j's scratchpad

This coming Friday’s Chronicle of Higher Education includes an article about how some college and university campuses are using RSS. Though the article presents a great discussion of how campuses are using RSS, the author’s explanation of RSS is a little confusing and not completely accurate.

“The technology allows users to receive information, similar to the way in which one would get messages from an e-mail discussion group, except that users decide who can send what.”

Users choose which feeds they subscribe to, but they don’t really decide who sends what on that feed. If they have a really sophisticated system that can filter out posts by certain people or in certain categories, then they can filter what they receive, but they can’t control what gets sent. Being able to filter feed content by category, author, and other factors aren’t common features yet.

He also says that aggregators are free. Some are, some are not. He claims that users choose how often their aggregator searches for new material. Maybe some aggregators do this, but my aggregators don’t allow this. He makes it sound like users subscribe to feeds through the feed-producing Web site, not through their aggregator. He describes aggregators as stand-alone screens on someone’s computer (some are, some aren’t), then he contradicts that later in the article. He writes that aggregators provide a summary of the feed and users follow a link to get the full content. Some aggregators provide the entire feed without a summary or making readers follow a link. It also may depend on how the feed is configured: some feeds only send a certain number of words instead of the entire text. He also doesn’t do a good job of explaining the difference between a site’s e-mail alert and its RSS feed.

Contrary to his thoughts, I think it can be particularly useful for sites that don’t change very often to utilize RSS because it lets people know when there is new content on the site. The e-zine I work on has a sporadic production schedule. One of the complaints we hear from our audience is that people don’t know when new content is added to the site, so they don’t know when to visit the site to look for new content. If we had a feed, our subscribers would know when we’ve updated the site at least. If we configured the feed in a particular manner, they would also get a nice taste of the new content.

It is nice to learn about campuses using RSS, though. It’s useful fodder for convincing certain people about the utility of RSS and why they should produce feeds for their content. I am definitely going to share this with my coworkers, but I am going to let them know that the explanation of RSS and aggregators isn’t quite correct.

Addendum 2/11: There’s a nice pointer to this from Steven Cohen of Library Stuff.

I did share the article with my coworkers along with a pointer to my criticisms and a note saying I’d be happy to explain RSS and aggregators, possibly by doing a demo for the office. No takers yet.

Addendum 2/12: I just found a pointer to this post from elearnspace, a blog about elearning.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2004 at 10:38 am and is filed under Feeds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.