Proceedings

Track: Knowledge Management, Metadata and Semantics, Case Studies

Audience Level: High Level/Technical view

Time: Tuesday, November 15 16:45

Keywords: Content Management, Content, Repurposing, Metadata, Semantic Web, Web Services, RDF, RSS, Remixing

Abstract:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication; there are other acronyms but this is my personal favourite) was developed in the 1990s to enable automatic web surfing. An RSS 'feed' is simply an XML file using a very simple XML format with the latest updates to a site. Users can subscribe to an RSS feed using an RSS reader and be automatically kept apprised of that site's updates without manually having to check the website.

RSS was popularized by blogs, but it has been adopted by mainstream media sites like the New York Times, BBC, the Economist etc., by search engines like Yahoo, Google, etc., by RSS search engines like PubSub, Feedster, Technorati, etc. and is being built (or is already built) into popular software and operating systems like Microsoft Office, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Safari, Firefox, etc.

The widespread adoption of RSS has enabled a user generated content revolution. How? Since RSS is XML, it is machine readable which enables near real time search engine indexing. This allows users to have almost real time distributed conversations on the web. The early adopters and VERY early majority on the web are now publishing their content using RSS to take part in this conversation.

A large part of this conversation is through "RSS Remixing". In its crudest form, RSS Remixing is bloggers subscribing to an RSS feed, and remixing it by quoting part of the text, adding some commentary and then publishing this on their blog. This updates their RSS feed which others can remix as well.

This has been done manually by users and in code by developers since the early days of RSS and is now being done increasingly automatically using tools such as Drupal (an open source content management system), Radio UserLand, FeedBurner and many, many other tools.

These tools enable any power user and early adopter to be an RSS remixer without any software or XML knowledge. Previously, this power was only available to developers and XML experts!

This high level presentation will briefly introduce RSS and blogs and then illustrate with examples how users remix RSS today and in the past and also discuss the implications for knowledge management and sharing in a world where this kind of re-mixing is ubiquitous and where RSS is mainstream (as it will be post 2007 when it is part of Windows Vista) and eventually becomes transparent.

Copyright: © 2005 Roland Tanglao