Last night I mentioned that we had some nifty new features and that I'd tell you what they were today. Marc decided to venture a guess based on my hint that the new feature had something to do with "RSS and keeping your wife, your mother and your girlfriend sorted out..."

Now before I tell you exactly what it was that I was talking about let me first say that Marc is partially right in that it has a lot to do with Microcontent. You see, we have a very specific idea of how all of this fits together. This idea ties our RSS model, nifty features like ReVieWs and Photoalbums, Global UserIDs, relationship with Technorati and much more, all bundled together in a way that actually makes it easier for users to deal with the web.

We call it "Create and Consume".

Its what we are driving towards with all of these features. The internet doesn't make it easy for the average user to share stuff. We hope to ease that a little bit.

So back to Marc's guess. He was right in the sense that this has a lot to do with microcontent. It also has a lot to do with other types of content. At this point, we want to make sure that in BlogwareLand there are no ugly content ducklings - microcontent is just as important as multimedia content, because its the connections between the two that we view as being of tremendous value to our customers. But in order to get us to a place where true Create and Consume is possible, there's a lot of work to do. One of our first big steps was to make sure that every publisher, every reader, every comment-leaver (spammers included for now), administrators and resellers have and use their own userid.

The latest step down this road was the set of features that we added this week - secure RSS feeds. You, in the back, yes you. Yes, I know that secure RSS has been around for a while - I know, nothing earth shattering with sticking an http-auth challenge in front of an XML feed. But this is the spiffy neat part - that's not what we're doing.

Remember a while back we were talking about everything in Blogware is an object in a database? Well, one of the implications of this is that every single time you visit a Blogware page, these objects are pulled from the database and displayed in your browser.  Further because Blogware knows who you are from your userID, publishers can choose which content they display to specific users. For instance, you can take pictures of your kids in the bathtub, upload them to a Family photoalbum living in your Blogware account and make sure that only the proud grandparents, aunts and uncles have access to view them. Even better, you don't need to stuff massive jpegs down a dialup line via email anymore - just send your family a permalink.

What we released yesterday simply extended these existing features to the various XML feeds that we're dynamically producing.

Here's a more concrete example. My team runs an internal blog that we use to share all sorts of confidential information back and forth between ourselves and other groups in the company. Until yesterday, everyone had to go to the web version of the blog to get at the good bits. We couldn't rely on our aggregators to notify us of the latest news because the latest news looked like this:

That's it - two lousy articles. Well almost, two lousy articles that are viewable by absolutely everyone in the world. (You can verify this by visiting the weblog itself - see what I mean? You're seeing the content that all unauthenticated users see. Even if you have a Blogware userID and sign in, you aren't likely authorized to view that content - so you get the two article view - not incredibly helpful if you are an authorized user trying to view the blog via RSS.

But today, because our RSS now has some smarts - it can tell who you are - we can offer a slightly different view of the feed...

The really cool thing here is that this is generated on a per user, per query basis. If your authorization changes, you will get a different view of the feed, different users get different views, and different categories and topics can have different views and security and...the best of all, this is all done dynamically. 

Two more user scenarios: 

Before Blogware RSS security: Marc and Ross are co-producing a book review blog¹. Their editorial process consists of one of them writing the first draft and then bouncing the review back and forth before they publish it. Problem is, Marc lives in California and Ross lives in Toronto so Ross needs to notify Marc everytime he completes a draft and  vice versa. Not terribly efficient. RSS is the better answer - like Pirillo says, its Push without the Proprietary. The problem with using RSS is that its either perfectly public or perfectly private - there's no real way to mix secured content with insecure content in the same feed. Ross and Marc want to spend their time writing reviews, not wrestling with RSS, so they continue to send each other IM's and emails letting the other know that the latest draft is ready for the other and they continue to waste time doing so. Yuck.

After Blogware RSS security: Same guys. Now when Ross or Marc completes a draft, they simply publish it as secure content and the drafts automatically show up in the others aggregator. Turnaround times increase by 75% and both live happily ever after.

So, how does all of this mean that Marc was partially right? Well, I'll have to let you make a few more guesses, but I think I've given you enough hints as it is - (okay, one more for you: We're in the process of jamming adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine together. As we progress, the answers will become a lot clearer, think early stage, and not mid or final evolution.)

One word of warning. If you are using the same Blogware blog to share stuff with your mom, your wife and your girlfriend, make sure that you've got a clear grasp of how our user security works. It might get messy if you make the wrong pictures available to the wrong person ;)

¹(Any similarities to any individuals is purely coincidental and...well, you get the point, this is just an example - I'm not collaborating on a book review site even though I hope that someone out there is...free one year Blogware account to the first two people that send me an email  and want to take a crack at it...)