(Note: I’m writing here on my own, not on behalf of ESPN or Disney Internet. I did work on this project, so I’m just excited and want to share that with my friends.)

I’m happy to say that MyESPN.com beta is finally available to the general public. It should be an excellent new application for sports fans to set up all of the teams, sports, and news they want in one place site. Instead of visiting a small handful of sites, you can now add the different parts of ESPN.com along with headlines and news from sites around the Internet to your MyESPN page. One stop and you’ve got all your sports and news from more sites in less time. Hopefully, MyESPN will make it easier for you to keep up with your favorite team, win at fantasy, and keep up with the other sites you love.

Savvy users who have used other similar products will hopefully find MyESPN easy to adapt to. I think that MyESPN brings the best sports content and breaks it out into very consumables pieces. You can see a screenshot of my page below sporting the Eagles theme. Click the image to see it full size.

Here’s a quick explanation of what you see. Each little box is called a module or capsule. You can drag them around, rearrange them, get rid of stuff you don’t like, or minimize sports that are out of season.

The great thing about MyESPN is that the modules are richer than many other sites. The top story module, for example, contains the image and all of the links that appear in the Top Story position on ESPN.com. After all, the photography on ESPN.com is one of our strengths. With MyESPN, you can personalize everything and still get the ESPN experience.

The rest of this post will be about using the site. Continue reading if you’re interested in some tips and hints.

New feature coming at ESPN.com that you will probably want to check out, especially if you’re a sports fan. Be sure to mouse over the red caption bubbles to see detailed explanations of the features of the app.

Feed Rinse looks like an interesting product. Anyone use it? I’m curious about how well it works for people. I’m also curious if it performs well. I notice that Electric Pulp, the folks behind Feed Rinse, describe themselves as an “interactive agency” which, and pardon me for a bit of snobbery, makes me think of the couldn’t-scale MeasureMap. Even Google couldn’t save that.

I hacked together a little plugin tonight while avoiding the wedding planning now staring us in the face. So, now you can enjoy the videos in the RSS feed if you happen to be using a desktop aggregator or a tool like Bloglines. In honor of the new functionality, and as a test to make sure it actually works through FeedBurner, I give you this video:

Hope that worked.

I got a bit excited today when I went over to the FatMixx SiteMeter Report page because I noticed in FireFox that the RSS icon was present in the location bar, indicating that there was an RSS feed for that page. I was hoping they did what Measure Map did, with personalized feeds for my site. I was surprised that there wasn’t an announcement on the SiteMeter blogs. So I checked out what RSS feed they were pointing at. Turns out the feed tag in the source points to the RSS feed for the SiteMeter weblog. Booo! The RSS icon is only supposed to show on pages that have RSS feeds for the content on that page. Not just that the site somewhere has an RSS feed about something. Booo again!

Just a quick followup to my Measure Map, Google Analytics, SiteMeter extravaganza: I just noticed today that Measure Map rolled out RSS feeds for your site data. In other words, I now have 3 feeds in my aggregator that give me a quick view of what happened the day before on my blog. Very cool.

The NYT has an article up about how the print medium needs an “iPod moment.”

The newspaper business is in a horrible state. It’s not that papers don’t make money. They make plenty. But not many people, or at least not many on Wall Street, see a future in them. In an attempt to leave the forest of dead trees and reach the high plains of digital media, every paper in the country is struggling mightily to digitize its content with Web sites, blogs, video and podcasts.

And they are half right. Putting print on the grid is a necessity, because the grid is where America lives. But what the newspaper industry really needs is an iPod moment.

The article stands by itself, I think, but it reminded me of my post earlier about whether there was more to do with text. I mentioned the adoption of podcasts then but didn’t really emphasize one of the points this article mentions, that most mediums are more multitasking friendly. In other words, you can’t read a newspaper while typing up a letter or writing code. Audio, though, works really well. Video works well when you don’t have to watch (essentially audio). But text… too much mental focus. I’d argue that’s it’s a first order attention activity, while listening to a podcast or a video soundtrack is a second order attention activity.

So perhaps my real question is how do you make text a second order activity (screen readers?) or perhaps make it more valuable as a first order activity…

Google just launched Google Reader on Google Labs. Reader is an online RSS aggregator similar to BlogLines and NewsGator. The main thing I noticed that I really like is that they went label/tag based instead of folders, similar to GMail. If you’re used to the GMail organization paradigm (and I love it, by the way), this will make a lot of sense to you. It has some support for podcasts and enclosures, so that will be interesting to watch as well.

Update: Import doesn’t seem to work right in Safari.

Wow, NetNewsWire has been acquired by NewsGator. Now, NewsGator has one of the better online aggregators, an RSS plugin for Outlook, the best Windows RSS aggregator in FeedDemon, and, now, NetNewsWire.

It’s a nice stack. Now, the questions: What does this mean for Bloglines? Both FeedDemon and NetNewsWire had publicly shown a desire to implement Bloglines’s synchronization API. Since then, Bloglines was acquired by Ask Jeeves and both FeedDemon and NNW are part of NewsGator which has it’s own API.

Second, NewsGator is now in a unique position. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how textual content isn’t really done well in RSS. With the combination of the synchronization features, a good web client, and these great desktop apps, they’re in a good position to start understanding what people read and how they consume. Perhaps they can use that information to bring together a better reading experience. FD’s newspaper feature on steroids, as it were, or Google News based on your reading habits and feedback.

I have a great deal of respect for both Brent Simmons (NNW) and Nick Bradbury (FD) so I’m sure there’s something very compelling to get these two guys to join forces with NewsGator. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with some of the folks at NewsGator, and they’re smart guys who “get it.” So, you can understand that I’m a bit excited by these developments.

Update: wow, busy day… looks like Weblogs, Inc. got bought by AOL. Weblogs, Inc. owns blogs like Engadget and Autoblog.

Watching the adoption of podcasts has made me think about RSS and text. Apple’s implementation for audio podcasts really is quite solid. I know a lot of people who love podcasts because of their iPod. iTunes is, in a lot of ways, the ideal tool for enjoying podcasts. It’s built into the same app that manages your portable device and your music already, making it trivial to get things organized and synchronized between devices. When the video podcasts come out (with the video ipod), I expect it to be even more compelling, especially among the subway/T riding crowd.

This got me to thinking, though, that simple RSS for text really doesn’t have the sexy integration that iTunes has. I don’t really know what’s missing or what might be better, but I want to toss out the idea that maybe we haven’t done the best we can with regular web content and RSS. Of course, it doesn’t help that the most popular aggregators like My Yahoo and Google don’t show anything but the headline.

For example, some podcasts (like ESPN’s) are a best of sort of thing, involving editorial decisions. Other successful podcasts, like the Battlestar Galactica podcasts) offer complete content that augments other content.

What’s the equivalent for text content? Would you syndicate the front page of a site? Do composite items? Standardize something like FeedDemon’s Newspaper feature?

I’m sure there’s something better… just don’t know what it is. All I know is that it’s going to be something simple.

The National Hurricane Center offers their advisories via RSS feeds if you want to track the storm news. I suspect that this will be very helpful to folks who want to track storm warnings. It’s probably of limited use to residents in places that get hurricanes often, but particular storms might be interesting to have in a desktop aggregator (perhaps a Konfabulator or Dashboard widget?) in case you want to keep abreast of the storm track without having to constantly check the NHC web site.

I’m moving the FatMixx RSS/Atom feeds to FeedBurner. I’ve been impressed with them since Kareem started using them. I’m seeing them used on more and more blogs and I’m curious about how they work, what options they offer, etc. The old FatMixx feeds will simply redirect to the new feeds, but I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to modify your aggregators to use the new RSS feed URL below:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fatmixx

Let me know of any problems. The URL for the comments feed remains the same.

The Wall Street Journal Personal Technology section gives a nice overview of RSS. I also wonder about the characterization that RSS is for “news-oriented” readers:

Whichever approach you choose, if you are a news-oriented Web surfer who wants the latest stuff from a broad range of sources, RSS can be a great boon.

I think that this is true as far as the consumption of mainstream media is concerned. I find the greatest real value, though, in keeping track of my friends’ blogs and photos. It’s especially helpful for folks that don’t update their sites frequently. I use RSS to keep an eye on technology and sports. I use it for a lot of things that aren’t about reading lots of web sites daily. The main thing I like about the big media sites like ESPN.com having RSS is that it gives me a reason to check the aggregator each day. Since I’m consuming the web this way, adding another friends blog or photo feed is really trivial and makes sure I don’t miss out.

(disclaimer: I just bought a tiny bit of Yahoo stock)

I know I’m not the first to say this, but I think Yahoo is moving forward with some cool new ideas that I think will end up making them money. They’re one of the few big companies that get the future of syndicated content (RSS or Atom, for example). Take their new Yahoo 360 service. Among all the usual features you’d expect from a thing like Orkut or Friendster, they have this little announcement:

Coming soon…

You’ll be able to share your RSS-enabled content (blogs, photos, etc.) in Yahoo! 360°.

What I think this means is that soon, I’ll be able to have my 360 page display posts from FatMixx, my photos from Flickr, and my bookmarks from del.icio.us. That’s pretty cool.

It’s even more cool when you think about what they’re doing with 360 and My Yahoo. They’re going to be able to bring together all of this different content that they don’t have to worry about creating directly. That’s a good plan for them, because they don’t have to worry about the tools to manage your photos (though they did buy Flickr), don’t necessarily have to force people to use their blogging software, and generally can just take advantage of the fact that people go there for a lot of other things. It’s nice being a portal.

The one thing I’m reading into the presentation of 360 is that perhaps they’ll have specialized display elements for different types of data. It’s all RSS, but an RSS feed that’s just photos is different from an RSS feed with comics strips even though both contain images. It would be nice if they could provide little widgets that focused on a particular set of tasks. Little details, like sorting or persistence behavior would need to be different so it might not be that complicated to build. That would be a nice touch.

Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon goes over how to download podcasts to the PSP. Pretty nifty. I’m sure an AppleScript could be written to do the same with NetNewsWire.

Go NetNewsWire… wow, that’s pretty fortunate placement.