The newest post of the 15 Minute Lunch got me thinking that it is funny how reading just a few weeks worth of post can make you feel a connection with someone you never met.
November 26, 2007
October 12, 2006
An explanation of RSS
When looking for a way to describe RSS to a non user consider this…
[Thanks to Blogs for Learning via Weblogg-Ed]
For those who are not familiar with RSS, allow me a brief explanation. Although there are more in depth resources available to explain RSS (see references at the end of this article), I am going to offer a short explanation to aim at the concept behind what RSS does. When I am asked by people, regardless of their level of network literacy, what RSS is, I try to explain it by analogy to a newspaper. Imagine that you could have a newspaper delivered to your house that had only the content you wanted. That is, let’s say you want the sports section from Chicago Tribune, the education section from the New York Times, the editorial page from the Guardian, and international headline news from the BBC. Now lets say this newspaper would be compiled for you and presented to you whenever you requested, and, what is more, would only give you the information that has changed since last you asked. But, even better what if you could also add into this â??newspaperâ?? your best friend’s blog on cooking, a travel blog from Asia, updates from the Chronicle of Higher Ed . . .or pretty much any website you want. This allows you to monitor all of the content that you select from the web without having to visit all of the sites. What RSS does is â??syndicateâ?? all of the content you want, and send you everything you have asked for. (RSS stands for either â??Rich Site Summary,â?? or â??Really Simple Syndication.â??) Any site you have seen with the following Feed Icon XML Icon RSS Icon is offering these summaries, or syndication; all you have to do is subscribe. I am not going to go into the details of how you get the subscriptions, or what programs you need to do this (you can even do this all on-line so you do not need a separate program), but you can check the end of this article for a few resources that will help you set up the syndication. There are a lot of resources out there to handle these feeds, and each has advantages and disadvantages, so it is worth some time and effort to try out many of these to find out which works for your particular educational situation.
The rest of the article is very good as well. Particularly the part about RSS being the most important advance of the last 10 years.
the most significant transformations in communication in the past ten years, one of the most often cited developments is RSS.
Those interested in blogs as writing tools should read this post and the post from Weblogg-ed that lead me to this one.
Much brain food for today!
September 20, 2006
July 24, 2006
June 20, 2006
June 19, 2006
June 16, 2006
June 15, 2006
Who has the time?
This is a common question of those starting to understand the paradigm shift of the web. Needless to say, “I beleive we all do.” While we might not have the time or more importantly the desire to publish our own blog if you search the web for information searches you have the necessary time to participate in the read write web. And by adopting a few new tools you can make your searches more productive and subscribe to the sites that you find most useful.
In my experience with this medium, I track about 85 124 personal, professional or organizational blogs using a nifty (yes I said nifty) online tool called bloglines using site news feeds (RSS). Both tools are free and they allow me to read new content on the sites that I find most useful from one page that updates automatically when new content is available. Before using these tools I only received my information from a handful of sites that I could remember the address of.
The time these tools saved me allowed me to visit the sites linked within my favorite sites and to respond to posts that I felt I had something to contribute to.
I do keep this blog as a way to track and clarify ideas and projects. This is something that I used to do in a word processor so the time it takes to maintain this blog is only a time shift. BUT the added benefit I have received from this is that I have gotten feed back from others in similar positions and from some of the whose who in the instructional technology world.
Four Searches
To demonstrate the types of resources one can find I did a web search for World Cup Soccer on traditional search engines and Web 2.0 Search Engines…
Traditional Search Engines
Google – Notice the number of official sites and news sites this search returns. An example of new web tools that creep in to this search result is wikipedia and the add world cup scores to your google start page. (The new web is about shared authorship and reusable micro content)
Yahoo – Notice that this search also returns results for Official Sites, blogs and opportunities to buy tickets.
Web 2.0 Search Engines
Google Blogsearch – This search filters out the pages that do not allow user participation. You are more likely to get the “average human” perspective from blogs. A pretty neat thing (yes i said neat) but buyer beware you can’t believe everything that you read.
Technorati – (tags) One can search in three ways on technorati for posts, for blogs or for posts tagged with keywords. Notice the difference between each.
- for posts – This returns posts that contain the words World Cup Soccer in the body of the post.
- posts tagged with keywords – Searching tags helps you find posts specifically about world cup soccer as identified by the author.
- for blogs – this returns posts on blogs solely dedicated to the world cup soccer.
Each option narrows the scope of returns which normally increases usefullness of the results.
Delicious – Delicious tracks and searches web pages that other “regular” folk are bookmarking. Notice that the results for this search return both old school web sites and blogs.
