I've been thinking a lot about Web syndication "feeds" and different methods for aggregating them. As is the case with many Web 2.0 applications, our blogging service provides methods for syndicating or "feeding" the data out via RSS or Atom XML documents to Web browsers, plug-ins, feed readers, and other Web 2.0 applications which can display them. Most often "feeds" provide "recent changes" or new entries, but that doesn't always have to be the case. Many people who use the Web are familiar with RSS feeds even though they might not call them that. In Firefox, for example, a site with a "Live Bookmark" is one which provides a RSS or Atom "feed." The Penn State Portal has been using channels which are created from RSS feeds for years. "Feeds" are XML documents which have content but no formatting associated with them. These XML documents are in turn rendered in the browser or feed reader. Tools for rendering these feeds include built-in feed readers in Safari and IE7, the Sage plug-in for Firefox (my current favorite), bloglines, and various stand alone readers like NetNewsWire, NewsFire, Google Reader (one I also use), and FeedDemon.
What I've been working on in the last few days is using Google Reader and some of the built-in functions of the Penn State Blogs server to create aggregated blog feeds. I'll go into how some of this is done in later posts, but here's a feed exported from my Google Reader account which tracks 20 or so blogs of ITS people:
By the way, if you're an ITS person and your blog isn't there, just let me know.
Here's a feed which I now use as a screen saver on my Mac (see "RSS Visualizer" on the Screen Saver preferences) which searches the PSU blog server for entries tagged with "politics":
PSU Blogs search results for politics
When I do a regular search on just the word politics in PSU blogs, I find about four times as many posts. What this means to me is that not many people are using the "Tags" feature of the Blogs server. Although we have discussed this on Kevin's blog, I'd like to implore people to make use of "Tags" in your blog posts. Also, we probably need a Nomenclature Czar to determine common taxonomies for posts in order to make them more findable, e.g. psuits or PSU-ITS. As one of my favorite project managers used to say, "We're not there yet, but we'll get there..."
So please, please feed the Web!
