Deliver your headlines to more venues

For channel owners and editors there have been two interesting things that have happened in the last month that only signal more great things to come. That is the ability to add headlines in your channel to both Twitter and a Blogger gadget.

If you have a Twitter account you can put the username and password into the Channel Properties dialog. From then on any new headlines produced by your WatchPoints or any new solo headlines you add to the channel will automatically be posted to your Twitter account.

If you already have a channel going you will see a "TWEET" link beside each headline. This will allow you to manually send a headline to the Twitter account associated with this channel.

Once you have assigned a Twitter account to a channel, the channel title bar will then show a Twitter icon to anyone who views the channel. They can then link to the Twitter view of this channel and follow you from their own account.

We hope to soon offer the ability for anyone viewing the channel to "Tweet" any headline to any Twitter account. But for now there is automatic posting of your new headlines to a Twitter account you have assigned to the channel.

I will write an article soon to discuss how to put headlines in a Blogger gadget and add it to your blog.

Randy Cox

CTO

Mobile WebPartner is available

We have been a bit quiet about this, but in the last month or so we have introduced a mobile site where you can get your WebPartner channels delivered. Most mobile devices will be routed there directly if the device browser is aimed at www.webpartner.com. But in case we miss your device you can always get to it by going to http://m.webpartner.com .

We will be continually adding functionality to the mobile site including the ability to create a new account. Right now you can log in and get to your My Channels list. The performance is great. I can get my channels onto my older slower iPhone in a flash. Very nice when killing some time at the airport or waiting in the doctor's office or waiting anywhere for that matter.

Let us know if you have any questions. Contact Us

Randy Cox

Wow. Have we been busy!

It has been a while since any of us have posted a new blog entry on all the progress we've made with the product and service. Here are just some highlights:

• Completely new look for the whole site. It's just much cooler and more usable than before.
• Better "My Channel" management. You can now page through your channels and control things like how many channels show up on a page and how many headlines per channel to show.
• WebPartner channels can now be published to Twitter.
• We now have a Blogger widget so you can show your WebPartner channel on your Blogger blog. Check out the Help page for details and two different ways to publish your headlines on Blogger.
• A whole new search engine. This one works a lot better and is constantly re-indexing the site every five minutes or so. Now it's easier than ever to locate channels that may already have found the best sources of information you are looking for.
  
• Many more public channels are available. We have added probably 50-60 new channels since the website overhaul.

WebPartner usage has been building all the time. We think we're on to something.

Enjoy the new site and let us know if there is anything we can do. Contact Us.

Randy Cox
CTO

New channel on Wind Power

From the very launch of WebPartner, the Alternative Energy channel has been the most popular channel week after week. It's a great way to stay up on things going on in alternative energy without searching out the many sources of alt. energy news.

With the continued interest in this channel we have also begun new channels to concentrate specifically on areas of alternative interest. Today we announce the creation of the Wind Power channel.

The Wind Power channel will follow projects large and small in the effort to create more energy from wind power. There are many efforts targeted at both utility scale power as well as residential scale wind generators. Exciting things are happening in both areas and we'll do our best to cover them and also follow legislative issues at both local, state, and national levels in the US and the world.

Other recent additions in the energy topic area include Hot Rock Geothermal and Geothermal for Commercial and Public Buildings. This can be a confusing area because the word geothermal is used to mean very different things depending on the target.

Many people understand geothermal to mean the electricity production from water pumped onto hot rock thousands of feet below the surface of the earth. There are a lot of utility scale projects getting underway to tap this enormous source of energy.

Geothermal is also used for the micro extraction of stable heat from just a few feet below the earth's surface in your backyard. Highly efficient heat pumps have been developed over the last several years that will cool and heat your house based on whether heat is being pumped in or out of your home or building. It's a very efficient process and causes virtually no carbon output besides the electricity to run the pump which is similar to running your ice box.

This is a very exciting time in alternative energy and we hope WebPartner can keep you up to date on everything that is happening out there.

Enjoy.

Randy Cox

Earthquake Channel Maps Out The Shaking

Southern California was rocked by a 5.4 earthquake earlier today. I have been running an Earthquake Maps channel for quite some time due to my interest in geology and background from the Colorado School of Mines. WebPartner has picked up a lot of traffic today from people looking to see where the shaking was.

I created the Earthquake Channel because in my own quest to keep up to date on earthquakes I found I had to go to a long list of bookmarks and shift between many pages, particularly on the USGS site where much of this information resides. Now in one easy glance I can see the latest maps, magnitudes, and shake charts for the latest earthquakes across the globe. It even shows activity for parts of the U.S. that you may have thought were immune to earthquakes.

Earthquake Tracking Maps

Randy Cox

Tour de France almost over, Olympics in sight

I love summer sports and this summer we have a one-two punch with the Tour de France and the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

The WebPartner "World Of Cycling" channel has spent a lot of time on the Tour de France in the last two weeks. If you're like me and you're into a topic, there's almost never enough sources of information. One nice thing about the World Of Cycling channel is that it is pulling feeds from several of the top cycling news sites as well as picking up "one-off" articles written about an individual, usually from a newspaper or online news source close to where the person calls home. VeloNews is a great pulication and does concentrate more on US teams. But there's nothing quite like reading articles written on Cadel Evans from a news source "down under". Many of the cycling publications will want you to see the race from their perspective. With the World of Cycling you can get tour news and info from many sources and different regions of the world .

It's just a few weeks now until the Summer Olympic Games open. In preparation to celebrate and follow what is happening we have been running a channel to follow much of the news related to US Olympic teams as well as major stories from other teams and countries in their preparations for the games. You can find it at Olympics - Beijing. We will follow the good and the bad in the lead-up to the games and during the games. The slant will be positive, but won't ignore bad news for athletes, countries, or the hosts.

I do a lot of swimming as a masters swimmer here in Colorado, so I'm particularly keen on following Olympic Swimming. It's always peculiar to me when swimming gets very little coverage between games and then turns into one of the most popular sports every four years. It has been like that for as long as I can remember and I suppose it will stay that way.

If you would like to become a contributing editor to the Olympics-Beijing channel please drop us a note. Just go to "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the home page or "Contact Us" to go directly to the email form. We look forward to hearing from you.

Randy Cox

WebPartner and the iPhone

Did you know that WebPartner works really well on the iPhone? For those of you who have this device you can look at your favorite Channel Room via bookmark or direct link. Because of how the Channel Room is designed, the headlines with synopses and images are all lined up down the left hand side of the page and scaled in such a way as to make viewing on an iPhone very convenient. Try it sometime. You'll find it is a nice way to stay up to date during meetings or killing time in the airport.

Randy Cox

Journalist and Legend, Tim Russert, Passes On

I won't say anything different than thousands of people will be saying over the next few days. It's sad that such a news legend has passed on so early. I think Tim was the epitome of a great journalist and he will be missed. His presence was mostly felt in TV media, but I can't help but wonder who the great and enduring personalities will be across the blogsphere over the next decade. It's hard not to feel sad this Friday afternoon.

Randy Cox

Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup

This last Tuesday evening I presented WebPartner to the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup. For those of you unaware of the "Meetup" service, go to Meetup.com and discover all the interesting groups doing things you enjoy in your area. It's eye opening how many groups, interests, and people are involved in all kinds of Meetups.

The Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup is one of the largest new tech Meetups around and is one of the largest groups overall. It's well attended with nearly 300 attendees to each monthly meeting on the CU campus in Boulder and it has well over 1400 registered members.

The presentation format at this meeting is interesting. The standard drill is five companies present their product or concept for five minutes and take five minutes of questioning before moving to the next company. Although there are some true flops and bad presentations from time to time (think presentations by geeks), there are almost always several gems that come out of each meeting and it's very worthwhile to attend.

I had presented WebPartner to this group last January with great interest and I wanted to get back in front of them to get some reactions since we went to public beta in early May. Only about a third of the 300 attendees at this meeting had attended the January meeting. For this group I quickly showed how easy it is to set a WatchPoint on a region of the page and then went on to show several channels that are running that they might be interested in. This group is pretty technical although it includes product managers, PR people, CEOs, VCs, and many other groups. I even met a gentleman in commercial real estate who was interested in building a channel to track commercial real estate activity in the Denver area.

Here were a few of the questions:
- "The Channel Room URL doesn't look very SEO friendly. Are you going to add something to change that?" My answer - There isn't an ability to add a user defined channel URL alias right now, but it's something that is on the drawing board.
- "How do you make money?" - My answer - Google ads and sponsored ads. The response at that point from the gentleman that caught a laugh was "How can I find your investor?"
- "Can I go back and look at old headlines?" - My answer - Yes. From the Channel Room there is a link to "Headline Archive" which will display past headlines for each WatchPoint in the channel. We have not specified a limit on the headline history, but that will probably have to happen in the future.
- "How often do you update the web page based WatchPoints and does the user have control of this?" - My answer - We update all feeds on an interval you specify in the WatchPoint properties. We will update as often as every 15 minutes.

If you were at the meeting, thank you for attending. I hope you got something out of it and will come to WebPartner to give it a try. Create an account, find some interesting channels from our public library to subscribe to, give us some feedback, and create your own channel if you get motivated to try out creating your own channel.

Consider subscribing to the Colorado Startups Company Tracker channel. It's the only public place online that automatically tracks recent news and blog entries from many of the companies that have demostrated at the Meetup and have come across ColoradoStartups.com.

Randy Cox

Don't go to the grocery store hungry

I've noticed this phenomena many times while working on the Gourmet Cooking channel. It reminds me of going to the grocery store when I'm hungry. I end up wanting to cook everything that comes across this channel and what's worse is that it makes me hungry just working on it. I think I'm going to go have a snack.

While in the process of making sure things were up to date and adding a few more WatchPoints that I've come across, I found this little gem called "Seven Ways To Present Food Like A Chef". It's also posted on the channel, but I've left you a link here too. I've been cooking at a gourmet level for a while now, but food presentation is always something where I could use more experience and expertise.

Send me a link to some of your favorite cooking and recipe sites. I would love to share them on this channel.

Randy Cox

Wild Colorado Weather

Actually, the spring weather has been wild throughout much of the country's midsection. Last Thursday a line of thunderstorms traveled north to northwest along the Colorado front range raking several cities with strong wind and hail. In Boulder we had some slushy hail, wind, rain, and bright sunshine all within an hour around noontime. Unfortunately the area around Windsor, north of Denver and a bit southeast of Fort Collins, caught it on the chin. One person was killed and large portions of the community were flattened. Fortunately the community there is strong and the residents got right to work helping each other and trying to clean up and figure out how to rebuild.

I saved the animated radar of this storm on the Boulder weather channel. Scroll to the bottom of that page and you can see the yellow, red, orange, and magenta cell sweeping to the east of Greeley and Fort Collins.

In addition to the saved radar animation, I saved a headline from CNN that was posted at the time. This tornado was eventually classified as an F2 or F3 (Fujita Scale). Judging by the word descriptions on the Fujita scale I can even imagine it could have or should have been classified as an F4.

We maintain a few weather channels for places like Boston, New York, and the Bay Area too. If you would like to see more, drop us a line through our channel wish list .

Or feel free to create your own with WebPartner.

Randy Cox

Memorial Day 2008

Memorial Day 2008

Memorial Day means different things to different people. To some it’s just another day off from work. To some it means parades and barbeques. To others, it means another sale at the local mall.

To many people, Memorial Day means remembering those men and women in the U.S. Armed Forces who fought and died so that we could continue to have our freedoms here in the United States.

The Internet today is representative of those freedoms—to read what you would like to read, to be able to write freely about what’s important to you, to be able to blog, to IM to friends, etc. It’s easy to take these freedoms for granted.

On Memorial Day, we shouldn’t take them for granted. We should remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedoms. And if you should see someone in uniform today who is currently in our Armed Forces or who has served in them previously, please go out of your way and walk up to them and just say “Thank you”. Those two simple words will mean a lot.

Morey Schapira

Peak Oil - Are we on the downhill slide?

Peak Oil - It's a term that is gaining a lot of momentum out there in this day of $133 oil (no doubt we'll look back on this price with nostalgia). If you're not familiar with the term, Peak Oil is a concept that has been around for a long time and only now getting into the mainstream media. It's based on the fact that ultimately the world's oil supply is limited. At some point the reserves get so costly to extract or technologically infeasible that the amount of oil that can actually be delivered will not only level off, but forever be in decline.

Many pundits on both sides of peak oil have argued for years about when it will occur. Why do we care? Well, if the demand for energy across the world continues to rise and the ability to meet this demand is diminishing then there will be a massive commodity crunch coming that will literally limit the amount of growth an economy can have not to mention that oil prices will keep rising. Since practically anything a developed nation produces requires oil in some way, having an oil shortage, not simply an embargo as happened in the mid-80's, will produce an economic scramble unlike anything we've ever seen.

There is a lot of dicussion about whether we have just passed peak oil. Saudi Arabia simply can't produce more oil even with the reserves they have. Some think that producers like this are simply sandbagging to support the price. Others argue that at $133 oil there is simply no reason for any person, state, or country to hold back and so therefore if delivered supplies have flattened or declined then we have as much evidence as we could get that peak oil has occurred. Many of the emirates in the Middle East are already adjusting their economies by redirecting oil revenues into tourist infrastructure as evidenced by massive investments in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, and many other gulf countries. The leaders of those countries haven't tried to keep any secret that they are planning for the future where their region simply doesn't exist on oil revenue. Like they say, follow the money.

The thing that can delay peak oil is, of course, finding more oil. Many on the contrary side of the peak oil concept say that reserves will continue to expand or technology will continue to improve that will allow us to tap otherwise uneconomical reserves and therefore the supply of oil will continue to meet demand. That has certainly been true for many years, but recently there is a groundswell of evidence and belief that the days of finding a massive reserve that can stave off peak oil are now gone.

If you're interested in this topic, WebPartner has developed a channel that covers many of the news stories and sources around this complex, but very important topic. It includes both "proponents" and "debunkers" of Peak Oil. Take a look at it and subscribe to it if you want to stay up to date.

http://www.webpartner.com/?wp=chroom&chid=8y572hijr7YBjJmS

Randy Cox

Colorado Green Tech channel started

I met with Kevin Geminiuc last night here in Boulder. Kevin is a co-organizer of the Colorado Green Tech Meetup group which is a growing group of green technology, founders, and investors. Their goal is to inspire people to get involved with and share knowledge of green technologies and to support "ecopreneurs" getting started with their own products or services.

Kevin and his co-organizer, Kris Wiesenfeld, are working on some green tech products of their own. They are highly motivated individuals and have the perfect profile to run a focused group like the Colorado Green Tech group. WebPartner is a good match for them. Both are extremely busy individuals, but they like the idea of being a focal point for news gathering and commentary in this area. Their members are busy people too and WebPartner can help harness the power of the community by finding the most relevant news and sharing it with everyone so they don't have to spend the time to find it themselves. That sounds like green tech to me!

Their blog is getting underway at http://coloradosustainableenergy.wordpress.com and their website is under construction at http://coloradogreentech.net .

Stop by to have a look at the Colorado Green Tech channel

Randy Cox

New Bundle of Wine Channels Now Available

Wine. You either drink it or you don't. Many a life has been devoted to pursuing its pleasures or the business of wine making.

Today we announce the creation of a bundle of channels specifically highlighting this pursuit. Wine Channel Bundle Right now this is a bundle that includes a general wine channel, one specifically for California wines, and one that pulls together the latest news in the wine industry.

We will likely continue to enhance the channels in this bundle and add more as we go. We are also anticipating that there are more than a few wine afficionados creating their own public, but personal channel, highlighting aspects that they enjoy.

Whether you drink wine or not, we think this is an excellent example of how you can take a very personal topic and keep up on it with very little effort. We have already researched and linked to many of the top wine blogs and will continue to post articles of interest. Literally within minutes you can have a great overview of what is happening in the industry and what people are saying about various new releases.

Enjoy.

Randy Cox

Houston, We Have Lift Off!

Houston, We Have Lift Off!

WebPartner™ is proud of passing another milestone. We are now in our Beta phase.

We have moved our website to a public one and people are beginning to visit and use our site. Building WebPartner™ has taken a great deal of creativity and energy.

Kudos to Mark for his vision and leadership, without which we would not be here today. His thoughtful inputs have been very helpful in guiding us in the right direction.

Kudos also go out to Randy for all of his hard work in designing, creating and operating the WebPartner™ web site. He engineered the toolbar and backend WebPartner service as well. This was a significant engineering accomplishment.

People really like our look and feel. It has taken thousands and thousands of hours coding, testing and optimizing the cool features and functionality. The ability of our readers to set 'watch points' to observe changes on non RSS enabled web sites is VERY powerful and unique.

We also want to thank Landon, Fran, Robert, Richard, and David as well as our friends and family testers for their contributions. Thanks for your help in moving us forward.

So please take a moment now to register, find the channels of topics that are of interest and stay on top of late breaking events and news by watching the headlines in those channels change in your browser as they are automatically updated for you.

Enjoy!

Morey Schapira

Empowerment!

Some folks have asked me about what WebPartner™ is all about.

If I take a step back and look at WebPartner™, to me it is an empowerment tool.

It empowers you to able to find news and updates on the Web about things that matter to you. It gives you an unprecedented degree of granularity in terms of what you’re seeking.

WebPartner™ enables you to search, to learn, to share and to teach.

WebPartner™ enables you to find others who have similar interests.

WebPartner™ allows you to share your knowledge with others.

WebPartner™ unleashes all the information on the Web that is not RSS enabled.

WebPartner™ enhances the discussion with peers at work.

WebPartner™ brings hobbyists closer together.

WebPartner™ keeps team members closer together.

Think WebPartner™. Think empowerment!



Morey Schapira

How is WebPartner different from persistent search?

I often get asked this question, "How is this different from Google Alerts?"

Google Alerts is a service from Google that allows you to specify key words you are interested in and then it uses its vast search capability to inform you if it scans across new content with your words in it. Wow, that sounds pretty cool and it is. However, like most things, it's not quite that easy.

I use alerts a lot myself as a way to help make myself aware of things I would never find on my own. I have alerts set on many topics including geosource heat pumps, hurricanes, and many alternative energy topics.

If you've used Google alerts before you are well aware of some of its drawbacks too. Here's an example on the hurricane keyword. I set up this alert so that I could stay on top of news related to the weather version of hurricanes. But I find that I always have to sift through the wreckage of an alert that gets fired off to me. Why? Well, I might hear about Miami Hurricane NCAA basketball, or some obscure high school sports team. Or there might be a hurricane of activity surrounding some topic and I'll get notified about that too.

This is the core weakness of many persistent search services. You spend a lot of time sifting through the rubble of a search alert trying to find the nugget of information. Like I said, I use alerts a lot. But I view it as a service I'm providing when I find something of interest for one of my channels.

This goes right to the heart of why WebPartner was built. We want a wide community of people to leverage the news gathering and filtering capability represented by the many experts and the community itself to find and publish relevant news items. Many of these sources will be reliable for long periods of time. They need to be monitored, not searched for again. The intellectual equity that is gained when a great source is discovered can now be captured for all.

If you're interested in the latest information on alternative energy, then subscribe to my Alternative Energy Channel. I've already done hours and hours of work finding some of the best resources available. I've even split this topic into the science portion and the business portion. There is an Alternative Energy Business channel that concentrates on the money side and the macro trends pushing on the alternative energy industry. Again, this represents many hours of research and ongoing watches to find and publish some of the most interesting items on this topic. Believe me when I tell you that there are thousands of website and blogs out there trying to get a foothold. I've done the work to watch many of these go and I know which sites give good, reliable, and timely information. And therein lies the value of a channel to a reader or subscriber. They don't have to do that research that I did and yet they can get the best of the best in one efficient look.

If you are already an expert in a field then creating a WebPartner channel is a great opportunity for you to have a tool to help you keep up on that topic. You can use the channel privately, in which case it will never show up in the WebPartner catalog. You can share this private channel with your friends or you can make the channel publicly available for all to take advantage of. Creating a public channel can help you promote yourself or help you maintain your expert status. And WebPartner gives you the ability to invite additional people as a "Contributing Editors" to help you maintain the channel and post items of interest that they find.

I have done this myself to aid my professional knowledge. I set up a "Web Application Development" channel to help stay up on things going on in this realm of my profession. You can do the same for your profession, passion, club, friends, or whatever makes you happy.

Happy WatchPoint.

Randy Cox

What do Cooking, Weather, and Alternative Energy have in common?

Well, maybe they don't have anything in common to you. But to me they represent a few of the joys I pursue in life. I have created one or more channels in each of these areas. At first I started them just for testing purposes while we built WebPartner. Sometime, and I'm not sure when it was, they began to take on a life of their own. Pretty soon I realized I wasn't just reading news, but I was making my life richer. Can I tell you how many more recipes I've investigated, printed out, and cooked? Dozens. How many times, before WebPartner, did I spontaneously find a recipe on Food Network or Epicurious? None. The only time I took the time to search out recipes was when I was looking for something specific and, more often than not, it was the night before a dinner party or having family over. That's why I continue to watch this channel "Gourmet Cooking."

Alternative Energy has been a burn of mine since I was a child. I remember hooking up little solar panels to small electric engines to spin propellers for a science fair project (nerd alert). We're all busy people. Although it seems like there are a lot of people on the Internet with time to burn, most of us don't have that kind of time. Now I can literally skim through new headlines from dozens of sources, with and without RSS feeds, and keep up on the alternative energy field with very little time. Perhaps I'm a little smarter for it all, but more importantly it makes me happy.

Weather has always been an interest of mine. From my beginnings as a farm boy on the northeast plains of Colorado to time in a cockpit of an airplane, weather has always been part of my life. I moved back to Colorado from the Bay Area a few years ago and it seemed like weather once again took on a new aspect in my life. It's a cliche in many parts of the country to say something like, "If you don't like the weather now, wait 10 minutes." Insert your number of minutes as you see fit. Well, I can honestly say that the cliche rings true here in Boulder, CO.

I had a dream several years ago, when the Internet first came into the mainstream, to be able to put together a webpage that covered several of the most important weather resources. When I was a pilot I was obligated to consume as much weather info as I could prior to a flight. Often the legal minimum of checking with the local flight service station left me with a pit in my stomach. If I was honest with myself I really didn't know what I could expect when I left the ground. Not a good feeling. I was an HTML hack at the time and put together a page on my local disk that linked out to several of the up-and-coming weather news resources. Together these resources put together a picture of what my flight would be like when I left Palo Alto.

Today the WebPartner tool can do this for me. Even though I don't fly anymore, I still like to get the best picture of the weather that I can. There are a lot of good sites out there, but not a single one that has all of what I want to see. That's why I put together the "Boulder, CO, Weather" channel. In one quick sitting I can see wind data from my brother's weather station in Monument, CO, current conditions at NOAA and Broomfield airport, animated radar returns, infrared satellite images, weather maps, and forecasts in both text and image form. I can even be informed of when the sun is going to come up.

Let's be clear. I don't need a persistent search service or Google Alerts to tell me there is some new 5-day forecast somewhere in the universe. What I need is a way to tell that my local weather station has updated the 5-day forecast image. I'm not aware of any search engine or alert mechanism that can do that from a source that I already know and just want to monitor.

To get all of this information from the sources I want it from would take 15-20 minutes of navigating bookmarks, clicking, and deciphering. And that's when I know where I'm going. Now I can literally get the whole picture in less than a minute. Channels help you pull together a view of any topic when that topic is complex and the picture needs to be formed from many sources.

Because of the ease of viewing a channel and being able to get information from several sources all at once, it takes very little time to skim over topics that are important to me, but yet life gets in the way. With WebPartner I don't have to sit down and seek out news from loads of bookmarks or worry that my RSS reader is missing something important that didn't come from a feed. Many people simply don't have the time to seek out new information or news. This has been just one of the joys I've had in putting this product together.

Happy WatchPoint.

Randy Cox

Is RSS going to take over the world or just cycling?

Probably not the world and probably not cycling either. At least not in its current form. If you don't know what RSS is then you may not care about this post. If you do then a reminder that RSS is a data format that can be transmitted over the web in a form that make news and information available in a standard format. There are actually several standards out there, RSS being one of the originals and now often times used as a generic term to describe the ability to get a news feed from a website in XML form. Atom and others are also XML formats that attempt to do the same thing.

RSS and similar formats have made great inroads in web publishing as have the readers that reside in web pages or as client applications on your desktop. They help organize, search, and read interesting news from various places.

If you've looked through many of the public channels available on WebPartner you will quickly see that many of the headlines are produced from websites with no RSS feed or webpages where the site, even though they have a feed, are not producing a feed for that page.

A great example that I like to use is from the "World of Cycling" channel with some WatchPoints from VeloNews.com. Velo News is a gold standard in news for cycling, at least for US fans. They cover all kinds of bike racing including cyclocross, mountain biking, pursuit, and, of course, road racing. However, VeloNews has just one RSS feed to cover all of those disciplines and more.

One nice feature of their site is a segment called "Teams". If you know cycling you know that teams change rosters all the time. Many cycling fans spend a lot of time just tracking who is on what team. When you click into the Teams section of the VeloNews site there is no RSS feed specific to team news and roster changes. I can't imagine many people will take the time to click on each of these page and go to the work of figuring out what changed. I can imagine that there are a lot of people who would like to know when teams change without putting all that work in. RSS is not going to solve your problem because it's up to the website publisher to determine what articles and pieces of information to publish in RSS or other feed format. WebPartner turns this on its head by giving you the ability to create your own feeds from websites that may or may not have RSS feeds. You're in charge, not the website publisher.

With WebPartner it's easy to click on the link to any team on the VeloNews site, like Jelly Belly. Using the WebPartner tool bar you can highlight the Team Roster and create a WatchPoint on just that location. WebPartner will then load that page on the interval you set and produce a new headline if the roster changes.

If you subscribe to the "World Of Cycling" channel on WebPartner you can get updates on any team changes and related articles. Where else can you get that kind of information so easily? Even on VeloNews.com it would take several clicks and a lot of mental gymnastics to figure out what is happening.

I think this is just one of hundreds of examples where RSS can only go so far. You and I both know that RSS can only cover a small fraction of the amount of information available on the Internet. We do not intend to replace RSS or even compete with RSS readers, but we do think it is an incomplete solution to a problem we wanted to solve for ourselves. That is, how do you stay on top of all the changes in the world covered by websites when the vast majority of that information has no automated feed like RSS or Atom?

We do think WebPartner's job is to incorporate all the benefits of RSS, but also go after the multitude of information not available in that form and present it in a form that is easy and efficient to consume. If there is an RSS feed available, WebPartner can run checks on RSS feeds, show the new feed, but also show only the differences in the feed from the last headline too. It will add those RSS based headlines into your channel alongside WatchPoints set on parts of a web page or even an image. Now you can open up to vast quantities of web content and catch up on topics easily, with or without RSS feeds.

Happy WatchPoint.

Randy Cox

Welcome to the WebPartner News Blog

The WebPartner News Blog will bring you up to date with news about WebPartner, service announcements, noteworthy channels, commentary, and tips and tricks on how to use WebPartner.

We hope you enjoy it.

The WebPartner Team