Friday, February 04, 2005

VOIP ?
will be reviewing skype this weekend.

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

RSS: more
I was explaining RSS to someone who had not heard of the tech / concept before and i was trying to explain the process of needing a 'reader' to subscribe to the feeds. My explanation was to suggest to consider a news reader much like a web based e-mail program that someone signs up for. The differences being:

a. the e-mail program allows you to send to anyone (positive)
b. the e-mail program allows anyone to send to you (inc. SPAM: negative)
c. the news readers requires you to then subscribe to the content you wish to receive, and gives you the control to unsubscribe at will

make sense ? missing anything ?


Monday, January 31, 2005

updating dictionary: RSS
I maintain Hackers Hits and Chats. A project I started when I began some online teaching. Anyway, I will be doing a little teaching in the spring and need to update the resource (RSS, CSS etc.) and thought I would post a 'draft' of a definition and see if I get any feedback before including in the dictionary. So here goes ...

RSS
RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a means of distributing content (content syndication), using the XML format, to subscribers of that content. In order for a user to subscribe, he / she will need to sign up for a news reader (Bloglines etc.)

RSS has become a popular technology for bloggers to distribute their content, essentially 'pushing' content out to readers rather than relying on readers to visit the site to determine if there is new content. RSS is also useful for news organizations which publish content as a matter of their business model (and update regularly). It would be useful for companies that publish news releases of newsletters for subscribers in e-mail form. While RSS does require a reader to subscribe to a news aggregator before accessing content (this may soon be bundled with the web browser which will surely impact its rate of adoption) it avoids the problem plaguing e-mail distribution of content: SPAM.