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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.)"
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?
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.
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.
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!!
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?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
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.
http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/
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?
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.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
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.
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.
Ignore the rantings above. Poster is an idiot.