Wednesday, March 06, 2002

Blogs for the Politicians. More and more everyday, it seems that large news media outlets have a great amount of power over what the public knows about their government. In attempts for sensationalism, the media often glosses over the real truth of a story. Many people feel disconnected from their politicians, in turn leading to low voter turnouts. The personal weblog (or blog, as it's more popularly known) has been boasted as the next big revolution in media, where individuals are empowered with the abilities once only held by large news media outlets. There is some truth behind the hype, however, Joe Average talking about his stamp collection, however interesting, isn't going to change the world; important, respected and well-known people talking about items of general interest will. Put these two issues together, and I think a problem has just been solved. [kuro5hin.org]
12:08:24 PM

Subscription Sharing Systems (RSS)

This was published to the K-Logs group (knowledge management weblogs) on Yahoo. You are welcome to join (349 members and growing).

Note to new arrivals, subscriptions are called RSS newsfeeds in the weblog world (an xml-based format for easy syndication of Web content). Simply put, RSS news is a short summary of new posts to a website that changes often (a general news source or weblog). RSS information for a site is published as an additional page to the published website. For example: here is my weblog's RSS newsfeed:

http://jrobb.userland.com/rss.xml

A desktop subscription news aggregator, like Radio and other tools, automatically visits the RSS pages of all the sites you are subscribed to every hour looking for a new entry. When it finds a new entry it includes it on a news page on the desktop with entries from other sites. Here is what my newspage looks like (it is automatically created when I publish to my site) on my desktop:

http://jrobb.userland.com/images/newspage.jpg

In many ways an RSS subscription is like an active bookmarking system. Unlike a bookmark, you don't have to visit the sites you subscribe to in order to get new information. It saves time. If you are trying to keep tabs on dozens of sites, this is a must.

Sharing subscriptions to news sources and great weblogs is like sharing a bookmark list. Jon Udell (a technology journalist and analyst) put his current subscriptions on his weblog here (on the right hand margin):

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/03.html#a99

Aggregating subscriptions is a new area. You can get a large list of RSS subscriptions at newsisfree.com (put together by Mike Krus) and syndic8.com (put together by Jeff Barr and help). Both are excellent sites with thousands of news sources. You can also actively aggregate the use of subscriptions in new ways. Here is an example of an "RSS stock exchange" that ranks the RSS subscriptions people in the Radio community are using. Note: This is going to be a feature set on the new UserLand Radio Community Server (RCS) that will enable you to set up a sharing network in your corporate environment (in addition to rankings of page views of participating weblogs, referrer lists, and much more).

http://subhonker7.userland.com/rcsPublic/ranking?group=rss

Notice the mix of external news sources and personal weblogs. Nice. This is the start of the next generation of the Web's linking system. It's active, smart, and easier to use than the current bookmark based system.

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]
7:39:07 AM

Radio: Jon Udell describes Radio UserLand as a publishing system. It is that -- but I prefer to think of it (and use it as) a personal notebook with public (or private -- controlled by me) access. [SJL's Radio Weblog]
7:36:16 AM

[John Robb's Radio Weblog] Damn. David Berry's tutorial on using FrontPage with Radio is great. [rosewater]
7:16:45 AM