The web has changed the way we research, read, write and distribute information. Online practices are all significantly different to the print world. RSS and its implications will be the topic I discuss in class this morning.
We will start with a video RSS in Plain English produced by commoncraft.
Most of the time in this course I have been talking about ways to create content in the form of building websites or creating blogs etc. Today in class I will be talking about RSS as it is fundamentally a new way to deliver and consume web content.
Once you start poking around blogs you quickly have problems with ‘keeping up’ and reading does appear daunting. Before RSS, users had to visit individual web sites to find out what was new. You don’t have to click from blog to blog to see if your favourites have new content as with RSS new content is delivered directly to web browsers or your desktop, using an aggregator .
Wikipedia defines RSS as
a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.
Users of RSS content use programs called feed ‘readers’ or ‘aggregators’: the user ’subscribes’ to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.
To view RSS feeds, you’ll need an RSS reading program called an aggregator or reader which allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds. Their main advantage is that they save you time.
Ryan Singel writing for Wired News makes the observation in Aggregators Attack Info Overload that users are using aggregators in order to manage the information overload. Eric Dahl writing for PC World in RSS Hot Fix for Info-Junkies : Growing Web standard makes it easy to get news on the topics you want describes RSS as the “next Web-based time-saver”.
When an aggregator is opened it is much like an email program which means that each blog can be scanned quickly. Posts that are not of interest can be skipped and deleted while those that are of interest can be focused on.
Syndication holds implications for both website visitors and website designers as one aspect of dynamic sites is being able to produce syndicated content that people want. Aggregators allow users to shape their own media consumption. It is possible for a user to subscribe to some key news media outlets such as the BBC, or Reuters, as well as non-news sites such as for instance Flickr, podcasts, video podcasts, or Apple’s iTunes Music Store.
The recent development of ‘tags’ means that people can also subscribe to material such as photographs in flickr. I have found that once I became used to shaping my own media mix using an aggregator it would be extremely difficult to be satisfied with simply the content provided by mainstream news sites.
The implications of RSS for how we create and consume media are many as RSS not only enhances the range and diversity of available media products and allows consumers to easily shape their choice of material. The implications of a public able to shape their media consumption are huge. Many see the blogging phenomenon, and developments like RSS, as undermining mainstream media or ‘old media’.
RSS Readers and Aggregators
There are web based readers and readers that are stand alone applications housed on your own computer. I prefer web based readers as it means I have access to my news anywhere. Most RSS readers are free to use, and easy to learn.
There are many web based readers available
FeedCollectors allows you to collect feeds and share them.
feed-directory.com is a large directory of feeds
Yahoo has a list of readers
Google also has a list of readers
Links to more articles
Hack Attack: Getting good with Google Reader
Take a look at this article on using Bloglines as it has clear comprehensive instructions, illustrated with screenshots which has been published by Preetam Rai of betterdays.
Alex Iskold in The Future of RSS asks if RSS is evolving into a tool which can deliver semantically rich information. The article covers a brief history of RSS, an explanation of how it works and what it is designed to do and not do.
Elsa Wenze of CNet has done a review on the popular RSS readers Make your own headlines looks at readers like Google reader and bloglines.
John Tokash’s Aggcompare compares RSS aggregators.
Dave Shea of Mezzoblue has published a what is article in What is RSS XML Atom Syndication? and Dave Winer has summarized the History of RSS published on the RSS at Harvard Law blog.
