Here's a screenshot of the monthly calendar view in the BlogMatrix Platform. The individual entries are events imported Upcoming feeds and collected together into a "Toronto Network"

Read/WriteWeb has a post on Wine.com and it's RSS API. You can see an example of the API (i.e. a REST GET) here; you can see how well it validates here (not very, though the fixes look to be very simple).

Every page (well, except admin stuff) in BlogMatrix is an "RSS API" in the same sense as this. Our production model is quite simple: a userid + a set of tag selectors + a template selector = output. The userid is encoded the domain name; "all" acts as a wildcard and our new "network" feature acts as a wildcard across a defined set acconts. The tag selector is defined by the path of the URI: for example, this selects all posts tagged "blogmatrix" and "downtime". Finally the template is selected in one of three ways: ending a path in "index.xxx" selects template "xxx"; "?t=yyy" selects template "yyy" (and will override index.xxx if present). If neither of these are there, the query is assumed to be "index.html" which selects the template "html". Thus, to convert the page above to an RSS feed, just add "index.xml". If there are structured data elements in the posts they'll be properly encoded into the RSS feeds.

The challenge for the BlogMatrix Platform is to take an RSS feed like Wine.com's and when it is imported to store it in a useful way. We're 95% of the way there, but it's not a priority for short term delivery. Still...

Dion Hinchcliffe:

Important Properties of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise 

• Freeform: Only minimal upfront structure, with simple lists, tags, and microformats at first, with more structure later if absolutely needed.
• Zero Training/Simple: Any barrier to use means that automatically fewer people will use the application or its more complicated features.  The most successful sites on the Web require no training at all and guide the user to do the right things.  Your business systems can and should be similarly effortless to use.
• Software as a Service: Online software, with its functionality and information available on any computer, home or work, anywhere in the world, day or night, is the most productive and useful software possible.  Installed native software just cannot compete with such persistent availibility.
• Easily Changed:  If a user can’t easily make the necessary change to the structure or the behavior of a system, he or she must have an expert — usually in the IT deparment — to do it, and get in line to wait for it, not to mention pay for it.  This simply won’t do when there are ways to put much of this control back in the user’s hands.  Using the structure of the Web to chunk up functionalty, the increasing use of feeds, badges, and widgets, will transfer many common IT tasks back to end-users in the next few years.
• Unintended Uses:  Preconcieved notions about how an IT system will be used can cut it off from the most valuable uses down the road.  RSS syndication is teaching us a lot about this phenomenon on the Web, as well as mashups.  It’s all about letting the structure and behavior of IT systems emerge naturally and organically. Having open APIs, easily wired together pieces, and loose and fluid tools helps enable this as well.  Discoverability of all of these is essential too.  Examples:  Not UDDI, search.  Not Web services, RSS. Not portals, widgets.
• Social: Business software tends to harness collective intelligence and even e-mail is social to a certain degree (but darn it, it’s push isn’t it?).  Enterprise Web 2.0 software enables pull-based systems that enable people to come together and collaborate when they need to and are entirely uncoupled when they don’t.  Enabling just-in-time, freeform collaboration is the key, and so is capturing and publishing the results to be reused and leveraged afterwards by others.  Wikis combined with enterprise search do all this automatically for example.

"Back in skinny jeans" (we wish) has an excellent description of RSS for the everyperson, with graphics and everything:

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

Search Engine Watch is reporting (hat tip: Scoble) that Google Base is now providing RSS feeds. For example, this page has this feed (the RSS icon is in the upper-right hand side corner). Alas, it isn't providing the "Google Base data" in these feeds. If you want to know why this would be good, read on.

This is the first of several posts I'll be making about Google Base -- and in particular, the RSS/Atom "bulk upload" format which extends those XML formats with addition information that allows Google Base population.

We're working on a project to demonstrate structured data for "sales lead". In terms of standard "exisiting" structured element, this has a contact person, company, phone number and address. In addition, we extend it with Product Name, Percentage Closed, Close Date and so forth. The title of the entry represents the Opportunity and the body is for other comments.

You can see an example of this here. If you're interested in what the blogmatrix.cfg for this looks like, I've attached a sample snippet.

We haven't done anything particular clever yet. In particular, we'll be adding the ability to query against Percentage Closed using tags, items past the close date, and maybe a few other things for the demo.

What's really neat is that we can export this into our RSS feed also, using the Google Base definitions (a mix of predefined type and some we've made up on the spot). You can view the feed (for this one entry!) here or here's the important part (reformatted for readibility):

 <rss version="2.0">
 <channel>
 ...
  <item>
   <title>
    The potential to sell 10000 shiny pennies
   </title>
   <link>
    http://home01.semantic.blogmatrix.com/:entry:home01-2006-07-13-0008/
   </link>
   <g:product_type>
    Penny
   </g:product_type>
   <gc:sales_status type="string">
    Still looking for a sucker
   </gc:sales_status>
   <gc:percent_closed type="int">
    0
   </gc:percent_closed>
   <gc:person hcard:type="fn" type="string">
    Johnny Q. Public
   </gc:person>
   <gc:organization hcard:type="org" type="string">
    Bank of Canada
   </gc:organization>
   <gc:job_position hcard:type="title" type="string">
    Secretary to the Undersecretary
   </gc:job_position>
   <g:location>
    1 Bank Street
    Ottawa, Ontario
    Canada
   </g:location>
   <gc:phone_work type="string">
    605-666-6666
   </gc:phone_work>
  </item>
 </channel>
</rss>

More to follow...

I was at the University of Toronto this morning, courtesy of Greg Wilson to run through in more detail the demo I gave at DemoCamp several months back (link, link). In return I got a demo of BlogScope which is tracking an impressive 2.6 million blogs as of today. BlogScope does "text stream" analysis of blog posts, tracking what's popular, what's hot ("bursts"), and doing a form a faceted analysis ("correlation") -- what other words are popular in posts that have a certain word/phrase in them -- which is cleverly done since one would expect this to be a O(N²) algorithm.

We discussed structured data, geotags, tagging (all pretty key concepts in BlogMatrix) and so forth and how they could be used to extend BlogScope. There's a lot of potential for this application in "intranets", closed networks, if RSS/Atom had widespread adoption to export events and data with an organization.

DeWitt Clinton has a good article about why you -- i.e. "we" -- should use Atom over RSS:

If you’re a human then you’ll probably have no problems spotting that the first one is plain text, the second one is XML-escaped HTML, and the third is HTML wrapped in an XML CDATA section. If presented in a web browser, in a HTML <div/> tag perhaps, then a human will have no trouble interpreting the content.

But if you’re a computer, it isn’t quite that easy. To a computer, the contents of a RSS <description/> element are opaque. The best a computer can do with it is hope to render it for a human to interpret.

...

What if you added semantic microformat markup to your HTML? If you’re using an opaque data format, then you may as well have spared yourself the effort, as no client will know it’s there.

Or what if you wanted to put some other structured data in your syndicated content feed? Geospacial data, perhaps. Product data. Or perhaps Google’s GData format. If it’s syndicated over RSS, no one will ever know.

So the problem is that the RSS syndication format is that it is lossy. Lossy insofar as information you had when writing the data is lost when it is passed over the wire.

...

My recommendation to application developers today is to use Atom 1.0, not RSS, as the basis for your content syndication.

Alas, commenter Kosso finds the key problem with using Atom: 

Does Atom support enclosures. And multiple ones at that?
If so, I would look at creating a toolset to podcast in both formats.

However, that does not mean feeds won’t be broken. So many publishing tool are broken. RSS is ’simpler’ than atom.

...

I don’t want to fan a feed war, but I want to judge by trying to build a feed publishing tool which works.

BlogMatrix will always have a podcasting component (i.e. adding attachments to posts) and that means until Apple's iTunes accepts Atom feeds, well, RSS it is. Afterwards ... 

Atom N3 is ... well, I'll let the The Sun BabelFish Blog explain it:

Atom N3 is an ontology that closely maps the Atom feed format to N3. It clearly reveals the logical structure of the atom feed format, and is what is needed to make atom:

• easily and clearly extensible
• available to SPARQL queries
• easily mappable to java objects through frameworks such as So(m)mer

Singpolyma at the XOXO Blog has written a tool to convert hAtom, Atom, XOXO blog format and RSS into "standard RSS" (you can read his brief comments about it here).  It's written using Ning, which is pretty impressive -- I assume they're just letting him run PHP scripts.

The template for this blog should be hAtom compatible, so if you do this you shoud see RSS. Alas, you do not. I'm not going to mess with the templates right now because we have a new L&F coming out of our design shop any day now and I'll spend the effort there.

Disclosure: I'm responsible for the original hAtom spec!

We’ve updated our RSS 2.0 XML for Apple’s revised podcasting spec. In particular, your image should display correctly now. You will have to post a new entry (or repost an old one) before the changes show up in your XML file.

Please let us know if this works (or doesn’t).

BlogMatrix supports much of Apple’s new RSS extensions for podcasting and integration into the iTunes Music Store.

In particular:

• you can upload a picture to act as your cover art
• you can select up to 5 categories to classify your weblog under Apple’s taxonomy
• you can mark your podcast as “explicit” to warn kiddies away from adult content

You still must submit your weblog into iTunes Music Store manually using the iTunes 4.9 interface.