Yesterday, Webware (a CNET site) wrote a nice post on RSS Mixer: “RSS Mixer stacks up feeds.” They particularly liked the Apple Dashboard widget feature and the iPhone formated pages. They even built and embedded a Web widget in the article’s page. RSS Mixer also received mention in Widgets Lab. It’s been nice to see RSS Mixer get so much attention even in its fledgling prototype state.

The post mentions (as others have pointed out) that there is no way edit or manage user-created feeds, nor is there a search function. Thankfully, the author seems to understand that this is just a prototype. Over the last two weeks, we’ve been thinking about new features for this site, including searching and editing. If you have any suggestions, please send them our way. We’ll let you know what the next steps for the prototype are once we’ve decided.

Update (August 1, 2007): A couple of new reviews worth mentioning, one in WebInventif (France) and another in Abril.com (Brazil).

In the ten days since we released the RSS Mixer prototype, we’ve learned an awful lot. Of course, that’s the point of prototyping anything. However, the scale of the response (which was somewhat unexpected) has resulted in some hard, yet valuable lessons. In just the last four days we’ve had thousands of visitors and have served up over 10,000 pages. So far, visitors have created 600 RSS mixes which include nearly 1,300 feeds. All of this traffic resulted in some performance issues yesterday, and we still need to do some more tweaking.

Most of the traffic coming to the site is from small blogs, social networking sites, and directories, although a few larger blogs have taken notice, too. Most notably, Mashable, the social networking news site (and the “worlds #1 social networking blog,” and the #11 blog in the world according to Technorati) compared us to Twitter: “RSS Mixer could be Twitter with out the Social Network.” We also received nice mentions in DownloadSquad (“With RSS Mixer all feeds lead to one“), Somewhat Frank (“RSS Mixer Makes Blending Feeds Easy“), and Apple Reporter (“RSS-Mix-A-Lot“) among others.

There’s been a great deal of interest from overseas. Since RSS Mixer provides multilingual support, we’ve seen mixes from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. There have been stories about RSS Mixer in Chocolate (Japan), Quanda.Info (China?), Veadar (Japan), WappBlog (Japan), DosBit (?), Genebeta (Spain?), Estrafalarius (?), and many others. All of these blogs, along with two Dashboard Widgets on Apple’s site, have been driving most of the traffic to the RSS Mixer. (Take a look at the Tour de France News and All iPhone News widgets, automatically created by RSS Mixer.) Right now, the site is so new that less 4% of our traffic comes from search engines. But with hundreds of new pages generated each day, that figure will surely grow. We’ll post again as new developments unfold. Stay tuned… we’ll be adding a few new features in next week or so.

Update: July 30, 2007: Digital Streets has post which explains how to use RSS Mixer to create a unified theme for your Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce accounts, “Use RSS Mixer to Create a Unified Feed from Your Microblogs.” Also, take a look at “RSSMixer.com – Mix All Your Feeds” at Killer Startups.

In 2005, we helped design the Nevada Clean Energy website. The Nevada Clean Enerby Coalition is devoted to finding alternative energy sources and opposing the massive Granite Fox power plant, which was to be built in Northern Nevada. Last year, Sempra Energy decided to try to sell its interest in the plant. Just today we found out they’ve given that up as well!

Here’s a copy of the “Withdrawl of Application” presented to the Public Utilities Commision of Nevada.

This is a great victory for all of us in the West who are concerned about our energy future. It shows that a small but dedicated coalition can make a difference, even when they’re up against a multi-billion dollar company (Sempra’s revenues in 2006 were $12 billion). We hope Sempra will pursue sustainable energy production, rather than dirty coal-fired power. Congratulations to the Nevada Clean Energy Coalition and people of Northern Nevada!

Our latest prototype, RSS Mixer, is now available. This is by far the most elaborate of the prototypes we’ve been working on over the last few months. All of these experimental applications are part of a larger project that we are developing for release in 2008.

RSS Mixer allows you to combine various feeds into a new one that can be viewed as RSS, HTML, an iPhone page, as well as a Web and Apple Dashboard Widget.

The design is simple: you can create a title for your custom RSS mix and you can add up to ten feeds in the form. A listing of recent mixes, along with a few featured ones, is also included. This prototype (and the others) was programmed using Ruby on Rails.

Each custom mix includes Widgets, an iPhone formatted version, and links to the various feeds in the mix. Below are some links to a custom mix called Environmental News.

Take a look at the site and let us know what you think.

At the beginning of last summer, we decided to make Ideum carbon neutral. (See We’re a Climate Neutral Company or our Climate Neutral Page.) Since then we’ve been using wind power and purchasing credits to offset our carbon production. As of today, we’ve avoided nearly 50,000 pounds of carbon, the equivalent of planting over 2,000 trees.

Just today, I’ve renewed our effort and have adjusted our carbon usage. For example, last year at this time we had five employees and now we have ten (although two are part-time). 90% of our electricity still comes from wind, but some of the other factors have changed. Here’s how are carbon usage was recalculated.

• Electricity (the remaining 10% from fossil fuels): 1,742 lbs of carbon, an increase of 20% from last year. Lots of new computers. (Calculated from the Voluntary Reporting of Greenhouse Gases Program)
• Travel to work: 26,660 lbs of carbon (13.3 tons). 10 employees, 240 working days, 145 total daily miles= 35,525 miles annually. Some of our employees bike, walk or car pool, and this has kept the figure down, although it is still higher than last year with double the number of employees. (Calculated from An Inconvenient Truth > Carbon Calculator)
• Air Flights: 9,500 lbs of carbon. 10 medium, 4 long, and 2 extended flights. A 30% reduction from last year. Much less air travel with new, longer-term projects. (Calculated from An Inconvenient Truth > Carbon Calculator)
• Natural Gas: 3,200 lbs of carbon. The same as last year. (Calculated from the Carbon Footprint, had to convert English pounds to US dollars)

The total amount of carbon that we needed to off-set was 41,300 pounds, up from 32,052 pounds last year. Today we purchased 21 one-ton “RECs,” or renewable energy credits, from NativeEnergy. Our cost is $252 a year to off-set our carbon production. If you add in the extra $12 a month for electricity from wind, our final cost is a nominal $396, just over $1 per day.

Perhaps this weekend’s Live Earth concert will inspire other companies to examine their carbon footprints and consider becoming climate neutral.