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Conference Management System University Zurich's Conference Management System is a Web-based high-quality Open Source Conference Management Software which will ease the Administration of Conferences at the University for University Conference Organizers.

RSS feeds are the all the latest craze. It's one of the best and most popular way of staying up to date quickly. However, with services web feed readers like Google Reader and even desktop readers such as FeedDemon, those updates may not always come as quickly as you'd like them too. Or maybe you just don't live in your feed reader like I do. If you're not using Snackr, or Anothr, and you'd like your RSS updates as quickly as possible, try out IM Feeds.

IM Feeds

Similar to the real-time news tracker Anothr, IM Feeds allows users to get RSS alerts sent via instant messengers. To get start started, simply add any of the corresponding IM Feed bots to your instant messaging program of choice. Supported IM clients include Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and MSN Messenger. Send the bot a message with "join" and from there you'll be presented with a link to register your account. It's as simple as that. To add feeds, you can send a message to the bot using the 'sub' command or go through your web account with IM Feeds. You can upload an OPML file or enter the full url of each RSS subscription you'd like to subscribe to.

If you're managing your IM Feeds account on the web, your subscriptions will show up in a sidebar with a link to each. On the left, you'll be presented with a list of links to each of the latest updates from your subscriptions. Subscriptions are listed in order by site instead of by date and time, which is a bit unusual for an RSS feed manager. The user interface for the service is nice, simple, and clean with little to no distractions. Even the technologically challenged can set up an account and manage their feeds through the web interface without any help.

Quirks and Suggestions

While the layout is very nice and the service is simple, there were quite a few annoying quirks I ran into when using the service. For one, you need to know the entire feed url for each site. It would be more helpful and convenient to users if they could just type in a site address and have IM Feeds automatically find the feed url to import the feed. Also, the service takes a while to show the latest items for your subscriptions. So be prepared to wait a few minutes before seeing anything in order to prevent feed duplications.

All in all, IM Feeds does the job it was meant to do. When adding a feed, you won't immediately receive any updates. However, once they started rolling in I saw them in my instant messenger before seeing them in Google Reader. There's even a badge that bloggers can add to their sites to get users to subscribe to their RSS updates via Im Feed. I'd say IM Feed does the job quite well.

Macht Arbeit krank? Anmerkungen zur Befindlichkeit unserer Gesellschaft.

Are you subscribing to too many blogs? Tired of the same old stuff flowing through your feeds? Think there's a better way? Well, I have just the idea for you. Join myself and others in the dumping of our RSS feeds for an entire month!

RSS Reset Month

Devised by myself and Phil Glockner of Scribkin, we recently talked for a few hours about the overflow of feeds and the repetition of certain topics and sites. With so much more out there to see, there were only a limited amount of ways to get to them without jeopardizing what was already amounting to information overload. This is where RSS Reset Month comes in. Here's the plan and list of rules:

1. Keep feeds that track web site buzz (business-impacting).
2. Allow feeds such as Disqus, Intense Debate or other low-volume feeds that are necessary for timely work decisions.
3. Allow adding as many Google Reader Shared Items feeds as needed.
4. Allow adding of aggregate, smart or keyword-filtered feeds such as RSSmeme FriendFeed Friends or TechMeme.
5. Allow adding smaller site feeds. We set the upper limit for a small site to be 200 at the time of adding. This can be re-visited if the number is too small.
6. Allowance process: If a site feed is so unique that it is not being covered by the processes defined above, an allowance will be made to subscribe to a direct feed to any site. The number of allowances can not exceed 10.

RSS Reset will be in effect for an entire month. Be sure to back up your original OPML file just in case you want to give it a try and decide not to continue at some point. Meanwhile, you can check out what Phil and I are adding on Toluu (Corvida, Phil). All the feeds added will also be conveniently "retweeted" on Twitter.

What's the Point?

Finding new content is hard enough. Finding new subscriptions while keeping up with your current subscriptions can be even tougher. Subscribing to more aggregation sites and smaller quality blogs will allow you to venture into unexplored territories, while giving the "little guys" a chance to be heard.

If you'd like to sign up for Toluu and join in on the fun, leave a comment down below.

eGroupWare ist eine frei verfügbare und direkt nutzbare Groupware Software für Ihr Netzwerk. Mit eGroupWare können Sie Kontakte, Termine, Aufgaben und vieles mehr verwalten, was Sie für ihr<sep/>

management dashboard for mobile

Fast and easy CMS

NewsGator, which offers the most complete end-to-end suite of RSS reader tools on the market and possibly the most widely used offline readers (NetNewsWire and FeedDemon), today announced that its most popular products would be set free. As in beer. According to NewsGator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker, the reason for going free is simple: "What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients [...] we want our clients to become ubiquitous."

But perhaps the most interesting reason NewsGator made the decision to go free, according to Reinacker, is the company's desire to collect attention data. "Basically, by using your data, in combination with aggregate data from other users, we can deliver a better experience for everyone," said Reinacker.

As we reported in October, NewsGator joined the APML Workgroup. APML, the Attention Profiling Markup Language, is an attention data spec that "allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers." Attention data is not the most easy concept to grasp, but to quote Marshall Kirkpatrick from an earlier article on ReadWriteWeb, the simple explanation is that, "Attention Data consists of all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume." (For more on why you'd want to collect that data, see Alex Iskold's overviews of attention data.)

NewsGator is clearly serious about collecting attention data and using it to enhance the news reading experience. Reinacker said today that rather than just integrate APML into their feed readers, NewsGator plans to "implement an endpoint in our online platform where you (and only you!) can always access your personal APML data." The data will be aggregated from your usage across the entire NewsGator product universe.

The company hopes that by going free, they will attract more users to their reader (I am a recent convert, myself), which in turn will give them a greater pool from which to gather attention data and build stronger tools that rely on that data. But a poll we ran about a year ago revealed that 55% of ReadWriteWeb readers use web-based RSS readers (71% if you included personal start pages and portals). Just 18% still used dedicated offline RSS readers.

With today's news, we've decided to run that poll again. How much of an uphill climb does NewsGator have now to gain marketshare for their desktop readers? Will free desktop readers perhaps help win back some old users who have defected to online readers? Please share your thoughts in the comments below and participate in the poll.

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