Just to bring you all up to speed with where I am with the things we read about this week, and because it is is relevant to the conversation, and can be the fun factoid about myself, I'd like to describe my love affair with RSS. I have been blogging for several years now (actually, my time in ETL has brought my blog contributions to a halt, but that is another story), and have been presenting blogging as a concept to all sorts of departments at the university I work for as well.
In this, I have come to think of blog as sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy for web publishing. As the lesson hinted at... in the beginning there was the web, and it was good, but it certainly wasn't easy. The simplistic nature of a chronologically managed written content is all most people want. Blogs are nothing special in of themselves, but blogging as a movement or trend in homegrown authorship is quite powerful (as mainstream media seems to remind us ceaselessly).
And in this unbridled potential power... the first innovation to really make the web about more than those people with the resources to put things out there, is just one thing out there that can take advantage of the power of RSS. If blogging is a vast collective phenomenon comprised of individual component blogs, then RSS is the glue that holds everything together... and the surface is merely being scratched.
While blogs are the new kids on the block, I see more and more web services that offer some kind of RSS or XML syndication component. And while this may not seems like such a big deal, it is. It means that all those services that use one of these standards has reduced its offerings down to basic building blocks that can be reinterpreted as one sees fit. An individual blog post is the same as an individual news story is the same as an individual search result is the same as an individual forum posting is the same as an individual ebay item is the same as an individual upcoming event on a calendar. The fact that I can choose to look at all these things at once is amazing.
One real life application that I have done in the past would be to take multiple feeds and show them off on single web page. For example, we could edit the design of this blog to show the latest posts made by other teams. One service that makes this easy for people who don't want to get their hands covered in code is to use Feed2JS. I have had much success with this service which has its roots in education. It lets you paste in a feed URL and returns a piece of java script you can paste into a web page to have it show the latest items from the feed. \
I am sorry if I am all over the place with this post, but the subject matter has been so close at hand for so long. As a result, I am really excited to hear what others have to say about this week's content,.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Erik! Your post was inspiring! I had to take the time to check out the http://feed2js.org site that you linked to. This sounds like the solution I’ve been looking for to show our college news as headlines on the front page of our web site. I had intended to play around with it before I posted, but alas, I haven’t had the time yet. I think I would want to run the service on my own server so the updates would appear quicker. (I think the site said running from their server would cause a delay of up to an hour before changes are seen?) I’m guessing you run the code on your server, yes? Oh, and this statement: ”If blogging is a vast collective phenomenon comprised of individual component blogs, then RSS is the glue that holds everything together... and the surface is merely being scratched” – it’s totally quotable! And I agree. :)
While blogs are the new kids on the block, I see more and more web services that offer some kind of RSS or XML syndication component. And while this may not seems like such a big deal, it is. It means that all those services that use one of these standards has reduced its offerings down to basic building blocks that can be reinterpreted as one sees fit. I can't agree more - but how these feeds are used is the key! It is very powerful, and yet, so simple! It can help to provide more "dynamic" web content, as well as consolidate access to lots of sites one might want to access anyways - but gets tired of clicking to all the different web sites!
Post a Comment