Monday, June 28, 2004

New New York Times RSS Feeds The New York Times finally has a page headed with my father's initials: RSS That is, the Times has joined the growing list of news organizations offering their own pages of Really Simple Syndication feeds. Until today, the Times RSS feeds were offered through a partnership with Userland software. The new 27-item feed list eliminates a few earlier categories (Education, Dining & Wine, Home & Garden), but the others are redirected to the new addresses. New feeds include weekly sections like the Sunday Magazine, (Thursday) Circuits and Week in Review, as well as a "most e-mailed" story list, and the bloglike Times on the Trail presidential campaign page. Another feed lists "Multimedia" contents of the Times on the Web -- at the moment primarily slide shows of photos from the paper. (There are no multimedia enclosures in the feed, just one or two sentences and a link.) RSS Link Benefits If the new system continues the policy followed with the Userland version, the RSS feeds not only provide "syndicatable" story summaries, headlines and links for use in personal weblogs, those links have extra benefits: Readers can follow them without being asked to register at the Times site, and the links do not "expire" into the paper's pay-per-view archives after a week. For example, here is a link delivered by a partner=Userland Times RSS feed last summer, and here is the standard version of the same link, redirect to an archival abstract: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/11/international/europe/11TOBA.html (Except for reviews, most Times news pages cost $1 to $3 per story to retrieve from the archives.) Other RSS News Sources While my Dad was an early adopter of RSS as his personal initials, he named me RBS, for Robert Bruce, the legendary king of Scotland. So I like the irony of discovering the biggest collection of RSS news feeds I've seen at a newspaper called The Scotsman. Here are a few other news organizations' RSS offerings, ranging from major news topics and features like "most e-mailed" or "recent updates" (see the Boston Globe, below) to some finely-sorted news pages at the BBC and The Scotsman, which provides 574 feeds, including obituaries of famous people and pages about (or in) Kilts and Gaelic: Reuters (16 feeds) The BBC (17 main feeds, and look for more on section pages) The Washington Post (12 feeds) Baltimore Sun (57 feeds) The Christian Science Monitor (24 feeds) The Boston Globe (13 feeds; 10 from the Globe, three from Boston.com, including "updated news stories" between editions of the newspaper) ABC News (15 feeds) The Telegraph (28 feeds) The Scotsman (24 main feeds, but 574 total) updated 6/29/04 7:30:38 PM    comment [] Writing your life on the Web, true or false SAGA RIVALS TV SOAP OPERAS FOR INTRIGUE is the subheading on the San Jose Mercury about a personal weblog that ran for three years, attracting fans, friends and followers, before the author confessed that it was all a hoax, or, as the author says, "an elaborate interactive fiction." A 20-something Minnesota woman named Layne Johnson turned out to be Odin Soli,  35-year-old male, married with two children. At least he really was in Minnesota. Or so he says. "There are millions of blogs worldwide, many chronicling the mundane lives of teens or stay-at-home moms. What set Layne's blog apart was the compelling and well-crafted writing," says the Mercury's Michael Bazeley. A similar hoax made some headlines a few years ago, a site involving a fictional serial about a dying teenager. But, as Bazeley points out, that didn't include the more advanced commenting and social networking of today's blog-enhanced Web. Earlier hoaxes and deceptions in mailing lists, chat rooms and other virtual communities have involved even more interaction, but perhaps not with the pictures, production values or audience sizes of today's weblogs. That didn't keep them from involving intense emotions and feelings of betrayal, as recorded in Julian Dibbell's often-anthologized "Rape in Cyberspace" essay, which first appeared in the Village Voice more than 10 years ago. The online communities I've found most compelling have been ones with a real-world component, whether it's a virtual yacht club that does get together on the water now and then,  a folk music club that uses the Web and a mailing list to grow and communicate during the days or weeks between concerts, or a group of bloggers with a regular Thursday night get-together and dinner. Having face-to-face interaction with real friends seems like a good way to avoid not only long-term deceptions, but the flame wars that plague some online discussions. 3:17:41 PM    comment []

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