RSS

RSS feeds have been part of my daily life for several years now. The Wikipedia entry is not new to me, because I read it several years ago out of curiosity. But I have never taken advantage of them in the way described in Educase's “7 Things You Should Know About... RSS.” For me, the Google Reader and other RSS feeds have been only a personal virtual bookshelf. There are only two other friends in Google Reader that share materials with me or who allow me to share materials with them. It's not that I don't want to share with more people, it's that there are not that many people in my email list who use this service. The feeds I'm subscribed to in Google Reader are related to Adobe Flash, photography, science, and food. I have subscriptions to RSS feeds outside of Google and I use those more often. The word of the day, the New York Times, the BBC, etc. have become part of my routine. For me, these stand alone feeds with their orange-y broadcast symbol are the newspaper, while I see the Google Reader feeds as the equivalent of the magazines that arrive every month or so to my mail box.

In my classes, I use a wiki from pbworks.com, and this site has an old system to subscribe to a page—the email. The problem is that I get 10 or more emails a day from the this site telling me that a page has changed. Pbworks.com user may choose not to receive the emails, which is what I recommend to my students, but I hope they soon use RSS feeds instead.

iTtunes aggregates feeds as well. My favorite podcast is the one by the National Gallery of Art, which offers the recorded live talks at the museum.

I have met several individuals who confuse RSS with podcasts. In essence, they have the same principle and as a subscriber, I may use them in the same way. But the technical definition seems to be different. An RSS may feed news about text, mashups, and news, while podcasts resemble more a radio or tv show that comes up at a regularly.