Moreover Technologies, the premier provider of aggregated online current awareness and business information, today announced that Pluck Corp., a software company dedicated to making it easier to find and manage Internet information, will integrate several of Moreover's RSS (Rich Site Summary) news solutions within Pluck's free Internet Explorer browser companion application. This will provide users with a more convenient and comprehensive view into breaking online news. These new capabilities include...

Read to the end to see a baby penguin who, for some reason, has the energy of a 58-year-old mob boss. In today’s edition: Hello to everyone in Portland posting selfies with folks IRL that they’ve worked/gossiped with on Slack for ages.???? Etch, please! Kevin Geary attempts to stir up FOMO with his big, bold […]

The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs now provides RSS feeds for top stories from the State Department homepage, daily press briefings, press releases, and remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell. The RSS feeds are found at:  
 
http://www.state.gov/rss/channels/highlights.xml
http://www.state.gov/rss/channels/briefings.xml
http://www.state.gov/rss/channels/prsreleases.xml
http://www.state.gov/rss/channels/sremarks.xml

You can also subscribe to email mailing lists to receive the full texts of selected U.S. Department of State documents and publications that provide key official information on U.S. foreign policy, notifications of travel warnings, and Foreign Travel Per Diem updates.

Unlike Yahoo, Google has had a long standing resistance to offering RSS feeds for Google News queries. Hacks have long abounded from Julian Bond's GNews2RSS, Ben Hammersley's Google to RSS using the Google SOAP API, and Steve Rubel's advice in "RSS Hack for Sites That Don't Offer Feeds".

In this spirit, Justin Pfister has created gnewsfeed. Filling out the form uses a script that converts a Google news query (example) into an RSS feed (example). "I welcome anyone in the world," he humbly proffers, "to use it in an effort to become a more informed public."

Poor Justin. He's looking for a job. Maybe Adam Smith, and the Google Alerts product team will hire Justin to build in the syndication that Google should have offered long ago (hint).

We interrupt this irregularly scheduled broadcast.... to share a message more momentous than we've reported on before. We bring a message of hope, of goodness, of peace, of universal brotherhood. Here's how we can join our voices in a global conversation that can forever change the world.

"In one's own way," my mother told me long ago, "every person can change the world." That advice was at the time more prophetic than a truism.

Hyperbole aside, I do believe that individuals are now empowered as never before in history. Individuals are no longer bound by the confines of time, place, language, and political regime in their quest to do good in the world. We now have the capacity to find each other, to gather, and to converse without ever meeting in the flesh. It's all made possible through virtual communities and virtual networking.

Why does that phrase in the United States Constitution "we the people" so resonate in the hearts of people throughout the world? I think it has something to do with our nature as social beings.

In the past, institutions such as governments and churches were needed to organize and rally people. The problem is that all institutions by their nature become corrupt. Leaders succumb to power and greed, and institutions stray from their altruistic beginnings as they amass fortunes and property, gain political power, and build monuments unto themselves.

To Jesus, the church was the community of believers. It wasn't a building, it wasn't an organization, it wasn't a corporation. The church was not a place nor did it own any property. It's unfortunate, but institutions calling themselves churches have embellished to the point of distraction those simple teachings of Jesus to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. The true church remains the community of believers.

To do good in the world, you don't need institutional wealth, buildings, and treasuries. To self-organize, you don't need creeds, dictums, laws, governments, and rulers. People just need to do be free to do two things: talk and act. You just need to be able to communicate with others of like mind and then to collaborate with them in resolving needs. All conversation inevitably leads to understanding. Understanding leads to acceptance and concern, which in turn naturally leads to the desire to act.

So why can we be so optimistic?

Think for moment about peer-to-peer networks, instant messagers, collaboration workspaces (wikis, collaborative blogs), online communities (Meetups, AOL, Craigslist, Tribe.net, eWomenNetwork, Yahoo Groups, Ecademy, Idealist), alumni communities (SelectMinds, Classmates, TheSquare), syndication technologies (blogs, moblogs, RSS news feeds), and social and business networks (LinkedIn, Ryze, Orkut, Spoke Software, VisiblePath, ZeroDegrees, Knowmentum, Company of Friends). These social networking inventions are now in place and changing the way we interact and converse. But they only portend the future; more powerful social networking is on the horizon.

Social networking facilitates real-world and online conversations. Each of these technologies helps us bridge the six degrees of separation in finding others with similar goals and interests. We just need to apply this knowledge to loftier purposes. It's high time we used what we know for a higher purpose than dating, deal making, and job hunting. How about world peace? Maybe that generation of Miss America contestants had it right after all.

I'll call this repurposing of social networking the "Good News Network." The Good News Network needs no place, no domain, no trademark, no sponsors. It needs only open access and to be built on standards -- standards to converse one language with another and standards to programmatically exchange information. It consists of you and I, our friends, friends of friends, and those yet to be brought into our circle of friendship.

The Good News Network has two functions: to promote conversation and action. We converse by sharing the good news, our faith, and our belief in the goodness of humanity. And we act. We act in small ways, in big ways, but always in individual and personal ways, to share the good news of universality and peace and to promote well-being.

We speak multitudes of languages, we live in diverse regions of the globe, and we comprise all races and nationalities. In this day and age that is unique in history, we can all converse, we can join a global conversation, and we can meet in the virtual living room or the virtual temple of our choice.

So back to the age old question, how do you change the world?

Start by entering the conversation. In your blogs, in your chat rooms, in your networks, in your music, in your poems, in your art, in your families, and in your communities -- tell your story. Let your voice be heard. Sign on in whatever way makes sense to you in order to make a difference. As the marketers say, create a buzz. In the sense of paying it forward, start something in your own way and in your own voice. Start a conversation that will spread, that will continue, that will penetrate the hearts and minds of the power brokers. Those in high places will join us. They will, as Saul of old, see the vision and join the conversation. Perhaps in fulfillment of ancient prophecy, those with ears to hear will find each other, and they who are confused will recognize the voice.

Interrupt your own broadcast to begin the conversation. Let it begin with you; let it begin now. Spread the Good News!

Season's greetings, my friends,

Ray Matthews
Editor RSS in Government

With the proliferation of RSS feeds in state and local governments, a unique opportunity is developing to expand the delivery of the critical information contained in these feeds by leveraging the most ubiquitous personal communications device in the world -– the telephone. Governments that use RSS to deliver information to citizens using RSS feeds can also leverage VoiceXML, an open standard for developing telephony applications, to expose RSS content via cellular and traditional telephones.

VoiceXML is a web technology that can turn any telephone, even a rotary phone, into an Internet device. VoiceXML is a non-proprietary, web-based markup language for creating vocal dialogues between humans and computers. VoiceXML is similar to another common markup language -- HTML, the basic language of visual web pages. Just as a web browser renders HTML documents visually, a VoiceXML interpreter renders VoiceXML documents audibly. In this respect, one can think of the VoiceXML interpreter as a telephone-based, voice browser. As with HTML documents, VoiceXML documents have web URIs and can be located on any web server. However, instead of pointing a client-side web browser at a specific URI, citizens can access a VoiceXML application by calling a toll free telephone number from any ordinary telephone - cellular or traditional, touch-tone or rotary.

It’s not hard to think of a scenario where a local government or a university could publish an RSS feed with topical news, and have a phone number for students or citizens to call for more information. Depending on how the VoiceXML is structured, the caller could have the option of being transferred directly to the number associated with the information.

The trick would be, in my opinion, finding the right place within the RSS feed to put the phone number (if the publisher wanted to provide the option of an automatic transfer). Ideally, the phone number would be contained within its own RSS element. Glancing quickly at the RSS 2.0 spec, this could be something like the guid element. So, if a publisher was using a software package to author and publish RSS feeds, they would probably need to do a little experimenting to find the right place to place the phone number.

Because RSS and VoiceXML are both XML vocabularies, there are a number of standards-based methods for converting RSS to VoiceXML and using RSS feeds from within VoiceXML applications. The first method involves the use of eXstensible Style Sheet Language Transformations (XSLT). I have created a tutorial covering this technique and some of the issues relating to it. This technique is generally agnostic to the underlying technology used; XSLT transformations are supported in technologies like JSP, PHP, Perl, .NET and others.

To see it in action there is a demo application available at (800) 289-5570. Enter the following PIN when prompted: 9991422919. This example uses the latest headlines news feed from CNET News.com (news.com.com) and the XSLT file covered in my tutorial. This is only running on a demo platform, so I can’t guarantee anything on performance. Still, it gives you a sense of how an RSS feed sounds. This technology could allow travelers only equipped with cell phones to get the latest NOAA RSS weather reports, lobbyists to dial-in for legislative floor calendars, and rescue teams to phone for the latest operational instructions.

The other method for using RSS from within VoiceXML applications is to leverage the new data tag, an addition to the VoiceXML specification that is part of the developing VoiceXML 2.1 standard. Some excellent examples of this technique can be found on the VoiceXML Forum website at http://www.voicexmlreview.org/apr2004/columns/apr2004_speak_listen.html.

VoiceXML also allows for the playback of recorded audio. If one had an audio file that they want to include in a feed, a VoiceXML application could actually invoke the audio file and play it to the caller. There is a VoiceXML service at (800) 555-TELL that plays audio files. Give it a call and try listening to the “News Center” option.

One caveat -- most VoiceXML platforms only support certain audio formats, but the more common ones (WAV, MP3) are usually supported. VoiceXML also supports recording the audio of a call, so if one wanted to let callers post comments the application could record their audio and save it for later playback. There is actually a project called “Phone Blogger” that takes this approach (see www.wombatnation.com/phoneblogger).

By using these techniques, governments that make information available to citizens through RSS feeds can dramatically expand the accessibility of these feeds by making them available to anyone with a telephone.

Mark J. Headd
Voice Technologies for Government
www.voiceingov.org
mheadd@voiceingov.org





[Editor's note: Commenting is turned off because of spamming. Mark is interested in hearing from readers who are interested in how that can use VoiceXML to augment what they are doing with RSS. Please email the author with your comments and we'll invite him to write a follow-up here at RSS in Government addressing your ideas and suggestions.]

In which Nicole shares what she learned at the recent Whole Good News Conference and the talk she gave there. Also a lesson in time about praying while sick. Mentioned in this episode: The Whole Good News Conference hosted by MissioAlliance (https://www.missioalliance.org/twgn) The Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa The Emotionally Healthy Woman by Lisa Scazzero Irresistible: the Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer The intro and outro of this podcast are the songs "Idea" and "Remedy for Melancholy" by Kai Engel, available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

It's not often—in the life of a small parish–that the mortgage goes away and a new priest is on the way. Fr Joseph offers that news in St Silouan/College Station. Glory to God for all things!

Did you know that the word "gossip" originally meant "godparent" and is connected with the word "sibling"? Did you know that gossip and Good News aren't the same? (Go ahead, you can tell me, I won't tell.)

Not everyone will agree, but you'll have to listen to figure out why. BTW, is there any good news? Fr Joseph speaks of his recent "work-cation" in the PNW.

Sometimes you can judge a podcast by its title!

Stephen King writes the news? Delivers the newspaper? Either times are hard or the news is horrible! If it's both, what are we to do about it?

A sermon on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women reveals shocking news!

As the following game show reveals, some of your favorite Bible verses might not be in the Bible!

In a world which feasts and frenzies on the bad news and misfortunes of others, Fr. John Parker encourages us to keep ever before us the truly and eternal Good News: that Jesus Christ became man and took on flesh for the salvation of the world.

"On Friday we tried to read the gospel on the stairs at the mission. We were not well organized and without structure. In spite of this, reading the gospel outside made us, even for a little while, to see and hear Jesus preaching to people in the light of the day, sitting in the boat." From reflections written by Fr. Nicolaie.

there's a nice companion piece for Dave Winer's milestone in The Guardian #

Fr. Apostolos addresses sin as the animating principle behind the blood-letting we are witnessing around the world. References are drawn primarily from the Prophet Isaiah whose insights are as relevant today as they were 2,700 years ago.

Sermon on the Leavetaking of the Elevation of the Precious Cross (Galatians 2:16-20; Mark 8:34-9:1)

Fr. Lawrence Farley, priest at Saint Herman of Alaska Orthodox Church in Langley, B.C., and the host of Coffee Cup Commentaries, thoroughly dismantles the recent Newsweek article by Kurt Eichenwald titled "The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin."

Bobby Maddex interviews Fr. Lawrence Farley, pastor of Saint Herman of Alaska Orthodox Church in British Columbia, the host of the AFR podcast Coffee Cup Commentaries, and the author of The Gospel of Luke: Good News for the Poor, published by Conciliar Press.

Miho Ealy, a Japanese Orthodox Christian, talks to us from Japan about life after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

As Holy Week begins, Fr. Philip gives the hopeful perspective.

(Google blog post)

Appoints "President of Sales and Business Development".

Google is buying the leftover ad space in the _Chicago Sun-Times_ and filling it with AdWords ads related to the rest of the content. I wonder how they're going to charge advertisers. The domains posted are the real domains, so it can't exactly be pay-per-click.

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

So, I have some BIG news… I am quitting online courses. (And don’t worry. If you already invested in one of my courses, you won’t lose access. The website will still live on. I’m just done selling them after one final enrollment period). “Why? ARE YOU CRAZY!?!?!” No. I’m not crazy. “IS THIS A SCAM? […]

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