CNN has feeds for some of its popular sections. Where are these found on the actual CNN site? Who knows….

The Weblogs Inc flagship, Engadget, is currently docked at the Consumer Electronics orgy in Las Vegas. If you wish you were there, instead of filing TPS reports back at the cube farm, feel free to live vicariously through the obscenely frequent posts of the Engadgeteers. RSS is available at http://ces.engadget.com/rss.xml.

Tom Biro of The Media Drop offers a long list of U.S. newspapers with RSS feeds, organizzed by state. Currently, there are more than 140 papers represented, with more likely to be added as readers fill in the gaps.

Wired News offers a piece on ads in RSS and the concept of "alert-engine marketing."

As soon as mainstream publishers incorporated RSS feeds into their web businesses, you knew that ideas on how to make money from them would inevitably follow. This almost always means advertising, the bane of readers' existence, but it's the reason most content on the net remains free for the asking. So while some may protest the idea of monetizing RSS, it's inevitable. The trick will be to make it as unobtrusive as possible.

After noticing the data transmitted via the Wi-Fi Networking News RSS feed was escalating much faster than the number of subscribers, Glenn Fleishman decided to do something about it. After two weeks, his simple fix has shaved some megabytes off of his monthly bandwidth bill.

I built a simple program running via Apache that throttles RSS downloads: a given IP and user agent combination can only request a given RSS feed file if it's changed since they last retrieved it. Pretty simple. But the effects are profound…

...so we don't have to.

Over on his eponymous Jeopardy-themed blog, Jason Kottke has asked some of the prominent developers of RSS aggregators if they would "build ad blocking software into their software."

In short, the responses point to "no," and each of the developers seems to think that blocking ads in RSS won't be worth the effort, especially as aggregators get smarter about bubbling up relevant content to individual readers.

I'm actually suprised that no-one envisions the RSS landscape emerging similarly to the HTML landscape, short on intelligent tools and long on advertiser chutzpah. Maybe Jason should've asked Overture and Kanoodle whether they plan on developing RSS ad-blockers….

Adventurous types may want to snap up the new FeedDemon beta, which offers a nice set of features supporting multimedia enclosures, including the ability to sync automatically to your media device of choice.

Newsweek, in their article on podcasting, calls it "Tivo for your iPod," which is perhaps a new milestone in the annals of "convenient oversimplification." The operative thing about podcasting isn't timeshifting or the ability to capture all future broadcasts of a show (a la Tivo's season pass), it's the democratization of the media sources.  Tivo didn't enable thousands of new media outlets within the few few months of its existence. Tivo hasn't added channels to my cable system, last time I checked. Sigh. Still, it's good to see podcasting get all the over-excited coverage it justly deserves.

Luxist, the newest member of the WIN family, which covers the world of luxury goods and services, is available via RSS, of course. If you are truly a connoisseur of expensive cars, watches, wine, cigars, real estate, or any of Luxist's eighteen categories (each of which has it's own bookmarkable sub-domain), then perhaps you'll want to subscribe.

The news is out: MSNBC will have RSS feeds for selected channels.

[via Micro Persuasion]

Levy offers his executive summary of the Web 2.0 conference in this week's Newsweek, and uses RSS as the main example of a next-generation web services.

To get a taste of how this works, let's look at just one popular under-the-hood technology: a technical standard known as RSS. Don't bother to learn what it stands for—even the geeks can't agree. But behind the enigmatic appellation is a fantastically useful way of receiving the information you need from countless Web sites—without having to bother going and getting it. (It winds up in your mail in box, or you can access it through one of several online RSS reader sites.) An amazing number of places now use RSS "feeds" to distribute information, including The New York Times and Yahoo News. The National Weather Service uses RSS to send out alerts. And the Surrey (England) Police Department uses RSS for its lost-and-found. In addition, RSS can be built into your computer applications. Picture the following scenario: when your kid's soccer game changes location, your personal calendar is automatically updated to reflect the shift, because you're a subscriber to the soccer league's RSS feed.

Engadget's resident savant, Phillip Torrone, details how to access and/or produce homebrew audio subscriptions using RSS enclosures as the transport method.

Doc Searls may have said it best: "PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well."

Here's a very cool development from Yahoo!, who have been super-productive in the last few months — My Web — a bookmarking utility that shares some features with another popular website. You can save sites you find during searches or browsing (via a bookmarklet), annotate them, categorize them, and share them via RSS, My Yahoo, or email. This project is currently in Yahoo's "Next" area, a holding pen for betas, and offers a message  board for people to discuss the project publically.

My comments: Show categories near each item, not just in the side navigation.  And build in the social networking component. I want to be able to subscribe to my friends public bookmarks, both in their entirety and by individual category. You've got to do more than del.icio.us, not less. The bar has already been set and Joshua is constantly raising it…

Jeremy Zawodny and Y! Search Blog have more.

Yahoo has officially integrated "Add to My Yahoo!" buttons to their news search results pages, reports Search Engine Watch.

Micro Persuasion points out that Gmail, Google's email service, is now offering your unread inbox messages via feed. The feed format is Atom and it uses http with SSL, so your aggregator's mileage may vary.