Today, of course, having a Web site that can syndicate its content, activity, or media through an RSS feed is easier than ever. Using just about any content management system to power your site will most assuredly include all of the proper feeds by default.

Once again, however, times are changing. Even though consuming RSS feeds in a feed reader never made the mainstream (in my opinion if my Mom doesn’t consume feeds than it never hit mainstream) the popularity of such services as Facebook, and Twitter have. These platforms have helped the thought of finding things real time much more mainstream. Want to know what people think about Avatar or who just saw it, look it up on Twitter. You can even do a Google search and find the very latest things related to Avatar on Web.

But can RSS keep up? Most feed readers consume feeds on command or at some kind of interval (say, every thirty minutes). But what if you wanted the very latest updates to show up as they happen? What if you wanted to keep up with your subscriptions real time? Well, with the help of RSS cloud you can. RSS cloud is a “pingable” service that helps bring RSS aggregation into real time. You can read more about how it works on the site.

RSS has always proved itself to be incredibly flexible. It evolved when blogging began. It evolved when the need to distribute media, such as audio and video, came into popular demand. And it is evolving again to become a little more real time friendly.

And, just as I trumpted the importance of RSS when I first learned the spec myself, as Dave Winer requests – I’m joining the drum line for Realtime RSS. I’ve installed the RSS cloud WordPress plugin here on First initial, last name so that its RSS feed now includes everything it needs to be real time compatible.

I suggest you do the same. And by that I mean, learn why it is smart to make your feed compatible and make the necessary adjustments to your feeds no matter what you use to manage your site.

Addendum: Jason in the comments mentions that Pubsubhubbub is the RSS/Atom extension and service to bring your feeds onto the real time Web. He mentioned that RSS Cloud itself, although supported by the millions and millions of WordPress.com blogs, hasn’t really gained near as much traction as Pubsubhubbub. So, until I do a bit more research I’ve installed the Pubsubhubbub WordPress plugin.

Dave Winer tested it on a Friday night. He ran some pretty interesting tests ranging from a vanity search to queries about movies. His queries were interesting but I don’t think they are inline with what Wolfram|Alpha was built for. His searches were just that, searches. They weren’t comparisons, questions, or equations of any kind. While Wolfram|Alpha is perfectly capable of letting you know what 2001: A Space Odyssey is – it does a much better job at telling you how much money the movie made at the box office, or the weather the night the movie was released.

Amber Simmons decided to try to make Wolfram|Alpha fail by asking it some questions that she’s wondered about since childhood. Her results surprised her.

When I initially tested Wolfram|Alpha it was immediately after I had watched the screencast explaining what Wolfram|Alpha was built to do. I did a comparison search on Viddler and Brightcove, a search to figure out my ideal body weight, and one to figure out how many calories I’ll burn running that 5K every other day.

The jury is still out on how I will use Wolfram|Alpha but I do not underestimate its abilities nor it’s teams abilities to adapt the tool for nearly anything you need. I’m very much looking forward to the future of this product.

Over the past few days the number of Twitter statuses popping up from those I follow on Twitter have been scarce.  At first I thought it was because I was beta testing the latest version of Hahlo.  Then, I thought it was a problem with the API and so Twitterrific would also have the issue.  But, I’ve finally taken a moment to look into the problem and I am, indeed, missing the majority of status updates on Twitter.

Recently on Twitter

The image here (pictured) is what I see on my Twitter profile page. You are looking at roughly 12 hours of Twitter activity from, what should be, 43 people on Twitter. However, you’re only seeing activity from four people. This should mean that these four people are the only people that have updated Twitter in the last 12 hours.

But its way off. Turns out nearly every person I follow has updated their Twitter status within the last 12 hours. If you poke around their profile pages, you’ll see that’s true.

The reason I’m writing about this, is because I have yet to see anything on the Twitter blog about this, and I’m certain that I can’t be the only one affected by this. I’ll try my best to make sure that the team at Twitter sees this blog post.

Are you experiencing the same thing?

Update 11:43am EST: I submitted a support request to Twitter in hopes of making them aware of the issue.

Update 8:45am EST on April 21: Still no response from Twitter on their blog. I’m really not sure why they’ve chosen to go silent about this issue, but it is the direct opposite of a good example. Dave Winer is also very surprised at the silence. Ev, Biz, Alex, dudes?

Update: 12:57pm EST on April 21: Twitter has now posted an update to their blog about the issues. Thanks team Twitter for keeping us up-to-date.

Update: 1:05pm EST on April 21:

How to fix your Twitter cache

It is really simple. Follow someone you are not already following. And then un-follow them. Refresh your Twitter page and you’re all set. Your cache has now been restored.

Note: As several people have pointed out, and as I have now discovered myself, this fix only works for “past tweets” that you missed. It does not allow new ones to come through.

Update: 3:25pm EST on April 21: So this post has been linked to from Techmeme, my comment on the Twitter blog, Mashable, and elsewhere. Thanks for all of the links.

Update: 4:15pm EST on April 21: This post has been dugg. Digg it up, if you’d like.

10:45am – The first session of the day HyperDB and High Performance WordPress lead by Barry Abrahmson and Matt Mullenweg focused on making WordPress run smoothly when dealing with high traffic sites or even small personal sites that end up getting on sites like Slashdot and Digg.

A few tips if you do not use any caching and yet you’ve found your site down because of a Digg. There are a few options that were suggested. The first is to modify your .htaccess file and limit access to your site to only your personal IP Address. Then, create an index.html file of the post that is getting all of the traffic. Next, FTP into your site and create the same directory structure on your file system as your post has (i.e. /notes/wordcamp07-day2/ for this post) and upload the index.html into that file. Don’t forget to edit your .htaccess file again to allow everyone back in again.

After that I’d suggest installing WP-Cache, a free plugin, so that this type of thing doesn’t happen again.

11:00am – “Blogs at the New York Times” by Jeremy Zilar is focusing mainly on the struggles of training people to use WordPress, upgrading multiple copies, and just general workflow for their authors and how they use WordPress at the New York Times.

Something interesting that the New York Times blogs does is have “comment of the moment” which spans across off of the New York Times blogs. Many social networks will highlight specific content but not usually highlight comments. I like it.

11:15am – Designing massively multiplayer social systems lead by Rashmi Sinha, Ph.D. is focusing on how to design massively social systems like SlideShare. (View her slide presentation here.)

Notes: Interaction occurs around objects not “just connecting” like; coffee, concerts, wordcamp, etc. Even tag searches are “objects” that people virtually “gather” around. I don’t like that she is limiting interaction models to only four, though she didn’t say they are the only models.

Side notes: Slideshare was built as “the Flickr, or YouTube, of Powerpoint presentations…”. “Did you know that 5th graders do their homework in Powerpoint?” Church 2.0 (clergy are using them in churches). “Powerpoint pornography, does exist”.

Designing for the individual: Usability. Can you find information. Quickly access what you are looking for. Documentation clear, concise.

Designing for groups: How are people interacting? How will people share? “Group think”, or Wisdom Of Crowds, says that you can intelligent decisions being made by a group of people only if certain rules are kept and followed. The system must encourage everyone to be individuals, yet work together. Popularity is one of the most important things on social networks. Unfortunately: The rich gets richer.

11:45am – Almost time for lunch. I’m starving! I just posted my MeToday video, that I did this morning before WordCamp was really full.

Regarding Apple, Inc. “They do invidual design very well. They can’t do social design at all.”. Wow. I’m not sure I get this blanket statement, and I suppose I should take it with a grain of salt. Maybe I will email her.

“Any other activities, besides favoriting and tagging, to gauge popularity?” Favoriting and tagging “go together” on Slideshare. If you favorite something, you are asked also to tag it. (I like this feature). “You don’t get the same credit for favoriting, as you do for commenting.”

Rashmi is taking questions from the audience.

BBQ Lunch!! Wow. That was some delicious BBQ! It felt good to be able to eat, unlike yesterday.

2:15pm – I’m recording parts of Dave Winer’s discussion about the Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing which has touched on some very interesting points. He touched on future-safing your data/content as well as opening up social networks so that users do not get “siloed” into using the service. Example: Facebook’s APIs all point inward, and not outward.

The video for Dave’s presentation is now available on Viddler.

5:15pm – The last few presentations for the day included Liz’s presentation on how they are going through the WordPress admin testing it for usability issues and planning the next (or 2.4) version that will, hopefully, feature many improvements to the WP-admin.

Matt Mullenweg did a presentation on “The State of the Word” (video now available here) updating everyone on what has happened with WordPress since the last WordCamp in 2006. Impressive numbers, huge growth, and many plans for the future. (I have a good portion of this on video and will be publishing it on Viddler the moment that iMovie “does its thing”).