RSS everywhere courtesy of Microsoft? I blogged in May about Longhorn and XML. In Dale's lecture Tuesday there were at least two newsletter writers/web site content managers who had been informed by their users that they needed to provide RSS (yay, go users!) and didn't really know how to go about it.

At this point I was glad I wasn't the speaker -- because I don't really know how to answer that yet short of using a blog to generate a feed automatically. The scraper I tried once didn't work well at all and like most users, I wouldn't really think about trying to manually make my own. (there are a couple of books on it but who's got the time?)

I asked Dale if he'd heard anything about the new Longhorn being XML based and if it would have anything in it that would allow users to create feeds from Words like we can currently create other web documents....

Turns out I was just a few days ahead of my time. MS is apparently bigtime into RSS now with the new versions. The best way to learn about what they plan to do is to watch the hour-long video on Channel 9. I have some notes below but the post gives you time marks to forward to if you only want to see one part of the video.

Channel 9 post.
Hour long video.

Some features they talked about on the video:

• ie7 automatically finding feeds of any flavor (atom, .91, 1.0, 2.0, etc.)
• previewing the feeds in IE7 and allowing a word search
• subscribing in IE, which adds the feed to a list of user's feeds that are available to api's -- IOW, each user only has to populate one list of feeds ("common feed list") and then may re-use that list in any aggregator or program -- you don't have to re-subscribe in every aggregator you try
• the extensions that MS is building on to RSS will be under a creative commons share alike license (probably because they have to be because they're based on Winer's)
  
• using calendar feeds from conferences, etc., so that your Outlook (2003) calendar is updated when things change
• subscribe to a photoblog as screensaver (very risky at work...)
• media center automatically tivo's tv shows you subscribe to
• feed vs. list
• feeds are time-based, things drop off when they are old news
• lists, like gift registries, drop items as things change that need to be noticed -- it matters if things change positions or drop off (in a registry, something's been purchased, on a best seller list something is less popular)
• an extension to rss "treat as list"
• an extension that allows the user to sort list by which tag

More on the IE blog about the announcement.

tags: microsoft, rss, longhorn, ie7  ¶ 4:39 PM| |cites (technorati) |