John Breslin

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John Breslin

• Syndication and RSS
• 9th June 2005

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• And now, the science bit...

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Why Syndicate?

• Syndicating your blog is an easy and free way to
  get your message (be it personal or professional)
  out there to the public

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Overview

• Introduction
• What is Syndication?
• What is RSS?
• What are Aggregators and Readers?
• Irish Blog Aggregators

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Generation Blog
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What is Syndication?

• Content is syndicated from many blog and news
  sites in computer-readable feeds that can be
  used by other people / systems
• For example, news content from RTÉ and
  Ireland.com is syndicated so that headlines can
  be read by people in their own feed reader
  programs or integrated into their own websites
  the same goes for blogs

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Planet Of The Blogs
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Syndication Formats

• Latest articles, with hyperlinks, titles and
  summaries, are syndicated using computer-readable
  formats (e.g. for reading favourite blogs with a
  feed reader)
• Syndication format is usually RSS
• Some sites use a different syndication format
  (e.g. Blogger.com uses Atom)

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What is RSS?

• The most common syndication format(s)
• Acronyms
• Really Simple Syndication
• Rich Site Summary
• RDF Site Summary
• Eight flavours of RSS (not including Atom!)

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RSS Feed Structure

• Class channel
• Properties title, link, description
• Contains items
• Class item
• Properties title, link, description,
  date, creator, etc.

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RSS is Not Just for Blogs

• More than just blog headline syndication, since
  RSS can be used for
• libraries (e.g. NUI Galway use it to announce new
  book acquisitions)
• shared calendars (RSSCalendar.com)
• newspaper articles (one of the original uses)
• recipes, and more...
• Strength (and weakness!) is in its generality

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Irish Blog Engines

• Blogger
• Moveable Type
• WordPress

Atom
RSS (RDF, XML), Atom
RSS (RDF)
RSS (RDF)
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The Good News

• You don't have to worry about which feed format
  your blog provides, because practically any
  aggregator or news reader worth its salt will be
  able to read it anyway!
• If you want to help the Semantic Web effort, use
  the RSS 1.x variants (RDF) as these allow you to
  combine with other vocabularies such as FOAF,
  Dublin Core...

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What are Aggregators and Readers?

• Previously, semi-regular visits to bookmarked
  sites resulted in a lack of accuracy in
  monitoring information
• Aggregators or readers allow you to check
  multiple blog or news feeds on a regular basis
• Choose to view only new or updated posts

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Advantages of Aggregators and Readers

• Readers can pull information from sites and put
  it directly on your desktop application
• Allow you to quickly scan for relevant content
  using integrated newsreader solutions (Outlook,
  Mozilla, etc.)
• Intelligent pushing of feeds (e.g. with
  pingback) can be facilitated to update content
  immediately on aggregator sites

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Popular Feed Readers

• Desktop Mozilla Thunderbird
• Web-Based Client Bloglines.com
• Web-Based Server Planet Planet

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Irish Blog Aggregators

• IrishBlogs.ie
• First Irish blogs aggregator, well known
• Now has an Irish blogs directory
• planetoftheblogs.com
• Launched 1st April 2005
• 500 Irish blogs at present, largest
• Open inclusion policy

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Planet Of The Blogs
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The End

• Blog syndication is the provision of content from
  blogs using standard-format RSS feeds, that can
  then be used by others in their applications
  (aggregators, readers)
• Get a free blog at www.irishblogs.org
• Thanks for your attention!
• Any questions?