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.
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I’ve been on the Digital Divide Network (DDN) mailing list for about a year now and find it really interesting and useful for finding out what is going on in this area. There are some really inspiring and switched-on people who post to the mailing list and it is a great resource for finding out about new tools, information and perspectives related to ICT in commmunity and social development. The people who run it have recently launched an associated website for the DDN at:

http://www.digitaldivide.net

It includes the option to create a blog on the site, join or create online communities in topics of interest and read news and articles (provided in xml as well for RSS readers).

It’s great to see such a useful site being launched for people who are interested in this area.

While studies have shown that some local languages and dialects have been gradually falling out of use for a variety of reasons including the effects of globalisation and the increased use of languages such as English as a universal communication tool, some thought has also been given to the role the internet may play in preserving languages.

In Cambodia, I became aware of the importance of providing information in the local language (Khmer) but also understood the technical difficulty in doing this. Khmer script like Thai has its own alphabet. It’s a complex system and you’ll understand why I didn’t persevere trying to learn it (speaking was hard enough) if you check out the Khmer Alphabet information on Omniglot. There are no spaces between words, only at the end of sentences and there are many more characters and variations of characters than in English.
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