techtalk.r-l-w.net

If you have been browsing much recently you have very likely seen a link to a ‘feed’. You may, however, not be quite clear on what a feed actually is. This article aims to get you up to speed with feeds.

A feed is basically a reconstitution of your website content in an XML format that allows feedreaders to download it.

OK, I’m right with you, Roger… except for that XML stuff and the feedreader thing. I mean– OK a feedreader reads a feed, but that’s kind of a circular definition, aint it?

Let’s step back a moment and start at the beginning.

Checking one website daily for updates manually may not seem like much of a chore, but when you scale the idea to a even a couple dozen it can get to becoem a time-consuming hassle– especially when you find yourself wasting time visiting sites that haven’t changed since you saw them last. Some people want to get so much news and information that they simply can’t surf to all the sites that may interest them. Somebody decided it would be cool if there were a thing that would download postings to websites they wanted to ’subscribe’ to so they could skim the titles and read what they wanted without having to wade through the actual website itself. Within this idea lies the genesis of feeds and feed readers.

A feed reader is a program (or web-based service) that does exactly what the bedraggled surfer above wanted. A feed reader continually checks the websites you tell it to, downloads all the postings there, and presents them to you in a simplified and possibly categorized form so you can scan through the information quickly selecting what you want to read and ignoring what you don’t want to read alll without even having to open your browser bookmarks.

As mentioned above, a feed is simply the content of a website in a form compatible with feed readers. There are a couple of different types of feeds- RSS and ATOM being the two biggies right now, but as long as you are using a decent feed reader which you pick should be pretty transparent.

This is the simple foundational explanation of the concept of feeds and feed readers. It does get more complex.

For instance many web sites offer feeds of catagories of posts in addition to feeds of all posts. Some even offer feeds of comments on posts. Why would you want a feed on comments? Say you read an interesting web article that had a lot of comments. The comments in fact became an extended discussion on a topic of interest to you. You could use your feed reader to subscribe to the feed of the comments on the post and your reader would then continually download a concentrated form of the discussion you could quickly scan and absorb. Additionally some social bookmarking sites offer feeds on tags– your feedreader downloads articles tagged on the social bookmarking site with the tag you specified.

If you check a lot of websites daily, you might want to consider testing out a feed reader. If you don’t, well now at least you can impress your less computer savvy friends with a new buzzword.

Social bookmarking is the concept of using tags to create a folksonomy that helps people find information.

For those of you who might not be familiar with the concept of ’social bookmarking’, ‘tags’ or ‘folksonomy’– I offer a brief and hazy (perahps even simplistic) description of what these buzzwords refer to.

A ‘tag’ is a word used to categorize something. For example if I read someone else’s blog post about trouble-shooting a car that wouldn’t start I might want to associate the tags ‘how-to’, ‘automotive’, and ‘repair’ to that post.

Ok, Roger, but how do I associate these tags with that post?

This is where something like blinklist comes along. Say you have registered an account with blinklist- and then you read the abovementioned car-fixing blog post. You would add a link to the post to your blinklist and in the ‘Tags’ field of your blinklist toolbar you would type the text: how-to, automotive,repair.

Now you have ‘tagged’ that post with the three tags you felt were appropriate.

MMM, Aha. I see, but… What’s the point of this ‘tagging’?

The point of the tagging is that by adding tags to the links on your list you are building a ‘folksonomy’.

The word folksonomy is a derivation of the word taxonomy. A taxonomy is basically a system of classification and a folksonomy is a grass-roots classification by the masses, so to speak. That is, as people tag links and allow those tags and links to be shared, an organic taxonomy is generated by the folks who tag the links. Once a folksonomy begins to develop the links put into the system and tagged increase in value because they now can be found more easily and can be related to other topics.

Uh-huh. Perhaps the fog is beginning to clear– but how do you access this folksonomy thing that connects all these now-indexed posts?

A novel and interesting way of displaying a folskonomy is what is called a ‘tag cloud’. A tag cloud is a list of tags, usually in alphabetical order for easy visual searching, which shows some dimension of a tag’s parameters in a visual manner.

For example, if you click the link to blinklist above, you will see a column on the right side of the page filled with a list of words of varying sizes. This is a tag cloud. The larger the tag (each of the words is a tag), the more popular it is (the more links have that tag applied to them).

Now this might be interesting as a statistical display, but its power comes from the fact that each tag in the cloud is clickable. Click on a tag and you are taken to a page that shows you a list of links that have been tagged with the word you just clicked.

Not all social bookmarking systems have tag clouds some simply display a list of links with tags associated, but all of them offer a search box. Enter a term in the box and a list of links tagged with that term will be displayed.

I think I see now, but what’s the big deal? I mean why not just use a search engine instead of all this social bookmark stuff?

One of the benefits of using social bookmarking systems is that every link in the system has been tagged by a person (at least I am not aware of any kind of automatic tagging system, though some social bookmarking systems suggest likely tags when you mark a link). That means that someone has taken the time to consider what the information the link leads to is about and taken the effort to mark it appropriately. This frequently yields more appropriate search results, but there is another reason to use social bookmarking tools.

You can tag your own links. Say you’ve just written a blog post about your recipe for pizza sauce and you want people to read it. If you’re like me, simply posting it to the web and waiting will net you zero to six readers depending on how many of your friends you email about the post. However, bookmarking your post on a social bookmarking system and applying tags like: cooking, pizza, pizza sauce, homeade, sauce gives your link a much better chance of getting seen by someone interested in one of those topics. Furthermore, bookmarking and tagging your link on multiple social bookmarking sites (there are currently about twenty well-known ones, which are all free) will make it even more visible. But there is still another reason to use social bookmarking tools.

The good ones provide you with your own personal tag cloud. That means that in addition to the public tag cloud, you have your own private one that only shows your tags and links making it easier to organize and find your own bookmarks.

If I use one of these social bookmarking sites I would have to be connected to the internet to use them. Besides, I have this thing right here on the top bar of my browser that lets me bookmark links. Why should I bother?

Browsers do provide the ability to bookmark internet links, but most browsers have limited capabilities of organizing bookmarks. You can create hierarchical lists, but you have to do all the work to make those lists and organize them. Perhaps it’s not much work to make a new bookmark category to put links under, but it is work. Social bookmarking systems automatically do all that work for you in addition to allowing you to harness the power of tags applied to other people’s links. It can be difficult to get over the idea of having your own bookmark list right there snugly in your browser available whether you are connected to the internet or not, but when you think about how many of your bookmarks you click when you are not online the advantages of browser bookmarks over social bookmarks evaporates quickly.

Now hopefully you can see the value of social bookmarking. Give it a try– my explanation has only covered the surface of what can be done with social bookmarking tools and you will figure it out much more concretely by experimenting now that you have read my introduction. If you think about it a bit and tinker around you might even come up with a totally new way to use them.

Having decided to take the plunge from being a tech blog reader to being a tech blog writer, I hereby present my tech blog.

I envision this blog as a way to develop and record my thinking on technological things going on around me, and a way to introduce others to technological developments they might otherwise not have known about.

Hopefully I’ll finally catch the blogging bug.