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daily link  Saturday, May 11, 2002

Multi-Author K-Logs
 
This is another post to the K-Logs list (weblogs for knowledge management and collaboration).  If you like this topic, you are welcome to join (over 400 members!!) 
 
Today, UserLand introduced a new tool for leveraging RSS to produce a weblog with multiple contributors. If you are using Radio, you can download and install it from this page:
 
http://radio.userland.com/multiAuthorWeblogTool
 
There are lots of situations where it is useful to build a K-Log that aggregates the syndicated news from multiple authors (see note below on what an RSS newsfeed is).  This is also a great way to use K-Log categorization (see the note below on was a K-Log category is).
 
So, for example, I want to make a post to my K-Log about a project I am working on.  I can see right away that this post is useful to my main K-Log (which is available corporate-wide on the corporate Intranet), my team category (which I have opted to be just an RSS feed and not a full weblog), and my corporate partner weblog (which is available on a password protected extranet site which partners in other companies read -- I have opted to make this a full HTML K-Log).
 
My team leader can now run a Radio K-Log category that automatically publishes the RSS news from each of the K-Logs on the team.  It aggregates the feeds into a single readable K-Log.  The team now has a single readable repository for all information the team is working with, without pulling content away from their personal K-Logs.  Nice.
 
Note, that you can use Radio to build a team K-Log using its mail-to-weblog feature (see Radio's prefs section).  I have had a couple reports that people have done this and it works great!
 
Here are some notes on RSS newsfeeds and categorization:
________________________________________
 
NOTE(Categories):  For those of you that are new to the discussion, categories are a way to publish content to topic or reader specific K-Logs.  I can easily build categories for groups I am part of, topics that I am interested in, internal vs. external audiences, etc.  Categories can have different templates and generate their own RSS newsfeeds. 
Here is a screen shot of how to create a new category in Radio.
 
NOTE(RSS Newsfeeds):  For those of you that are new to the discussion, RSS newsfeeds are a short format (headline + description) syndication format in xml.  All Radio weblogs automatically create RSS newsfeeds for the main page and all category pages.  This newsfeed allows other people using a news aggregation tool, like Radio, to automatically get anything new that I post to my K-Log.   This makes getting the latest news from a variety of K-Logs and many general news sources (Radio comes bundled with newsfeeds from the NYTimes.com) extremely easy.  All the news gathered is on a single news page for easy scanning.  Here is a screen shot of my news page in Radio.
 
Here is a screen shot of the subscriptions icons/buttons on a Radio site
(A person, with Radio running, can subscribe to you by clicking on the orange xml coffee cup.  It's that easy.)
 
Thanks. 
[John Robb's Radio Weblog] 
5:23:58 PM  permalink  source

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