Actually, there are two terms I discovered today. One is bookmarklet. I assumed that bookmarklets were entries added to the Radio desktop application under menu item "Bookmarks".

The other is rss auto-discovery. I thought that this term described some spider that crawled the web to find rss feeds that matched the user's interests.

Wrong and wrong.

I just subscribed to Jon Udell's rss category (the category is 'rss', get it?) Jon mentions using diveintomark's rss autodiscovery technique. Mark's instructions were to drag this link into the web browser's link toolbar, which I didn't know I had. Well I found it, I dragged said link onto (into) the toolbar and it became a bookmarklet.

So bookmarklet is not a Radio Userland term, it is a web browser (well, an IE and Netscape browser) term. It is "a tiny program (a JavaScript application) contained in a bookmark (the URL is a "javascript:" URL) which can be saved and used the same way you use normal bookmarks" according to bookmarklet.com.

Now rss auto-discovery, it turns out, has nothing to do with spiders. While the orange and white xml button allows users to find your rss address. The coffee cup button goes a step further by allowing Radio users to add a subscription in one click. Well, the rss auto-discovery bookmarklet takes it a step further still: instead of scrolling up and down someone's web page to find their rss buttons, one can simply click their own bookmarklet on their own link toolbar of their own browser.

Someday in the near future I will edit this post so it makes more sense. Reading this made the concept click for me.

1:04:10 PM  comment [] | Categories: Jargon Glossary, Radio Progress|