Even More Tweetness
Just when you may have started to think about using Twitter, let me give you one more reason: it's an event organizing tool. What do you do to maintain order when you expect millions of people to show up at one location at one time? What do you do with ten thousand charter busses and ten times more people than there are spaces? If you're the DC security staff working Obama's inauguration, you'd use twitter.
And it's pretty brilliant. It seems to me, in my infinite shuffle through new media articles, that Twitter has really been pushed as a "microblogging" tool; meaning you basically update your status so people can look at you and what you're doing (as though they actually cared The real power of a tool like Twitter comes from the creative organizational uses and the Obama security team understands this just like the Obama campaign team understood this. It streamlines communication lines. Instead of "trees", you simply have a single text getting rerouted not just to other security members (which access can be limited to) but also to regular foot and vehicle traffic looking to navigate the soon to be packed-out DC streets. Where's the traffic? Has there been a wreck? Are some lines not being used? Are there alternate routes? Twitter's design allows for all of this information to be sent out immediately through a single channel of communication. Frankly, it's brilliant.
The Black Hole of the Internet
There are certainly a few places online where you can find yourself getting lost for hours on end, but few make as good a use of new technology as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online's new travelling snow cam. For those who haven't looked at the link, the Sentinel has a journalist driving around with a mounted camera and is sending a live feed of the road conditions around the Milwaukee area (it was in Waukesha when I saw it) Apparently this nifty device has been dubbed the "weather wagon", and quite frankly it's very amusing. I'm really impressed, however, at the creative use of technology and the equipment that they're using. The raw processing and transferring power they must have to send a live feed from a moving vehicle is pretty cool. It's also a very helpful view of the area around you. Just imagine if you could watch the road conditions an hour before you left for or from work so that you know what you'll be getting into before you even leave (assuming you want to know what roads other than the one in front of your residence look like). Another idea (probably not the best) would be for a live storm-chasing event which is fed directly from the chasers. Or, what if Deadliest Catch installed a 24/7 webfeed from the fishing boats? There are a lot of cool uses other than the puppy cam which was so recently popular (it saw 773 years of watching!!)
Sheldon’s First Christmas
Named after one of the funniest characters in one of the funniest shows, my fiancé was introduced to Sheldon tonight. Sheldon is her new kitten! And, for those who like kittens and find them irresistibly cute, I've gladly provided some footage of our new family member:
Simplifying Really Simple Syndication (five times fast…)
For those who have waited with baited breath, here's the third installment in my web2.0 series:
If you've used the internet for more than fifteen minutes in the past several years, or you've used Outlook or Firefox, chances are you've seen a little orange box with a radio signal in it. Well, that happens to be the icon for RSS.
RSS you say? What on earth is that!? — Well, it's not that easy to explain, but it's a really useful tool that could very well make your virtual experience easier. It certainly helps mine. And, what's more important, it could help you keep users coming to your site, inform your "customers" (whether they're buying products or simply reading your material) of any news, and it can help you streamline information you want to provide subscribers.
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It has been other things (Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary) but for all intents and purposes we're going to stick with the name that makes the most sense. Really Simple Syndication is exactly what it sounds like: you publish information or content on your page, and the RSS web feed is syndicated so that subscribers get content without much or any need to seek it. It's kind of like (or exactly like) a newspaper or magazine company. You write material, it publishes it and sends it to the people who have enrolled in a subscription. So, imagine you're Sports Illustrated. You've just written an article, and as you publish it on your website your RSS feed will syndicate it so that your subscribers will get it at their doorstep (or in this case, a virtual mail-box like aggregator).
Those articles will appear in what's known as a "feed reader", which is really a tool used to collect newly published articles by people you've subscribed to. Those feeds will include either the full article or a summary (your choice) as well as author information and the date. The readers come in both web-based and desktop-based formats, and the long list includes readers like BlogLines, FeedDemon, FeedReader, and NewsGator. Most Browsers also include an aggregator, and typically it just requires going to the "feed" link on a website and bookmarking it. When you do that, you'll often see the name in your bookmark bar followed by a number in parenthesis like : New York Times (25). In this case, it means I've subscribed to the NYT and I have 25 published articles that I haven't read. The great thing is that the aggregator does all of the work for me. I don't need to update or refresh it. As articles become available, the number will change accordingly.
Because the history is long, boring, and techy (and most of you probably don't care) here's a brief summary. The first significant contribution was a format created in 1999 by Ramanathan V. Guha for Netscape. (pretty much the only browser in the eighth grade!) This format was mostly limited to my.netscape.com users, and was pretty much destroyed in AOL's restructuring of Netscape in 2001. After that, UserLand Software and RSS-DEV Working Group took up the banner, and in 2002 UserLand released our current version, RSS2.0. For the designers out there, 2005 marked the official acceptance of the ubiquitous orange RSS icon as IE and Opera adopted it from Mozilla.
I personally subscribe to several feeds, including those at Quipsologies, BrandNew, Ryan's Blog, and numerous web aggregators.
So, make your life and website content really simple, and syndicate it, stupid! (MYRSSS!)