Really Simple Syndication:
Newspaper analogy: Associated Press is a syndicated news service. Articles published by AP appear in newspapers all over the country. RSS-delivered information is syndicated electronically in a similar manner: content posted to one website can be imported by RSS-enabled sites all over the Web, just the way that an AP story would appear in many newspapers.

"Radio RSS": broadcasting and receiving
To use another analogy, RSS is used to deliver information over the web in the form of articles, posts, or headlines/titles via a feed or "channel." The concept behind this is similar to radio broadcasting. This channel is a relationship between one website and an infinite number of others. We can think of the site originating the content as a "broadcaster," and the infinite number of other sites as "receivers."

History/ background

The earliest incarnation of RSS was invented by Dan Libby in 1999 for use in a personalized portal that Netscape developed for users. This page displayed dynamic, self-updating content. The rise of the popularity of blogging and news feeds necessitated the ability to aggregate or collect content on one page in order to keep up with the various sources users might normally visit. We'll learn more about aggregators and portals shortly.

So far we've suggested that RSS works in a way that is analogous to a technological device you are all familiar with: a radio. One website is the "broadcaster," and an infinite number of others can be the "receivers." The information travels from broadcaster to receiver via an RSS feed or channel.
Types of broadcasters: blogs or news sites. Information is published or posted to news sites or blogs, and is flagged with some special xml code. This enables other Web sites we've been calling "receivers" such as portals, aggregators or your WebCT course, to automatically discover and post the information that has arrived via the RSS feed or channel.

Blogs/ online diaries:
If you buy our radio analogy, blogs are a type of "broadcaster." Though not always, they are typically RSS enabled. They normally consist of relatively small articles called posts, which are often displayed in reverse chronological order on a long, scrolling page. Posts are often riddled with links to other blogs or sites. The short articles that constitute a blog, or links to them, can be detected and collected by aggregators or other "receivers." Many blogs allow users to comment on posts.

News feeds:
News articles can be broadcast via RSS feeds to receivers such as aggregators or portals similar to the way that blog posts are delivered.

Aggregators and portals: "My MSN.com" and other commercial personalized pages are customized with dynamic content that is updated automatically via RSS feeds. On a regular basis, aggregators can search for sites offering syndicated content. Aggregators recognize and import content that has been flagged with xml code (RSS) so that the user can simply access information from all their favorite blogs or news sources via one common interface.

So, we just introduced the concept of broadcasters and receivers. For the most part, Blogs and news sites are the sites we can think of as broadcasters. Though we won't get too far into wikis today, they are worth mentioning as an innovative and unique use for RSS. Many of you have heard of Wikipedia, which is an example of a wiki, a page that can be edited easily by users using no other software besides the web browser. Combine this concept with an online encyclopedia, and you get Wikipedia: an online encyclopedia with entries any user may edit. Some editors are fanatical about keeping entries on their favorite topics accurate, so they subscribe to an RSS feed that notifies them which articles have been changed recently. This is tremendously important to the success and accuracy of Wikipedia, because it enables experts on certain topics to monitor changes to entries and to eliminate "vandalism" or profanity and to correct factual and grammatical errors. Thus, Wikipedia relies on the principle of strength in numbers, and the hope that authoritative editors will keep less-than-competent or ill-intentioned editors in check. Portals, such as mymsn.com, and aggregators, such as Bloglines, can be thought of as receivers. By the end of this presentation, you'll know how to turn your WebCT classes into receivers, and you'll be able to enhance your students' learning experience by importing dynamic content automatically!

Lib Line:
Lib Line, the HCCS library blog, is used to deliver updates, library news, or research tips to HCC students, faculty/staff, and community. Posts appear in reverse-chronological order on the page. Users could receive the latest posts in three ways: they could visit the page, they could use an aggregator to import the posts, or they could sign up to have the posts delivered via email.

My MSN:
The mymsn.com portal page can be thought of as a "receiver." The user chooses news stories, weather forecasts, and other RSS feeds to be arranged on the portal page. This information refreshes automatically, as portals retrieve and publish the most recent feeds.

Bloglines:
An aggregator is set up by the user to do exactly as its name suggests: to aggregate or accumulate content that is delivered via RSS feeds. Think of it as a table of contents offering links to news articles and blog posts on your favorite topics. This table of contents is constantly refreshing the information, adding posts or articles that are published by RSS-enabled sites.

Bloglines Search Feature:
It is possible to search for only those sites that offer RSS feeds. Bloglines and Google Blog Search are two examples of blog search engines that will find RSS-savvy sites. As with any Web search, it will be up to you, the user, to sort out the reliable from the non-reliable information. However, Bloglines will sort by popularity. This will cause the creme de la creme of the blogosphere to rise to the top. Try searching for the name of your specific discipline (i.e. "business law") or by using a search term that incorporates the name of your discipline (i.e. "business news").

Locating URLs for RSS feeds:
Once you have located a suitable source of RSS feeds, look for a small orange or blue icon labeled either "xml" or "rss" on the page and click on that icon. (If there is no such icon, look for the word "RSS" or "subscribe" elsewhere in the page. That should lead you to the feed URL.) You will see a page of code. The URL of the feed will appear in the internet address field at the top of the browser window. This feed location will enable you to import content into your rss aggregator or into your WebCT classroom.

Okay - so Barret has explained to you what RSS is and common ways it's used. It delivers bits of information across channels much like a radio station does. And, just like radio waves, without a receiver, RSS is pointless. Both radio waves and RSS require receivers to be utilized to their maximum potential. Barret demonstrated one tool you can use to harness RSS feeds - Bloglines. I'm going to demo a couple of others - specifically rssfwd and Feed2JS.

Rssfwd is a tool that allows you to receive email updates from RSS enabled sites, and Feed2JS is a tool that allows you to pull fresh content from one website - or many - into another site.

Faculty can use these tools to push information to students from sources that they find and determine relevant to their courses - e.g. from online journals or magazines or, as we'll see, the HCC Libraries. 

Rssfwd is a free online service that allows you to receive updates from any RSS enabled site directly in your email inbox. It's as simple as copying and pasting! First, I'll show you what the results look like, then walk you through an example of getting it set up. And then, I'll have each of you subscribe to LibLine, our library blog. And don't worry - you can unsubscribe yourself if you want to.

Faculty can use this service to require their students to subscribe to receive updates from any number of sources.

Feed2JS is another kind of tool that takes those rss feeds and, instead of generating an email, generates a chunk of javascript that you can copy and paste into any webpage. 

This is helpful for anyone who maintains a website and wants to have dynamically generated, fresh info pulled into those pages with little or no effort.  Faculty can create dynamic reading themes that pertain directly to their classes, and these can be made available in their WebCT classes or their learning websites.  Also, because LibLine, our library blog, is RSS enabled, they can add a much needed library component to WebCT, as well.

First we'll look at a couple of examples: one in WebCT and one in another webpage.  Then I'll walk you through the process of adding a feed to WebCT. And then we'll have you guys walk through the first part of that process.

Also, I want to point you folks to my Learning Web site for a minute. Here I've already put up some code that faculty can use to drop blog content anywhere. If you folks decide to pass this info on to faculty or anyone at HCC who runs a website and who might be interested in pointing students to valuable library information, they can bypass most of the process and just grab the code they need here.

So, today Barret went over the basics of what RSS is and showed you some of the ways it's being used on the web. Additionally, he demonstrated one of the ways you can harness the power of RSS when he talked about Bloglines. I went a bit further and showed you a couple of other ways that you can use RSS, including rssfwd, an RSS to email tool, and Feed2JS, which converts live feeds into javascript allowing you to add dynamic content from any RSS enabled site to your web pages or WebCT classrooms.