It seems that RSS is a hard concept to communicate. Numerous articles and blogs use headlines similar to “So what exactly is RSS?”. This indicates that the concept is still in its infancy, and although many people now use it, a far larger number do not and do not understand it. Perhaps the acronym and the term “syndication” are too mysterious, or perhaps it is just too new.
It seems that receiving feeds through RSS is far easier than setting them up if one is a web publisher. Good’s article balances the pros and cons of RSS well. RSS is secure so far (few Trojans, not often spammable), but I think it will only be a matter of time before there will be problems with RSS feeds as there are currently with incoming email. The emphasis of Good’s article is on RSS feeds replacing e-publishing. In other words, replacing another one-way broadcasting. The RSS feed can replace the newslist or newsletter. The difficulty with RSS is that the broadcaster no longer has a list of mailing addresses and no longer knows the subscribers. For a company this will be solved with fee-based private feeds. Using RSS for broadcasted feeds would free up email for two-way communication and correspondence. I gather that the news aggregator collects information stored inside an auto-generating file that sits next to the web page and that contains updates to that page. I agree with Cohen’s remarks that aggregators need to be smarter—that we need keyword searching so that the feeds do not overload subscribers.
My reaction to this week’s readings is that although I already had a basic understanding of RSS feeds, I feel no closer to being able to create one myself, and remain confused. I found Nottingham’s tutorial full of useful detail, and I can see that using XML correctly is essential for your feed. However, I can’t say that at the end of the readings I know how to approach the XML for RSS. I need to examine examples.
4 comments:
great point, Jill. There are countless articles out there that explain RSS but few that actually break down the XML file structure and teach you how to build a feed. The main reason for that is that most 2.0 technologies & tools (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking tools, even social networks now) include native RSS feeds, which means that the chances of you having to create one from scratch are slim.
Your blog is an example - you set it up and Blogger creates the feed for you. So, you've already created your first feed!
Your final point is well taken though - if you're interested in figuring out the XML file structure, the best way to do that is to "look under the hood" - open an RSS file in a text editor and look at the tags. Might be a bit scary at first (especially if you've never seen mark-up code, like html), but once you get used to the tag structure, it's pretty easy to figure out.
I agree that RSS is hard to communicate properly. I believe that this is because RSS can be a fairly complex topic (ie. how to create it, XML code, etc.) or a fairly simple topic (tutorial on how to get a reader and subscribe to feeds). Some people who are just looking for a simple tutorial can't find a jargon-free example that meets them at their level. Others (such as you, it appears) can't find detailed enough information.
I enjoyed seeing the publishing side of RSS while reading the article RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters; however, it did not make me feel confident in my ability to publish my own. Amanda's comment that we will probably never have to create our own feed from scratch, is reassuring. I don't think that I would have been as interesting in starting a blog if I had to figure out all of the coding (although Amanda says it's pretty easy, I'm not so sure that it would be for me!!).
Hi Jill,
I'm also wondering how to set up a RSS feed. To tell the truth, I'm terrified by the HTML codes of RSS showed in one of the reading.
I agree that the security of RSS would be a problem, especially when there is a trend that either RSS merges into e-mail or e-mail into RSS.
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