Random Bytes...by Ross Rader

Wednesday, March 16

[12:34PM EST] Tris Hussey: "...the "portal" isn't dead" C | T (67) | #

[11:38AM EST] Bret: "Tucows' Skydasher. Terrific idea."

If you have signed up as a partner, you can funnel your feature requests through the Start Beta newsgroups at nntp://news.r.tucows.com in the tucows.beta.start.* forums.

If you have saigned up as an end-user, you can funnel them straight to me via "start@beta.tucows.com".
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Tuesday, March 15

[06:04PM EST]

Scripting News: 3/15/2005 "On this day six years ago Netscape unveiled their feed reader, my.netscape.com, and a format named RSS."

Coincidentally, our "feed reader" - Tucows Start Service - debuted today (as a beta) and it loves RSS.

Yeah – I know its late. Don’t ask. The main thing is that its here *now* and its going to be totally cool when everything is said and done.

The Start Service isn’t really a feed reader though, it just looks like one. A lot of web apps are going to look like feed readers – the wave is cresting and users aren’t afraid of syndication anymore. So why *not* leverage it.

But – RSS isn’t the be all, end all of the solution. Things are extremely early stage right now, but we've got a ton on track behind the scenes to get the tool up the curve to where I want it very quickly. I think you’ll be quite impressed and pleased with how it progresses over the next six months.

Of course, that really depends on who you are. I imagine that some won’t be pleased or impressed at all.

We're enrolling beta partners as we speak. I'm going to be a beta tester myself - I'll be setting up "my.byte.org" shortly.

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Thursday, January 13

[10:23AM EST] What is it with those guys over at Bryght?

First, Roland, fueled by a link from Robert Scoble, scoops me on my own announcement that Tucows was about to release an OEM weblog management and provisioning platform - Blogware.

Now, Boris, scoops me on my own announcement that Tucows is doing similar work in the hosted aggregator space.

"Ross's new package for ISPs (Skydasher), which includes RSS-powered content blocks, is one step in this direction: run your own MyYahoo. #

...the media center component gets enclosures coming in from various RSS feeds, and sorts them into the appropriate section based on the type of media.

The UI, by the way, is a DHTML interface.#"

Now I'm not going to explicitly confirm - nor deny - any of the details that Boris posted, Skydasher has been a pretty open secret since the beginning of November. But I will say that the video that he got his hands on is from mid-November. It illustrates similar functionality to what I was showing to our partners at ISPCon and our friends at Bloggercon.

No matter.

I have at least one more Skydasher secret that no one knows about. Not even Joey. Or Darryl. This one is so secret that even the codename has a codename.

More soon.

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Wednesday, January 12

[08:28AM EST] RSS: "Yahoo sends emails to bloggers with RSS feeds saying, hey if you put this icon on your weblog you'll get more subscribers. It's true you will. Then Feedster says the same thing, and Bloglines, etc etc. ...all those logos, when will it end?"

Dave Winer has floated a very timely proposal to run a community subscription management server to help solve the problem. I was just about to implement "Yet Another Subscription Logo" and if this comes up to speed fast enough, I'm pretty sure that I can get this into Tucows "about to be announced but still secret" Skydasher project.

Given Dave's history running www.weblogs.com, audio.weblogs.com and other community servers, I can't think of a better steward to manage this resource in the interests of the community.

In other Skydasher related news, we'll be opening up our beta program shortly and we're looking for a large number of users to help us test things out. Better yet, we're also looking for different types of users to help us out. Selected beta testers matching a specific profiles will actually get paid to help us with these tests. Leave a comment here or drop me a note if you are interested in getting more information when we take the wraps off.
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Saturday, November 6

[06:54PM EST]

I've probably showed Skydasher to at least 200 people at ISPCon and Bloggercon this week. Not really willing to talk about it publicly yet, but I'm happy to show off one of the many cool components included in it. Without totally blowing my big secret, I can say that you can think of the "Media Center" as an RSS tuner.

It looks like we're going to do a preview release of Skydasher in early Q1/05. In the meantime, I'm looking for ISPs and webhosting companies that would be interested in participating in our beta program. If you think you fit the bill, sign up for the Tucows NSE program. We'll send you a note with further instructions closer to the start of the beta program.

I'm also considering an end-user beta period similar to what we recently undertook with Blogware. If you're interested, leave a comment to this post or send me an email

(ps - yes, that is a "Daily Source Code" podcast highlighted in the Audio folder )

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