This is an interesting discussion covering many topics in one thread. But I have a suggestion for Jude - if you are trying to give a simple explanation of RSS, don't use the word "metadata" and especially not without an attempt to define it. In your enthusiasm you confound the problem instead of addressing it. If someone does not understand RSS it is unlikely they will understand that term.
So here's my attempt to help Pamela, and other readers of the list: DAVE'S RSS PRIMER An RSS feed is really a list of the information about a particular page of a website. Because it is usually a digest - as little as the titles or headlines of the stories - it can be scanned very quickly in a newsreader, a program which serves as a small browser of these lists. Like an email program, the newsreader also keeps track of which items you have already read, and often lets you know when there are additions to the list since the last time you read it. The newsreader usually has two windows - one with a list of all the sites whose feeds you are monitoring, and a second which displays the headline list when you click on the site name in the first window. When you see a headline you are interested in, you click on that headline and it opens the complete story, usually in your regular browser's window. You subscribe to a feed either by dragging the orange button that you see on the page into your newsreader, or by copying the URL that it links to (copy link location, usually a right click on the button) and then pasting it into a dialog box that the newsreader provides for adding new feeds. If you simply click on one of those orange buttons, the XML file, which the newsreader uses to show headlines, will open up in your browser - giving you a sudden look at the heart of the system. This is just a text file, with code surrounding the headline and other information, often an excerpt. It may include the full text of every item. Some people like to have the full story included in the feed itself, since they can read the whole item in their newsreader without opening it up in a browser. In recent months the word podcast has come into the RSS world. It is used fairly loosely - Andy Carvin is using it to refer to either the uploading of an audio file to a server - "to podcast" - or the audio file itself - "a podcast" - which is most often an mp3 file but can also be a wav file or any other audio format. But if you find a website offering a podcast, it will often be an RSS feed with mp3 enclosures. All this means is that one or more of those items in the list will have not just a title but an enclosure tag, referring to an mp3 file. If you were to open that XML file in your browser and look at it, you would see the word "enclosure" there amidst all the code for each mp3 file that is in the feed. Why is this useful? Because you can subscribe to a podcast feed with a specialized version of a newsreader that is generally called an iPodder. That little program will automatically do the following: Periodically load the XML file from the website Find the enclosure tags Go to the website that supplied the XML file Download the mp3's AND load them into your iPod. Now you are not even scanning the newsfeeds for items of interest. It's more like having your own assistant who is checking with all your favorite radio stations and loading up your iPod with anything new, so that you have it ready for your morning commute or your trip to the gym. These "radio stations" can in reality be any individuals who can record an audio message and upload it to a website and make sure their RSS feed puts the audio file information in an enclosure. Or they can be actual radio broadcasts that are being made available in this format by radio outlets, as many are beginning to do - "On the Media" from NPR recently announced they would provide a podcast feed. If this all sounds a little complicated, it's because it is. No one has yet come up with a simple application for the podcast producer that can do the recording, the encoding (I didn't even mention the need for mp3 tags - similar to album, artist, genre - that are necessary to prevent the file from being lost in the thousands of songs on an iPod), the uploading, the generation of a feed with enclosures. For the listener/subscriber, iPodder programs are getting better, and newsreaders are starting to incorporate the same capability, but it still takes some headscratching to get it all working properly. So for now, if someone wants to make a regular podcast available, best practice would be to provide both the podcast feed with enclosures (the XML file) and a direct link to the mp3, so people wishing to simply download and listen to the file can do so. This direct link method has been around a long time, long before the words "podcast" or "RSS enclosures". Call it a podcast if you like - it sounds catchy. Where is all this going? Enclosures can enclose any kind of file. They are already being used for video clips and bittorrent files (an explanation of bittorrent will have to wait for another day). So media producers will have a new method of distribution that bypasses the broadcast and cablecast sources completely. You will be able to create your own "channels" by selecting and subscribing to feeds to be loaded to your VideoPod. This has the potential of revolutionizing and decentralizing communications of all kinds. But readers of this list will be quick to realize the equal potential of widening the digital divide. We would need ubiquitous broadband, simple and cheap tools, and widespread knowhow to distribute this technology evenly. For this vision of universal unmediated person to person media to be realized (and the first crop of videobloggers are evangelists for this) we would have to be living on a far different planet. And on that note I thank you for your patience, and wish you good night. With dreams of narrowing the gap Dave Pentecost On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 06:33:18 -0800, Jude Higdon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, Pamela, > > RSS stands for really simply syndication. It's like a wrapper of some > basic metadata that is automatically put around units of content on the > Web. These content units might, for instance, be a blog entry or a news > story. The metadata that's captured is some standard info about the new > story or blog entry itself, not about the content -- things like the > author's name and the date and time the content was posted. The groovy > thing about RSS (or one of them at least) is that it works like a news > feed, so if you expose your RSS to the world, other Webheads might do > something cool like include your feed as part of their site or use a > feed reader to pull in a whole bunch of feeds from various news and > blog sites. I personally read all of my online news now in Mozilla's > Thunderbird -- goodbye Web surfing and bookmarking a bunch of sites > that I usually forget to go to. > > I admit the benefits may seem a bit esoteric at first, but I recommend > continuing to wrap your head around it; it took me a few months before > I started to see what it could do for me (and for the school where I > work), but now I'm somewhere between a convert and a zealot. > > Hope this is helpful. > > jude > > On Jan 21, 2005, at 2:35 PM, Pamela McLean wrote: > > > Am I the only person wondering what RSS stands for? > > I confess I am only dipping in and out of the DDN list anyhow so may > > have missed something - or perhaps its something that "everyone" knows > > (Maybe I'll suddenly realise as soon as I click on the send button to > > confess my ignorance ..) > > I don't need all the techie details - but would appreciate a sentence > > or two...... > > > > _______________________________________________ > > DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list > > DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org > > http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide > > To unsubscribe, send a message to > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the > > body of the message. > > > > _______________________________________________ > DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list > DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org > http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide > To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE > in the body of the message. > -- The Daily Glyph http://www.gomaya.com/glyph Usumacinta http://www.gomaya.com/dams Cell 917 312 9733 _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
