RSSWS 3 ELAG 2005

Peter van Boheemen

Mette Båstrup-Larsen, dk

Jill Cousins, eu

Jean-Blaise Claivaz, ch

Nathalie Cornee, uk

Oleg Cvik, sk

Elisabeth Freyre, fr

Jan Erik Kofoed, no

Martin Svoboda, cz

Agenda

• Questions

– RSS – what does it mean?

– What is it & what is it good for?

– Who is using it and why?

• Relation to other kinds of communication

• Conclusions, recommendations

RSS – what does it mean?

Rich Site Summary

Real Simple Syndication

RDF Site Summary

What is it & what is it good for?

• Small chunks of well structured data

(XML; title, date, link, …)

• Simple standardised method of

broadcasting (feeding) news

RSS principle of operation

“news”db

sele

ct

reformat RSS

read

& in

terp

ret

e-mail

weblog

RSS reader

???

web page

Who is using it and why?

• Who produces RSS feeds?– Bloggers: The Shifted Librarian, Peter Scott’s Library

Blog, …– Media: BBC, CNN, …– Journal publishers: NPG (Nature), …– Libraries: Woodburn Library, …

• Who reads RSS feeds?– individuals, which?– applications

• aggregators, library portals?

Channel Paper E-mail SMS RSS

Characteristics broad personal personal broad

Audience both known known anonymous

Frequency low n/a n/a potentially high

Requirements eyes (+ glasses)

mail reader GSM RSS reader

Costs to produce

high: paper, postage

application development

application development + delivery

application development

Availability widespread widespread widespread emerging

Format free text/html short text simple structured text

Relation to other kinds of communication

Conclusions, recommendations

• Powerful: really simple & easy to implement both at producer and user side

• Ca 15 million bloggers do use it• Could serve libraries well to broadcast „news“ to

users• Not part of our standard applications yet (plug-in

or separate reader needed)• Likely to be integrated into browsers or e-mail

clients soon (tomorrow) … • Be prepared!!!

Sir TSir Timim

Berners-LeeBerners-Lee

for Nobel prize !for Nobel prize !