Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Welcome to Kevin Burton’s Feed Blog – dedicated to RSS, Atom, aggregation, and feed technology.

My name is Kevin Burton and in a former life I was the author of the NewsMonster RSS aggregator and a co-Founder of Rojo Networks (though I’m now independent).

I’ve been working with "feeds" for about 5 years now.  It started as part of my Jetspeed project and then was influenced by my research with distributed reputation systems.  When blogs started to get hot I became convinced that feeds were the way of the future.

Around 2002 or so I became an RSS 1.0 Working Group member and then started NewsMonster.

NewsMonster was the first RSS/Atom aggregator integrated into the browser (Mozilla and Firefox).  It took Microsoft and Apple three years to deliver similar offerings.  NewsMonster was the first aggregator to include browser integration, Atom support, RSS module support, offline caching, favicon support, images for stories, and a distributed reputation system (including many other features).  NewsMonster integrated deep into the framework of Mozilla so I was able to learn a lot about the internal design.  Most of this technology was later incorporated into Rojo Networks.

After starting NewsMonster I wanted to take aggregation to the next level.  In 2003 I met with Chris Alden and we formed Rojo Networks along with Mark Graham (a friend who stayed on as a founding advisor).

NewsMonster merged with Rojo Networks and the technology was incorporated into the rojo.com website.  I was responsible for core architecture, cluster design, robot design, and all operational aspects of the site (until early 2005).  I was able to accomplish a number of major tasks while at Rojo including: