Our Digital World I (TIDL 115.01) Blogs, wikis, and torrents, oh my!
Social technology aka Web 2.0
Day 3. Many-to-many publishing: e-mail, directories, search, tagging, and
syndication
So you have something you have a writing, photograph, or recording that
you want to share with other people. How do you do it?
You could post it to the Web and put together a list of e-mail addresses
of your audience, and then either you e-mail your piece directly
to them or you e-mail its address.
You need an aggregator (also called a newsreader,
feed reader or RSS reader) to be able
read a syndicated blog.
Blogger's "How do I change
my site feed settings?", mentioned last
week, can orient you.
Watch our FaceBook group to add
new feeds to your aggregator.
Aggregators are popping up everywhere. Here are some
possibilites, organized according to what device
you use them on:
Desktop aggregators
Feed reading is incorporated into
a recent versions of most web browsers. For instance,
whenever
you
navigate
in
Firefox to a page
that
has
a feed,
this icon appears,
which you can click on to save as a bookmark. The
disadvantage of using a web browser
is that the feeds that you save are updated everytime
you open the browser, which can slow it down considerably
if you have a lot. That's why I prefer a dedicated
or or stand-alone aggregator.
Some portals incorporate feed reading
into their personalized home page, such as MyMSN,
Google
Personalized Home Page, MyYahoo!, which
you read through your web browser.
Some websites do nothing but aggregate feeds for you,
such as Rojo, Bloglines,
and Newsgator.
Many blogs have 'chicklets' (little icons) which you
click on to add the blog's feed to your account at
the aggregator. Here are the chicklets of the ones I just
mentioned:
Feed search engines
There does not appear to be any such thing, but see Feedser
under "blog search engines"
Reactions
What are the advantages of this procedure?
What are the drawbacks?
Social and other networks: FaceBook, tagging & folksonomies