Google News Now Providing RSS and Atom Feeds

Avery writes "Several sites are reporting that Google has announced in their blog today that they will provide RSS and Atom feeds in their news section. Previously the only way to get RSS/Atom feeds from Google news was through third party scrapers. Now, you can get feeds for any of Google's news areas as well as feeds for a news search. (The news search is basically the same concept as Google news alerts, only in RSS.)"

Comments

It seems that Slashdot..

[speights_pride!]

..has always been plugged into the RSS feed anyway ;-)

Re:It seems that Slashdot..

[Jarlsberg]

Yeah, and at times all that was shown was Slashdots inane "you have accessed the rss feed too often". ;)

Re:It seems that Slashdot..

[It'sYerMam]

multiple IPs from NTL's proxies have been banned from /. The insane thing is that if you change proxy to another in your area, you're still in the same subnet, so you're still unable to post.

What is the point of RSS?

[Jaruzel]

So far, I have failed to see the point of RSS.

It was originally touted as a low-bandwidth solution, but this in most cases is false. If 10,000 people subscribe to a sites' RSS feed and set their RSS aggregators to 'refresh' that feed every 5 mins or so, the bandwidth usage very quickly mounts up. Most sites use dyanamically created pages even for the feeds, so pre checking the age of the page doesn't help.

I installed an RSS reader on my PDA, I thought it would be great for offline news browsing, but I quickly found that I was crippled by most of the feeds because they at very least just showed the news titles, and at most showed only the first paragraph of the articles. If I wanted to read more, I had to go online. If I'm going online I might as well just browse the web normally.

I'm sure RSS has niche uses (such as the slashboxes here on /.), but in general I fail to see why the whole community is hailing RSS as the second coming of the Internet.

Just my 2p's worth.

-Jar.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Lisandro]

Well, it's not that RSS doesn't have a point (it does), it just gets awfully misused. Take podcasts, for example; why bother setting up an RSS/Atom feed with mp3 files when you could do it as easily with a simple web page?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[the_unknown_soldier]

Don't be silly. The op had a point but the only exception to it that I have found IS podcasting. I don't want to have to click to download an mp3, and drag it into my player and then onto my dap, i want it to be automatic so that when i wake up my dap is updated with the latest. Rss makes this a far simpler process.

Opening my rss agregator is just as easy as opening my web browser, only my browser gives me more information.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[neglige]

I installed an RSS reader on my PDA

I'm happy with AvantGo; it may not be perfect for content creators (since they have to pay for a channel), but as a user I get quite a nice bunch of information. Replaces a daily newspaper.

As for RSS feeds... it would be interesting to see the most recent/most searched queries on Google. And maybe the results (including pictures *g*).

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[TheFlyingGoat]

On my HTPC, I pull RSS feeds of news and sports scores each night. It gives me a quick and easy way to get the daily headlines all in one spot. Same as people who use aggregators... it's all about convenience.

Your bandwidth example is faulty. First of all, most people don't have their aggregators set to update every 5 minutes. Second, if you've ever ran a website that gets a decent amount of traffic, you'd know that content takes very little bandwidth compared to images and markup code. Third, a smart site operator would have a script set up that would create a static rss feed instead of a dynamic one, perhaps running it each minute. For a popular site, the processing savings would be significant.

PDA applications are a great example of RSS put to good use. Sure, you have to connect to read the full content, but the headlines are presented in a simple manner that even crappy PDAs can handle. Far better than downloading ALL of the content on a site, or requiring a constant connection to the Internet.

There's MANY niche environments that RSS feeds are perfectly suited for. They're easy to set up on a site. They're easy to use as a client. Why NOT have them around?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[strider44]

Because it's a standard way of syndicating information in a way that can be reformatted. With an RSS feed the information can be placed inside a browser, a news ticker or a widget on Karamba with equal ease. Each of these have wildly different formatting and RSS is used to accomplish this, whereas with HTML it's either impossible or very hard, having to write a manual script for each and every site which would break as soon as the site is changed.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

I'm glad somebody else thinks this way. After hearing all the buzz with RSS I finally decided to give it a try. I had just finshed building my MythTV box and one of the Myth plugins is MythNews, an RSS aggregator. Great, I thought.

I installed it, selected a few feeds, and tried it out. What a waste! The program worked well enough, but the information content was so minimal, I was almost better off not knowing.

This lack of content wasn't MythNews' fault, of course, but content-free news seems to be an epidemic in the RSS world. Hmph.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[jurt1235]

Well, since RSS stands for Really Short attentionSpan, I think it is pretty clear.
The whole goal of RSS is to get people who have a short attention span to become totally unproductive since they now have the RSS feed to break up the last bits on concentration they have. Complementary you can install chat software with annoying blinking icons to divide the attention between RSS and chat/messaging

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Lisandro]

Mmm good point, it eluded me completely (maybe it's because of my disgust for podcasts to begin with :).

    Still, RSS is overdoing it: even while it might be well suited to the task, the idea behind RSS is that you recive updated information about something as soon as it's avaliable while using as little bandwidth as possible. I've seen a lot of sites, like the op mentioned, that miss the point completely: either they deliver a lot of data through it or very brief headline-like updates, which most of the time doesn't cut it.

    Delivering links through RSS for FTP/WWW downloads would be a better way of Podcasting, but i doubt it'd ever catch on.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the points (there are, of course, many others) is to be able to quickly browse through headlines and only view the articles you want. Rather than go to each of the many sites you visit, you just open your RSS reader (or your bookmarks menu if you like Firefox's Live Bookmarks), find a headline that interests you and click. The better RSS feeds have a description (usually the first paragraph) so you have an even better idea what the article is about.

It makes reading the news much more efficient than going to each individual site you visit and browsing through the headlines.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[aussie_a]

I have failed to see the point of RSS.

I don't know what the "official point" of it is, but I have a great many uses for it. One main use I have is I have several feeds on my homepage and I can at a glance see if they've updated and/or see if I might be interested in their update.

Another use for it is to open up one program and it will tell me if any blogs I read (and there are many that I do) have updated since I last checked. Instead of having to open up over 20 pages (most of which remain unupdated for months at a time), I just open up "one page".

Another use is I keep track of new e-books on this site and I'll keep the items in my reader. Once a week or so, I go through all the items, delete most of them, keep the items for books that sound interesting*. That way whenever I want to buy a book, I can just open up my client and look through the items I've saved (which are obvious as they're unread).

* Actually I lie. I put the ones that sound interesting in a relational database. But you don't HAVE to do that, I'm just anal like that. Well, that and trying to keep track of my free e-books is very, very difficult.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[isorox]

One word: Live Bookmarks.

Clik the orange blob in the bottom right, subscribe to the slashdot RSS feed, and drop it in your bookmarks (or on your toolbar). No need to visit slashdot to see if there's any interesting stories, as they'll be in your bookmarks.

I do the same with BBC News too, I can get an idea of what's happening by simply dropping down a list and checking the headlines. If a story grabs my attention I click it and go straight to the story - no need to navigate the horrendus news.bbc.co.uk site (fine for the top 5-10 stories, but after that it's easy to miss stuff)

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

Slashdot bans you if you refresh too often.. so it really is not a practical solution if you want to be up to date.

Seems kinda retarded if it is OK with them that you can refresh the front page, images + dynamic content, hundreds of times daily, but you can't refresh the RSS feed without risk of getting banned.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[embezzled]

Caching? Doesn't anybody cache anymore? All you need to do is check the date stamp, or the filesize, or have a 2 byte hash somewhere, so the 20k page gets reduced to a 2k rss feed, which gets reduced to a 2B hash. Surely there'd be a bandwidth saving there?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[embezzled]

What do you know? Its been done already:
http://www.rsscache.com/

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[nicktripp]

Syndication. You do it for the same reason you use a TiVo to get new television content instead of a VCR. I don't want to manually check a page for new files and then manually download the new ones, just like I don't want to manually program a VCR and load a tape. I want a feed that iTunes can check for new content, then download said content for me and then update my iPod with the new content. Waking up to fresh content on my iPod in the morning versus spending an hour at work downloading files and updating it is the difference to me.

Besides, I need that hour to read/post on Slashdot.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to check out how podcasting actually works. It is delievering links to downloads via the enclosure tag. It's not like there are ascii armored mp3s in the rss file...

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Delivering links through RSS for FTP/WWW downloads would be a better way of Podcasting, but i doubt it'd ever catch on."

That's exactly how it works.

The podcasting programs just automate the process of following the links and getting the stuff to your player.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yours is the most lucid explanation of the advantages of RSS to date, thanks. My solution to rarely updated sites has been to visit them every month or so, or forget them if they aren't consistently interesting. It seems that with RSS it would be possible to juggle a much larger amount of non-professionally and occasionally updated sites. Maybe it's time to give it another try... now all I need is a list of top quality RSS sites that match my interests. Oh, and a pony would be nice, too.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Bogtha]

How many websites do you visit on a regular basis? How many times have you visited them and not found anything new? Atom and RSS stop you wasting your time.

How many times have you visited a site and realised that it's been that long since you last visited it, you've missed quite a lot? Atom and RSS help you keep tabs on a large number of websites without having to visit them all the time. Atom and RSS make more efficient use of your time.

This isn't about saving bandwidth or being able to browse offline. It's about knowing when something interesting or important is on a website. Without Atom or RSS, you would have to visit those websites on a regular basis. Without Atom or RSS, the number of websites you could keep track of without wasting inordinate amounts of time is rather limited.

Sure, when a feed only includes the first paragraph, it's useless if you want to use it as a substitute for visiting the website. But it's enough to let you know there's something new on the website and enough for you to decide whether it's interesting to you or not. That's what matters.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[MichaelSmith]

So far, I have failed to see the point of RSS

Recently I bought a new Palm Pilot. I looked at AvantGo, but it doesn't support Linux. I installed plucker, but I still needed a source of information.

I wrote a short (10 line) script which grabs the RSS feed from abc.net.au, uses xslt to extract the links, loops through the links downloading each html file, installs them in plucker and runs pilot-xfer.

The whole thing takes about 20 seconds to run and gives me news to read on the tram in the morning when I go to work. A different script invokes this one when the palm connects to USB.

Yes, I could grab a normal web page for the news feed but it would have a lot of junk on it and be much harder to parse. I can use the same xslt style sheet to crack RSS feeds from multiple sources because they have the same format.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[hachete]

I use the RSS feeds in Firefox to check the status of news items from Le Figaro, BBC and the New York Times.

I also use it to check if there are new items from Slashdot, PennyArcade and Megatokyo. The headlines are usually explicit enough to tell me if I want to go to the website or not, which saves me an important amount of time given that PennyArcade and MegaTokyo both take a while to download even on a corporate network.

Works for me. To me it's just a dynamic bookmark folder in Firefox, think of it like a news-ticker. I agree that RSS is not the second coming, just like "blogs" are just over-inflated home-pages. Although to hear the combatants of Atom V RSS (sometimes boiled down to one mega-corporation against one millionaire), you'd think that the lives of millions were at stake, particularly from the Atom camp. *sigh*

The interesting one is Slashdot. The feed from my work machine works. The feed to to my home machine worked a couple of times and has now stopped, in spite of the crap spouted on the Slashdot apology page on "why the Slashdot RSS feed isn't working for you". Maybe "they" only allow one nibble at a time?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[fruey]

I'm with you on this : Plucker is the way to go, and it can pull in regular HTML with small images : try finding the mobile content for PDAs which is HTML with small images and otherwise text only. For example the BBC PDA site. Works like a charm with Plucker, and no RSS parsing needed.

RSS is for syndication. Aggregators are useful for those kinds of people who like "My Yahoo!" and similar, and it looks like RSS will be the tech of choice for this kind of site in the future. That's the point of RSS, it's not supposed to replace the browser but it sure makes customisation easier. Reading multiple blogs is much easier with an RSS aggregator too, and RSS search engines for blogs will be useful too.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[turnstyle]

"...that can be reformatted..."

That's the part that really interests me, and I've been doing that in my new app, Bitty Browser.

If interested, try this:

1) go to http://www.bitty.com/editor

2) Choose "RSS feed URL" (2nd in the scrolling list)

3) Enter http://slashdot.org/index.rss (that's Slashdot's RSS)

4) Enter Slashdot for the title

Then skip to the bottom and click Continue -- on the next page you'll see a preview embedded Bitty Browser with Slashdot. If you Continue again from there, you can copy/paste a snip of HTML to embed Slashdot into any Web page.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[aussie_a]

If you're a webcomic reader then this is the site for you. It tells you if a comic has been updated since you last read it. It's great for all of those comics that have unusual update schedules or go on hiatus every now and then. Plenty of comics that I do enjoy, but eventually forget, are now on that site. And unlike similar sites, the comics on the list are user defined, not artist defined.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[earthbound kid]

If you need to check slashdot more often than once every 30 minutes (hint: new articles aren't posted that often), you're too engaged in FP pissing contests.

RSS is best for keeping track of 500 sites that only update their content sporadically, say every month or so. That way, instead of throwing it into your bookmarks and forgetting about it, or wasting your time checking it all the time when there's nothing new 29 days out of 30, you can file it away and only come back when there's something new. For that, it's very handy.

For getting FP on slashdot the second a new story is posted, yeah, it kinda sucks. But who cares?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[aussie_a]

Slashdot doesn't even update their feed on a regular basis anyway, so it's pointless to constantly refresh it. I guess they figure people are unlikely to sut there and do it (or find a script/create a script to do it), whereas most readers let them do it automatically. That or maybe it's because they don't get ad revenue from the feeds, while they do from the main page ;)

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[mikkom]

So far, I have failed to see the point of RSS.

The main point is that it is a kind of standard. You can fetch tens of news sources, sort them and read fresh news all the time without having to visit all the sites.

I never even thought of RSS being a solution for bandwidth usage.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[singpolyma]

The point of RSS is simple... you can check a whole bunch of site from one place (your feed reader). I don't want to have to load ever webpage/newsservice/blog that I check frequently when I want to see if there's something new.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[TheWormThatFlies]

RSS is not primarily intended for offline browsing[1]. It's a mechanism for notifying you when a page has changed.

I don't want to have to reload the huge group of news sites, blogs and other periodically updated pages that I find interesting in my browser every hour to see if anything has changed. It's a waste of time and a waste of bandwidth, since there's a good chance that half of them haven't been updated at any given time.

I recently set up a feed reader. Every now and then I go past the workspace which has the feed reader open, and I flip through the headlines. If I see something interesting, I follow the link to the full text on the website. Since I only find a small percentage of news headlines interesting enough to follow up, I don't mind not receiving the full text in my feed reader. It would be a waste of bandwidth.

I subscribe to about forty feeds - that's many more sites than I was manageably able to follow using the refresh-a-bunch-of-pages-occasionally method. I can also actually keep up with very infrequently updated sites now - I just add the feed, and if there's some activity a month later, I'll know about it. Before, I would inevitably lose track of pages like this, because it really wasn't worthwhile to add them to my regular refresh list.

The bandwidth that feeds use up can indeed be a problem if people refresh their feeds every five minutes. This is a practical limitation of the technology, but I don't think that the workaround (discouraging too-frequent refreshing) makes it less useful. It makes no difference to me in practice whether my feed reader refreshes every five minutes or every hour, because I don't check on my feeds every five minutes anyway, so I use the global hourly interval, except for feeds which suggest a shorter one.[2]

RSS has certainly been very useful to me. If it's not useful to you, then you possibly just don't have the problems to which it is a solution.

1. Some feeds, like those generated for most blogs, include the full body text - so you can quite successully use feeds for browsing some pages offline.
2. Most modern feed readers set a long refresh interval for you by default, and inform you that making the interval too short is frowned upon.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[JustOK]

THAT's *NOT* your homepage, its MINE!!!!

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[neglige]

I looked at AvantGo, but it doesn't support Linux.

Probably depends on your PDA. I'm using a (rather old) m515 with Linux & J-Pilot. Get the client for the PDA from AvantGo (the last files contain the .PRCs), then J-Pilot, and finally the MAL plugin (which might be already included in your distribution). Don't forget to enable the conduit in J-Pilot :)

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[hacker]

I'm happy with AvantGo; it may not be perfect for content creators (since they have to pay for a channel), but as a user I get quite a nice bunch of information. Replaces a daily newspaper.

AvantGo has LONG been surpassed by better, smaller, faster, more-capable, feature-rich, free tools.

Take a look at Plucker for the current leader in this space. Runs on everything (Windows, Linux, OSX) and on PalmOS, PocketPC, Linux PDAs. Has Python, perl, Java, C++ distillers, dozens more options than AvantGo, lots of third-party support and add-ons, and is significanly more visually appealing than the bloated, wasted space of AvantGo.

Feel free to read the (slightly old) comparison of AvantGo, Plucker and iSilo over here for more details.

Lots of screenshots of Plucker examples over here and Google's new RSS feeds in Plucker over here.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[TheWormThatFlies]

Actually, RSS has made me slightly more productive at work. Before, when I was feeling lazy, I would often take a break by refreshing a folder full of news sites and waiting for them to load. And then, ten minutes later, I might do it again - just in case something terribly exciting had happened while I wasn't looking. Now that I have feeds, I am notified when updates happen, and I can't keep reloading all the feeds I'm watching before the refresh interval is up because then I might get my IP banned from Slashdot again. So I no longer have this excuse for wasting time.

Now I can spend much more time posting my ramblings on assorted internet forums.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[grazzy]

The point is that now 10,000 more webmasters are going to be aggregating google news, furthermore polluting the web.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Komarosu]

Heh i'm perma-banned as i'm behind a isp's proxy...no way i can ever get round it. I'll get maybe one refresh per week.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Hes Nikke]

Delivering links through RSS for FTP/WWW downloads would be a better way of Podcasting, but i doubt it'd ever catch on.

Someone better tell Dave Winer! He needs to add a link portion to each channel item. It should be called an enclosure tag. And just to make thing easier on the aggregator, we'll include the MIME type, and number of bytes this other file will be!

What? They already are?! But Lisandro said that he doesn't think it'd catch on... Since 2001 you say? And that's the mechanism used by all podcasts... I'm so confused!

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[jurt1235]

Interesting effect. I tend to be distracted by flashing things. Being bored however makes me open the same sites 10 times too to see that nothing or little has changed in the last hour.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[slim]

If 10,000 people subscribe to a sites' RSS feed and set their RSS aggregators to 'refresh' that feed every 5 mins or so, the bandwidth usage very quickly mounts up. Most sites use dyanamically created pages even for the feeds, so pre checking the age of the page doesn't help.

That depends on how smart the code that dynamically creates the RSS is. A sensible implementation will understand the "If-modified-since:" header, will perform a very cheap database request for items newer than that, and if there are none, respond with "304 Not modified".

Wordpress's RSS generator does just that. I'm sure all the other reputable applications do too, and I know any respectable client will implement conditional GETs.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[TheWormThatFlies]

This isn't a flashing thing. I don't have pop-ups or other intrusive notification mechanisms to tell me that the feed reader has a new update. It just does its stuff silently, and I have a look whenever I'm feeling bored. It's kind of like email.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[shokk]

Check out FeedOnFeeds if you have your own web server. You can access the same content from home or work for reading your feeds. I have a reblog patch that lets you mark articles for including in a feed of your own.

I find it very useful for keeping up with rarely updated Sourceforge projects as SF has feeds for all announcements done for a project. Web comics, news, entertainment, etc. Who wants to waste time going to web sites to see if they've updated? One look at your feed reader will show you what's new, leaving you time for reading more content, or just plain doing something else.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[someonewhois]

Yeah, pulling sports scores is a perfect example of a practical use of XML. It doesn't say much for RSS though. Pulling news, sure, that's the point, but then again, that's what Google's doing here too.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[isorox]

Slashdot bans you if you refresh too often.. so it really is not a practical solution if you want to be up to date.

I have it on a 60 minute refresh, do I really need to know about Moody Non-photo-realistic driving the second the story is out?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[oldbenway]

Lots of uses--plug a title into azureus, whenever your title shows up in RSS, the torrent downloads and starts. Keep a folder of RSS headlines as an active bookmark in Firefox, I can browse news headlines from slashdot, theguardian, photoshopnews, psphacker, thinksecret, apple developer and allakhazam (warcraft news) withing a minute. If anything interests me, I can head to the site. Browsing the headlines of those 7 sites would take much more time. Especially concerning /., I don't have to read the latest google blip or microsoft flame, I can just get right down to the article about the super monkey collider.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[smokele]

I don't think it matters that you can't find the point of RSS... not even the google ig front page can load in one of their RSS feeds

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[ffdixon]

I agree with Strider44 on the problems of HTML embedded in RSS.

Google has provided a feed, but the next step is to provide b>all the data in a structured format (either using RSS 2.0 extensions or more tags in Atom). The current feed is good, but only goes half-way.

Want to see what is possible with more structured data? Check out Serence's Google Kilp, which parses the HTML to give you the ability to choose language, topic, and pop-up alerts.

Google news Klip (This is a Klip that in the KlipFolio RSS Dashboard.) Obviously, it would be easier to parse XML than HTML. We predict that many feeds (like Google) will soon move to offering more contnet in their feed that newer RSS readers can leverage.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

If aggregation is done properly, why would it pollute? If webmasters have the ability to aggregate content on a specific subject, it becomes possible to scan, through Google, a very large pool of news and editorial content. You can then zoom in only on those articles that are relevant to your subject and create a new feed or web site from it. It also becomes possible to add your own editorial content on top of these aggregated news should you wish to.

Slashdot is not unlike an aggregator. Members send content suggestions and the editors publish whatever news they deem relevant. Is it polluting the Web?

Being able to tap into Google's sorting and searching abilities is interesting because it will enable savvy webmaster to create relevant sites that can cover much more ground in less time. Slashdot has thousands of people who are able to send word of interesting news. For other subjects and smaller sites, it is much harder.

To sort information you need the ability to extract semantic knowledge from news items. You need an ontology that keep track of concepts related the field you're doing research in. These are very hard to create and maintain. If a webmaster can unload the semantic work to Google, it opens up a wide array of possibilities.

Imagine you are following the progress of a trial against... say... Microsoft (seems plausible). You could ask Google to feed you all the articles about it and automate the process of posting it to a blog as draft articles. You review the content daily and make a selection of the most interesting articles. You post the articles or combine them into yet more concise posts à la Slashdot.

That's pollution only if you're not interested in trials against Microsoft.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[stinerman]

No need to visit slashdot to see if there's any interesting stories, as they'll be in your bookmarks.

True, but if you'll never get a first post due to the lag between the bookmark update and the posting of the story. :-)

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[phildog]

You should try out bloglines.com. Install the firefox extension for bloglines while you are at it. For me, it is an easy way to keep tabs on over 100 blogs/sites without having to pull up over 100 different URLs. It is immediately obvious to me on a single page which ones have been updated and I can pick and choose which to read. I'm a big believer in RSS, hence my site: dodgeit.com

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Popageorgio]

So we need a more open version of iTunes' podcast library. One that reports usage stats back to publishers when it caches their podcasts.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[cmacb]

I have been mystified too by the success of RSS since its early proponents claimed it was a "push" technology.

A TRUE push technology would have made enormous sense. You update your website, your website automatically notifies aggregators such as Bloglines and search engines such as google that it has been updates, the big players talk among themselves and spread the word.

Instead the feed mechanism has turned into something that consumes more bandwidth than th eoriginal HTML ever did. The fact that you are sending just text and not all the graphics is more than made up for by the fact thatpersonal aggregators on millions of PCs are checking your site 5 times a minute even while the user of that computer may be away on vacation for a month. The whole concept has gotten ridiculous.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Monkeyman334]

if you've ever ran a website that gets a decent amount of traffic

I do, and your wrong. Regardless, pulling data is fundamentally less efficient than pushing.

Third, a smart site operator would have a script set up that would create a static rss feed instead of a dynamic one, perhaps running it each minute.

I would imagine the smart site operator would just update the rss feed whenever the data is changed.

They're easy to set up on a site. They're easy to use as a client.

I'd say about that's the only reason for their popularity, but just because you like using them doesn't mean they have any technical merit.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Drakonian]

You know, I'm starting to see Slashdot in a different light. I used to think it was the place to learn about/discuss cutting edge new technologies. Instead, I'm increasingly finding there to be a conservative, hostile view towards new technologies.

Bah humbug. I don't see the point of technology XYZ. Why can't we do it like we used to. When I was a boy we used simple web pages coded in HTML 1.0 by hand. And liked it!

I don't see many posters using RSS or things like del.ici.ous even though they are becoming pretty popular in the so-called blogosphere.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Attackman]

Content-free news is an epidemic in the news world buddy, at least it is in the US.
The trick is finding sources that provide rich content. The feed for Slashdot includes the full post text, including the links to TFA. That way, I can hit up the news I want without being tempted to read comments and post replies (I save that for killing time at work, like, oh, now).
Another rich feed is that of the comic strip Goats. Unlike many strips, which only feed the comic title, or the fact that it has been posted, the feed the comic itself plus all their new items. That's one less site I have to check. It's there in my Straw each morning.
So, just like with real news and entertainment, most sources are devoid of content. It's all a matter of hitting on the good ones.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[superspaz]

The point of RSS is that you don't have to keep going back to check a website, like slashdot, to see if any new items have been posted. You can also navagate directly to the new posting you care about.

I neither see why you don't get it or why people are going crazy about it. Fine, it is push based content in its earliest form. It has a ways to go in practice.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[jc42]

Hmmm ... That URL gets a 404. Did they pull it? Or was the URL wrong?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Gulthek]

Mmm good point, it eluded me completely (maybe it's because of my disgust for podcasts to begin with :)

Just curious, what's wrong with podcasts? Do you not like NPR's Science Friday with Ira Flatow? Or getting Battlestar Galactica episode commentaries for free?

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Lisandro]

Actually, the nerd factor is ok :) It's just that's a "recorded radio show"; i used to do those when i was 10 with a dual deck cassete stereo...

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[FLEB]

...and nobody cared.

Now, with the Internet, two or even THREE people can care.

That's progress, bucko!

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[aussie_a]

Sorry, slashdot did something weird. www.comic-nation.com

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[CuriosityKilledWHAT]

I use Opera's built-in RSS aggregator. I subscribe to a little over 100 feeds and get maybe 800 items a day which are all neatly filtered into virtual folders and presented in a way not unlike e-mail.

300+ are from deal-watching sites like fatwallet, techbargains, slickdeals. It takes maybe 2 minutes to scan through them for anything that might interest me (or I can use Opera's built in search) and delete the rest. Others are from news and tech sites, a few blogs (mostly library and academic related), Fark, Alterslash, BoingBoing, OSNews, Metafilter, Monkeyfilter and a few Delicious feeds.

I read the subjects and decide what to read and delete what I don't want to. Some have enough full text that I can just read in the mail view, others I have to middle-click a link to open the site in a new tab, but weeding out the ones I don't want to read is far faster when presented in a uniform e-mail-like display.

The ones I read and mark read (but don't delete) are kept in my Opera's local mail database, which is also fully searchable (including both subject and body).

Unlike an e-mail mailing list, I can remove a feed at will with a couple of clicks instead of having to dash off an unsubscribe request. Some feeds are set to update every hour, others just once or twice a day.

RSS/Atom has radically changed the way I use the Internet.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

I don't care about getting FP (check my posting history). Thats for losers like TripMasterMonkey, Garcia, and GNAA trolls, all who need the attention.

I check Slashdot every... (few minutes?).. because I really have nothing else to do with my life.. Personally, I don't really care about having a Slashdot RSS feed, but given how often new stories are posted, using the Slashdot feed to "keep up to date" is really not practical.

Given how inefficent Slashcode is, it makes no sense to have this restriction but not complain about hundreds of thousands of people hitting refresh every 5 minutes on the front page. It takes hardly any CPU power at all to have Slash generate a static XML file every time a story is posted, modified, or removed. The static file would also have miniscule server impact compared to me opening the front page.

Common sense isn't always common when it comes to some people.

I didn't accuse you or anyone else of anything in particular, but since you're apt to do it, I'll say this: Only losers who are obsessed with blogs need 500 RSS feeds!

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[earthbound kid]

You make a good point: Slashdot should either ban people for checking the front page too much or stop banning checking static RSS files too much. The current policy makes no sense, since encourages checking a processor/bandwidth heavy page.

As for the lameness of blogs, well, Slashdot is essentially just a blog with multiple authors and an assload of comments. Mreh, whatever.

Re:What is the point of RSS?

[VolciMaster]

I incorporated an RSS aggregator (magpie rss) into my website for subscribing to sites I normally visit heavily. It's reduced my load on several sites, only loading the headlines that interest me, instead of the whole site, then the ehadlines (a la CNN, InfoWorld, Slashdot, etc).

Sure, it's not a perfect fix, but it's a nice start towards finding what I want to see.

Very cool

[ReformedExCon]

A data scrape of an info amalgamation. Mmm.. sounds like it should be treated with some Bactine and a bandage.

This seemed like an easy and logical step for Google News. They've already got something similar for their blogspot service.

Check out their in-string wildcard searches, though. Cool!

Re:Very cool

[Mozk]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/fill-in-bla nks.html

I'm much more interested in that. I've always wanted that feature.

Good thing

[kihjin]

FTGB: "And since feed reading can be addictive, don't forget to feed yourself after feeding your reader."

Well then, it seems having a refrigerator next to me will finally start paying off!

Wow!

[Too Much Noise]

What's next, Google News Beta becoming Google News RC1?

The world has gone crazy, I kid you not!

Google's Atom Feed

[pyrrhonist]

Incidentally, does anyone know why the first entry in the Atom feed is always a link to the Google News front page?

Since the same information is in the feed's link, it's kind of superfluous. Is there some reason for this or is it just a mistake?
They appear to use NFE for the feeds. Is this a default in NFE?

The RSS feed does not appear to have this issue.

Re:Google's Atom Feed

[timyang]

ScrappyGoo, the Google News scraper is in RSS 2.0 and unlike Google's RSS offering, ScrappyGoo will always be ad-free. Google News will probably introduce RSS ads very soon -- as you have pointed out, they're already using their feed to drive traffic to their site.

Re:Google's Atom Feed

[JabberWokky]

More than that, these are the only feeds that somehow are messing up Akregator's "Keep Article" and "Mark articles as read" features. I have no idea why, but I'm curious if they are feeding misformatted feeds.

--
Evan

Re:Google's Atom Feed

[JabberWokky]

Ah - as an update to anybody reading this, I figured it out. Those URLs are incredibly long with some sort of packed or hashed data in a single get variable. Akregator must store some sort of index by the url, but these urls are too long to use. The feeds work fine without that variable on them, so I just stripped them off the url for the feed and it works.

--
Evan

Blogs! RSS! Podcasts!

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS feeds are great so I can integrate my social networking and always get the latest updates to all the blogs and trackbacks that I podcast too!

Or something like that. I don't have time for that shit. I go to sites like cnn.com and www.corriere.it where "journalists" aggregate the news for me.

Yahoo's had this for months now...

[Gopal.V]

Yahoo news , my.yahoo.com , search and alerts .. have all been RSS for quite some time.

I can imagine the irony of reading google news on my.yahoo.com (too bad /. banned my.yahoo).

Re:Yahoo's had this for months now...

[natrius]

Incidentally, I found out about Google News' RSS feeds from an item in my Yahoo News feed that I subscribed to solely because Google News didn't have an RSS feed. Now I can get rid of it. Thanks Yahoo!

After using the Google and Yahoo RSS feeds side by side for a day, I'm definitely sticking with the Google one. There are a wider variety of sources, unlike Yahoo's content partners or whatever's going on there. Pretty pictures inside the feed help as well. What really put Google over th edge is that I can get my own customized feed that has the entertainment section stripped out, and more interesting stuff in it's place. Can My Yahoo do this? I'd never actually played around with it until just now. It'd probably be a better idea to integrate some of the customization features from My Yahoo into the main Yahoo News site so it's a bit more discoverable.

Re:Yahoo's had this for months now...

[Momoru]

The difference of course, was that slashdot didn't announce it when Yahoo added that feature. I'm frankly surprised the Google blog entry about "those freakonomics guys" didn't get posted here. No doubt at least 50 people submitted it as a story idea though.

Re:Yahoo's had this for months now...

[JustOK]

I like how under google's fun section, there's a feed for Ask Yahoo!

Re:Yahoo's had this for months now...

[Anonymous Coward]

I partially disagree with this. For the category feeds I prefer to see only one article per grouping of story, since I do not want to see the same topic a few hundred times. They already give links to their grouping anyway if I want other write ups. The way the Google RSS feed is currently set up, without a persistent id for each grouping, my RSS reader is needlessly bombarded with too many articles on the same topics, so I will NOT be using the Google category feeds.

If the Keyword RSS feeds return the same results as the email alert (I haven't compared that yet), Yahoo generally has more sources in my experience, although there are a few obscure ones that Google has that Yahoo doesn't.

And yes My Yahoo can dice up anything however you want it.

Re:Yahoo's had this for months now...

[Ilgaz]

Is there a strategic partnership with OSDN and Google?

If there is, not declaring it is unethical.

Yahoo and some other portals are using RSS for ages and they allow every single site (small or not) to have a chance added to my.yahoo.com for free.

I also heard Yahoo got banned from Slashdot RSS feed. Well, somebody over there takes himself too serious I guess. When your feed is in yahoo,millions and millions of frequent my.yahoo users and news.yahoo.com users were getting it without cost to your bandwidth.

Whatever. If there is an agreement between Slashdot and Google let us know.

Re:Yahoo's had this for months now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much all online aggregators got banned from Slashdot at one time or another, including Bloglines, Newsgator etc. The problem then (I don't know if it was actually fixed or they just special cased the online guys) was that /. has multiple feeds, so when the services refresh the feeds, they need to refresh all of them, and those were all counted towards the /. limit, leading to a ban.

In case of Slashdotting

[CleverNickedName]

Here's the cache.

MOD PARENT UP

[aussie_a]

OP's being a dick and parent calls him up on it.

Re:Google Banned Once

[aussie_a]

Normally I wouldn't feed the trolls, but this one has been modded up. Do you have any links to back up your claim? Or are you just doing some good old-fashioned trolling?

Advertising?

[zaguar]

Anyone else remember Google patenting RSS advertising?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/30/14 41249&tid=217&tid=95&tid=155

But that would mean...

-Head Explodes-

Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

Works good in Safari 2.0. Its about time RSS was available, even if it isnt 100% necessary.

http://www.uncoverip.com/

So heres hoping they do it RIGHT!!

[MrBandersnatch]

Ive been playing with RSS feeds a lot of late and seen a lot of half-assed solutions. Its ****** annoying to find an RSS feed for an area/site only to find they have commited one of the following ?-ups :-

1) No option to specify the number of results returned, returning to few results by default and putting a low cap on the max.
2) A feed but no "feed from search facility"
3) No pubDate information.
4) Feed intermitantly breaks because someone forgets to encode '&' or '' etc. in one or other fields.
5) Piling a **** load of HTML into the descripiton field (often leads to 4)

and theres more but those are the most annoying sins Ive seen recently.

Anyways this IS Google so I fully expect them to do it technically right...but I also fully expect them to limit the result set to 100 results - which is going to be useless to me and many others who might want RSS off google for more than just sticking into a aggregator!!

Re:So heres hoping they do it RIGHT!!

[MrBandersnatch]

Ahhh I hadnt realised it was actually live! Well at least the HTML in the decription is well formed but of course they have comitted sin # 1 - or am I failing to see an option to change the no of results return? And a default of 10 results....xing useless *sigh*

Re:So heres hoping they do it RIGHT!!

[Utopia]

I like the way MSNBC implemented RSS.
You can get RSS for just about any topic.
Some 1000+ RSS feeds. Just goto any Section for RSS its auto links.

Re:So heres hoping they do it RIGHT!!

[PW2]

Thanks; I'll try that one; CNN does it wrong -- in the description field, there is a ~%50 chance that it will just say something like "Read full story for latest details." where I'd prefer to see a summary or something (which they sometimes do).

Re:Google News RSS and Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I have noticed that to.

Maybe its because they use RSS ver 2.0?

AC.

Re:Google personalized home

[seweso]

Just click the 'go' button 20 times or so.

Re:Google News RSS and Firefox

[Bogtha]

It's because they haven't put the <link> elements in their HTML to enable autodiscovery. They'll probably add it soon.

Re:It seems that Google does not cache all feeds

[SebastianX]

I've seen that for a while now, beyond news. Google requests (not only popular) feeds every 15 minutes, often several fetches per second come from the same IP (probably another instance). It seems that Ms. Googlebot now actively collects feed URIs within her regular crawling, harvests feeds from personalized home pages etc. Once a feed is known, it gets fetched way too often. Although Google has implemented pinging (sitemap resubmission), it does not make use of it for feeds. http://feeds.google.com/ping?feedURI is still wishful thinking. Hopefully Google is working on a submission based solution, frequent spidering of feeds based on guessing or time schedules is pretty much inefficient on the long haul.

Not working well yet

[GeekNJ]

Saw this yesterday and added a couple of News keywords as RSS feeds to my aggregator. Seems that a lot of the same entries are showing up multiple times as new entries. Appears to be the same title/date & time. I don't think it's my RSS reader as it's handling 30+ other feeds fine.

Re:Not working well yet

[tachyonflow]

What RSS aggregator are you using? I use Thunderbird to read RSS feeds, and I see this behavior all the time for several feeds.

Re:Not working well yet

[GeekNJ]

I use GreatNews. See http://www.curiostudio.com It's free and works great. Windows only.

What? No link rel="alternate"?

[200_success]

When I go to news.google.com, the page doesn't have a

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="..." href="...">

element in the <head>. That means that browsers cannot automatically announce the existence of an RSS feed. It would be nice if I could use such a link to get an equivalent RSS/Atom feed that matches my customized news topic selection. (The RSS/Atom links on the left side of the page don't reflect my customizations.)

I'm a bit surprised at that, since Google has a reputation for making things as standard and user-friendly as possible. Perhaps that's why it's still Beta. (Where do I post feedback? Does Google have a crawler that indexes this gripe and reports it to their developers?)

The point is Syndication

[danila]

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, Syndication being the key word. You can automatically move the news items around and do anything you want with them. You are no longer a hostage to the website designer.

For example, you can label stories as Todo or Check later in your mailer (such as M2), you can integrate stories from different sources in one interface, you can search many feeds at one, you can display the news in many innovative ways, from a newspaper-like interface to tag clouds. You can choose how often to read the new stories and not have to endure complex archive navigation at each site.

If you are only getting your information from a few sources, one or two mailing lists and a few sites, you can just read your e-mail from inbox, bookmark the sites and check them manually. But if you want to know everything about foobar and aren't content simply with visiting only www.foobarnews.com, only RSS can help.

RSS can provide you with the same level of service that used to cost real money (thousands of 000) when it was provided by marketing companies under the name of media monitoring.

RSS is the shadow of the future power of Semantic Web already available in one particular area - news and new materials online. It's not intended for reading only, it's intended for processing and organising. With RSS you can automatically process all kinds of content, from slashdot articles, to search alerts to CNN news, to articles on rarely updated niche site, to del.icio.us links and flickr photos. You don't have to do it manually, your browser (RSS reader) and a bunch of web apps can do it for you.

If you really don't see why RSS is important, your opionion is not even worth 2p. You should have politely asked "please explain to me, why am I missing here", not offered your opinion, which was uninformed and stupid.

Re:The point is Syndication

[Jaruzel]

You were doing really well there, until you insulted me.

It's a free world, and I'm allowed to offer my opinion according the the Universal Rules of Earth.

I'm surprised my comment has sparked such an active thread, but I have now learnt much about RSS that I had hitherto not considered. Many thanks to those that replied (including you).

My main opinion point still stands, RSS is _not_ the second coming, well not for me anyway.

-Jar.

Re:The point is Syndication

[danila]

I didn't insult you, I called your opinion stupid. You deserved that harsh comment - you have the right to offer your opinion, but should be ready that other people may make a public value judgment.

BTW, your post was OK, until you offered your opinion again. :) You see, noone actually called RSS "the second coming", so your statement is obvious, banal and irrelevant. What people called RSS is "cool technology with tons of uses for many people". Dissing it just because you don't need it is like dissing hygienic tampons because you are a guy. In other words, it's idiotic.

Re:Google Moon!

[aussie_a]

If you go to maximal zoom, you'll finally see what the moon is made of!

Pixels?

Looks great in Plucker!

[hacker]

The new feeds look GREAT in Plucker on my PDA. I wrote a little web-based tool that takes any rss/rdf/atom/opml/nntp resource and converts it to validated HTML, which I can then directly manipulate (and in my case, turn into Plucker format).

You can see some screenshots of what it looks like on my Palm.

Re:Looks great in Plucker!

[Patik]

I wrote a little web-based tool that takes any rss/rdf/atom/opml/nntp resource and converts it to validated HTML

Is that available anywhere?

Re:Looks great in Plucker!

[hacker]

Is that available anywhere?

Not yet.. I'm working on turning it out as a service of the new Plucker site, when/if we do another version launch.

Re:Google Banned Once

[CoderBob]

IIRC, there were some issues when the http://www.google.com/ig portal was released. I don't remember if it was /.'s mistake, or google's, but the RSS feed for slashdot was often messed up. I think it was that google was polling the slashdot feed too often, but I could be wrong. I haven't had any problems since the first week, so I'm assuming it was taken care of correctly.

Why is RSS HTTP?

[el_womble]

Subscribing to an RSS stream has always struck me as a misnoma. You're still using HTTP, so you're still having to request the data, rather than sit back and let the data come to you. Why can't the site tell me that the content is ready and ship it to me? If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?

Couldn't this technology then be used to allow software updates etc as well as podcasts and news feeds?

In terms of a security risk, its only as bad as bittorrent. Sure somebody could modify their client to suck up the IPs of everyone that is interested in that information. Worse, somebody will probably figure out a way of adding a payload (although again, with proper hashing, and encryption that becomes increasingly difficult).

Could this be the killer app that gets us all hooked on IPv6?

Re:Why is RSS HTTP?

[theashworld]

If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?

I know someone who is working on RSS/Bittorrent integration. Will mostly help podcasters save bandwidth...hold your breath.

Re:Why is RSS HTTP?

[slim]

Subscribing to an RSS stream has always struck me as a misnoma. You're still using HTTP, so you're still having to request the data, rather than sit back and let the data come to you. Why can't the site tell me that the content is ready and ship it to me? If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?


I too was disappointed to find you had to poll for RSS -- but when I gave it some thought, I accepted it. Polling is simple, and does the job. If-modified-since headers keep the bandwidth hit down. You can hand-crank your own RSS feed and host it on any old static web server.

And of course, once you have an application that polls on your behalf, as a user you really do "sit back and let the data come to you". As an end user, does it bother you that your POP3 client has to poll?

Couldn't this technology then be used to allow software updates etc as well as podcasts and news feeds?

It can already.

Re:Why is RSS HTTP?

[Mant]

I think its advantage is it is very simple to impliment. The RSS feed is just an xml file on the webserver. No new technology is needed to set it up, no new protocols or software.

I think that is why it was caught on. Remember previous attempts at "push" technology on the web were supposed to be the next big thing, and never went anywhere becuase nobody set them up.

I'm not sure why IPv6 would have any impact. It's just more IP addresses available.

Re:Why is RSS HTTP?

[el_womble]

I figured... and I expect I'm wrong one of the reasons push technologies fail is because you have to work through NAT, firewalls and dynamic IP addresses all work against having a listeners on end users machines.

Maybe it could be done if it was handled by a system similar to Skype. With the data transmitted via HTTP with you machine acting like a web server, updating a distributed registry every time your IP is updated?

Adding the Google Feed into Firefox

[Pablo El Vagabundo]

Google does not tell Firefox it has a feed, here is how to add it (ripped from the mozilla site):

Some sites don't tell Firefox that they support Live Bookmarks, even though they actually do. If you know the URL of a site's RSS feed (url ends with .rdf or .xml), you can manually create a Live Bookmark for the site. Go to the Bookmarks menu and select 'Manage Bookmarks'. Under the 'File Menu', select 'New Live Bookmark'. Create a name for the Live Bookmark and add the URL. New articles from that site will appear as Live Bookmarks in Firefox.

Pablo

Re:Adding the Google Feed into Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't work. Google news feed doesn't end in .xml or .rdf. However, Yahoo supports this automatically. After you do the Yahoo news search in Firefox, you get the little orange thingy in the lower right corner that tells you that you can make it into a Live Bookmark, which can easily be placed on your bookmarks toolbar. Once again, you can go to Yahoo today to see the features that will be in Google a few months from now.

Re:Adding the Google Feed into Firefox

[jmagar.com]

Cheap hack is to add another variable to the url:

http://news.google.ca/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn&q=&output =rss&dummy=dot.xml

Enjoy!

Re:Adding the Google Feed into Firefox

[Perfesser Einstein]

Tried it and got error message "Live Bookmark feed failed to load." Any idea why this may be so?

Re:What? No link rel="alternate"?

[Jugalator]

The feed service is part of the Google News service, extending its functionality.
So I suppose the Google News team would be the appropriate people to contactabout these things.

Bookmarks

[Jaiwithani]

I use RSS for all my bookmarks, via del.icio.us. No more need to carry around my Firefox profile to have my bookmarks on me - if I have internet access, I have all my bookmarks.

Re:What? No link rel="alternate"?

[garo5]

Propably someone at Google has already read your feedback right here at ./

  - Garo

Google's rss-friendly home page

[4ginandtonics]

Google's had the feed in their personalized home page for some time...

Check this out, if you haven't already:

http://www.google.com/ig

Add rss feeds to make your own homepage with google. This is the "Personalize your Homepage" feature from http://labs.google.com/

The point is XML

[Kamiza Ikioi]

It's more about XML, I believe. News is a unique content source, as opposed to static content. For instance, Moby Dick is static content. Moby Dick in XML might not be that useful. RSS, or xml, on the other hand is raw annotated content. Unlike a webpage, it doesn't need an html interpreter (browser) to read, but can feed directly into applications, including offline readers (I recommend Avantgo if you really want mobile news... it installs on most palm/pocket pc devices).

The advantage is that rss is really different. If you look at the XHTML specification, RSS is only really different from a web page in the names of the tags it uses. It's just a file format. It doesn't cure cancer. It won't make your teeth whiter. But, for people that aren't html standards compliant, they at least get their feet wet in a standards compliant format for their content, thus increasing the universal access to their public data.

And by that measure, Google has increased universal access to their data as well. Such feeds might be used directly by rss readers. For the most part, though, the feeds will be used as parts of applications.

For instance, you could set up a company RSS feed to search for all news on your company, and feed it directly into the internal e-mail system. Or, if you are like me, you can integrate RSS news feeds into other web-applications, like Google Maps. Prior to this, I hooked Yahoo's RSS news feeds (by location) to the Google maps, so that you could view top news geographically, instead of chronologically.

Without RSS and other XML standards, scraping websites is very inaccurate, and much more bandwidth/time consuming. Parsing an XML document is far easier than a raw, unorganized document. With a proper cache setup (like Magpie for PHP), small sites can utilize a LOT of RSS content, which would only take a tiny amount of bandwidth. Compare that to a site scraping a Google search result, then scraping all resulting pages, and trying to pick out things such as the "headline", "publishing date", "author", etc.

Those are some of the advantages to RSS/XML, though I'm sure someone even more familiar with the standards could go more in depth.

Doesn't work on Personalized Google?

[bornyesterday]

So, I made a custom news search and tried to add it to my personalized google page and it wouldn't work.

The rss feed that it provides is this: http://news.google.com/news?q=Poland&output=rss but the required feed for a custom section on the personalized google page is .xml

I expected better internal compatibility from google.

Granted, they already have a customizable news search category, but you'd think this would work the same way.

Re:Doesn't work on Personalized Google?

[Frobisher]

Ditto. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing obviously. I tried to fool it with a &foo=.xml or something like that, but still no go. I expect they'll fix that soon.

Try a wget...

[$0 31337]

... And you get a 403 forbidden error

Re:Try a wget...

[Bogtha]

Google seem to be specifically blocking wget. Use the --user-agent 'Not wget, honest!' switch and you can download it just fine.

I can tell you how I use it

[raitchison]

My RSS reader (feedreader) Is currently configured for 3-4 dozen different RSS feeds, some news sites, some home pages ("blogs"). Some of them are updated multiple times a day, some updated daily, some updated infrequently.

Really I don't have time to check all of them even once a day but with an RSS reader I just have to start and tell it to check all the feeds and I know where there is new stuff.

Then I can look at the subject lines and see what looks interesting, then I look at the summaries and then only actually read ~5% of all the new stuff that pops up. I can effectively check several dozen sites and get the information I want out of them in only a few minutes. Without RSS checking that many sites would take at least an hour and would be difficult to manage.

Firewalls

[Augusto]

Use any other protocol and it's going to be block, reducing it's adoption.

If you want it to "push" data to your client, that's even worse because then you have to poke holes in firewalls to talk to each client, so these feeds will most likely not work behind any corporate firewall.

Re:Firewalls

[el_womble]

What does this say about our industry?

I'm not saying your wrong, in fact I completely agree with you. I'm reminded of:

'When all you've got is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail'

The current mentality seems to be, everybodys got a hammer, so make nails - we understand that some people like the idea of screws, but that will upset the people that make hammers. If your nails don't work use more nails, or make bigger nails. If that doesn't work we'll make a bigger hammer. No screws allowed.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

those feeds are useless for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Those feeds are useless for me.
I use KNewsTicker and it fails to work with all the html crap in the feed.
I do not want a "news box" ON MY web site, I want a clean news feed on my KNewsTicker :)

Thanx for nothing!

still not enough filters - for me

[dindi]

I tried all rss search engines and at the end i wrote my own because of general dissatisfaction ....

My problem was this: others did not allow filtering the way I wanted, so I created one, that allows url filtering

1.URL must/must not contain
2.Must contin at least one of these
3. AND at least ove of these
4. Can not contain any of these

While a bit afraid of being ./ -ed since the server is already overloaded i post the URL here
please avoid "archive search" and note that it is a "hobby project" for me so it has some boo-boos and it is far from ready ....
http://www.azfeeds.com/ takes you to a search, http://www.azfeeds.com/edit-feeds.php lets you check/build/test some custom feeds...

RSS-on-Toolbar setup for Firefox

[mooboy]

To use these new feeds on the Firefox toolbar:

• Copy the new RSS or Atom link from Google's page
• Go to Bookmarks.. Manage Bookmarks
• Highlight the spot under the "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder" section where you want the feed to appear
• Click File.. New Live Bookmark
• Give it a name and paste in the link!
  

Look Back in Time

[guaigean]

Not sure how many remember, but Google used to have RSS a few years back. They then discontinued it due to it being linked so much as to cause bandwidth problems according to the search giant. Interesting that they waited so long to re-release it.

Google vs Yahoo

[jimmyjim]

Google will need to start doing a front page like yahoo.com soon if they keep offering more services. I like that fact about yahoo.com most of everything I want is on the front pagea click away. I wonder if it is a PR {page rank} thing I noticed that yahoo.com has a PR of a 9 maybe cause it has so many outside links on the front page? I imagine we will always here about Google buying something new just about every other month after all they got like a googles of money since going public.I imagine that a music service will be the next take over target for Google in order to compete with yahoos launch music service.

Not fully implemented yet

[jpm242]

> Now, you can get feeds for any of Google's news areas...

Actually, that's not true. Some localized content isn't available, such as the Canadian French version, which uses different news sources as the US english version.

I'm guessing that the localized versions are running on a different set of servers and they just haven't been updated yet with the new back end software.

JPM

Re:Google Banned Once

[Capricous]

This is all the proof that I have of this event, I thought it was funny enough to take a screenshot. http://www.boundlesssupremacy.com/capricous/5-26-0 5aslashdotbannedgoodle.png

Yahoo News has it for months

[neves]

We should note that Yahoo news has implemented this features months ago. Just make a search and the orange xml button will appear in the results page. You can even use rss auto-discovery (the rss feed in describe in the html meta tags). If you are a bloglines user, you can click in their bookmarklet, and automagically subscribe to the feed.

Cool

[billybob]

Holy crap, that's really cool :D Very neat idea.

RSS Useless?

[4of12]

Depends on the content providers.

But if you're browsing with Mozilla/Firefox, check out Sage. I find it quite useful for floating over feeds from MarketWatch.com, Reuters, freshmeat.

Looking at how RSS works, though, I have to wonder why RFC 822 Mail Subject headers aren't fed into RSS as an option for gmail.

Tempinbox can rss emails

[Cooke]

You have been able to get google news alerts to an email address since it started. If you point them to a http://www.tempinbox.com/tempinbox.com> address you can then get that via RSS feed.

Also note that this will work for any email mailing list too. The cool thing is that if you don't want to get the list any more you just remove the RSS feed. Chris

Google News versus Yahoo News!

[newsmaniac]

Using feed reader to feed Google and Yahoo! news search results. A tool to compare the news articles side-by-side at http://www.newsiness.com/googleyahoonews/