Hot out of the RAI lab…RSS feeds generated from Visual SourceSafe. Many development shops use some kind of email notification for source changes – and this is a perfect application of RSS. Here’s a screen shot in NewsGator with Outlook 2003:

This currently runs as a Windows service, and periodically generates the RSS file(s). To get it running, do the following:

1. Download (msi or zip) and install the service. When you install, make sure you enter in a user account that has permission to access the directories where your VSS data lives.

2. Edit the config.xml file in the installation directory. It should be pretty self-explanatory.

3. Start the service from the service control manager.

Post comments here – I’d love to hear your thoughts. Also, I’m not sure what the final disposition of this code will be (free, part of another product, etc.)…so this build will expire on August 1.

Sam Ruby’s wiki is documenting an effort to define a syndication format, designed to overcome some of the existing issues with RSS (which I won’t get into here!). There is quite a bit of popular support so far for this effort, which is nice to see. If you’re at all interested in RSS and syndication, I encourage you to go over and take a look! There’s also more on Sam’s blog.

If a new syndication format grows out of this, NewsGator will support it (in addition to RSS) in the first release thereafter.

I haven’t followed this whole thing all that closely, but I thought this was interesting:

…open-source folks aren’t tackling the one key question in the SCO Group-IBM hoo-ha over Unix: What if the company’s right?
[CNET News.com]

It has come to my attention that a few folks I haven’t heard from are having stability problems with NewsGator. If you are seeing any problems like this at all, please contact me.

Sam Ruby has started a wiki to discuss what really
makes up a weblog entry. He started it out with the following:

Authentic Voice
of a Person.  Reverse Chronological Order.  On the web.  These
are essential characteristics of a online Journal or
weblog.

I think we should
expand the scope of this just a bit, from “online journals or weblogs” to
“syndicated content”. There are a lot of interesting applications of syndicated
content that have nothing to do with journals or weblogs, and these will
arguably only grow in importance over time. For example, event log
monitoring – no voice, and not on the web…but uniquely
useful.

In any case, if you’re
interested in syndication, definitely take a
look.

A great example of using the scripting capabilities of Outlook, combined with NewsGator (excerpted):

I went ahead and implemented my idea for having Outlook automatically convert keywords in my posts into hyperlinks.  Man, this is great… now I love using NewsGator even more! [Robert Levy]

Cool idea, Robert!

Well he doesn’t mention
it by name, but it sounds like Steve
Gillmor likes NewsGator:

Why do the most innovative
RSS readers work as plugins to
Outlook?

Dave
Winer doesn’t seem to agree – heh. Go figure.

Our SQL server was
offline today for about 6 hours (ouch), which affected
this weblog, and portions of newsgator.com. It should be
fine now, however…so if you were going to leave a comment
about advertising
in RSS but couldn’t, please try again!

As some of you may
have noticed, we are running NewsGator
ads in some of InfoWorld’s RSS feeds (example here). These are the
first ads of their kind that we’re aware of. I think what happens here will, to
some extent, set the precedent for RSS-based advertising.

Any comments on this?
RAI and InfoWorld both would love to hear your
thoughts…

Hmm…Christina
Aguilera is on the front page (and another) of java.com.
Ok Microsoft, this is no time to sit on your hands. Better call Britney and get her
excited about .NET. :-)