Lancaster PA Incident Status Feeds

Lancaster County in Pennsylvania has live incident status feeds that let you track fire, EMS, and traffic incidents in real-time.

http://www.lcwc.co.lancaster.pa.us/lcwc/cwp/view.asp?a=782&Q=538338

Voxant Newsroom

The Voxant Newsroom may be a bit out of place in this list, at least right now. But it deserves some mention. It lets you embed news videos on to your site and actually pays you when people view them.

Right now you pick a video or a topic to embed, but you don't have a whole lot of control after that. Rumour is that they plan to add more features soon that may give you more automated control of the content. Keep and eye on them.

http://www.thenewsroom.com/

Real-time Traffic Information and Alerts for England

The UK Highway Agency has real-time traffic condition feeds that cover all of the Highway Agency's roads England. You can look at conditions across all of England, in specific areas, or specific highways.

http://www.highways.gov.uk/traffic/11278.aspx

Also of interest is this traffic alert feed from London Transport that covers all of London.

http://trafficalerts.tfl.gov.uk/rss/trafficalertsall.rss

If only we could freely get this kind of data here in the states...

Newsfeed Maker

Newsfeed Maker lets you build RSS feeds (as well as JavaScript and IFRAME inserts) that return the news you want. You can select specific categories or enter specific keywords to filter what you get. And it is totally free for commercial use.

Some of the results are just the headlines, but many include a snipped of the article. If you provided a search term, the snippets usually include a piece of the article with your search term.

The news sources are the typical sources you'll find at at most likes Google News or Yahoo News - New York Times, LA Times, etc. There also appears to be lots of new sources from their parent company.

http://www.newsfeedmaker.com/

US and World Population

The US Census Bureau publishes real-time estimates of the the US and world population in RSS. I'm sure someone can find a use for this.

http://www.census.gov/main/www/rss/popclocks.xml

BBC News

The BBC News has a collection of over a dozen news feeds on the typical subjects you'd expect from a news agency - politics, entertainment, business, health, etc. The feed includes the title and brief summary of the article. They even had some "video feeds" but the feeds themselves just includes a summary of the video - your users will have to follow the link for the article to view it on the BBC home page.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm

Weather Reports and News

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) publishes free data feeds with local weather reports for locations all across the United States. What's extra nice about their data is that they publish it in two formats. There is the standard RSS, with the weather conditions in free text, and a more precise XML format that lets you easily pull out specific attributes - humidity, heat index, wind speed, etc.

http://www.weather.gov/data/current_obs/

Bonus: NOAA also publishes a couple of feeds with weather related news and information. And just like the weather condition feeds, these are free to use as you wish.

http://www.rss.noaa.gov/

Currency Exchange Rates

CurrencySource provides RSS feeds with exchange rates for over four dozen currencies, free to use in your web sites and applications. While not real time (it's updated every 20 minutes between 11 AM and 6 PM EST, Monday through Friday) it's perfect for most applications.

If you host a number of web sites that need currency exchange data, we'd recommend you schedule a job that polls this feed and stores it into a shared database that your other applications can pull from. We do this at Byzet for this very feed as well as many others.

http://www.currencysource.com/rss_currencyexchangerates.html

Forbes.com

Our very first RFF listing is from Forbes.com. It's free to use on any web site as long as no content is altered or published full-text, and that you attribute Forbes.com as the source.

Pick from a collection of over three dozens RSS feeds on a variety of topics - business, health care, personal finance, investing, philanthropy, taxes, retirement, law, technology, real estate, health care, travel, food... and more. You are bound to find something of value here.

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/rss.html

Welcome to Really Free Feeds (RFF)

Many RSS and Atom feeds are available for "personal, non-commercial use only." Commercial users have to pay to incorporate similiar feeds into their site. So what about the small commercial user who doesn't have the budget or income to justify the expense? Well, there are some totally free feeds out there, and this blog will help you find them.

We'll also from time to time focus on related issues, like tools and code to integrate feeds into your site.