CdlTalkOnRss - Raymond Yee's Wiki

On 2003-09-19, I will be giving a talk on RSS to the CaliforniaDigitalLibrary. This is a good time to pull together what I know about RSS and what it might mean specifically for librarians. I've been told that I can be as techie as I want since the audience will be primarily programmers.

Current version of the slides (pdf)

I would like to give people pointers to some background materials (and materials that they can learn more from after the talk).

tutorial, library applications, relate to Scholar's Box (RSS as something we can exploit and expand on). Could I simply just give my WebNetTalkOnRss? What's new? Melvyl-to-RSS? RSS 1.0 and SemanticWeb. Pie and Atom.

Materials that I've come across since the talk

Sam Ruby's RSS presentation at Seybold 2003 Syndic8 -- a directory of RSS feeds.

Some possible things to talk about

Syndicating Learning Objects with RSS and Trackback -- points to TheFuss

What is RSS?

RSS stands for "Rich Site Summary" or "RDF Site Summary" or.... RSS is a family of XML formats used to syndicate content ranging from news items, weblog entries, and “pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items” (quote from Mark Pilgrim. What is RSS?)

RSS samples

Drawn from Mark Pilgrim. What is RSS?:

Amazon to RSS

I want to use parts of my Webnet talk to illustrate how we can get RSS out of Amazon to feed into other systems. (I don't think that one actually has to do a XSLT transformation now to get RSS out of amazon. Is there some native RSS coming from Amazon now? Yes)

I can generate a Amazon to RSS for "Bach"

Other Applications of RSS (People are going to use RSS for many different applications)

Contact info: Jenny Levine's Kunekt card. Kunekt
JonUdell had talked a while back about using RSS for syndicating job listings, which inspired some work

Implications of RSS for METS/IMS-CP interoperability issue

This issue has not yet hit the library and educational technology communities, one can get a glimpse into how it may play out by studying the debates around RSS ("Rich Site Summary" or "RDF Site Summary") and related formats among weblogging technologists. RSS is a family of XML formats used to syndicate content ranging from news items, weblog entries, and “pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items” RSS has also been a quickly evolving testbed (and lightning rod) over a number of questions: Is it best to extend RSS via the use of addition of core elements or by modules? How important is the readability of the format to adoption and creative use of the format? Are the benefits of casting RSS (or its successor) in the framework of RDF (Resource Description Framework, part of the semantic web stack) worth the increased abstraction? Are the demands of “episodic websites” such as weblogs best served by the creation of a new specification or working with RSS.

What I think about RDF

I like how MarkPilgrim (in Should Atom Use RDF? breaks the problem out into four issues: 1) Is the RDF triplets model sound? 2) What do you think of the RDF/XML syntax? 3) Do the tools compensate for any illegibility of RDF/XML? 4) What do you think of the SemanticWeb?