RSS - the joys and the pains!
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has become pervasive over the past couple of years, like chickenpox in Kindergarten the RSS logo is appearing on site after site, page after page, blog after blog. A pandemic of RSS has swept the Internet and it shows no signs of slowing down. We're already on at least the second RSS standard "logo" and the speed at which this has happened is astounding.
Whilst RSS has grown in availability many different applications have spouted up to help you aggregate and manage your feeds including some from the big players like Google and Yahoo (oh and Microsoft).
The sheer volume of RSS out there is just astonishing everything from flickr to the most insignificant of sites have RSS feeds to keep you up to date with what's going on.
I remember many moons ago, back before .NET even, James Shaw created and published a site which made it easy to "share" content through this new fangled RSS (really simple syndication) technology, there were so few RSS sites at that time that James' site even kept a listing of the RSS Enabled sites, could you imagine doing that now? It's amazing the speed at which RSS has spread through the Internet.
I believe that RSS is still the preserve of the Geek, at a conference earlier this year I was presenting to an 
audience primarily made up of CEO's and Directors of companies in and around the North West of England, during my session I talked about how the Internet has changed from a place where people reproduce their brochures in electronic format to something much more interactive and user centric; during the session I talked about RSS and I was astonished that the vast majority of people had never heard of it, let alone used it. Surely though, it's only a matter of time before the public become aware of RSS and start using it in every day life. Modern browsers support and help people manage RSS without any additional software, so it's on it's way if it's not here already.
RSS is supposed to define a structured way in which we can share data, but unfortunately, there are many RSS feeds out there which to put it quite frankly are utter tripe. When I refer to the feeds, I don't mean their content, but rather their makeup, at a technical level, many feeds just don't conform to the specification and schema which defines RSS. This is where life becomes much more difficult for us, the consumers of RSS.
So what do you do, you have all these feeds and you want to consume them, but some of them are a little duff, well there's a service which Dave Verwer has launched called afeeda which helps solve that problem, it is a feed aggregator ("oh no, not another" I hear you scream!) but with a difference, it is specially designed so that it can work around the deficiencies in RSS (or rather, individuals implementations of RSS) and present you with a clean conformant feed.
afeeda is so much more than just an aggregator though, it's capable of being your central hub for RSS, it allows me to create feeds myself, so here's a "Personal" or as I think of it "Persona" feed all about Phil Winstanley (that's me if you didn't know!). That feed combines my Blog, Flickr and even my del.ico.us links into one feed, which means if my friends want to know what I'm up to they can just subscribe to one feed - that is a really nice feature.
In addition to the Persona feeds you can create any kind of feed you want, Dave created a feed for me which aggregates together all the blog posts from the Microsoft UK Developer Evangelists' into one easy to digest feed, I've been subscribed to that feed via Outlook 2007 for many months and it's been very useful to have all 10 or so blogs coming through in one feed, it makes my reading of posts easier in addition to meaning I never miss anything.
One really special feature of afeeda is it's support for event specific feeds, and this is where afeeda comes into it's own. One feed which has been added in the last couple of days is one for Big Brother 8 here in the UK where you can see a whole range of different sources coming through with all the Big Brother information you'd need (if you're a bit sad and like that kind of thing).
Another area the event specific feeds are cool is around conferences, because the aggregator is capable of searching out content and using tags to define and filter out specific entries. Last week I was at Reboot9 a hip and trendy conference for non Microsoft types (I was the token Microsoft user I fear). What was really cool was being subscribed to the Reboot9 feed via afeeda which was bringing images, blog posts, and a whole manner of other content directly to me, before, during and after the conference, it was like having my own network of spies around the entire conference gathering information for me and compiling it into an easily digestible format.
The feeds are not just static either, you can suggest new feeds to be added to any feed and become a contributor yourself, think that there's a good Big Brother blog which isn't on the main afeeda Big Brother feed, then join the feed and add your own contributions.
I would highly recommend you give afeeda a shot and run it in parallel to your existing aggregator (if you have one), I believe you'll be pleased with the outcome.
It's worth saying, I know Dave Verwer very well, we're good friends, so this endorsement isn't entirely unbiased however, I stand by every word in this post.