Collaborative Thinking

Microsoft Sync Framework: More Details On XML Feeds Please...

Interesting - but unclear whether this leverages Windows RSS Platform for the sync services... 

Microsoft Sync Framework includes a number of providers that support common data sources. Although you can write custom providers for these data sources, it is recommended that you use the providers that we supply wherever possible. This can minimize development time and enable you to reuse existing tested code. The following providers are included:

• Sync Services for ADO.NET: Synchronization for ADO.NET enabled data sources
• Sync Services for File Systems: Synchronization for files and folders
• Sync Services for SSE: Synchronization for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) such as RSS and ATOM feeds

.....

RSS Feeds and Web services provided by an external organization such as Amazon or EBay are both examples of simple participants. These organizations may give you the ability to execute Web services and get results back, but they do not give you the ability to create your own data stores or the ability to execute your own applications on their Web servers. 

Introduction to the Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime

OUseful Info: UC Berkeley Lectures on Youtube, via Grazr

Building on my earlier posts (below), an interesting application at OUseful Info.

• The era of grazing has begun
• UC Berkeley first to post full lectures to YouTube

Extending UC Berkeley's YouTube Site:

TechCrunch reported today that UC Berkeley have been putting a wide selection of their lectures up on YouTube: UC Berkeley Puts Courses On YouTube, though AJ isn't much impressed...

I was intrigued as to whether it's possible to search videos by user on YouTube and get the result via a feed using the YouTube/GData API, and it's easy... For example: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?q=skeletal+biology&author=ucberkeley.

Using a simple bit of GrazrScript, it doesn't take much to build a little search widget around this feed, that you could then embed in your own page.

To make things a little more interesting, though, I also added a feed embellishment via a Yahoo Pipe that adds the movie as an enclosure to the feed so that it can be played directly within the Grazr widget (scroll down on the result in the widget... the embedded player may look a little broken at first, but it works fine if you click on it).

So here it is: UCB Video search via Grazr

OUseful Info: UC Berkeley Lectures on Youtube, via Grazr

The era of grazing has begun

Applications like Grazr and its use of OPML deserve more attention from IT strategists ... there are interesting application scenarios.

A few weeks ago we assembled all the pieces that would become Grazr 2.0, and I started doing demos in the Boston area and the Valley. What I soon discovered by watching people react to this product, and listening to their ideas on how they could use it, was that this was much more than just a cool way of managing feeds. I am now convinced that Grazr 2.0 introduces a new medium for online collaboration and publishing. What do I mean by a medium? The combination of HTML, servers and browsers defined the Web as a medium. Weblog software, RSS, and feed readers created the medium of blogging. By this definition a medium is a combination of content, technology, and human behaviors. In the same way, grazing is a medium that combines the data standards of OPML and feeds with our widget, drag and drop reading list editor, and new site design. Add in the type of behaviors these components make possible, and you have the medium of grazing.

This is a pretty bold claim. Watch this video of Grazr 2.0 in action, then try the Grazr 2.0 site and decide for yourself.

Feedonomics » Blog Archive » The era of grazing has begun

Another innovative example:

Ever since I started developing Grazr RSS applications, I've been wondering if it were possible to integrate other services into the Grazr widget. Today I'm presenting you with my most advanced project to date: Podcasting Professionals. This news radar demonstrates that Grazr RSS applications can be enhanced with the functionality of other, quite useful services. For this particular Grazr I picked ZapTXT, Particls and BlogRovR. In this post I'll discuss the value they each add to this particular news radar.

A full-page version of the Podcasting Professionals news radar is hosted on the PODHANDLE servers.

CleverClogs: Podcasting Professionals : Advanced News Radar using Grazr#more

SynOA: Syndicated Application Architectures

Another indicator that XML Syndication is being thought in more serious terms (as outlined in an earlier post here):

Jon Udell Interview with Rohit Khare

At the 2002 Emerging Technology Conference, Rohit Khare gave an influential talk on an architecture he called application layer internetworking (ALIN). Five years later that thinking has evolved, and now he's describing syndication-oriented architecture (SynOA). The same idea of event routing is at the core of both ALIN and SynOA. With ALIN, messages are SOAP packets that travel between applications. With SynOA's, messages are items in RSS or Atom feeds that travel among applications, people, or both.

ITConversations podcast with Rohit Khare

O'Reilly XML.com article

In a recent interview with Rohit Khare, Director of CommerceNet Labs, Jon Udell may have been responsible for introducing a new meme into the noosphere that will be as important in its time as AJAX was in 2004. Rohit Khare gave an influential presentation describing ALIT, which utilized SOAP messages for transferring events between systems, but in the intervening years, his thinking has shifted to a new system based not upon SOAP but upon RESTful RSS and Atom feeds, for which he has coined the term Syndication Oriented Architecture, or SynOA.

....

A syndication feed is a curious beast. At its head is a block of metadata that includes a reference to where it comes from, a category or two, publication dates, and enough data to provide a human readable label on that particular feed. The entries of a syndication feed are similarly blocks of metadata tied to links that also include identifiers and the potential for content blocks. In general, the purpose of such blocks is not in general to contain bodies of information (which is the way that SOAP works) but rather to contain enough of a description about the given entry that it can be used either by a human agent or by a machine agent to figure out what to do with the link.

With a system like AtomPub, you can also post entries to an AtomPub server wrapped in an <atom:entry> block, and the system will then, based upon ACLs and the entry envelope’s rel or category tags, perform processing on that object to add something derived from it to the server. This information doesn’t have to be HTML blogs - it can just as readily be objects modelled as blocks of XML (or potentially JSON) data. What’s more, what gets sent in that particular case may not necessarily be the data itself, but instead might be links to that data - in essence, a properly enabled publisher would then be able to reference that linked data at a later time, with the knowledge coming from the atom <entry> envelope making it possible to determine what specific action needed to be performed on that data.

SynOA What? Syndicated Application Architectures Come of Age - O'Reilly XML Blog

Feed Paging And Archiving

Self-explanatory ... worth tracking however.

Status of This Memo

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

This specification defines three types of syndicated Web feeds that enable publication of entries across one or more feed documents. This includes "paged" feeds for piecemeal access, "archived" feeds that allow reconstruction of the feed's contents, and feeds that are explicitly "complete".

1. Introduction

Syndicated Web feeds (using formats such as Atom [1]) are often split into multiple documents to save bandwidth, allow "sliding window" access, or for other purposes.

This specification formalizes two types of feeds that can span one or more feed documents; "paged" feeds and "archived" feeds. Additionally, it defines "complete" feeds to cover the case when a single feed document explicitly represents all of the feed's entries.

Each has different properties and trade-offs:

• Complete feeds contain the entire set of entries in one document, and can be useful when it isn't desirable to "remember" previously-seen entries.
• Paged feeds split the entries among multiple temporary documents. This can be useful when entries in the feed are not long-lived or stable, and the client needs to access an arbitrary portion of them, usually in close succession.
• Archived feeds split the entries among multiple permanent documents and can be useful when entries are long-lived, and it is important for clients to see every one.

The semantics of a feed that combines these types is undefined by this specification.

Although they refer to Atom normatively, the mechanisms described herein can be used with similar syndication formats; see Appendix B for one such use.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5005.txt

You might not have noticed but...

... we are in the midst of a slight change in focus in this market - but it is also a very important and necessary adjustment - a shift in emphasis from use of XML feeds to improve how information is communicated to "operationalizing" XML feeds as part of a process and application context. The focus on syndicating data will likely result in a stonger assessment of security, permission models, audit and compliance capabilities by IT organizations of vendors in this space. You can download the KnowNow report and/or register for the Attensa webinar by following the links below.

KnowNow Co-Founder Proposes "Syndication-Oriented Architecture" to Manage Information Overload

... As with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) - where data flows between applications both inside and outside the firewall - a "Syndication-Oriented Architecture" extends the flow of critical information beyond applications to the people that need it most.

"Syndication standards are no longer just formats for relaying headline news. Now they can enable 'information agility' for all of the knowledge flowing inside and outside the enterprise," said Dr. Khare. "It is not farfetched to consider Facebook as an example of the future of enterprise knowledge management. Its personalization and collaborative filtering features may be at an early stage, but its platform strategy makes clear that its members view the world as a continuous stream of written information and social interactions. This infrastructure for scalable information routing is one of the most broadly used publish/subscribe applications in the world. SynOA outlines the implications of this model, and provides a roadmap for deploying these capabilities -- while complementing Service-Oriented Architectures -- to push relevant information to employees, customers, and partners."

KnowNow Press & News

Attensa and Kapow Webinar -= RSS Feeds Powerful Enabler for Data Syndication and Web 2.0 Apps

On September 6th at 8:30 am PDT see Kapow's Mashup Server and the Attensa Feed Server in action and join the conversation between Stefan Andreasen, Kapow's CTO and Charlie Davidson, Attensa's CEO as they discuss and demonstrate the ability to create feeds from any web based source using the Kapow Mashup Server and channel role based feeds to specific users and groups across the enterprise with the Attensa Feed Server.

Enterprise RSS Feed Servers and RSS Readers - Attensa Blog - Attensa and Kapow Webinar -= RSS Feeds Powerful Enabler for Data Syndication and Web 2.0 Apps

NewsGator Launches Facebook App: NewsFriends

Facebook continues to draw support from a wide range of vendors, some with parallel enterprise solutions (future synergies perhaps):

One of the leading RSS Aggregation startups, NewsGator Technologies, jumped on the Facebook bandwagon today with NewsFriends (add to Facebook here) - a social news application where Facebook users can aggregate and share news, videos and podcasts. Once you have it installed, you can select friends and it automatically delivers you the news they are reading. You can also pick packages of popular feeds selected by NewsGator editors, or add news feeds directly.

The latest news stories display on your profile page, and by opening the app you can browse all your news feeds. You can post any news story and your comments to your profile, or send to a friend. Video and audio podcasts play inside NewsFriends.

NewsGator Launches Facebook App: NewsFriends

Windows Live Writer & AtomPub

Nice to see some passionate participation in what I believe to be a very important set of standards (Atom and Atom Publishing Protocol). While RSS is the term commonly used when people discuss XML feeds, my recommendation to clients is to consider RSS as a tactical and legacy approach (use it and support it as needed). You might notice that the tag used to create an index view of my posts on XML feeds is labeled as RSS. This tactic just acknowledges common use of the term. Strategically, the focus should be on Atom and Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). 

Note: Windows Live Writer is my primary blog authoring tool.

Windows Live Writer comes out sitting pretty! All of the servers I was able to try worked great (although a bug fix or two needed to be made along the way). Since the last time we did an interop event like this (in April) I have implemented image uploads to media collections as well as ETag conflict management, and both of those areas seem very solid now.

(Note that the version of Windows Live Writer I was testing is not publicly available yet. Despite the good results from the last two days of ad hoc testing, there’s a whole lot of testing and review that still needs to be done before we’d feel comfortable shipping it–same as with any other new feature.)

AtomPub interop event notes « whateverblog.

Outlook 2007 And 250 Feeds

Ouch ... I've installed Outlook 2007 and have been using it for several weeks. After making sure I had all the patches, the general performance problems associated with the product seem to be much better. However, the RSS feed synchronization process seems extremely painful. I'm looking into why but right now, I consistently experience tremendous performance impacts (in a negative way) when Outlook 2007 synchronizes my feed list. Now, to be honest, 250 feeds might not be "normal" ... and I don't seem to experience such a degradation when IE7 synchonizes its feeds. The difference could be that IE7 relies on the Windows RSS Platform while Outlook 2007 has implemented its own subsystem to some extent.

So - still investigating the root cause but I would be interested in reader comments on Outlook 2007 native RSS synchronization experiences....

Can You Have Info 2.0 Without XML Syndication?

Catching up on some older news - IBM announced a new initiative along with some associated technologies within the meme "Info 2.0". Amazingly, information that I have seen so far does not seem to mention the role of XML feeds (e.g., Atom) - at least not yet - and where XML syndication plays in its Info 2.0 framework. I remain amazed (underwhelmed?) that no major vendor has stepped into the feed server aggregation/management space where Attensa, KnowNow and NewsGator remain the most credible enterprise options.

Info 2.0 is a technology (or information fabric layer) for simplified integration of data and content via Information Mashups. Info 2.0 uses simple interfaces and intuitive tools to connect information from custom and packaged business applications, the web, spreadsheets, and databases – making information assembly and access easier for both IT and non-IT users. Info 2.0 extends and complements existing investments in information architectures. Moreover, Info 2.0 is focused on enterprise users, so now mashups can be not only created for external users, but also for departmental users within a company. Info 2.0 provides a data organizational element needed (such as data standardization and data cleansing) to mashups and other Web 2.0 applications to create software in the enterprise and SaaS (Software as a Service) on the web.

Why is Info 2.0 needed? Info 2.0 can be used for business advantages, as it speeds up users' ability to access and use information. Traditional architectures don't cover this use case for 2 reasons:

(1)Many data sources are not covered by enterprise integration architectures, such as departmental content, desktop content, email content, etc.

(2)Data sources are typically accessed in an enterprise application manner when they need to be accessed in a situational application manner (created for a group of users with specific needs; applications that have a shorter lifespan based on that need).

Lauren Cooney : Weblog