Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Timely example of an RSS feed reader I mention "RSS readers" in class a lot. There are simple readers built into browsers now, and sites like my.yahoo, Google reader and my.nytimes.com allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds. Even our university's campus "portal" page has that feature, but not a very broad selection of feeds. Other programs are dedicated to reading lots of feeds and quickly share items through your own blog. The picture shows the one I use, a program called Radio 8 from http://radio.userland.com (It's also the editor I use to write this blog, which is why it has the same green page heading.) The "post" icon to the right of any message lets me copy it to my own blog for republishing, the "syndication" idea that gives RSS its Really Simple Syndication name. The "pencil" indicates that the blogger behind the feed lets readers comment on his posts. If I click the pencil and write something, my public comment appears with others at his site. The funny thing is I've been using Radio for five years and didn't try this feature until today, thanks to a tip from Userland's founder, Dave Winer, who pointed out a new service for handling blog comments, http://disqus.com/. The tiny speaker icon indicates the original blog item has an audio or video attachment -- what folks gradually came to call a "podcast" because they could copy the downloaded audio to an iPod. (Apple latched onto the idea later, and made iTunes an RSS reader so users could subscribe to feeds directly.) I also mention "Citizen Journalism" a lot in class, and my aggregator offers Blue Ridge Muse as a timely local example. Click on the image to read that item -- or go around to the front page at http://www.blueridgemuse.com/ to see more of Doug Thompson's writing and terrific photos. 9:26:43 AM    comment []

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