"Feeding Time," From law.com
Overwhelmed by infoglut? Finally, there's an easy way to stay on top of the news. And you can do it by looking at one -- yes, only one -- window on your computer desktop. The online wizard behind this is RSS, or "really simple syndication."
A WordPress blogger has created a detailed chart comparing the features and limitations of the blogging software options. It's still a work in progress.
We used Movable Type as our example in the presentation. As you'll see from the chart, it's not the only option out there.
The RSS Cookbook is a quick-and-dirty guide to getting started with a desktop reader (in this case, SharpReader) and subscribing to a feed.
A comparison of E-mail and RSS, positives and negatives, from the perspective of marketer (or librarian) and customer (or patron). This is a good explanation of the differences between the two, as this question came up during the presentation.
From his remarks yesterday at the Microsoft CEO Summit. I hope the demo was better than the explanation.
Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that [that] notifies you that something has changed called RSS.
This is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they'll wonder why I didn't put their name on it. But, then again, I don't want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I'm saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.
Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web site and it never changes. It's very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.
And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you're interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn't interfere with your normal Inbox.
An PLA ePublication by Steven M. Cohen. While he focuses on public libraries, the information is relevant to any library organization.
Wired currently offers 15 feeds, including "Gadgets & Gizmos," "Wireless News," and "Privacy & Security Issues." They also offer a customized search feed option.
A PowerPoint presentation by Howard Ratner, CTO of Nature Publishing Group. Presented yesterday at the NISO workshop, "Metadata Practices on the Cutting Edge." Ratner focuses on some of the "techie" things that Nature Publishing Group is doing with RSS and Urchin, an RSS aggregator they're currently developing.
NPG currently offers 10 feeds, including Nature Science Update and Access to the Literature: The Debate Continues. Unfortunately, the complete list is buried two levels below the NPG index page. However, scattered links to the newsfeeds can be found on the relevant pages, but with no consistency of appearance or location.
Joining Syndic8 and NewsIsFree is CompleteRSS, another tool for locating RSS feeds. This one is a search engine, without a browse option.
I searched on 'Science' and found 179 feeds, with no explanation of how the feeds are sorted. CompleteRSS is still in beta, so hopefully this is a work in progress.
Two more resources have made RSS feeds available, and these examples certainly illustrate the locating challenges that we discussed last week.
SmartMoney.com has put an "orange RSS button" at the bottom of the page. They are currently offering 12 feeds, including one for recent articles. They also give explicit instructions on how to use the feeds in your own Web site.
Reuters has put their "orange XML button" with the text "Reuters RSS" on the left margin, under the list of primary news channels. Sixteen feeds are currently available.
The Virtues of Chitchat - Michael Schrage, CIO Magazine
Using blogs for project management, and how not to use them
RSS: is this the next step in online marketing? - Trevor Marshall, Backbone
RSS: What it is, Where to get it, How to make it, How to use it - Robert Teeter
Surf's Down as More Netizens Turn to RSS for Browsing - JD Lasica, Online Journalism Review
We would like to thank everyone who attended the presentation on Tuesday. I'm making a few updates to PowerPoint slides, once that's done we'll convert the file to PDF and make it available to everyone.
The Typepad demo blog will be up until the end of the month, but we'll keep this one going as long as there's interest.
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