When it comes to promoting the CMS Report's news feeds, I've always been indecisive on how best to promote our various RSS links. I've always been happy to promote our primary news feed, but I've been hesitant about promoting and supporting some of our more "hidden feeds". However, increasingly I've been receiving emails from our readers asking for alternative feeds that might be more suitable for their needs.

So by popular demand, a list of some of the RSS feeds available at CMSReport.com:

I'm looking forward to evaluating the new FeedAPI module for Drupal. Though one feature I haven't seen in any of the aggregators I've seen so far for Drupal...a way to snip the original RSS feed. Some sites provide you the entire post in the RSS feed with no teaser. This may be great for the reader, but I'm not sure everyone is happy to see their entire post on someone else's site.

From time to time, I've hacked the core to get me closer to how I would like the content from an RSS feed to display at my site. There has to be another way and perhaps FeedAPI could by my solution...

Development Seed: FeedAPI 1.0 Released -

After being in development for about seven months, we released FeedAPI 1.0 nearly two weeks ago! This is really exciting for me and everyone else who has been craving a more flexible aggregator for Drupal.

A very nice article on RSS found at IBM's developerWorks:

Realize the power of RSS in Ajax and Web 2.0 applications - Tap this article's fully functional PHP code snippets that show you how to use PHP-based server-side functions to develop your own customizable RSS feed aggregator. [IBM developerWorks]

I'm still looking for an article that explains to those of the non-IT persuasion what RSS feeds are all about. Everytime I make an attempt to explain RSS feeds to those how don't even know what browser they are using...I get this "deer caught in the headlights" look from them. They then usually turn around shaking their head wondering if I will ever try to speak to them in English. Sigh...

A few weeks ago, Federal Computer Week, had an article about the role Web 2.0 may have in the federal government. Is there a place for wikis and other tool now included in most modern content management systems in the federal government?

The article hints that Web 2.0 may have place more behind the scenes then in public view.

Other officials are beginning to recognize the value of government wikis. One crisis management expert said he thinks wikis and other Web 2.0 applications could become useful resources for homeland security and disaster relief officials. W. David Stephenson, an Internet strategy consultant and principal at Stephenson Strategies, said that before another disaster such as Hurricane Katrina hits, the government should set up a wiki behind a firewall to coordinate relief efforts.

The intelligence community recently acknowledged its interest in using internal wikis for information sharing. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) hosted a public roundtable on Intellipedia, which is an adaptation of Wikipedia, the online, self-correcting, self-evolving encyclopedia that a community of Wikipedia users updates regularly.

Now you may ask why would the government use Web 2.0 internally and not in public view? In my opinion most of the Web 2.0 features allows individuals to express themselves in a larger collaborative group. However, when you visit your government you're not looking for the personal opinion of an a single government worker but the "official" stance taken by the government. What good is an employee's blog about his disagreement with a newly enacted law when in the end it's a law that must be followed?

"I think there’s a lesson here for us as we think about helping more people get the full benefits of the Web. RSS is a fundamental technology that is changing and broadening the way everyone can find and stay up to date with information that matters to them. Yet awareness of RSS is minimal."

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Planet WordPress is a site that aggregates feeds from a number of users who have contributed to the WordPress Open Source project, or who provide good sources of information on WordPress, it’s themes, or it’s plugins. Planet WordPress produces a feed that is displayed in the Dashboard of most WordPress installations."

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Nothing fancy, but it let me figure out a lot of stuff about how the new feed content API interfaces work. I’ve written the first bits of a document about them, and will be adding more content, including documentation for the interfaces themselves, over the next few days."

"Tobias Schlitt "freaked out" today about PHP Freak's republishing of his blog feed. He publicly withdraws his implicit permission for PHP Freaks to republish content from his feeds. This is an interesting area of law. Eric Goldman has an rundown of the issues. In my mind, there's no question that a blogger grants an implied..."

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Ian Ward, Development Seed, not only makes some good points about the inclusion of CSS within an RSS feed, but he also that the "look" of the feed varies from RSS reader to RSS reader. Hopefully, in the future the Internet gods will be kind. I personally don't want to worry about how my CMS looks in a browser and an RSS reader.

Development Seed: Optimizing the look of your syndicated content - Just like the large number of different web browsers that you need to design for (you have Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Mac Firefox, Mac Internet Explorer, etc.), there are also a ton of RSS readers. On top of that, RSS readers can be desktop based or web based – similarly to email with desktop email like Outlook or Lotus Notes and web-based email like Gmail or Hotmail. From a web designer's or content publisher's perspective, a person in these trades needs to be aware that the content they are publishing on their site will look good no matter where a user sees it. [Planet Drupal]