Brad Feld

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Shaking and Baking With RSS

Dec 13, 2005
Category Investments

Since FeedBurner and Technorati started off their announcements this week with cooking metaphors, I thought I’d continue the trend.  Three of my four RSS-related investments made announcements this week about products and/or customers.

FeedBurner announced a  new service called FeedFlare.   Jennifer Aniston didn’t wear enough Flair in Office Space, but she would have been fine if she had used FeedFlare.  At the bottom of my feed, you’ll now see options to email this post to a friend, email me, see the Technorati links to the post, tag the post with del.icio.us, and see any del.icio.us tags that have already associated with the post. This was trivial to set up – a couple of clicks within my FeedBurner setup page and I automagically had Flare. FeedFlare is based on an open-API so expect lots of new Flare to quickly appear.  Fred Wilson nails it with his description

FeedBurner also announced that Reuters has chosen it to manage its RSS feeds.  Major publisher, major market validation.

Technorati announced the Technorati Kitchen.  Niall Kennedy explains why this is “The Kitchen” instead of “Beta” (Beta feels so “day old bread”, doesn’t it?).  First up – Explore.  Think of it as a newspaper front page for any subject – find out what bloggers are saying right now on any topic, organized by how many links their posts are getting.

NewsGator announced that the NewsGator Hosted Solution has been chosen by Newsweek and MacWorld.  Brent Simmons – the creator of NetNewsWire – talks about why he’s excited about the MacWorld deal.

All in all, a tasty day.