There's probably never been so much fanfare over a tiny orange icon. But the icon Firefox browsers use to indicate that RSS feeds are available on a Web site is being adopted by Microsoft for its Internet Explorer 7 and, likely, Windows Vista operating system. Then the news came that Microsoft would use the Firefox icon in Office 12 -- particularly in Outlook.

Personally, I prefer the RSS icon that says "RSS" or, when I'm feeling really geeky, the one that reads "XML." But the Redmond, Wash., giant and Mozilla officials met and agreed that the Firefox icon is more user friendly, especially for folks who have no idea what RSS is.

In related news, a designer has created a Web site for the new logo. You can download the icon in a variety of sizes.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for ads in RSS, and have said so for months. I have intuitively felt that inconspicuous ads would probably work best, if only because they would piss off readers less than big, loud ads. However, a study from Pheedo indicates the reverse is true, and it's two layers of bad news. First, ads run as separate RSS feed items are far more successful (generating about eight times the clickthroughs) as ads embedded in RSS items. Then, it turns out that blitzing the feed with ads in every other item is the most successful tactic of all. Of course, you might lose most of your readers, but the remaining ones will be clicking your ads.

This weekend it's going to be quiet as a library in here. We're doing some maintenance—big, important stuff that I'd tell you about except then I'd have to be killed, and besides, I don't undertand it in the slightest. Posting in this blog will be light to nonexistent, and the comment sections will be entirely broken. Save up your rants and raves 'til Monday morning. Thanks!

After 10 days of collecting votes, we have some results in our Dec. 5 poll that asked you what RSS readers you use. Bloglines was the winner, with 187 votes, followed by NetNewsWire with 163 votes. It's interesting to see the number of readers who are Mac users. FeedDemon, considered tne best RSS readers for Windows by some, only received 34 votes. Readers could vote for multiple selections.

Yahoo received 89 votes, followed by Google's 51 votes. "Other software reader" garnered 94 votes, with 41 votes going to "other online reader." Seven voters said they don't read RSS feeds. Combining Bloglines, Newsgator, Yahoo, Google and "other online reader" indicates that a large chunk of our readership get their RSS-feed information online rather than from software applications.

It suggests to me that they are getting their news, but perhaps are missing some of the extra features found in software apps. But this could be good news for the new Web 2.0 online readers slowly surfacing. They may be able to attract more people than the desktop software developers can, shaking up this growing niche of the software industry.

Yahoo! has agreed to provide Movable Type as the default blogging solution in its extensive small-business suite of services. The other hand will get washed as parent company Six Apart directs small-business traffic to Yahoo! for a complete ISP/merchant/blogging package. There's nothing new about Web-hosting accounts with Movable Type pre-installed; the Movable Type site has a recommendation page for such services, to which Yahoo! has not been added.

When I first glanced at the e-mail press release about this announcement, I expected to read that Yahoo! had acquired Six Apart—that would be an appropriate complement to Google's ownership of Blogger.com. Of course, Yahoo! provides a newbie-friendly blogging experience with Yahoo! 360, which could possibly be interpreted as competition to the much more established (and feature-rich) Blogger. But Six Apart's three platform levels (Movable Type, TypePad, and Live Journal) cover all the bases and could vault Yahoo! into a whole new position in the blogging wars.

Ajaxy personal pages with newsreaders are gaining traction and usability. Protopage is a free service that is astonishing easy to use and doesn't even require registration. (If you create a page and wish to make it persist at an easy-to-remember URL, you must register. But it's still free.) Floating information panels can be dragged around the screen, and there are three basic types: RSS reader; sticky note; and link panel. As far as I can tell there is no way to add a photo to a page, which is a shame. Protopage also provides a default search panel with keyword boxes for Google, Yahoo!, Dictionary.com, and Wikipedia.

Overall a simple product, but the RSS panel does allow OPML uploads, and you can fashion more than one panel for extra sorting power. All colors and backgrounds are customizable with sliders and drop-down menus. You can add pages to your Protopage space, and make those pages public or private individually. A mechanism for inviting friends is furnished, but there's no integrated social action here. You share you page by giving someone the URL, and, of course, friends can build link panels with each other's addresses.

Perhaps the funnest application of Protopage would be to share a password, and get a group together to build a space. Protopage would be an entertaining environment in which to assemble news, links, and notes. Conversations could transpire on the sticky notes. More widgets are needed to bring this thing to life, though. Give it a calendar and photo uploading, and Protopage would start to rock.

We'd like to hear which RSS readers you use to read RSS and Atom feeds. So we're running a poll that asks that very question. Please select all the readers that you use on a daily basis. If your reader isn't specifically in the list, feel free to tell us about it in the comments (along with an URL, if possible, so others can check it out).

 

Which RSS reader do you use?
	Bloglines
	Newsgator
	FeedDemon
	NetNewsWire
	Yahoo
	Google
	Other software reader
	Other online reader
	I don't read RSS feeds.

Yahoo! again demonstrates its facility with RSS by adding feeds to the beta Mail which is still in restricted distribution. (Original review of it here.) Yahoo! Mail takes advantage of the Outlook-styled interface to create an intuitive RSS package. It's preloaded with selected feeds, and, remarkably, that selection appears personalized. I'm waiting for confimration of this, but it seems that the preset feeds are taken from profile information and personal-interest choices in Yahoo! 360. Naturally, that information wouldn't be available for every user in a wide rollout of the new Yahoo! Mail, but millions of people have Yahoo! IDs that contain a bit of profiling, so perhaps Yahoo! plans to mine every bit if personalizable information it can get. I'm all for it. This level of integration makes for a satisfying experience from the first click.



Of course, you can add feeds. Yahoo! provides a recommended list of about 25 feeds, asnd users can specify an RSS address. NOTE: Users should be able to paste in a Web-page address also, and the feed reader should have the smarts to find the feed; Yahoo! has started a tradition of RSS invisiblity in My Yahoo!, and it should be carried over into Mail.

Somewhat oddly, Yahoo! presents the feed in a three-pane view: feed list on the left, feed items in the middle … and nothing in the right-hand vertical pane. I expected the source page for the feed item to appear in that pane, and was disappointed to see Yahoo! opening a new browser window to display that page. that system works best on some monitors and resolutions, granted. I'd like to have a view choice. Put the source page in the same window as the feed item, and you're really starting to emulate a desktop newsreader. Since Yahoo! mail (beta) emulates a desktop mail program, this would make sense.

Good start! Excellent start. Yahoo! is going to have one rowdy, boat-rocking launch when the new Mail emerges from beta.

The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs. Each week we ask our bloggers to choose their top posts, which we bring to you in one easy-to-read weekly post. You'll find links to the hottest posts from the past week after the jump including a call for Digital Photography bloggers, the announcement of a brand new fanboy from Joystiq, and an invisible (almost) browser. Enjoy!

Man, this is a good idea. Simple Tracking interfaces with UPS and the Post Office ()not with FedEx, alas) to track packages, and provides an RSS feed for continued tracking. It's a no-brainer when you think about it, eliminating the need to repeatedly check UPS or USPS every step of the package's itinerary. DHL and FedEx support is promised.

For Mac users only: iFeedPod allows downloading of OPML files (indexes of RSS feed collections) to iPods for offline, portable reading. It's free; PayPal donation of five dollars is requested. I'd like to see something like this for PSP and other multipurpose devices. [via HB3R3W]

The new Feedster Top 500 blogs list is out, and it makes an interesting browsing section, especially if you skip past the headline acts that everyone knows about. Speaking of those headliners, though, I can't stop myself from mentioning that five of the top ten are Weblogs Inc. properties. the RSS Weblog in slightly further down: number 238, to be exact.

Pardon this bit of network promo. Our Joystiq gaming site has opened its first affiliate—Xbox 360 Fanboy—and we're jazzed about it. Go to it. You'll laugh, you'll cry, it'll become a part of you. In fact, you might have to scrub it off in the shower.

After taking flak for months about Technorati performance issues, David Sifry find reason to brag. He has been promising (see his comment here) a big infrastructure upgrade to be completed this fall, and now that it is finished, speed tests show off Technorati in a good light. A graph shows Technorati completing searches as quickly as Google's Blogsearch and a mysterious entity Sifry calls "Yahoo Blog Search." I'm not incapable of horrendous oversights, but I have searched both my memory and past entries, and see no such product offered by Yahoo!—save the mixed news/blog search results at Yahoo! News, which can hardly be called a blog search engine. Is Sifry talking about the unofficial Yahoo! blog search engine put up by Threadwatch?

Anyway, Sifry's blog post notes some bragging rights: "Technorati's index is the most comprehensive, and has the fastest updates. The index is over 3 years old, currently 21.5 million blog posts and over 1.7 billion links are indexed. Our median time to index is now under 3 minutes from the moment a blog post is created."

The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs. Each week we ask our bloggers to choose their top posts, which we bring to you in one easy-to-read weekly post. You'll find links to the hottest posts from the past week after the jump including a contest to pick a name for our Design Blog, how to sell your Mac, and a little Jolie voodoo. Enjoy!