Weblogs & Webfeeds Here's a revised version of my Researching personal and collaborative publishing online - implications for designing for online communication & collaboration handout from a month or so back. It's for an hour long session I'm running for the faculty of science & technology entitled 'Weblogs and Webfeeds', um, tomorrow, so any feedback would be more than good, especially if it involves demonstrating some of the below :o)
1. What is webpublishing?
While constructing a website through Dreamweaver or building a Geocities site is webpublishing, I refer to webpublishing here as posting itemised content to a site that you personally own (at least in part) on a regular basis and supplying a webfeed for that content.
For example this is webpublishing: incorporated subversion (my weblog), OLDaily, Scripting News, Crooked Timber (collaborative).
Most webpublishing takes the form of weblogs (or 'blogs') however there are videoblogs, blikis (or wikilogs), audioblogs, photologs and many more developing genres. It's tempting to just call them 'blogs', perhaps we should?
2. What is a webfeed?
A webfeed is an xml version of the content you have posted, this is able to be subscribed to using a news aggregator (or feedreader) (for example, here's my weblog, here's my webfeed and here are the webfeeds I subscribe to through my aggregator). Once you have subscribed to a feed your aggregator will automatically check it and deliver to you any new content.
This way I am able to check over 130 websites (not only weblogs have webfeeds) every morning... and it only takes me 20 minutes (averaging about 80 new items a day).
3. What makes this special?
As we are now able to access so many websites so easily through webfeeds and participate in the conversation through webpublishing we are able to have vast distributed conversations with ease.
As each posting is itemised (has an individual URL) this conversation can be further facilitated using tools like Technorati and trackback.
My thoughts, records and links are now all archived just a google search of my site away.
Many many other things including:
-My personal ownership of and control over what I have written
-The contextualisation of what I write
-The nature of communication in this medium
-Decentralization decentralization decentralization
Further Reading
Bartlett-Bragg, A. (2003) Blogging to Learn [viewed 15 July ]
Blood, R.. (2000) Weblogs: a history and perspective [viewed 10 July ]
Downes, S. (2003) More than Personal: The Impact of Weblogs [viewed 15 July ]
Fielder, S. (2003). Personal Webpublishing as a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning. In Burg, T. N. (Ed) Blogtalks.(pp.190-216) Wien: Libri. [draft]
Guarak, L. et al (eds.) (2004) Into the Blogosphere [viewed 10 July 2004]
Paquet, S. (2002) Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research. [viewed 1 July 2004]
Richardson, W. (2004) Blogging and RSS — The "What's It?" and "How To" of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators [viewed 15 July ]
Suzuki, R. (2004) Diaries as introspective research tools: From Ashton-Warner to Blogs [viewed 15 July ]
Wrede, O. (2003) Weblogs and Discourse. Weblogs as a transformational technology for higher education and academic research [viewed 10 July]
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