News Blog

DailyLit, which offers entire books over e-mail and RSS in daily serialized chunks every day, is now offering information from Wikipedia on various topics.

The free service would be perfect for people who are short on time and don't mind digesting literature and information in 5 minutes at a time on their handheld.

The Wikipedia-based topics DailyLit is creating "tours" of major world religions (22 installments--compared with the 260 installments for Moby Dick), "Wine 101," presidents of the United States, "Best Picture" Oscar winners, famous poets, famous women in history, Greek mythology, famous inventors, and wonders of the world.

Each installment has a brief intro to a subcategory, such as Buddhism in the religions tour, and a link to the relevant Wikipedia page. Wikipedia's content is available for such repurposing under the Creative Commons license.

Bloglines has just launched a new beta version of its site. Bloglines has been an immensely popular Web-based RSS reader since its launch in 2003, so it's great to see that it is stepping up its game with this new release. It went in the obvious, but logical, direction of offering a customized start page, with the feeds you are the most interested in. I've talked before about how the personalized start page market is already very crowded, but Bloglines might have a loyal enough user base and a good enough reputation to make it work here.

First off, this new release allows you to easily create a customized start page by dragging and dropping feeds from your list in Bloglines. It's very smooth and "Ajax-y," and has all the makings of a successful service. It doesn't complicate the matter with various widgets to add to your page, which may be a good thing for some people. It's really easy to use and allows you to quickly reference news, at a glance, that you need to read first.

The addition of the new start page is great, but the real question is: How is Bloglines going to compete with Google Reader? Google Reader surpassed Bloglines as the most used Web-based RSS reader, with ease, when it appeared that Bloglines was not doing much to improve user experience.

Bloglines' latest release brings great new functionality to its core feed-reading experience. In addition to Bloglines' traditional view, which it is now calling "full view," it has two additional feed-reading views called "quick view" and "three-pane view." Quick view is essentially an e-mail-style view of the unread posts in any given feed. Only the titles of the posts and the time that they were posted are presented and you can click on individual posts to read them. The three-pane view is a mix of quick view and full view. The quick view element is on the top half of the page and the full view, on the bottom half, comes into play when you select a post to read.

It is great to see that Bloglines is innovating again. I personally switched over to Google Reader when Bloglines started getting a little stale, but this new release is making me rethink that decision. This could be a sign of good things to come for Bloglines in its quest to regain a position of power over Google. We'll have to wait and see, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

You can also get Richard MacManus' take on this release over at Read/Write Web.

As expected, address and calendar organizer Plaxo unveiled on Monday its Pulse social-networking site.

Rumors about Plaxo expanding into social networking have been floating about recently; the company confirmed them to a number of press outlets last week and made some screenshots available in advance.

Now you can play with the beta service yourself. But don't call it a social-networking site; Pulse is really one part microblogging platform and one part RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader. And despite the fact that such a description sounds nauseatingly Web 2.0 pitchy, this is a service that Plaxo hopes will appeal to a less technologically adept set of users.

Overall, Pulse's interface is a lot like Pownce in the sense that it's a feed of short clips of media from your friends, co-workers and whoever else you'd like to stalk; you can add comments to anything, too. There's also an internal Twitter- or Pownce-like feature with which you can input short messages or links to add to the mix. (Pulse, however, does not appear to allow you to share files or event invitations the way Pownce does.)

Also Pownce-like is the set of privacy controls that are a bit more extensive than what one might expect from the likes of a social-media site (Pownce one-upped Twitter by allowing both public and friends-only posts; Twitter requires its users to pick between one or the other for all posts).

With Pulse, you can opt to share information publicly or only with designated "family," "friends," and "co-worker" groups. There's no way to create custom groups, which is unfortunate, but this will still likely be appealing to many casual Web users who are a bit taken aback by the social-networking crowd's willingness to throw so much personal information onto the Internet.

There's clearly some microblog influence in Pulse, but the really central feature is the incorporation of "people feeds," or RSS feeds from a number of social-media sites, most of which you can add simply by entering your username. (Tip: You can also share any regular RSS feed by selecting the "blog" option in the list of choices and then inputting its feed's XML address.)

The list of Pulse-compatible "people feeds" is currently limited to a handful of services popular with the consumer market and a few that are very much the domain of the trendy early-adopter set: Amazon.com wish lists, AOL Pictures, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, Jaiku, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace.com, Picasa, Pownce, Smugmug, Tumblr, Twitter, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Yahoo 360, Yelp, YouTube.

Plaxo has said the beta service will soon have much more feed functionality. The feeds currently do not refresh as quickly as I'd like them to, but perhaps that's another beta feature that will soon be ironed out=.

There is one really counterintuitive aspect to Pulse: it allows you to aggregate RSS feeds and make the overall feed privacy-protected, but many of the feeds in question are inherently public in the first place.

You might not want prospective employers seeing, for example, that you post a lot on Yelp about which restaurants have the best lunch hour cocktail specials that will leave you nice and sozzled for an afternoon at the office. But all Yelp feeds are technically public; even though you might uncheck the "business contacts" option when sharing that feed on Pulse, the aforementioned prospective employer could easily find the information otherwise by checking your e-mail address against a service like Yelp. Pulse, in that respect, may give some users--especially those who are fairly new to the world of the social Web--a false sense of security.

Pulse will likely give a considerable advantage to Plaxo in that it puts a friendlier face to a networking site that, as of now, has a strictly business reputation: kind of like Plaxo's version of the cute BlackBerry Pearl. There is nothing really revolutionary about any of the technology behind it, but it does present concepts like microblogging and RSS aggregation in a way that just about anyone's mom could easily understand.

If anything, Pulse is evidence that the "microblogging" model may not have run out of steam quite yet. Services like Twitter, Pownce, and Tumblr have been hailed as borderline revolutionary by social-media junkies, but they've failed to make much of a blip on the radar of the average Web user. While we probably won't see our less tech-savvy friends using Twitter any time soon, Pulse is evidence that similar concepts can nevertheless appeal to the more Luddite-inclined among us.

Earlier this week I ran into a colleague who had moved out of town a few months ago. After swapping the usual gossip, the conversation swung around to the recent layoffs sweeping the news business. Here in Northern California, both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News recently announced major cuts in staff. Then earlier this week, tech publisher CMP laid off some 200 employees in a bloodletting that included several of the company's best known reporters and editors.

These are rough times for the news business. The present is unsettling and the future appears grim. But as The Bard famously noted, the fault is not in our stars but in our selves. If we want someone to blame, just look in the mirror. Why it's taken this long for the media profession to recognize technology's transforming impact remains one for the history books.

I was reminded of the time when a moderator asked attendees at a meeting of The American Society of Newspapers Editors if they recognized the name Craig Newmark. Only a few people raised their hands. Asked about Craigslist, a few more hands shot up.

That was in 2005.

Meanwhile the continuing popularity of RSS feeds and blogs has effectively put a coda on the supposedly halcyon era when journalism was a one-way soliloquy starting and ending with the reporter. Now it's a conversation with our readers--and that's been all for the good. No news about that any more. Observers of the tech scene like Dave Winer and Dan Gillmor, among others, have blogged about this shift for quite some time.

Sadly, the new reality kept getting ignored by the folks in charge at most media companies. Blogs? RSS feeds? Simply the flavor du jour. They'll pass from the scene quickly enough.

Wishful thinking, guys.

I don't understand what's so hard for them to grasp. Humpty Dumpty won't get put back together. The fragmentation of the media landscape is only in its early stages and the view will look a lot different over the next five years. Am I pessimistic? Not necessarily so. To be sure, the emergence of new ways of delivering information is going to create new challenges. It also offers opportunities. But that assumes the folks in charge stop denying the evidence accumulating before their eyes.

Maybe that's taking place--belatedly. Unfortunately, it's always the rank-and-file that ultimately pays the price for the mistakes of muddle-headed management.

As expected Google has acquired RSS management firm FeedBurner , the companies announced on Friday. No details of the deal were disclosed. The move means Google advertisers will have another, new avenue for their marketing and FeedBurner 's more than 430,000 publishers will be able to join the Google AdSense publisher network, Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google, said in a conference call. Chicago-based FeedBurner was founded in 2003 and has raised about $10 million in venture capital funding. The site allows blog owners to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers.

TechCrunch is reporting that Google is about to close a deal to acquire RSS management firm FeedBurner for $100 million in cash. The report cites a "source close to the deal." The transaction is expected to close in two to three weeks, TechCrunch says. FeedBurner was founded in 2003 and has raised about $10 million in venture capital funding. FeedBurner allows blog owners to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers. A Google spokeswoman said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation. Representatives at FeedBurner did not return calls seeking comment.

PHOENIX--NewsGator introduced a hosted solution that allows publishers to integrate an RSS reader into their Web sites. It's part of an effort to bring RSS to the masses, similar to efforts by Yahoo and others to make feeds out of everything consummable. The look and feel is customizable, and companies including Newsweek.com and SFGate.com will be launching private-labeled NewsGator RSS readers. The NewsGator Hosted Solution includes built-in templates and is hosted by NewsGator.

SimpleFeed also demoed new RSS related publishing tools, including a Web import, which brings pages into an RSS feed. Feed templates can be have a unique look and feel. In addition, the company introduced SimpleFeed Secure, which allows companies to publish feeds that require a user name and password.