RSS is a great technology for reading headlines from blogs and news sources, but it doesn’t need to stop there. An RSS 2.0 feed is really just a a list of stuff. If we build on that premise, then we can do some incredibly powerful things with RSS. RSS Traits is an extension spec to RSS that allows you to deliver all kinds of information (domain-specific or otherwise) within an RSS feed.

Here’s a brief sketchcast that outlines the motivation behind, logic around and a few simple examples of RSS Traits:

A draft specification of the RSS Traits extension is available for sharing and viewing. Like everything else on the Arc90 Lab, it is available under Creative Commons.

While looking for information about the Nintendo Wii he had just preordered, Joel Nagy found himself running across a growing number of search results that didn’t have the facts he wanted. Instead, he got back articles talking about comparisons or previews. What to do when you get pages about the PS3 or Xbox when you’re looking for the Wii? Search clouds provide an interesting solution.

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As fradualent emails become more and more commonplace, and occurences of identity theft rise in frequency, Arc90′s lead architect Joel Nagy steps back and thinks about a new way to make email a bit more secure.

With the onslaught of spam and phishing that deluges our inboxes everyday we have a hard time even trusting legitimate email. This past weekend I received an email from my bank with a link to login to my account, which of course I didn’t trust. How are we supposed to know which messages are real and which are phishing tactics?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell, at a glance, whether or not an email was from a reputable source? Users need email communication from service providers to be uniquely identifiable with some sort of key. This way, any email without this key would be immediately suspect. Luckily, there exists a mechanism built-in to email software for doing this: pictures. If every email from your bank contained a simple, recognizable picture, you would know when you received an email from someone who wasn’t your bank.

For the picture to be easily identifiable the account holder should upload a unique photo. To make it slightly more secure so that someone can’t simply grab your photos from flickr and try to send them to you in an email, upon upload the image should be modified with some random filters. Filters such as rotation, coloring, borders, noise, or inverting will make the image more unique, yet still recognizable.

Here’s an example of what an email could look like with this method employed, I would notice that this was a picture I took my self and with a few filters applied to the image it is now unique and still recognizable:

Granted any information sent in an email is able to be intercepted, and someone could potentially get your picture, however this would be part of a targeted attack. Phishing by and large is a wide net approach at trying to get millions of people to enter their account information. This approach is not meant to be a complete solution but part of broader security measures (which would take into account users with disabilities), and provides a simple and quick way for users to gain a higher level of trust from online services.

Many of us have come to realize how useful RSS is when it comes to tracking news headlines or your favorite blogs. It’s a great way to keep up without having to visit many websites. What most people don’t know is that RSS is an incredibly flexible technology that can do all sorts of other things.

The following list is a collection of 25 alternative uses for RSS. We hope you’ll find some of them useful.

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