Why RSS? Why Blogs? Why? Why? Why?

April 15, 2003

RSS, RDF, XML, news aggregators, blogs, ack!! It can all get a bit overwhelming and difficult to keep tabs on. I’m still very much slogging through the learning stages when it comes to much of this stuff. I suspect this is the case for many of you out there. These are a few loosely-gathered thoughts on the whole matter - a little pep talk in case you’re feeling overwhelmed (trust me: this is equally therapeutic for myself). Last chance to hit the back button on your browser…

Tip #1 - don’t get frustrated, and don’t feel you need to understand it all…at least not yet, anyway.
This is fast-developing stuff, and you can only hope to do your best to follow along with the digital gurus that blaze the trail. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think even the experts know what’s going on 3/4’s of the time.

Tip #2 - Blogs, RSS, instant messaging, listservs, e-mail, yadda, yadda, yadda…, these are all different ways of communicating messages and/or capturing information, and each has its strengths, and each has its weaknesses. I see RSS and content aggregation as trends for the future, but not necessarily wholesale replacements of the present. It all depends on the context.

Here’s something to chew on: Randy is trying a neat experiment over at his blog - he’s taken a question that he has posted to multiple listservs, and tried to move the replies (and some of the discussion spread across 5 listservs) back into a (one) blog setting. He’s not trying to pull the discussion off the lists per se, but rather trying to capture the discussion from 5 lists in one place. In this case, the difficulty will be getting people to shuffle this topic off the list(s) and onto the blog. Buy-in is a tough one — not because the blog isn’t well suited to the task, but because the conversation didn’t start there, and because the listservs are probably too well established. It will be interesting to see what happens. A great (but possibly time-sucking Part B to the experiment) would be to recruit a few of the listserv renegades and to start up a fledgling subject weblog (in this case, probably a blog for engineering librarians), and to start posting on topics that matter to librarians in this area. For those that like emails, most blogs can be set up to automatically email you when someone posts (much like a listserv) and like my own blog, you can even set it up so that you need only subscribe to comments from one posting (or thread, in other words) rather than the whole shebang (trivia- did you know ‘shebang‘ is a Unix term!). At this point, Trackback is the next little gem that comes into play, but let’s leave that out of the equation, at least for today. Back to the blog idea - it is a relatively quick and painless process to setup a RSS aggregator to track blog postings, comments, and other changes (assuming there’s an XML way of framing it) to the site. The news is still being delivered to you, I think in a way that makes more sense than your average folder hierarchy using Outlook’s In-box. For example, check out the great features that Awasu and others are currently implementing to help organize and maintain your RSS feeds (see my extended comments for details).

Tip#3 - Don’t think of a blog (or any of these other elements) as a flat item, or one that stands alone without consideration of the other pieces. Blogs can incorporate oodles of other components, modules or whatever else you might like to call them. Bulletin boards, calendars, document archives, FAQs, downloads, RSS feeds, RSS aggregation within your webpage…, you name it, it can probably get spliced in somewhere.

’nuff rambling from this overtired cowboy. Read up from these people that actually know what they’re talking about (and please let me know in the comments if you have other suggestions for the list):

What is RSS and why should I care?
:: Explanation of RSS, How You Can Use it, and Finding RSS Feeds by Michael Fagan
:: News That Comes To You by J.D. Lasica
:: RSS 2.0 by Dave Winer
:: What is RSS? by Mark Pilgrim via O’Reilly
:: RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content by Danny Sullivan
:: How to’s: What is XML? And What is RSS? Why Do I Want It Anyways? by ScriptyGoddess
:: The Evolution of RSS by Andrew King (Web Reference)

RSS and Libraries:
:: RSS For Non-techie Librarians by Steven Cohen
:: Keeping Current in 40 Minutes or Less - Guaranteed! by Steven Cohen (ppt from CIL 2003)
:: Looking at Content Through RSS Colored Glasses by Steven Cohen and Jenny Levine
:: Keeping Current Using RSS and Portals, Blogs and RSS: Why they are your future by Jenny Levine (both are PPT presentatons)
:: The Blog Realm: RSS, Aggregators, and Reading the Blog Fantastic
by Greg R. Notess
:: RSS-ing libraries via eBN
:: Searching RSS Channels for News, Four Models for Aggregating and Publishing RSS Headlines, and Publish and Syndicate Your News to the Web from the Utah State Library
:: RSS Resources compiled by Peter Scott (see also libdex list with available RSS feeds listed!)
:: An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers by Stephen Downes (Word doc)

List of RSS and News Reader Aggregators:
:: RSS Feed Reader / News Aggregators Directory from hebig.org.
Other:
:: DMOZ - Libraries - RSS
:: Google - Libraries - RSS

I don’t know that the beta release of 1.0.3 has been made public, but I’m glad I was given the chance to be a guinea pig:

New Awasu features (straight from the guru’s mouth):

:: If you are running out of fingers and toes keeping track of your channel subscriptions, channel filters will help you keep them neatly organized (your channels, that is, not your digits). Channel filters are a much more flexible way of managing your channels than the traditional way of putting them in folders and sub-folders. If you’ve heard rumours about the file system being developed for Microsoft’s next generation of Windows, you will recognize some of the similarities in the way information is being managed.

:: Channel reports provide a single-page listing of all or a selection of items from any number of channels. If you like to browse your channels from a single page or want to export your channel feeds to a PDA for offline browsing, then you’ll be using this feature a lot. However, channel reports are surprisingly flexible and let you do much more than just this. You can export your channel subscriptions to any format whatsoever, automatically keep your blogroll up-to-date or create meta-channels i.e. channels that are aggregated from several other channels!

:: Items in the channel item panes are now shown in three different ways: no icon to indicate read items, a black and white icon for unread items and a yellow icon for new unread items i.e. items that were received in the last update for that channel.

:: Channel summary pages now show the appropriate icon for each feed item and italicize read items. These summary pages are also kept in sync with what happens elsewhere in the UI e.g. if you mark items as read from the item pane, the summary page will update itself to reflect that.

:: The number of unread items in each channel is displayed in the My Channels window. This can be turned off in the Program Options if you find it distracting.

:: “Mark all as read” was added to the My Channels context menu.

:: The size of each channel’s item pane is saved and restored the next time the channel is opened. If you prefer the old behaviour where it would show itself every time the channel was opened, stop Awasu, find the “SaveItemViewHeights=” option in your user’s CONFIG.INI file and set it to 0. Note that if you have “Auto-hide feed items” turned on in the program options, the item pane will always be closed up when you open a channel’s window (as before).

:: If more than one new item is found when a channel is updated and notification balloons are enabled, the tray icon starts animating and/or a sound played only when the first balloon is shown (instead of for every one).

:: The way Awasu decides when to start and stop the system tray icon animation has been completely overhauled. It was working properly as designed (no, really!) but some people were finding it a bit annoying. The animation will now be stopped any time you switch to Awasu and will not start if Awasu is the active window.

Posted in RSS and Aggregators