What is RSS?

I really enjoyed class this week­end with the MBAs! I did get a few ques­tions about why we’re using Blog­lines, and what’s it all about, anyway?

As I men­tioned in class, I’d like you to try some push tech­nolo­gies dur­ing our course, as a means of cre­at­ing your own form of per­sonal com­pet­i­tive advan­tage in your careers and busi­ness ventures.

You’ll have a chance to eval­u­ate these ser­vices at the end of our course, and some of you might con­tinue using push ser­vices if they work well for you.

This arti­cle at ubergizmo.com is a nice, quick expla­na­tion of RSS or Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion. RSS uses the XML data stan­dard to push infor­ma­tion about blogs and web con­tent to you.

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/rss.php

We’re using RSS to sup­port our busi­ness intel­li­gence and research projects. Blog­lines com­bines a fine RSS reader with the Ask.com search engine, so it’s almost like one-stop shop­ping for your research needs.

Next week, I’ll dis­cuss how to use EBSCO along with Bloglines.

There are many, many RSS read­ers that you can install on your com­puter. An RSS reader lets you sub­scribe to mul­ti­ple RSS feeds from dif­fer­ent web sites, and will pull new con­tent into your reader when­ever you run the reader program.

Some peo­ple pre­fer that approach, in which the RSS sub­scrip­tion soft­ware is installed on your own com­puter, or what IT pro­fes­sion­als call the client. If you’re con­cerned that some­one might hack into a web-based RSS reader account and read your sub­scrip­tions, and you only use one com­puter on a reg­u­lar basis, then client-side soft­ware is a good choice.

I find this client-side approach dif­fi­cult to use, as I use sev­eral dif­fer­ent com­put­ers in dif­fer­ent loca­tions. So I’ve cho­sen Blog­lines as my web-based RSS reader. Blog­lines uses a server-based approach, and it is always updat­ing my account with your blog entries and other items on my blogroll, or list of RSS subscriptions.

I’m requir­ing your groups to use Blog­lines because it works pretty well as a group­ware tool, and I can focus on your assign­ments instead of sup­port­ing mul­ti­ple kinds of RSS read­ers. I’ll admit that Blog­lines isn’t per­fect. I find the edit win­dow is quirky, and there’s no spell checker. You might con­sider edit­ing your posts in Word before you copy-n-paste an arti­cle into the edit window.

Blog­lines is not the only web-based RSS reader. There’s another one that I’ve seen but haven’t tried called Rojo.com. It uses tag­ging, a tech­nique that we’ll exam­ine with another ser­vice called social bookmarking.

If you want to set up your own server-based RSS reader, but you don’t like Blog­lines, I’d sug­gest My Yahoo if you already use that ser­vice or Yahoo Mail, and you could try Google Reader if you are a Gmail or Google News user. There are other alter­na­tives avail­able, so use your favorite search engine to find them.

Tagged as: cloud, content, data, feed, Internet, MBA, pda, rss, search, server, social, software, XML, Yahoo