Blogs, RSS and XML

Blogs, RSS and XML

In this lesson we will focus on some newer trends on the WWW: Blogs, RSS and XML feeds. Much of this lesson is adapted from articles on these subjects from Wikipedia, the free WWW user-written encyclopedia.

Blog Basics

A blog (or weblog) is a website in which messages are posted and displayed with the newest at the top. Like newsgroups and discussion boards, blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. Some blogs function as online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Since its appearance in 1995, blogging has emerged as a popular means of communication, affecting public opinion and mass media around the world. Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software on regular web hosting services.

The term blog is a blend of the terms web and log, leading to web log, weblog, and finally blog. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called blogging. Individual articles on a blog are called "blog posts," "posts" or "entries." A person who posts these entries is called a blogger.

How Blogs Differ from Traditional WWW Sites

A blog has certain attributes that distinguish it from a standard web page. It allows for easy creation of new pages: new data are entered into a simple form (usually with the title, the category, and the body of the article) and then submitted. Automated templates take care of adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page, and adding the article to the appropriate date- or category-based archive. It allows for easy filtering of content for various presentations: by date, category, author, or other attributes. It allows the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permission and access are managed by the blog's administrator.

Blogs are different from forums or newsgroups. Only the author or authoring group can create new subjects for discussion on a blog. A network of blogs can function like a forum in that every entity in the blog network can create subjects of their class. Such networks require interlinking to function, so a group blog with multiple people holding posting rights is now becoming more common. Even where others post to a blog, the blog owners or editors will initiate and frame discussion, manipulating the situation to their goals or interests.

The Growth and Significance of Blogs

The first broadly popular American blogs emerged in 2001: Andrew Sullivan's AndrewSullivan.com, Ron Gunzburger's Politics1.com, Taegan Goddard's Political Wire and Jerome Armstrong's MyDD—all blogging primarily on politics. In 1999, then owner of popular technology review portal, The Review Center, John Guilfoil theorized that daily, and often multi-daily updates instead of the often used weekly news updates seen throughout the technology reviews world would soon be needed in order for these web sites to survive. He suggested that shorter, more pointed news updates in the theme of livejournal.com, which was then a fledging blog site, would be necessary across the board. This revolution in up-to-the-minute updating and real-time news updates has led to the evolutionary shutdown of countless amateur technology web sites.

By 2001, blogging was enough of a phenomenon that how-to manuals began to appear, primarily focusing on technique. The importance of the blogging community (and its relationship to larger society) gained rapidly increasing importance. Established schools of journalism began researching blogging and noting the differences between journalism and blogging.

In 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants, news services and candidates began using them as tools for outreach and opinion forming. Even politicians not actively campaigning, such as MP Tom Watson of the UK Labour Party, began to blog to bond with constituents.
Minnesota Public Radio broadcast a program by Christopher Lydon and Matt Stoller called "The Blogging of the President," which covered a transformation in politics that blogging seemed to presage. The Columbia Journalism Review began regular coverage of blogs and blogging. Anthologies of blog pieces reached print, and blogging personalities began appearing on radio and television. In the summer of 2004, both (America's Democratic and Republican) parties' conventions credentialed bloggers, and blogs became a standard part of the publicity arsenal. Mainstream television programs, such as Chris Matthews' Hardball, formed their own blogs. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary declared "blog" as the word of the year in 2004.

RSS and XML Feeds

RSS is a family of web text-feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news websites, weblogs and podcasting. RSS "pushes" new data out to users, often without any specific human input once certain rules and guidelines have been specified. The abbreviation is variously used to refer to several different technical standards:

Really Simple Syndication
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
Real-time Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

Web feeds are widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files. Since mid-2000, use of RSS has spread to many of the major news organizations, including Reuters, CNN, PR Newswire, and the BBC. These providers allow other websites to incorporate their "syndicated" headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds under various usage agreements. RSS is now used for many purposes, including marketing, bug-reports, or any other activity involving periodic updates or publications. Many corporations are turning to RSS for delivery of their news, replacing email and fax distribution.

Technical History

Before RSS several similar formats already existed for syndication, but none achieved widespread popularity or are still in common use today, as most were envisioned to work only with a single service.

RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Dan Libby of Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My Netscape portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9. In July 1999, responding to comments and suggestions, Libby produced a prototype tentatively named RSS 0.91 (RSS standing for Rich Site Summary), that simplified the format and incorporated parts of Winer's scripting news format. Soon afterwards, Netscape lost interest in RSS/XML, leaving the format without an owner, just as it was becoming widely used. A working group and mailing list, RSS-DEV, was set up by various users and XML notables to continue its development. At the same time, Winer unilaterally posted a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification to the Userland website, since it was already in use in their products. He claimed the RSS 0.91 specification was the property of his company, UserLand Software. Since neither side had any official claim on the name or the format, arguments raged whenever either side claimed RSS as its own, creating what became known as the "RSS fork," i.e., a "schism' between the original RSS development strand and the newer specifications.

In reaction to some technical problems with RSS (and because RSS 2.0 is no longer being developed/improved), a third group began a new syndication specification, Atom, in June 2003, and their work was later adopted by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The relative benefits of Atom and the two RSS branches are currently a subject of heated debate within the Web-syndication community. Supporters claim that Atom improves on RSS by relying on standard XML features, and by specifying a delivery system that can handle many different kinds of content unambiguously. Opponents claim that Atom unnecessarily introduces a third branch of syndication specifications, further confusing the marketplace.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a standards-based general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. In other words: XML is a way of describing data and an XML file can contain the data, too, as in database. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet, and has become a popular tool for bloggers.

Using RSS

Technical issues aside, as the mainstream media attempts to realize the full potential of RSS, the new media is utilizing RSS by bypassing traditional news sources. Consumers and journalists are now able to have news constantly fed to them instead of searching for it. A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is common to find web feeds on major websites and many smaller ones. Some websites let people choose between RSS or alternate formatted web feeds; others offer only RSS.

RSS-aware programs are available for various operating systems. Client-side readers and aggregators are typically constructed as standalone programs or extensions to existing programs such as web browsers. Browsers such as Apple's Safari, Opera browser and Mozilla Firefox are moving toward integrated feed reader functions. If you're using Internet Explorer, pre-version 7, then it probably won't work. From version 7 on, when you subscribe to an RSS stream, the selection becomes a pull-down menu in your browser's toolbar menu. The headlines of the stream are displayed when you pull down the menu. Microsoft has a page describing the use of RSS in IE at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/rss/default.mspx

If you don;'t have IE 7, use Firefox. When you click the RSS icon, you get a page with the following message:

This is a “feed” of frequently changing content on this site.
You can subscribe to this feed to receive updates when this content changes.

Select the manner in which you want to receive the news stream, and then you're set.

On a Mac, just use Safari. When you're on a page that has an RSS feed, click the RSS icon in the location bar (just to the right of the URL of the currently-displayed page).

Web-based feed readers and news aggregators require no software installation and make the user's "feeds" available on any computer with Web access. Some aggregators combine existing web feeds into new feeds, e.g., taking all football related items from several sports feeds and providing a new football feed. There are also search engines for content published via web feeds like Feedster or Blogdigger.

On Web pages, web feeds are typically linked with the word "Subscribe," an orange rectangle, , or with the letters or . Many news aggregators such as My Yahoo! publish subscription buttons () for use on Web pages to simplify the process of adding news feeds.

Conclusion

Blogs, RSS and XML feeds are tools about which you should know because they're becomming fairly common on the 'Net. How they develop and whether people will continue to think they're useful, only time will tell.

Have fun and keep your questions coming.

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