Thoughtful and considered look at the state of existing RSS readers (Google has killed all), the emergence of new RSS readers that try to deal with the deluge and where this method of getting information is moving. It's worth remembering that reading stuff in an RSS reader is just one use of RSS. The main reason for an RSS feed is to have your content in a machine readable form. That it can also be used for updates is just one benefit of many.

Long article by Anil Dash on the emergence of a protocol for, in laymans terms, a decentralised Twitter / Facebook system, which is essential as the centralised model is not sustainable and runs counter to how the Internet works. I'm cautiously optimistic about this and if you think it's above your head would recommend you scroll down to the "What should we worry about?" section, specifically the shift in user understanding and competition from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Interesting observation on Bandcamp of how their artists are using "albums" as buckets into which songs go.

"What exactly constitutes an album is rapidly evolving... Rather than treating albums as immutable collections of tracks, lots of you treat albums as open containers. Containers for song-a-day/week projects, explorations of particular musical styles, or just general works-in-progress."

Reminds me of Flickr photo sets which people either use as one-off collections of photos which will never be added to or themed collections which build over time. Bandcamp have added RSS feeds to their albums, as Flickr have to photo sets. Seems counter-intuitive at first but actually makes perfect sense. Albums are dynamic things.

Woah. Pipes can mess with raw HTML and turn it into a feed. To investigate.

Hmmm......

Feed Wrangler is a simple plugin that allows one to create custom feeds for their WordPress blog. You can customize the structure of that feed by creating a corresponding file in your blog theme