TIE 2007 Session 2118 - RSS June 20, 2007
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Conference Sessions, Edubloggers, Tools.trackback
2118 – RSS Connecting ideas and knowledge – Will Richardson – 6/20/07
Points to his PDF article on weblogg-ed.com – RSS Guide. RSS – real simple syndication. This is similar to subscribing to a magazine or newspaper for web pages. In the digital world, these RSS subscriptions are free. An RSS subscription comes from a content producers RSS feed. RSS feeds are common for blogs, wikis, photo sharing, etc. The good news is you can be more efficient keeping track information online, the bad news is you can easily get overwhelmed collecting feeds.
Starts with Google Reader as an RSS new aggregator. Collections are organized in folders. New posts are indicated by bold and the number of new items. RSS works best when we self-organize. Google Reader lets you star, share, email, mark as read, or edit tags that describe the post. Will’s reading has changed. He’s no longer reading every word. Quick scanning lets him organize information for later detailed reading or discarding. Uses Performancing to assist with the blog proess. http://performancing.com/
And http://performancing.com/performancing-firefox/performancing-firefox-1-1-delicious-technorati-release
How do you collect feeds? I find most of them from other feeds to which I subscribe. Will checks frequency, authorship, number of incoming links, etc. You can also search by keywords. Check frequently visited we sites for a feed link. You can also now download your Google reader content using Google Gears. Sometimes it is as simple as the traditional link with RSS added. For example www.nytimes.com/rss provides a list of all the RSS feeds they provide. You can also unsubscribe. In Google News, you can specify a topic and a source to generate an RSS feed. This is important. http://blogsearch.google.com/ and technorati can be used to search for blogs.
Social bookmarking. The web2.0 directive includes sharing the good stuff. Del.icio.us. He looked a little bit at IBM who has implemented social tools big time. Tags are really important. Again, we’re organizing ourselves, where folks create the taxonomy – naow called folksonomy. David Weinberger, “Everything is Miscellaneous” http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Miscellaneous-Power-Digital-Disorder/dp/0805080430
David Weinbergers blog: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/
Will walked through the steps of saving a bookmark on smartmobs, adding tags (use a unique tag for easy reference by your students) and save the link. This tag includes an RSS feed. You can even subscribe to a network from del.icio.us.
Will also used flickr to demonstrate tagged photos. Example: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/darfur You can also subscribe to YouTube tags for video.
Starter pages, pageflakes, netvibes, can be built with RSS feeds, but shared with others. These are already familiar to me and are included in my presentation notes for my session on Thursday.
RSS to javascript, www.rss-to-javascript.com lets you create a javascript that can be pasted into any web page.
There is also an RSS calendar (http://www.rsscalendar.com/rss/ ?), librarything is another cool inclusion, http://www.librarything.com/.
Teachers can monitor their student published work through RSS, or you could set up a system that requires approval. Best is probably up front education where everyone knows that what is published needs to be appropriate. Parents, teachers, students, all need to understand that they are publishing publicly and objectives and expectations were clearly understood.
It is important to avoid the ‘echo-chamber’ to only subscribe to feeds that affirm what you believe.
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