Martin Winer put together a nice list of next generation Web applications. Just as the Web brought us no install, this next generation is all about no login either.

http://mwiner.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/web-20-trend-no-cost-no-login-no-install/

RSS feeds can have tremendous value. As such, you should look at protecting your value. The best way to protect the value of your RSS feed, is to own it's URL by hosting it on your domain. If you don't own it, then you could lose it like this guy. He was hosting his podcast on mac.com and when he upgraded his blogging software, the RSS URL changed. This meant he lost his previous subscribers. There's very little he can do now. He can implement an XML-level redirect, but that's not widely supported. If you don't own it, then you are at the mercy of those that do. If you can't own your domain, then consider hosting your feed at FeedBurner.com. You're still at the mercy of Google, but they are less evil than most.

Simple2Chat is a very cool website. It's an AJAX-based web chat client. You don't need to install a client or setup an account.

http://www.simple2chat.com/

I love it when people do cool things with XML. Erik Berg has done one of the greatest by providing all the SportsML for MLB (baseball), NFL (football), NBA (basketball) and NCAA basketball for years worth of games in the current decade. Check out his work!

http://erikberg.com/xmlstats/

College@Home compiled a great list of 50 Cool Things You Can Do with Google Chart API. I'm still making my way thru the teens. Fun for a day or two.

http://www.collegeathome.com/blog/2008/06/05/50-cool-things-you-can-do-with-google-charts-api/

At this morning hour, I finally setup the DNS for reblinks.com. It took a lot longer than expected. I wanted to do this in January, but I had major problems with the registrar. After a couple months struggling with the registrar to setup the DNS, I decided to move all my domains to a new registrar. That process is finally ending this week.

http://www.reblinks.com/

Today, I searched the Internet for a method of exposing the RSS <enclosure> tag for images already attached as assets of an entry in MT4 (Movable Type). It was not easy. I searched for about an hour before I came up with the following. Here's hoping Google will make it easier for the next guy. GoogleBot index!

<mt:EntryAssets>
<enclosure url="<mt:AssetURL>" length="<mt:AssetProperty property="file_size" format="0">" type="<mt:AssetMimeType>" />
</mt:EntryAssets>

NewsAlloy, a semi-popular RSS news reader, may go offline in the next few days. I received an email this morning warning me to back-up my OPML as their hosting arrangement is nearing its end. They are looking for new hosting. This might be an interesting customer purchase for a larger RSS company.

http://www.newsalloy.com/

Of late, I've come across two very evil symptons of Flickr, which I think Yahoo must address.

1. The first is that people who paid (or received free accounts) on Flickr can no longer download their own pictures unless they agree to pay Yahoo! $25/yr forever. Although not a lot of money, this is clear extortion by Yahoo!
2. The second is that I'm receiving more and more emails from Flickr users who are blatantly uploading their pics to my forums only to try to extort licensing revenues from me. Does anybody actually fall for this ploy?

This is getting out of hand. Yahoo! has to get a couple lawyers to step in here.

Alec Saunders's Iotum has come up with a free conference calling Facebook app. This isn't new, but until this week, I didn't see the value. They have four video walk-thrus that demonstrate some high end broadcasting capabilities. I'm gonna play with it in the next week and report back.

http://apps.facebook.com/freeconference/landing
http://www.facebook.com/video/?id=17733760018

Rogers Cadenhead just released a new Web application called Meme13 that highlights the last 13 sites that made their TechMeme debut.

http://www.meme13.com/

Ya, I'm really bored these days. Today, I wrote a generic XML Schema validator. Eventually, I want to expand this to validate common forms of XML like Google's sitemap. But, I noticed that each version of sitemap XML has it's own namespace. What a nightmare!

http://reblinks.therssweblog.com/xsd.validator.aspx

Update: I've also completed a Sitemap Validator, which re-uses the code from my XSD Validator.

http://reblinks.therssweblog.com/sitemap.validator.aspx

Today, I put together a smll RSS autodiscovery checker to compliment the other tools on Reblinks. Supply the RSS 2.0 feed address and it checks if the <channel/link> element points to a page which has auto-discovery that reflects back to the original RSS feed address.

http://reblinks.therssweblog.com/tools.aspx#disco

Everytime I need an XML well-formedness checker, I can't find one. So, I wrote one. Untested 67 lines of code.

http://reblinks.therssweblog.com/tools.aspx

I was looking for a countdown widget and most all of them I stumbled on didn't work very well and many didn't work at all. I finally decided on the yourminis.com countdown widget. Not great, but at least it works.

http://www.yourminis.com/minis/yourminis/yourminis/mini:countdown

One of the least taken advantage of features in Facebook that doesn't require much work is the Facebook Share Partners. This is a link that when clicked shares the current page on the users Facebook profile.

http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php

I just realized that SpringWidgets also does podcast. I simply injected my sports talkcast into their RSS widget and all the magic happened. Here's a sample.

Jeff Nolan reminded me that NewsGator has their own widget framework. You have to sign-up and agree to terms of service, which might be too much to expect from Joe Randy, but NewsGator's has a great reputation in the RSS enterprise market and this might be the solution for a larger company (like NBC).

http://www.newsgatorwidgets.com/

I've been testing a few RSS widgets. The vast majority of which are completely broken. I eventually landed on SpringWidgets, which is a division of Fox and associated with MySpace (I think!). This widget seemed very customizable and worked like a charm. SpringWidgets also has a bunch of other widgets that seem pretty cool and actually work.

Today, I put some effort into getting Digg to working with my MetaWeblogAPI implementations. I and others have submitted bug reports before, but Digg seems unconcerned with fixing their absolutely ridiculous implementation. I tried to tweak my own implementation to compensate for bugs at Digg, but eventually gave up. Here are the highlights of my day.

• Digg incorrectly uses the methodName of metaWeblog.getUsersBlogs instead of blogger.getUsersBlogs. Not a biggy and easy fixed with a hack on my end.
• Digg does not ask for the blogId. Unsure what their algorithm is for determining the blogId, a critical variable in the protocol, but I can only assume they take the first result in the set returned.
• Digg ignores your submitted editUri and makes up it's own based on your other settings. It assumes the end-point is xmlrpc.php. So, unless you use PHP or kludge it, then you can't post Digg stuff to your blog.

Very frustrating!

Sorry for the emptiness of this blog of late. I've been working extremely hard on a new website. In the meanwhile, enjoy a video about getting your X back using facebook. Very creative!

If you can't see the video, then go here.
http://www.5min.com/Video/How-To-Get-Your-Ex-Back-Using-Facebook-5235820