Week 2 Introduction

In Week 1, we got off to an amazing start! I was so pleased to see so many of you really engaging with the content and thinking about how blogs could be used in your setting. On my own blog, Information Wants to be Free, I wrote up what I saw as the highlights of the first week in terms of your posts. You all brought up some really amazing points, and I hope each of you will have a chance to view your fellow participants’ posts and comment.

This week, we will be covering RSS and Social Bookmarking. RSS is a format for syndicating content on the Web. It is based on XML, which means that the content itself is separated from the presentation. In plain English, it allows content on one page to be placed on other pages and for the content to update itself dynamically as the content on the original page is updated. So unlike using HTML to just copy and paste the content to the other site, with RSS the content shows up there and is updated automatically. RSS also allows you to take pieces of content from different sites and put it all up on a single page, like you see in a site like MyYahoo! RSS feeds are usually found on sites that are updated periodically, like blogs, news sites, and event sites that are updated with new content. With RSS, instead of having to visit each and every Web site to see if new content was posted, you can read them all on a single page. Lots of sites these days have RSS feeds that allow you to read their content elsewhere such as the New York Times and CNN.

RSS allows us to make our content more portable, where it can be resyndicated and remixed by us or by others. It make it easier for you to do much more with your content.

This week, you will be getting familiar with RSS feeds by getting set up with your own aggregator and subscribing to some RSS feeds. You will see how you can read content from a variety of sites on a single page and how your aggregator will let you know when new content is posted to your sites.

Social Bookmarking is a Web-based and social version of the traditional browser bookmarks. It allows you to bookmark a site you like so that you can remember it later. Instead of creating hierarchical folders in advance (like with browser bookmarks), users assign tags to their bookmarks along with an optional description of the link. Tags are whatever keywords the user chooses to associate with a link. Users can choose a single tag to associate with a link, or they can use multiple tags. Social bookmarking allows people to catalog the Web using terms that are familiar to them. It also offers others the opportunity to find out what people with similar taste are interested in. Social bookmarking systems capitalize on the actions of people to help others make better decisions. While people are often bookmarking things for themselves, they are, by extension, helping other people to find the items that they have tagged and have implicitly noted as being worthwhile.

To get familiar with social bookmarking, you will be signing up for an account with del.icio.us and will tag some content for your fellow participants.

On Tuesday at 7:00 pm ET, Michele Mizejewski will be teaching us the basics of RSS in her OPAL presentation Getting up to Speed with RSS Webfeeds.

On Wednesday at 9:00 pm ET, Melissa Rethlefsen (creator of the excellent screencast Using RSS to Add Currency to the Library Web Site) will be available in the chatroom to discuss how libraries can use RSS to syndicate content onto their Website.

Our Thursday Webcast at 2:00 pm ET, Make your library del.icio.us, will cover the basics of social bookmarking. Jason Griffey will show you how you can use the social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us in your library in a variety of ways.

This week, we also have a terrific screencast presentation about tagging, Tagging, Folksonomies and the Collective Consciousness of Online Communities, by Gabriel Lundeen. Tagging isn’t something only used in social bookmarking systems and Gabriel will show you the many other areas where tagging is used to make things more findable.

I can’t wait to see what you all think of RSS and social bookmarking!