Last night, I wanted to try out NewsFire but I didn’t want to go to the trouble of adding all my feeds that I read on MyWireService. It would be nice if NewsFire (or any RSS aggregator) could just work against MyWireService to get my news. Two things made this possible: 1) Gay was out for the night again volunteering for the Vashon debate team to help them in another tournament this weekend and 2) I wrote MyWireService so I can make it do anything I want.

So while I watched the end of Gothika (ugh, terrible movie) on TiVo and had a glass of wine, I added a cool feature to MyWireService: it can now generate an RSS feed of all the updates to all the RSS feeds in each of my sections. So I can use any RSS aggregator to read my news and continues to solve the RSS bandwidth problem. And possibly even better, I saved Gay from having to watch Gothika.

And even better, we can now do some cool stuff, and very easily, with food-related news on Recipezaar that we’ve been planning. Since Gay won’t be home til late tonight and it’s too wet to mow the lawn, I have my Saturday project planned.

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7,000 news sources!

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MyWireService was featured in an article in the San Antonio Current. Nice! But, when interviewed, Gay needs to learn that my name is not “Troy Gilmore”.

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6,000 news sources!

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4,000 news sources!

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Interesting weblogs survey finds that 66% of all blogs have not be updated in the past 2 months; in fact, 25% were just tire-kickers (abandoned on the day they began). Not surprisingly, 92% of bloggers are under the age of 30, but 50% are under 19! “Active blogs were updated on average every 14 days. Only 106,579 of the hosted blogs were updated on average at least once a week. Fewer than 50,000 were updated daily.” In other words, what you see of the blogging world (high frequency posting from experts) is very different from reality of the blogging world right now.

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Editor and Publisher Magazine (perhaps the United States oldest magazine still in publication) looks at several startups, including ours: MyWireService.

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Matt Hartley recommends using MyWireService for newbies. He’s right and he clearly understands the flaws in RSS.

Telling the average person who reads news they need “an RSS aggregator” is like telling a television viewer they need “a radio wave tuner and cathode ray tube”. This is what technologists always fail to grasp. Worse, they call RSS a “simple” technology. Yes, it’s simple to someone who understands HTTP and HTML, but it’s not simple to most people.

RSS, like XML (because it is XML), is useful to programmers only. Software must step up several levels to make it approachable to real people and that’s where MyWireService comes in.

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MyWireService hits 2,000 news sources.

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The last big cycling tour of the year starts today, the Vuelta de Espana (Tour of Spain). We record it on TiVo and then can watch the day’s stage in the evening as opposed to 6am when it happens live. This means a careful cycling news embargo, otherwise we will find out what happened before we get to watch it. Luckily, our other site makes this easy. Just set up a filter for “vuelta” in the My Account page and all news that contains that word will be hidden from me. I am so EXCITED! Go Roberto

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