RSS Publishing By Email - From iUpload.

Transforming Email Campaigns Into RSS Feeds?

iUpload, a net-native content management solution provider, is making available a free service called MailbyRSS for authoring RSS feeds by e-mail. The service is expected to assist organizations avoid enforcement liability of the CAN-SPAM Act, which took effect at the beginning of this year, through a service that transforms e-mail campaigns into RSS feeds. MailbyRSS will allow organizations to replace or augment their opt-in e-mail campaigns with RSS feeds, providing them a way to ensure that the information they publish reaches subscribers without being filtered out by spam lists or filters.

MailbyRSS accepts both text and rich content e-mail, requires no new computer hardware or software, and is invoked by simply emailing content to a free MailbyRSS account.

"If you deliver your campaigns and newsletters by e-mail only then you are part of the spam problem," states Robin Hopper, president and CEO of iUpload. "And now with CAN-SPAM the law of the land, any online marketer is just a single e-mail message away from enforcement liability. There will be no delay enforcing the provisions of CAN-SPAM. Now is the time to do more than talk about support for spam legislation. We challenge all online marketers to give their subscribers a choice and as such, are making MailbyRSS available to anyone. Using MailbyRSS you can cut through the information smog and deliver your content to your subscribers' desktop while avoiding the chaos of the e-mail inbox."

Users author content for their RSS feed by sending it as an e-mail to the iUpload service, where it is transformed into an RSS feed and distributed. Augmenting e-mail campaigns by offering an RSS version is as easy as including the MailbyRSS account information in the distribution list of any campaign or newsletter. When MailbyRSS receives an authorized e-mail message, it automatically creates or updates an RSS feed and generates any supporting web pages required.

"E-mail campaigns are a big part of our online marketing strategy", says Jason Butterfield, VP Technology NPICenter.com. "MailbyRSS meant no extra work, we've even added the RSS option to both our opt-in and opt-out process to give customers the delivery choice"

Organizations can sign up to use the free service at http://mail.byRSS.com.

10:02:14 PM    

Recently he pointed to an article on Techdirt complaining about the mainstream press misunderstanding BitTorrent.

I'd say it's Techdirt, and just about everyone else who's caught up in this broadcatching craze, who misses the point about BitTorrent.

BT differs from other P2P systems in the algorithm that it uses to distribute data. That's what makes it work so well for large files. But there's no reason P2P networks couldn't be enhanced to use that algorithm. If they did so, they would be SUPERIOR to BT for almost every purpose.

No longer would you have to find a .torrent file host to download data. No longer would someone have to do something special and act as a seeder - they could just put the data file into their P2P shared directory and it would be available to the world. No longer would you have to beg people to keep their BT clients (instances of which are specific to the file being downloaded) running after the download finishes, scolding them about being "leechers" if they don't upload at least as much as they downloaded.

I can't understand why everyone is talking about BT as if it's a new paradigm for data exchange. It's just a different file sharing algorithm that is more efficient for large files, which could be incorporated into any peer to peer application.

Now, there are a couple of other advantages that BT has. The biggest one, frankly, is the other side of the first disadvantage I listed above: the difficulty of finding the .torrent data files necessary to start a download. These are hidden in the little known and less traveled nooks and crannies of the web, the kinds of places you had to go to download MP3 files in the pre Napster days. IRC bots, dynamically-assigned web pages, and similar evasions are used to give the BT transfers a low profile. Putting them on Kazaa is going to make them wide open to the public and increase the amount of privacy many-fold. As it is, BT piracy is limited to the kinds of motivated people who engaged in MP3 piracy five years ago. Mom and Pop aren't using BT to download movies, because they don't know where to find them. Putting the BT algorithms into Kazaa will make movie piracy available to broadband customers. It will be Napster all over again, this time for movies and TV shows.

Another apparent advantage of BT is that the .torrent file could be hosted on an authorized server, providing a centralized location to track the downloads and letting users be sure they are getting legitimate content. However, you could achieve much the same thing in a P2P network by having the distributor publish a hash of the data. Several P2P networks use hashes internally to recognize identical copies of songs, and they could be extended to take in a hash from an outside source and search and download on that.

What we really need are enhancements to P2P to use BT style algorithms to improve the efficiency of distribution of very large files. This means allowing uploads to begin before the downloads finish. Adding the capability to search and download a P2P network by a published hash will further increase the utility for authorized distribution. Doing this will make P2P networks an ideal medium for distributing large data files, such as Linux and other software releases today, and eventually video or movie files when the creators are ready to put them out onto the net.

10:00:22 PM    

phpBB-php Bulletin Board

Got this from a link from Marc's Voice that pointed to SemText, so I tracked down the root technology, which is phpBB. The following blurb is from their website.

What is phpBB?

phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customisable open-source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.

Who are phpBB?

phpBB are a group of individuals based internationally who believe in opensource software. The project has been stable since its creation in June 2000 without changes in licencing, leadership or corporate associations. Our goals remain unchanged and clear, to continue developing and supporting a stable, free, opensource forum system.

Key Features

1:34:15 PM    

Internally at Microsoft I've been getting a ton of questions about RSS. I figure I'd just post my emails here too so you can see why I like RSS so much.

The first one is what is better about RSS than email.

1) RSS is easier to have search bots visit.

2) RSS is easier to link to (at least if it also spits out an HTML page, like all weblogging software does).

3) RSS won't get mixed in with other email (SPAM, other DL traffic, and other email types). I've been looking at Microsoft employees inboxes, and many people here don't setup rules to filter their email into separate buckets.

4) RSS is easier to subscribe and unsubscribe from.

5) RSS doesn't use up any of my Outlook rules spaces (some of my coworkers have so many rules that they can't add anymore).

6) RSS is usable not just in an email client (Bloglines, other weblogs, even other Sharepoint sites can subscribe and aggregate it).

1:20:31 PM    

I've written about this one before, but thought it might add something to the mix. It's my ideas on why RSS is better than reading in the Web browser.

My goal is to use IE (or any browser, really) as little as possible? Why? Because it is FAR LESS productive to read information in a browser than it is in a news aggregator. Keep in mind, I'm watching 1353 feeds right now. Every night I read all my feeds. That'd be impossible to do in a browser. Here's why:

1) It is 10 times more productive to read RSS than HTML. If you want to read, in a browser, all 1353 of my information sources, which include not only blogs, but MSDN, and BBC, and New York Times, you'd need to visit every single one of those every 24 hours to see if they posted something new. But I DO NOT NEED TO DO THAT. Instead, I only need to look at the sites that have actually posted something. In the past 24 hours only 189 feeds have actually posted something. So, right there I'm 10 times more productive than you are!

2) No wait for browser loading. The average weblog takes 10 to 15 seconds to get to a readable state in the browser. But, my RSS feeds are downloaded ahead of time for me, and when I click on them they load instantly. 15x1353=20295 seconds/60=338.25 minutes/60=5.6375 hours. Am I doing the math right here? If you wanted to pull up 1353 weblogs/websites in your browser you'd be waiting 5.675 hours just to have them load?

3) No looking for "what's new." When you visit a site like CNET you need to do a lot of mental work to see what was different from yesterday when you read the site. In NewsGator new things are bold. I don't need to do any work and I don't need to pay any attention to old things.

4) No distractions. If you do eyetrak research you'll see that the average human eye spends a lot of time looking at blinking stuff and color stuff (er, advertising on a page and design on a page). In RSS, I only get the content. That means that I can read that content far faster than you can and provably so.

5) Same font for easier reading. Because all RSS is presented in the same font (unless the feed producer is an idiot), your eye can read more without getting tired (imagine if USA Today ran each story in a different font, how hard would that be to read?).

1:20:15 PM    

Anything Marc likes I check out, Anything Danny Ayers likes - I check out.

So I just signed up for SemText.  Here we go - I wonder if it gets all hung up in Semantic kind of things - and misses teh 80'20 rule for portals, CMSs and end-user experience. If it can get the balance right - there's no limit how far it can go.

This is kind of what I was hoping Nova Spivack was doing and what Haystack was.  Well we'll see soon enough.

1:17:40 PM