It's not easy staying in touch with your favourite web site -- bookmarks,
email newsletters, notification agents, search results, shared tags and the
increasingly popular RSS (and Atom) syndication are some of the more common
techniques. Each demands a certain amount of work to set up and recall to
actually re-visit a choice location.
Not for profit and commercial interests employ strategic mixes of various
attention grabbing approaches to stay on our mental radar. Of course some
approaches such as publishing an email newsletter can be very effective but
require significant resources. Other methods such as bookmarks depend on our
individual organizing capabilities.
Tags and RSS/Atom are comparatively more recent web innovations that make it
easier to stay in touch with specific interests. (There are also emerging
services for identifying, locating, and researching specific individuals,
but that's for a future post.)
Two of the most popular tag sites are www.flickr.com and
http://del.icio.us/. One of the better ways to think about these are 'easy
browsing' locations. Find something you like and follow its tags.
Alternatively, search the tags and see what they bring up.
Tags are also appearing on individual sites. Our Community Corner
application (www.itscooperative.com/community/) applies tags internally.
Check the bottom right of the home page for the tag cloud. The more often a
tag is applied, the larger the font for that tag. Follow the link for
'browse all tags' to see the complete list. When visiting a section within
the site, such as a blog or photo gallery, the only tags visible are those
used in that specific blog or gallery.
RSS/Atom syndication is taking a great leap forward. Both Firefox and the
just released version of Internet Explorer 7 have built in capabilities for
automatically identifying the availability of syndicated content.
Inevitably, as more users upgrade Internet Explorer or use Firefox, they
will check to see if a page of interest has a feed they can store in their
browsers.
As with tags, RSS/Atom feeds are not only individual but can be shared. For
example, we do a fair bit of work with health information providers so we
use the built in capabilities of our Community Corner to collect and
publicly display health news
(http://www.itscooperative.com/community/blogs/feeds/default.aspx).
If you like our sources, you can visit each location and capture the feed
yourself. Better yet, it may be easier to simply subscribe to the
syndication of our display page using the capabilities of the newer
browsers. Anything appearing on our site in this location now appears in
your browser.
This growing capability to share content is critical to those whose business
or mission is to produce, organize and distribute specialized information.
You are our new librarians; our authoritative sources. With the growing
volume, we need organized filters that help us stay in touch with the
information we need to meet responsibilities. Strategic use of syndication
from trusted sources combines the skills of information organizers with
smart use of technology to keep the user informed. If the user likes it, she
will click through to the source.
Several years ago we advised funders to include a requirement that all
public output from their grants be available for web access in HTML or in
PDF format. The updated version of that advice is that any information
produced for the public good should be accessible through syndication.
Note: for those who are using IE7, there's a nice online tutorial for using
the new feed manager feature located at:
http://browsers.about.com/od/tipstutorials/ss/ie7_rss.htm
_______________________________________
A. Simon Mielniczuk - Solutions Architect ITS Co-operative Inc.
416.828.2118 / www.itscooperative.com
ITS blog:
http://www.itscooperative.com/community/blogs/its_weblog/default.aspx
personal blog:
http://www.itscooperative.com/community/blogs/asm/default.aspx
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