UserLand Software has introduced Radio UserLand 8.0, a new version of the desktop Web publishing product for use in personal publishing and corporate knowledge management. Version 8.0 adds Mac OS X compatibility.
Radio UserLand is a news publishing and routing tool that runs on the desktop, patterned after the “weblog” concept pioneered by UserLand. It supports Web service protocols such as SOAP and XML-RPC, co-developed by Microsoft, Developmentor, IBM and the open source development community. Because Radio supports XML-RPC and SOAP 1.1, you can run software that links into new distributed XML-based networks, being created by developers on all platforms, in languages such as Python, Perl, Tcl, Visual Basic, PHP and AppleScript. Even C, Java and Microsoft .NET software can wire up to the Radio desktop over the Internet.
Thousands of compatible XML-based news feeds are available in RSS format, co-developed by UserLand and Netscape, according to Dave Winer, UserLand CEO.
Radio can also be used as a Web writing tool. If you’ve been using Blogger or Manila, it will be familiar, according to the folks at UserLand. It’s integrated with the news streaming feature and can sort news into categories for people in an organization and Internet-based workgroups.
The US$39.95 software package comes with tools for building and publishing Web sites, including hosting, your own URL, a news reader that gathers news from news sites, Weblogs’ browser-based editing, a development environment and one-button “push-it-and-read-it” publishing.