I hardly ever log in to Facebook but each time I do, I find that there are friends whose birthdays I'm glad to find out about. In order not to miss them, I've extracted that information from my Facebook account in to an RSS feed that I can subscribe to elsewhere. I used the wonderful tool Dapper.net to do it. Below are screenshots demonstrating how to do the same thing yourself.

Of course this is just one example of a general principle. I hope you can imagine all kinds of other applications that you would like to get limited access to without visiting them, but from inside your RSS reader.

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The most common topic I give training presentations on is the use of RSS for tracking issues important to various organizations. This has been the heart of what I've focused on since I first got involved in this industry, that hasn't changed. My methodology has changed a lot over the years. It's a happy day when I can add something new to my personal RSS strategy, and thus to the strategy I share with others.

Below is a series of screen shots illustrating the current state of my basic RSS work flow. There are lots of little details, feed discovery and creation techniques and other advanced steps that can be taken - but I'm often asked about the basics. So here they are. I hope you find this useful and feel free to pass it along to a friend. I'll do my best to answer any questions in comments below. If you'd like a personalized research system like this set up and populated with the most useful feeds for your work, let me know. I'm also working with some other people on a giant post coming soon describing all the things I know how to do with a pile of RSS feeds - I have a consulting project that's totally open ended so I thought I'd make a list.

Note that I made this post almost entirely with the application ScreenSteps. It was easy and fun, I wanted to try it and it didn't take too long for me to think of a good topic to try it on.
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I'm excited to unveil my latest consulting project, a fairly extensive RSS-based microsite put together with Sun Microsystems for next week's JavaOne conference. It's called BlogCentral. Turns out today is international RSS Awareness Day! This might have been a better fit for Enterprise RSS Awareness Day last week, but that's ok.

I don't often blog about particular consulting projects because most of the work I do is with pre-launch companies or for internal use only, but consulting is what I spend one to two thirds of my day doing after I finish blogging at ReadWriteWeb.

The Project

After building out a collection of RSS feeds that attendees could use to track the DEMO conference in January, I was approached by Sun about helping build a blog coverage microsite to track discussion of their giant JavaOne conference that starts next week.

This is an example of one end of the RSS spectrum, most use cases are far simpler - so don't be scared!

JavaOne is a huge conference where scores of attendees will be blogging about a wide variety of Sun products and announcements. I worked with Sun to create a page called BlogCentral (hopefully to be moved to sun.com/blogcentral by conference time!) that aggregates all the latest and the most popular blog posts about the conference and 15 particular Sun projects and products. It's like a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what's being written about at JavaOne.

How We Did It

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I was honored to be interviewed by Dave Winer today in a 20 minute podcast about the service FriendFeed and other RSS applications. Winer helped birth a wide range of technologies like RSS, podcasting and OPML (bundles of RSS feeds that you import and export from feed readers). He's a tech hero and I don't know what my life would be like without his work.

Read on for a Flash audio player and links that we discussed.
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I'll be giving a one hour presentation on using RSS for your business today at the Open Technology Business Center in Beaverton, Oregon and the organization broadcasts all its presentations in live video via UStream. Update: Notes below, above the book stuff. Will post video when avail. Presentation time is 12 noon PST. Embedded below is the player, I hope you'll consider stopping by for a visit. I'll share some thoughts on what I consider to be one of the most important technologies on the web for communication and I'd love your feedback. Live chat is enabled at this page. Though the talk is aimed primarily at businesses, if nonprofit readers here are able to ignore the parts about using RSS to grind up flowers and fairies for profit, there should be some information of interest to you as well.

Here's part 1, the action starts a little bit in and there's more advanced stuff in parts two and three. Brief notes for the whole talk are below.

Coincidentally, I'm also working on a book proposal for a publisher interested in a work concerning RSS. The original title was "RSS for Power Users" but the number 1 bit of feedback I've gotten is that the title has to change! Otherwise, feedback so far has been on balance good. Below is that proposal, just pasted in as I'm on the run, but I'd love your feedback too in comments. Thanks for stopping by!
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I wrote this post on ReadWriteWeb for Marshallk.com originally as it had been such a long time since I last posted here, but I showed the screencast I made for it to Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb and he asked me to post it there instead. I was happy to do so, but do want to point it out to readers here. I post a lot at RWW but I think this one will be of particular interest to readers here.

The highlights of the post are the link to this Wired article about the economy of screen scraping (great article) and this screencast about how to use Dapper that I finally recorded.

These types of tools are things I use often in my consulting work. They are really exciting and worth a close examination by anyone who reads this blog.

I've been asking PR people lately to send me an OPML file of their clients' blog feeds. One person sent me a list of links to their clients' blogs in an email tonight, but other than that no one has been brave enough to try. This is something that everyone could benefit from knowing how to do. That big blue icon is the proposed icon for OPML, which stands for Outline Processor Markup Language (stay with me here, non technical people!).

An OPML file is an outline. In this case, it's a bundle of RSS feeds that can be moved into and out of any RSS reader as a group. No matter what RSS reader you use, it can import and export OPML files. It's real handy. If PR people, for example, would send me one OPML file of all their clients' blogs and a news search feed for each of those clients' company names - I would throw it into my reader and have a long term connection with all their news. It would build name recognition if nothing else, but I'd likely find something in there someday to write about too. There's a billion other reasons to use OPML - just ask yourself in what circumstances you can imagine sending someone else one link or file that contains a collection of dynamic sources on any topic. I know these are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night.

Here's how you do it...
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I'd like to do some consulting for some environmentally focused businesses next year. As part of that effort I'm pitching a relevant trade journal with an article idea. That's not something I've done before, but for now that's beside the point. I write to you here to ask- what do you think of the following as a succinct explanation of the power of blogging and RSS? I thought you might enjoy reading it and comparing notes.
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One of my favorite clients that I've consulted with in recent weeks is a Massachusetts based company called Softrax. I helped put together a unique and powerful newswire system for their website RevenueRecognition.com. The site's subtitle is "revenue management resources for today's financial executive."

Softrax came to me with almost no experience in using new web applications and by the time our work together was done they had a topical OPML file, a system to easily aggregate industry news on their website and a solid initiation into the web 2.0 experience. This case study is an example of one sort of plan I help clients strategize and implement.
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I wrote a blog post today over at Read/WriteWeb about a small message posting service called CBox that's being used by a man believed to be the last practicing blogger under Burmese military rule. CBox doesn't offer an RSS feed, which is a real shame. For my post, I thought it would be nice to be able to offer readers an RSS feed they could subscribe to in order to follow the events there via this blogger.

Just because there's not an RSS feed where you'd like there to be one is no reason to give up hope! Here are 3 tools you can use, depending on the circumstances, to scrape an RSS feed from a page that doesn't publish one.
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