Phil Shapiro wrote:
hi DDN community -
i'm working on a new article that explains what RSS is and how it benefits
people. the beginning of the article appears at
http://whatisrss.blogspot.com/
i have some ideas of what i'll be including in this article next, but i
need help getting more examples of how RSS brings benefits into peoples' lives.
if you can think of some examples of how you or others use RSS, thanks
for sending them over this way. the more examples i can assemble, the more
people will be able to understand what RSS is about.
the article i'm assembling is in the public domain and will be freely
redistributable for any purpose -- including reprinting in newsletters, etc.
thanks in advance.
phil shapiro
washington dc
Hi Phil
I don't know if meant "sending ideas this way" to you personally or to
the DDN list, but I believe it would make an interesting discussion
topic, because:
I first heard of RSS on the DDN discussion list: you, Andy, Taran, other
tech-minded people posted about it. As usual, I was slow on the uptake,
only realizing after half a dozen messages that wow, this ws really
something revolutionary and I'd better make an effort to understand what
it would change and how.
Then I tried to bring the concept home to the other people at ADISI
www.adisi.ch: we are meant to concentrate on the divulgation of
"cyberlaw" issues, but in a way, cyberlaw is not autonomous, it's about
how to apply law to things happening in the cyberworld. And really
simple syndication is certainly something big happening in the
cyberworld, with legal conundrums attached. About authorship and
authors' rights, for instance.
One problem in trying to make the others at ADISI understand the
momentous importance of RSS was language: the vivid experiences
exchanged on the DDN list were in English, and English is the 3rd or 4th
language for the members of the ADISI committe (Italian native, then
French, German).
To overcome this language barrier, with Mahdi Mezher, the IT pro at
ADISI, I wrote a blog entry on 11/9/04, "Firefox 1.0 è uscito oggi.
Novità: il "newsreader incorporato"" (Firefox 1.0. came out today. New
feature: embedded newsreader" <http://adisi.livejournal.com/20329.html>,
about live bookmarks in Firefox. The others politely said it was very
interesting, - staring blankly. But OK, the started using the live
bookmarks in Firefox and bagan to get interested.
So I made www.bloglines.com/public/adisi, and the others seemed a bit
more impressed, being able to view all those dynamic sites in real time
and in one page (I must confess that I only just understood what the
clip blog that goes with it, http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ADISI, is
about and how it works).
And then you tech-aware people at DDN moved on to podcasts. It was
damned thrilling, but I had learned from the experience trying to convey
the importance of RSS feeds. So I first made a very crude podcast at
http://podhost.de before shooting my mouth about it here.
It worked. As did the fact that our translation of Tod Maffin's "How
podcasting will save radio" was immediately taken up by Indymedia
<http://switzerland.indymedia.org/demix/2005/02/30216.shtml> :-D . Mahdi
and I got interviewed about podcasts at RSI, the Italian-language
national radio. Now RSI has started having podcasts too.
We are also making a podcast for our own radio broadcast, Tam Tam
<http://feeds.feedburner.com/adisi/tamtam>. And by making I mean making
it by hand, adding an XML sausage to the string for each new instalment.
We make code mistakes, take down the file, try to find where we went
wrong, put it back up, take it down again...
This handmade podcast doesn't make sense, per se: Tam Tam is a bi-weekly
thing, and we could just have gone on putting the MP3's in the broadcast
list (<http://www.adisi.ch/tamtam/lista2006.html> for this year's). I
feel like the bloke crouching in Vaucansson's chess-player's "automat":
that's not how normal folks do podcasts: they have a program that does
the sausage-adding for them, like the one I first used at podhost.de.
We really started it as an example in Italian. There are light music
podcasts, of course, but we wanted to show that it can also be used for
conveying info, and in education.
But as to real divulgation, beyond people already curious about tech, it
ain't easy. Here, blogs are still considered as kids' stuff. Some
education researchers are starting to advocate using blogs in teaching,
but - with the notable exception of prof. Lorenzo Cantoni's
http://newmine.blogspot.com - aren't keeping one themselves.
And teachers, not being told about RSS possibilities, feel daunted at
the prospect of following several blogs. And they are not told about RSS
possibilities because the teachers' trainers don't know about them. In
part because of the language problem, which in turn implies a mediation
instead of direct access to debates about tech innovation. Or rather:
about the uses and potential of tech innovation, as happens here on the
DDN list.
Media could do more. At RSR, the French-speaking national radio,
Jean-Olivier Pain has a hilarious and bloody well-informed broadcast
about IT innovation, "La capsule de Pain" every morning from Monday to
Friday:
<http://info.rsr.ch/fr/rsr.html?programId=110451&bcItemName=capsule_multimedia&rubricId=3500&contentDisplay=last_five&siteSect=1000>
(1). With a podcast and a help page about podcasting.
It doesn't quite work the same way in the Italian-speaking part. RSI
does have podcasts, but it doesn't have a general RSS feed, whereas RSR
has one. Again, a language issue: English is far more widespread in
French-speaking Switzerland than here. There are other factors too (RSI
has a smaller budget, for instance), but access to info in English seems
to be the main one.
And it's a sorry paradox, because Italian speakers, being a minority and
fairly isolated geographically from the rest of Switzerland, have an
even greater need for the advantages of IT innovations such as RSS feeds.
(1) I wish our national broadcasting corporation would find a way to
produce meaningful URLs - shorter one for La capsule de Pain:
<http://tinyurl.com/a3uuz>.
Best
Claude
Claude Almansi
Castione, Switzerland
www.adisi.ch
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