social media outlets come from identifiable sources through a connections that must be negotiated.  More importantly, the target is not a captive audience as with email.  People encounter social media channels only by choice, so far.  RSS spam can be more easily regulated or ignored.

How RSS to Twitter works

I have to assume you know what a RSS feed is, for the easy reason that I have no simple explanation that would satisfy one who doesn't know.  RSS feeds are everywhere, and you've seen the distinctive icon frequently, scattered about the web.  With a blog, for example, an RSS feed might contain every single post in a structured data format in a single file that can be read by anyone.

A human can share a blog post on Twitter by posting a link to their Twitter account directly.  A computer software program can extract the link information for a blog from its RSS feed and post each one to Twitter, if Twitter allows it, and Twitter allows it.  That is the root process of RSS-to-Twitter systems.  It involves the automated extraction of data from an existing RSS feed and then posting that data to an existing Twitter account.  That is the gist of how it works.

"RSS to Twitter" is a metaphor

RSS to Twitter is also a statement of origin.  It started with Twitter and Twitter users,  and it makes sense.  If I can write a blog post and manually post a link to it on my Twitter account, and I do that every day, how much more efficient is it to automate the process?  Quite a bit, for me, and it is not limited to Twitter.

The RSS-to-Twitter process immediately found use and support for other social media platforms.  Now, it is possible to automatically send a notice of my new blog post to a multitude of social media outlets.  RSS-to-Facebook, RSS-to-Delicious, RSS-to-Blogger, RSS-to-Tumblr, RSS-to-Google Buzz, and many more are now a practical reality.  It is being done and it is growing, slowly.  It has instant and obvious appeal to internet marketers.

RSS to Twitter - How it's done

This is not a genuine "how-to" for converting a RSS feed into a Twitter API feed.  It is a "How to use free web resources to do that which you lack the time or the motivation to do yourself."  The main free to use on-line force behind RSS-to-Twitter is Twitterfeed.com.  There are also use-for-pay services such as SimpleFeed.com, that caters to multinational corporations, but that is not for us.  Another free to use service that went dark is RSStoTwitter.com.  The individual developer did not come up with a working business plan that made his RSS to Twitter service pay for itself.  It was unsustainable.

So, "how it's done" for most of us non-programmers revolves around using Twitterfeed.com, or something similar.

Twitterfeed.com accepts RSS imput, converts it to a Twitter-compatible format, and feeds the result out over the following channels:

1. Twitter,
2. Ping.fm,
3. Hellotxt.com,
4. Status.net, and
5. Facebook

Both Ping.fm and Hellotxt.com allow further distribution of the Twitterized feed to several scores of other social media.  Previously Ping.fm did not accept RSS feeds directly at all, but it has recently introduced that feature which, for now, is limited to a single RSS feed.  Ostensibly, Hellotxt.com has a companion site Hellotxtfeed.com that functions like Twitterfeed.com, except its server has not been available online since I started checking five days ago, so I have my doubts about it. Feedburner.com has also recently added the capability of sending Twiterized RSS feeds directly to Twitter.  That is contained within Feedburner's 'Socialize' tab.

What good can come of RSS to Twitter?

That remains to be seen, as far as I'm concerned.  Right now I am busy trying to understand its potential, once I figure out how it actually works in practice.

See my RSS syndication map - a work in progress

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

RSS syndication feeds: Importing feeds to Tumblr.com

It is possible to import RSS syndication feeds directly into Tumblr.com and have the feed posts appear in Tumblr almost just as if they were originally posted there.  This is a great convenience for establishing and maintaining a semi-automatic blog post RSS syndication feed distribution system, but Tumblr is not totally overjoyed at the prospect of becoming an automated dumping ground for posts coming from and going to someplace else.  Tumblr is in the business of community building.

On Tumbler, an external feed will remain active only so long as a real live person regularly originates posts on Tumblr itself.  "You must log into Tumblr frequently or directly post to Tumblr frequently in order for feed imports to remain active,"  says Tumblr representative Mark Lafountain, here.

In truth, the only genuine advantage from importing an external feed into Tumblr is is you have a collection of followers who read the feed.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

RSS syndication glitch No. 1

Below is a screenshot of my own Facebook page showing that my most recent RSS syndication configuration results in double posting of these Microenterprise blog posts.  The lower of the two auto-posts shown here is through a ping.fm to Facebook link, and the one above is a Tumblr.com to Facebook link.  I knew that ping.fm is a simple pass-through service, but I incorrectly assumed that the Tumblr link would limit itself to new posts that originated on Tumblr itself.  Instead, Tumble passes everything along.

I haven't yet decided how I will deal with it.  Tumblr passed on the Feedburner link back to the original post unaltered, and it is ugly, but I may have to live with it and eliminate the ping.fm to Facebook link.  Whatever I decide, the change will be reflected in an updated syndication distribution map.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Blogger comments RSS feed channels

Blogger.com is the free blog hosting service for this blog.  Blogger is owned by Google, and Google has introduced a steady stream of improvements to Blogger since its acquisition by Google a few years back.  I don't remember when RSS feeds for Blogger were introduced, but as it stands now, Blogger provides one RSS Atom syndication feed for the blog posts as a whole, and one separate RSS Atom feed for each post's comments.

The usefulness of an Atom RSS feed for the blog as a whole is apparent once you take a look at syndication, and this is a topic I plan to discuss in detail.  Yet, the usefulness of as many different separate comment feeds is still not obvious to me.  Maybe if all the comment feeds were merged into one aggregate feed, they might have vale.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter