OUseful Info

We Ignore RSS at OUr Peril

Each of the two OU Curriculum, Teaching and Student Support (CTSS) Conference days this week ended with plenary session, with panels made up from the great and the good in the OU hierarchy. Yesterday's panel session included John Naughton, who dared to mention the 'word' RSS, to blank stares from many in the audience and most of the panel.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

In today's panel, an unpicked upon, throwaway comment - in what I thought sounded like a mocking tone - about "John Naughton's RSS feeds, ha, ha" suggested to me RSS is something that some may have heard about, but have little understanding of.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

As a publishing medium, RSS offers two significant benefits to the OU and other e-learning providers. Firstly, it provides a mechanism by which users can subscribe to content delivered by the RSS feed and receive it at a time of their choosing. Secondly, it provides a medium for syndicating that content, allowing users to republish it (that is, view it) in a location of their choosing.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

Subscription is familiar idea in many areas of publishing. To see how subscription works with RSS feeds, watch this. When you subscribe to a service, you enter into a trusted relationship with the service provider. Within the context of that relationship, you might expect to receive a certain type of content, maybe at a regular interval, maybe on demand, for the duration of subscription term. Ideally, you, as subscriber, should be able to terminate the subscription, without penalty, at any time. Control rests with you - the user. As we move away from a world dominated by broadcast media to one dominated by user-defined channels, RSS feeds will provide a key part of the 'hidden wiring' - or plumbing - for this new world.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

Typically, RSS feeds allow users to subscribe to websites and receive content updates, via the feed, as and when fresh content is posted. Another class of RSS feeds - static RSS feeds - contain fixed content, such as the content of a course, or chapters of a book. Users can subscribe to static feeds using services like OpenLearn_daily, which deliver the feed items as bite sized "chunks" of content, once a day (or once a week, or twice a week, whatever), starting on the day you subscribe and continuing to deliver content according to a specified schedule until the last fixed item in the feed (such as the last chapter in the book, or the last section of the course unit) has been delivered. The subscription to the feed continues until the user takes the positive action to unsubscribe. For static feeds, the direct, user-initiated, trusted link to the user continues (unless they unsubscribe) even after all the content in the static feed has been delivered. This offers the opportunity to offer after-care, or cross-selling of other content feeds.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

One way of thinking about content delivered by RSS, compared to delivering via a website, is to consider the world of film. Visiting a website to consume content is like going to the cinema. You have to physically visit a multiplex, for example, and locate the screen that is showing the film you want to see. Subscribing to an RSS feed is like subscribing to a satellite TV channel. Your Skybox, or digibox, which you keep at home, of course, aggregates the channels you have subscribed to, each playing films on a particular theme. Each channel is like an RSS feed. You can choose which you subscribe to, and when. You can channel hop at your leisure. In the same way, users consume the RSS feeds they are subscribed to via a single application - either online (using a service such as Bloglines or Google Reader) or via a desktop client. Sky Movies sells convenience, pushes content to me. RSS is another push medium.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

The second, key feature of RSS feeds are that they provide a way of syndicating content. Syndication is well known across the media, from print to radio. Many cartoonists, photographers, and local newspapers survive by syndicating their content - republishing it unchanged - to other outlets, typically for financial gain. RSS feeds allow publishers to syndicate their web content so that it can be republished on other websites or be delivered, in an appropriate format, to a wide variety of mobile devices.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

Offering content for syndication via RSS feeds offers several benefits. Firstly, users can publish the content on a personal site they visit regularly, such as personal homepage or 'webtop', such as Google Personal Pages, Pageflakes, or Netvibes. Secondly, the content may be published on other peoples' websites, providing more opportunities for users to come across it. Thirdly, content published on a third party website can provide links back to the original publisher's site, driving traffic onto their own web properties.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

As well as syndicating content, RSS feeds can be used as transport mechanism for moving collections of weblinks from an originating source, such as a database, and allowing them to be republished elsewhere. In the Open University, the OU Library is exploring the use of this technique as a way of surfacing links from their ROUTES database and MyOpenLibrary collections within the Moodle VLE. You can see many more examples of how RSS feeds can be used to pipe content into Moodle in this demo Moodle course.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

Valuable, topic related links, as well as media assets such as videos, interactive flash movies, images or audio files, can be mined from within the body of a course unit and published via static RSS feeds, atomising the course into high value component parts; courses can also be bundled from RSS component feeds. The media enhanced RSS feeds can then be published via online do-it-yourself media channels, such as SplashCast. Like youTube, these services offer media players which may be embedded in third party or personal websites, or indeed elsewhere within the original publisher's own site, as taster, teaser, refresher or revision items.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

Collections of weblinks mined from course materials can be passed via RSS feeds to users' browsers, where they can operate as course provided bookmarks. These static, link collection RSS feeds can also be used to limit web searches via custom search engines so that the search is only made over the websites that are linked to from the original course.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

Late last year, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7. Like many modern browsers, such as Firefox, Opera or Safari, IE 7 is geared up for RSS feeds. Not only is it capable of RSS feed autodiscovery - recognising when a web page publisher has declared within a web page that an RSS feed for that web page, or website, is available - it is also capable of subscribing to, and displaying, RSS feeds. Furthermore, installing IE7 on Windows XP systems also installs the Windows RSS (Common Feed List) Platform, which is also an integral part of the Windows Vista operating system. This platform provides the subscription to RSS feeds at the level of the operating system, with the result that when one application (such as IE7) is used to subscribe to a feed, that feed is also made available to other applications via the platform. Subscribe once, reuse everywhere - at least as far as desktop applications go. The full implications of the common feed platform have barely been touched on yet. Under the most optimistic view, shipping the common feed platform with Vista could be as significant an event as when Windows first starting shipping with the Internet Explorer browser.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

The future is bright. The future is orange.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

Visit the website of any media outfit and it is likely that you will see the orange feed icon somewhere on the site. Web 2.0 blogger Martin Belam has recently published a series of blog posts analysing how "web 2.0" the websites are of the UK national daily newspapers, a critique that features prominently the ability to subscribe to content via RSS web feeds. The BBC has published up a wide variety of RSS feeds, many of which are used in web 2.0 mashups developed by (public) members of the BBC Backstage community. The Guardian newspaper's Technology Guardian website leads the way on innovative reporting in the print sector.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

The BBC also uses RSS feeds - as do thousands of others - to publish podcasts. Publishing an audio file on a website does not make it a podcast. A podcast is something you subscribe to. A podcast is an RSS feed with audio file enclosures.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

In the same way that an audio file online is not a podcast, an online journal entry is not necessarily a blog. For me, a blog is something you can subscribe to. A blog is an RSS feed that contains predominantly text entries. Yes, the blog may have the public face of a website. But at its heart, it is nothing if you cannot subscribe to it. A blog is as nothing without a corresponding RSS feed. It is just another website.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

To a certain extent, RSS is becoming a universal data transport mechanism. As well as transporting links and content, RSS feeds can also move data between websites. Many online calendars publish RSS feeds containing the dates of past, present and future events, and online calendars can in turn be used to display the contents of an RSS feed in a calendar.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

GeoRSS feeds can transport geographical data directly into online maps, such as Google Maps or Yahoo! maps. The same RSS feed could even be used to pipe data into calendar and map displays at the same time.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

RSS feeds can be merged, combined, sorted and filtered. Yahoo! Pipes provides a graphical interface for building feed processing applications, lowering the barriers to entry to for developers keen to build RSS feed powered mashups - applications that use data from an online service (or data mixed together from several different online web services) and display it via other third party web services.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

Many search engines make the results of a particular search available via an RSS feed that a user can subscribe to. Subscribing to the RSS feed of a persistent search (also known as a saved search) means that the user will be notified whenever the search engine discovers a new result for that search. Subscribing to the RSS feed essentially provides the user with an alerting service defined by the terms of the saved search.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

Blatantly disregarding the potential for using RSS feeds to revolutionise the way we syndicate content throughout our internal publishing systems is a risky strategy.

Blatantly disregarding the potential for using RSS feeds to expose and syndicate asset collections generated by mining our courses for those assets is a risky strategy.

Blatantly disregarding the potential for using RSS feeds to revolutionise the way we make content available to our students so that they can study it where they want it and when they want it is a risky strategy.

Laughing off RSS feeds as a technology that we don't understand is not an option.

We ignore RSS at OUr peril.

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PS I've never written a manifesto before... which is what this is, I guess... sort of... in reverse, maybe... ;-)
PPS Thanks to John Naughton for suggesting a few tweaks to an earlier version of this post.

Posted by ajh59 at May 3, 2007 12:51 AM