Syndicated content: it's more than just some file formats.

Paul Miller takes a look at issues arising from the current enthusiasm for syndicating content to portals or other web sites, and offers some guidelines for good practice. [Ariadne (UK) May 2003]

11:45:28 PM    
  

RSS - Sharing Online Content Metadata.

Imagine you could create a Web site that keeps your users informed of the latest news, jobs and resources available in a given subject area in addition to any content you wish to provide. A site that is updated automatically so that once you have set it up, it looks after itself, with minimal maintenance from you. Sounds like so much fiction? A little idealistic perhaps, but it is this sort of thing that a technology like RSS aims to provide. [Cultivate Interactive]

11:40:15 PM    
  
I'm putting together a page with pointers to give people a tour of the infrastructure behind communities of weblogs. I'm going to show a global community (Weblogs.Com) and a local one (Harvard Law School). They use the same protocols. [Scripting News]
1:56:59 PM    
  
SSR-Enabling an RSS 2.0 Module. Today's mini-opus : SSR : Supporting Modules Sjoerd sent me some helpful pointers and did a few XSLT tweaks, so... [Raw Blog]
1:26:46 PM    
  
This review of blogging APIs is a must-read. I've been thinking about rounding out the MetaWeblog API to incorporate all the functionality of the Blogger API because Blogger is moving away from it's own API if you can believe that. [Scripting News]
1:25:26 PM    
  

Journals, News, and Discourse.

Due to poor planning (ask me later) I’ve received a “new faculty grant” to start a free access, online, peer-reviewed, instructional technology “journal.” Of course, my inclination is to lean it toward learning objects / reusable media / online communities / blogs / open content / etc. for the topic or niche. But the point of the grant is to explore new publishing models, and there are a whole bunch of other exploratory things that could be done. [autounfocus]

Route to David and Heidi. Illustrates my points this morning. David Wiley is important.

10:30:13 AM    
  

Microsoft webloggers listing.

[Microsoft Watch]

9:56:53 AM    
  

Microsoft adding support for weblogging.

It was just a passing mention. But Chairman Bill noted at yesterday's Newspaper Association of America Annual Convention that Microsoft is very interested in making sure blogging tools are there to support folks doing "bottom-up publishing." Microsoft has been sticking its toes in the blogging tools waters, as of late, with everything from a Windows Media 9 blogging plug-in, to its Community Starter Kit, to other goodies under development by some of Microsoft's best bloggers. [Microsoft Watch, April 30, 2003]

Worth watching. Will they extend to "k-blogging" (using weblogs for knowledge management)? Maybe by connecting to Access? Stay tuned.

9:35:54 AM    
  

RSS: Your gateway to news and blog content.

[Search Engine Report]

Good introduction

8:34:05 AM    
  

Making an RSS feed. 

[Search Engine Watch]

Helpful step-by-step guide.

8:31:00 AM    
  

Best Newsreaders, help with rolling your own RSS.

Sam is heavily into RSS news aggregators and notes the best Windows software is Wildgrape NewsDesk.

I use OS X and am still very happy with NetNewsWire Pro.

Try one of these and see if it doesn't change your way of using the Web.

___

On the production end one has to worry about making the RSS feed. Most blogging tools handle this automatically, but enabling a website may be an issue. This link, should you choose to roll your own, may be useful. [Crandall Surf Report]

Wildgrape NewsDesk is begware - they ask for a donation via PayPal. NetNewsWire Pro is $39.95; the Lite version is free. Download 30 free trial here -- the link above takes you to the download site for the new beta version (NOT recommended - bugs).

8:14:47 AM    
  

Community Webloging.

Charles Lowe has some interesting thoughts on comments and weblogs (and egos as well I guess!):

"if we are the first to find a primary source, or we have some extensive commentary to write, or if we were to create an original piece, then we probably want to post it to our site, not the community weblog. We want our site to contain our most important thoughts. So do we duplicate post to both?"   Cyberdash

Charles goes on to argue that Drupal can do it best where:

"...the front page becomes a composite of target posts from member blogs"

Which sounds cool, a community aggregator, no?

So, this is cool, but in the end, it's just a hub and a hub has to have filters or moderation (or it'll just blow everyone away) and filters/moderaqtion are basically what individual bloggers do and so we're back where we started, aren't we? Monday morning!

 

[James Farmer's Radio Weblog]
8:06:44 AM    
  

Adding an upstreaming file type (e.g., WML).

For the record, anyone wanting to configure their own Radio Community Server to upstream WML or any other kind of file not upstreamed by default simply has to add the filename extension to the list at radioCommunityServerData.prefs.legalExtensions. The default filename extensions that are allowed are: .xml, .html, .htm, .opml, .txt, .text, .rss, .ftsc, .fttb, .root, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .ico, .doc, .xls, .pdf, .ppt, .css, .wav, .swf, .zip, .sit, .hqx, .gz, and .svg. [David Davies' Weblog]

8:06:09 AM    
  

Everything about RSS.

Brainstorms and Raves, Friday Feast #42 (April 27, 2003).

7:57:28 AM