Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Gary has cleverly figured out a way to get RSS content from NewsGator Online Services into his new Gmail account:

Now though I’ve started to play with GMAIL, and the first thing I wanted was to use google’s search capability against the many rss feeds I get. It works! I went out and found a pop3 redirector, Mail Redirect and am testing it against the Newsgator online feed. So far, it’s working great, every two hours it goes out, pulls my feeds and redirects them to google.

Great idea - even though Gmail doesn’t support POP3, he’s found a way to send content from the NGOS POP edition to it!

For anyone who’s going to be at Supernova, be sure to check out the “Spam and the Future of Email” panel Thursday at 4:30pm…I’ll be on that panel, joined by some folks from Cloudmark, Turntide, and Oddpost. My contribution to the panel is obviously in the relationship of RSS and email, and how RSS can potentially help with the spam problem for certain categories of email.

And even if you don’t go to that panel, be sure to find me and say hello if you’re at the conference!

…also known as Blogging for Associations, Non-profits & Content-driven Web Sites, is happening on June 30 in Washington, D.C. Debbie Weil, a wizard of online publishing and marketing, has lined up Komra Moriko to speak. Debbie says there are still a few spots left as of today.

NewsGator Technologies is pleased to sponsor the seminar, and is giving away a 6-month subscription to NewsGator Online Services (a $65.70 value) to all attendees.

To quote Debbie - “Blogging for business isn’t about being cool…”  Well said!

I’ll be participating in a RSS round-table webcast on Thursday morning, 10:00am PDT. It’s free - if you’d like to listen in, you can register here. On the call will be Mark Fletcher, Mitch Ratcliffe, and Harry Hayes. [the registration page says differently, but I believe this is the more up-to-date information]

Continuing his series, Harold Check has published an interview with me on his weblog - The New Net Architects, Part IV - Greg Reinacker. A quote from the interview:

Syndication will change things. For a taste, look at the early adopters of syndication technology, and how much they say it has changed their online habits, and how much it has changed their lives.

I very much enjoyed reading his earlier installments of this series with Luke Hutteman, Mark Fletcher, and Brent Simmons…check them all out!

I was just flipping through some old posts here on my blog. It’s been fun - a lot of it really takes me back to what was going on at the time. Like an online diary. I know, I know, people have been reflecting on this for ages, but I finally have posts that are old enough it’s fun to go back and read them :-).

I’m going to try to start writing some more here, as soon as things calm down a little. Some of my favorite posts here have been about non-work-related stuff…so hopefully I can squeeze some more of that in too.

Some of my favorites -

Semiconductor physics - to those who know me well, you know this has to be a favorite. :-)

Most eligible bachelorettes - darn it, neither Sandra nor Britney called.

Valvoline runoffs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) - tidbits from one of the highlights of my racing career thus far, the 2002 SCCA national championship.

First race at Arizona Motorsports Park - I’m glad I wrote about this…since as it turns out, this was the last race there I would get to go to before the track closed.

Driving (1, 2) - musings on understeer/oversteer, and front/rear wheel drive. Some of the most fun I’ve had writing on my weblog…

It’s not all that often that I post about some new technology that I see, but today’s going to be an exception.

As some of you know, I used to do development consulting in the travel business. Well today, I was fortunate enough to get a glimse of a new application from TravelMessenger, the likes of which I haven’t seen before. It’s basically an automated travel agent, which you interact with via MSN Messenger:

Very interesting. It’s got some quirks at the moment, but it’s a great demo. I’m not completely convinced I would book a trip this way, but maybe - it’s definitely got potential. With some good AI work, I think this could become something very different than most of us are used to - in a good way. I’m told this will go into a limited beta next week…

From today’s announcement:

NewsGator Technologies announced that the recently launched NewsGator Media Edition is featured in Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004’s “Online Spotlight”

This is pretty cool. Now anyone with a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 PC can get to NewsGator Media Center Edition without having to download a thing. And when new users are browsing around in the Media Center interface, they will see NewsGator - right next to MSN and ESPN.

So your homework for tonight…go to your local Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, or whatever your preference. Find a Media Center PC, pull up Online Spotlight, and go into News/Sports. Behold that which is NewsGator…and tell the passers-by that THIS is the reason they need a Media Center PC! :-)

(ok, maybe that was a little over the top…but hey, it’s Friday!)

In case you’ve missed it, there has been some great press recently, mentioning NewsGator and NewsGator Online Services:

New York Times: Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information (June 3, 2004)

“There is also a subscription service that can coordinate your news feeds across several devices - say, a cellphone, a home PC and an office computer - so that you never inadvertently read the same headline twice. It can even be directed to send traffic information only to your cellphone and movie news to your home computer.”

Detroit Free Press: Keep Track of Web Favorites (June 2, 2004)

“Among a new generation of software and services that shield the underlying complexity of RSS are two new products from NewsGator Technologies…both products are well designed and show a degree of professional polish missing from many first-generation efforts.”

And an excellent in-depth review of both products in EContent Magazine’s May issue:

EContent Magazine: NewsGator 2.0 & NewsGator Online Services: EContent Decision Maker Review (May 1, 2004)

“NewsGator takes this product - and news aggregators in general - to a new level.”