Our team was given an assignment to understand RSS, both feeds and aggregators. I think we were confused about the terms "readers" and "aggregators" — they seem to be the same thing. Aggregators allow you to look at your selected feeds. Different aggregators present the information in different ways. I use RSS Popper, which presents short summaries of blog posts as individual emails; the emails can be grouped by feed into different Outlook folders. Bloglines.com presents the summaries "aggregated" on a web page. The various tools (RSS Popper, Bloglines, etc.) examine your subscription list and check those websites for updated feeds.
RSS feeds are XML documents that are published to a web page. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication; it is a particular XML document format. The feed contains summaries of the various items on the web site. When something new is published, it automatically goes out on the feed. There are a variety of tools that generate RSS feeds.
Here is an article by Robin Good that I found useful on the topic: Intranet 2.0: Collaboration, Self-Publishing And Tools Mash-up New Driving Forces
June 13, 2006 at 8:31 pm
I love the name of your blog
Luigi (Robin Good) is a great source of unbiased information.
June 15, 2006 at 3:33 pm
I also like the blog title. It is like a little zen poem or meditation; one pauses, and opens to the beginner’s mind.
Of course, seeing as I am a beginner, finding the beginner’s mind is not a difficult task. But opening to is a different problem.
I’ve been aware this week, with this workshop and other activities, of how fear of the unknown can shut down that beginner’s mind and squash all those possibilities for learning.
Rereading “Wishcraft” this morning — an excellent and practical ‘follow your dreams’ self-help book by Barbara Sher. She lists the various covert ways our minds can express fear when we work towards our dreams. I won’t list them all, but a couple whose familiarity made me laugh are:
-a sudden overwhelming desire to sleep, eat, or read paperbacks
-a sudden loss of interest in your goal: it fascinated you in theory, but in reality it’s boring, not for you at all.
-a sudden ferment of plans and ideas about eighteen other dreams you’d rather have first, before this one.