Mozzeenet

OK, this post leans towards the technical side but it talks about technology which is becoming very significant for all web users and I thought worth an entry. It is revolutionising the way we get web content.

It’s RSS. You might have noticed links on websites to ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What’s syndication? According to dictionary.com, the definition for ‘Syndication’ is:

n 1: organizing into or administering as a syndicate 2: selling (an article or cartoon) for publication in many magazines or newspapers at the same time; “he received a comfortable income from the syndication of his work”

We’re interested in the second concept here - distribution of content through dispersed channels simultaneously. On the web it is not necessarily about buying and selling. There are specialised tools available now called readers or aggregators (some free and others licensed) which can interpret content published in the appropriate machine-readable xml code and serve it to the web user in a format which is easy to consume. This eliminates the need to trawl through your bookmarks to go to a website and see if it has been updated. You can simply click through the RSS feeds you have saved into your reader to get updated content.

I use the free tool, Sage within the Mozilla Firefox browser to view current news articles from various sites. If you are interested in a particular topic area you can develop a rich resource of sites providing related information which you can check daily for new information. The articles are displayed as text in the reader so you don’t need to wait for graphics to download.

Here is a screen capture of what Sage looks like in Mozilla. I simply choose Tools menu > Sage and my list of saved sites appears in the left. I click through and the updated articles are shown on the right as text which I can easily skim and click through to the website if I want to.

I’m not going to try to examine the benefits and features of RSS and RSS readers here because I don’t know enough about it and it has already been well-documented but I want to point to an excellent discussion by Marnie Webb titled ‘Ten Reasons Nonprofits Should use RSS‘ published in a Digital Divide Network blog entry about the benefits of adding an RSS feed to your own site. It also gives those who want to start accessing news through a reader or aggregator a good run-down. There are links to background information at the top of the post as well.