A couple of quick things to mention.

First, we’re now publishing our subscriber statistics in our user-agent. That means when NewsGator Online retrieves a feed, it sends information to the publisher about how many subscribers there are to that particular feed. There have been quite a few folks publishing their readership statistics recently, and we’re trying to help out where we can.

And second, NewsGator and DivX announced at CES that NewsGator would be providing content to their supported consumer electronics devices through their DivX Connected program. This is a really cool development. We’ve had NewsGator Media Center edition for quite some time now, and it’s an awesome user experience for users with Windows XP Media Center edition or Snapstream Beyond Media. This DivX announcement takes that experience further, so you’ll be able to buy a DVD player that can display and interact with content from NewsGator.

There have been a whole lot of posts about Halo 2 being released…but Scott Hanselman’s post about getting game stats via RSS certainly caught my eye.

Tom Walker took it one step further…if you look on the left side of his blog, you’ll see his latest stats right there in his sidebar.  He’s taking the Bungie RSS feeds, and re-publishing the latest two games on his blog, using NewsGator Online’s “Headlines” feature. Very cool, Tom!

Here’s what you would need to do, in a nutshell, to publish Halo 2 stats (or any other feed’s content, for that matter) on your blog:

1. Subscribe to the feed in NewsGator Online

2. Go to the “Edit Locations” section under NewsGator Manager.

3. Create a new location, perhaps called “Halo feed only”. Set the “don’t automatically add feeds” option, and click “Feeds” and remove all of the feeds from this location except the one(s) you want to republish.

4. Click “Headlines”, and enable and configure the template to republish the headlines.

5. Copy the javascript on the headlines page to your blog.

That’s it!  I’m using it on my own site for “recent comments” (which shows latest content from my own comments feed) and also “where have I been”, which is from a photoblog I’m playing with (more about this later).

Give it a try yourself!

Monday was a big day for me.

A few weeks ago, J.B. (our CEO) mentioned the idea of doing an “Enterprise RSS” weblog. I told him it sounded like a great idea to me, and promptly moved on to other things and forgot about it. (Those of you who know me know about my amazing memory skills – heh!)

On Monday, I was sitting in on a conference call, reading feeds on my phone with NewsGator Mobile edition. In my keyword search feed for “NewsGator”, I saw the following come up:

We here at NewsGator have decided to create a weblog focused on Enterprise use of RSS. We’re going to…

Imagine my surprise.  We did?!?  Who wrote that?  How did I not know about it?  WTF?!?

Monday was a big day. It was the first day since starting this company in 2002 (in a spare bedroom) that I realized I didn’t actually know every detail about everything that was going on.

Big picture? Yes. Execution details? Not always.

And that’s a good thing!  We have a lot going on in parallel, and we have a great team who knows how to execute on our plans.  What more could I ask? :-)

After lots of complaints (and many, many more via email and other channels), we’ve changed the way the folder organization GUI works in NewsGator Online. It’s now easy to organize feeds into folders, and do it with multiple feeds at a time.

Thanks to everyone that has provided feedback on the new system – keep it coming! There have actually been lots of changes, getting loaded several times per week…so your feedback is definitely being heard and acted on, even if we don’t publicly mention it. :-)

With the recent popularity of podcasting, there have been a lot of questions and comments as to NewsGator‘s support for enclosures. Let me try to clear this up.

NewsGator Outlook Edition – supports enclosures in two different ways. By default, it will not download enclosures, but rather will put a link to the file in the message body.

However…it can be configured to download the enclosure automatically. To do this, go to NewsGator/Subscriptions, select the feed(s) you want and click Edit. Go to the Options tab, and enable the “automatically download enclosures/attachments” option. That’s it – after doing this, enclosures in the selected feeds will be downloaded and stored in Outlook as attachments.

You may want them in your file system instead of in Outlook, so you can auto-sync them to a portable device. There’s an Outlook add-in called Outlook Attachment Sniffer, which will save these attachments into a folder for you. Many thanks to Michael Greth for pointing this out!

NewsGator Web Edition – displays enclosures as a link within the item.

NewsGator Email Edition – displays enclosures as a link within the item.

NewsGator Media Center Edition – supports on-demand streaming of audio and video enclosures…screen shots are at

http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/ad_mediacenter.aspx

The 4th through 7th images are all showing how video content looks when there is a video enclosure in a feed (screen shots are based on the Channel 9 feed).

There has been lots of interest in our new ratings system after yesterday’s post. There were also a lot of questions. Let me try to address some of the most common questions I’ve been hearing:

Why do I have to have a NewsGator Online account to rate posts?

If we didn’t require registration, it would be too easy for someone to spam the ratings. As it is, it’s still possible if someone were to create a number of online accounts, but at least it’s a small barrier to having someone rate a post a “5” hundreds of times to get it pushed to the top of the ratings pages.

Can I programmatically access the ratings data?

Yes!  Well, not yet…but we’re designing an API as we speak to be able to save and retrieve ratings. If you build an aggregator or a publishing tool, and you’re interested in integrating our ratings with your product, please contact me ASAP.

If we can all share one rating system, I think we all win in the end, since we’ll have more complete data to work with.

But then doesn’t NewsGator own all the data?

Well, we indeed store the data – yes. But it has to be stored somewhere. And our intent is to programmatically expose this data to those who are interested (within privacy and other constraints). The API isn’t written yet, but this is definitely the intent – it will be coming soon.

In a nutshell – if you build a product that uses our rating system, and you want aggregate data to do some cool stuff for your users, we’ll provide it to you as best as we can.

I added the script to my template, but it doesn’t work. Why?

Well, I don’t know…but if you post on the NewsGator forums about it, we’ll try to get you squared away.

One of the cool free features of the new NewsGator Online is the built-in rating system for content.  For every post you read within NewsGator Online, you can give it a rating from 1 to 5 stars, and see the community rating as well:

In the example above, the red stars are my own rating (I liked this post that I wrote, so I gave it a 5!), and the community average rating is shown by the orange (4 in this example).

Even better, you can now put these ratings on your own site…I’ve done this here (click through the link if you’re reading in an aggregator), and here are some other examples. If the user is signed into NewsGator Online, they will see the same interactive rating GUI; if they’re not signed in, they will still be able to click the rating image, and they’ll get a small popup to sign in and enter their rating. All in all, pretty seamless and easy to use.

Information about how to add these to your own site is on our Tools for Bloggers page.

So what do we do with all this data? First, we have the Highest Rated Feeds page, showing you the feeds which contain the most highly rated content. It also feeds into our recommendation engine, so you’ll get back good suggestions on other content you might be interested in.

This is just the beginning – we have lots of other cool ideas of how to use this data to give our users a great experience. Feeds of content that your friends rated highly. Feeds of the highest-rated individual posts of the day. The list goes on…and if you have ideas of your own, definitely let us know!

You’ve probably heard by now that we’ve re-launched NewsGator Online, our web-based aggregator, and we’ve made much of it free. Woo-hoo!

Here’s the part that’s now free:

• NewsGator Web Edition (the web-based aggregator), which includes recommendations, ratings, clippings, and lots of other cool features
• Blogroll publishing
• Headline re-publishing
• Synchronization with NewsGator Outlook Edition and FeedDemon (and other products in the future)

There’s so much cool stuff to talk about…for example, the new rating system we have for content. But rather than make you read for pages and pages right now, I’ll post more about this and other features in the coming days.

We’ve gotten some great feedback in the first few days – a few examples:

Brian LeRoux: This is the online aggregator I’ve been waiting for.

franck’s blog: The interface is very slick and years ahead of the Yahoo! implementation. If you read a lot of blogs, there is no contest.

anonymonk: In speed and looks it wins easily.

roudybob: I’m a big fan of NewsGator – and their online services are phenomenal.

Go try it for yourself, and let me know what you think! Just go to http://www.newsgator.com.

Today was a pretty interesting day.

We announced three new partnerships with FeedDemon, Moreover, and Six Apart. You’ll start seeing the fruits of the latter two over the next couple of weeks…for the FeedDemon one, I’d like to chat about it here.

We’ve offered synchronization in our online system (NewsGator Online Services) for 9 months now; users of NewsGator for Outlook have been able to synchronize subscription information with NewsGator Online Services.  They could use multiple machines running Outlook, and they could use any of our online editions (Web edition, Mobile edition, POP edition, or Media Center edition).  Users didn’t have to use Outlook at all – the online editions work fine by themselves, and will sync content between them just as you would expect.  It was all a nice happy product family.

But today we opened the door. FeedDemon can now sync subscription information with NewsGator Online Services, and their users can now read their content on any device that we support.

I’ve gotten quite a few calls and email about this – “why would you work so closely with a competitor?” was the question of the day. The answer is in two parts.

First, we’re not typically in a competitive selling situation. When users are looking for Windows-based desktop RSS tools, NewsGator for Outlook and FeedDemon are typically the two that come to mind. The decision is then made based on whether the user wants to read the content in Outlook or not. If they do, NewsGator is the obvious choice; if they don’t, then FeedDemon is the way they go.  In fact, I’ve often told prospective customers to take a look at FeedDemon if they weren’t using Outlook.

Second, it pushes more subscribers to NewsGator Online Services. If we deliver great additional value to FeedDemon users (with our multiple editions, premium content, etc.), everyone wins. We gain a subscriber, the customer gets additional capability, and FeedDemon keeps a loyal customer.  Everyone wins.  And if we have an online customer who would really like a stand-alone desktop product, we can now point them to FeedDemon, and they can still enjoy all of the benefits of centralized subscription management in our online system.

A good day indeed!

Nick Bradbury comments on his weblog, including download links to get the latest beta of FeedDemon 1.5 that works with NewsGator Online Services.

As you might have noticed by now, we have hired J.B. Holston as CEO of NewsGator Technologies.  I’ve gotten quite a bit of email about this – some of it along the lines of “so the VC’s brought in a CEO, huh?”

It’s not like that at all.

When I first started working with Brad Feld at Mobius Venture Capital, and it became pretty clear that we were going to do a deal, we started talking about the management team. Basically, Brad said that he would personally support me in whatever role I wanted, but that I couldn’t do everything myself. [aside: good advice!]  Ok, so it was time to get it together and figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. :-)  I started meeting some people who were potentially good fits to join our management team, and J.B. was one of these folks who was a great fit, had a great background, and someone I got along with right away.

At the same time, I was chatting with some other folks (both CEO’s and founders of various companies), and started defining in my own mind what the different roles needed to be. As I did this, it became clear to me that I personally wanted to spend time working on product direction, vision, development, and evangelism. Things like sales, finance, and other such tasks sounded interesting (believe it or not!), but I knew I’d have a lot to learn to come up to speed in those areas. The product-related roles are where I can contribute the most, and are also what I personally enjoy doing the most.

So based on that, Brad and I chatted some more, and decided to move forward with J.B. and make him an offer.  He’s been working with us for the last couple of months, and I couldn’t be happier about the situation. He brings a lot of ideas and experience to the table, and I’m learning new things from him every day. And at the end of the day, we’re a better company now – and that’s what really matters.

My new title is CTO / Founder, with responsibilities as described above. It’s a great job – I get to do all the fun stuff. :-)

So please join me in welcoming J.B. to our team!