By: Anne Broache | Source: news.com.com

Microsoft has filed for two patents covering technology used to organize and read syndicated Web feeds, such as those delivered via the widely used Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, family of formats.

The pair of applications were made public by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for what appears to be the first time on Thursday, following the expiration of a requisite 18-month window in which applications are generally kept secret.

Redmond actually filed for the patents on June 21, 2005. That date, incidentally, is just three days prior to the company’s formal announcement that it planned to build support for RSS into the next version of its Internet Explorer browser and into its planned Windows Vista operating system–then referred to as Longhorn.

Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in Internet Explorer, detailed those features in a blog entry last year. Kim and her colleague Amar Gandhi, who serves as group program manager of the Windows RSS team, are among the inventors listed on both applications.

RSS is typically used by news publishers, bloggers and podcasters to notify subscribers of new postings. Web users can choose from a number of freeware applications to collect and read those feeds.

Read the rest of this entry »

By: Loren Baker | Source: searchenginejournal.com

Almost every blog and news publication on web includes a small “save to del.icio.us” link or little del.icio.us box next to posts which entice users to save the story as a del.icio.us bookmark and share with other web users.

But with the popular new fancy buttons coming out from companies like Digg which show the amount of Diggs on a story, wouldn’t it be nice if del.icio.us put together an easy social 2.0 button which would not only allow readers to instantly bookmark a site or story, but also would show those readers how popular the story is by serving a preview of the amount of users who have bookmarked the story, and the most popular tags users have assigned to it?

The new del.icio.us Tagometer does just that!

Read more here…

Spread the word: bookmark it/ readit

By: Joe Lewis | Source: webpronews.com

The rising trend of social media and user-generated content continues as Amazon touts the launch of its Askville service, a site geared at asking and answering just about any question that you can possibly come up with.

The announcement comes shortly after Google’s decision to stop development of its own Q&A project.
So what exactly is Askville going to look like? Here’s an except from the FAQ:

Askville is a place where you can share and discuss knowledge with other people by asking and answering questions on any topic. It’s a fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you can share what you know. You can learn something new everyday or help and meet others using your knowledge. Askville even helps you learn by giving you cool tools to help you find information online while you are answering questions. It’s all about sharing-what you know and what you want to know-so go ahead and meet someone new today and Askville!

Read the rest of this entry »