Jinfo: RSS Update: It's RSS, Jim, but Not as We Know It

RSS Update: It's RSS, Jim, but Not as We Know It
Jinfo Blog

30th June 2007

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Roddy MacLeod One of the classic lines from Star Trek was when, on seeing new life on a strange planet, Dr McCoy turned to Captain Kirk and said in an ominous tone: 'It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.' I have replaced 'life' with 'RSS' in the title of this article not merely to catch your eye, but also because I feel that the time has come to change our perspective towards RSS and regard it as something less alien.

For anyone who may have been in a time capsule since Dr McCoy last boarded the Enterprise, RSS is a format for sharing content on the Web. Traditionally associated with news items, and more recently blogs, RSS can in fact be used to syndicate content from almost any list orientated information.

RSS has great potential, and its use is growing. I wrote about it some time ago in FreePint 161 ("RSS: Less Hype, More Action" <http://www.freepint.com/issues/170604.htm#feature>), and I still stand by my perception that RSS will not create an actual 'revolution'. However, as I said in 2004, it is an extremely useful protocol, it is important for the information community, and its use is likely to grow.

One thing that has held back RSS is that it is a slightly difficult concept to explain and grasp. For a start, people often want to know what the initials 'RSS' stand for. RSS can stand for 'Rich Site Summary', 'RDF Site Summary' or 'Really Simple Syndication' depending on whom you ask and which version they are speaking about.

Then there is the fact that to read RSS content, feed reader or aggregator software may be required, and this can be either desktop- or Web-based. Of course, the latest browsers are making it easier to subscribe to feeds, and even the growth in use of the term 'feed' has helped to some extent. However, it is still necessary to understand the reasonably complex concept of subscribing to regularly updated content produced elsewhere, which is subsequently presented via a medium of choice. At the same time, it is not quite as simple as that, because it is also possible to read RSS content that has already been syndicated by someone else, on their website.

There are icons on the starboard bow

Another complication has been the variety of icons used to represent rss. Simple orange (but occasionally blue) rss icons have been popular, but orange xml and rdf icons are also often used to indicate the availability of feeds, and sometimes the version (rss 1.0 or rss 2.0) is specified within the icon. There are even several tools, such as rss icons <http://rss-icons.com/> and feedforall <http://www.feedforall.com/public/rss-graphic-tool.htm>, which allow the creation of almost limitless variations. On some sites, more than one icon is used, examples being the iop syndication site <http://syndication.iop.org/>, which gives the choice of rss 1.0 or rss 2.0 for journal table of contents feeds through two different icons. And also newscientist.com <http://www.newscientist.com/feeds.ns>, which offers three variations. There are valid reasons for the provision of such choice, but the net effect, as with other rss icon variations, is to make things appear more complicated than they actually are.

An orange square with white radio waves has recently become the industry standard for both rss and related formats such as atom, with examples to be found at feed icons <http://www.feedicons.com/>, but many sites do not use these, and some even feel a need to customise this icon and add 'rss' to the left.

Information professionals, publishers and webmasters have been quick to create helpful explanations of what all of this means. Directly beside most rss icons (or orange square with white radio waves, or other variations) on websites can be found a link to a 'what is rss?' or 'what is this?' page. A few examples, taken in this instance from journal publishers, are:

Blackwell Synergy RSS Help <http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/help?context=rss_help>
Emerald Help - RSS Feeds <http://www.emeraldinsight.com/info/help/help_pages/rss_help.jsp>
RSC's What are RSS feeds and how do I use them? <http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Technology/whatisrss.asp>
Oxford Journals RSS Web Feeds <http://www.oxfordjournals.org/help/rss.html>
BBC RSS Help (one of the best general examples) <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm>.

These explanations are all very laudable, but what a duplication of effort, especially as most of these examples give much the same information! Remember, there are thousands upon thousands of such pages. Such information can also become out of date as new ways of using RSS become possible.

A further complication, for the novice RSS user at least, is in the available choice of feed reader. Here are 10:

Bloglines <http://www.bloglines.com/>
Google Reader <http://www.google.com/reader/>
NewsGator <http://www.newsgator.com/>
RSS Bandit <http://www.rssbandit.org/>
Rojo <http://www.rojo.com/>
Awasu <http://www.awasu.com/>
Newsburst <http://www.newsburst.com/>
FeedHugger <http://feedhugger.com/>
Bloogz <http://reader.bloogz.com/>
FeedBucket <http://www.feedbucket.com/>.

Many more are listed by the RSS Compendium <http://www.allrss.com/rssreaders.html>, and in fact, there are so many that they have been broken down by platform (Ajax, Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix, Cross-Platform, Web-Based, Blackberry, Pocket PC, Mobile Phones, e-mail and Other).

Stay alert, crew

As use of RSS becomes ubiquitous, hopefully such concerns will decrease. Certainly, millions of people are now using RSS in one way or another, but millions more are not. It's the latter group that particularly concerns me, as they may be missing valid opportunities for keeping current.

RSS is being used in new ways. For example feeds are available to monitor changes to any Wikipedia article (via an article's history page through the toolbox link labelled "RSS"). Some search services, such as IceRocket <http://blogs.icerocket.com/>, allow searches to be saved as RSS feeds. It also is possible to convert email discussion list outputs to an RSS feed, and there are ways to share calendars via RSS <http://www.rsscalendar.com/rss/>.

RSS is therefore being used to deliver a growing number of types of information in addition to the traditional news feed. Other examples include new funding opportunities (eg, COS Funding News <http://fundingopps.cos.com/news/rss.xml>), new patents (eg, FreePatentsOnline <http://freepatentsonline.com/rssfeed.html>), research announcements (eg, Alphagalileo <http://www.alphagalileo.org/>), calls for papers (eg, Inderscience <http://www.inderscience.com/rss/calls.php>), ePrint repository updates (eg, arXiv.org <http://arxiv.org/help/rss> and E-LIS <http://eprints.rclis.org/last.xml>), job vacancies (eg, Redgoldfish <http://www.redgoldfish.co.uk/jobs_rss.asp>), and new dissertations and theses updates (eg, ProQuest <http://www.umi.com/syndication/rss/disstheses.shtml>).

RSS is increasingly being used by scholarly publishers. When I wrote about journal Tables of Contents (TOCs) by RSS back in FreePint 161 <http://www.freepint.com/issues/170604.htm#feature>, there was only a handful of publishers who were producing TOC RSS feeds. Today, there are many, and many thousands of individual feeds. Probably the best and most current list is the Electronic Journals RSS feeds <http://www.liv.ac.uk/Library/techserv/ejrnl/rss.html>, which is maintained by the University of Liverpool Library. Journal TOC RSS feeds are not only being produced by journal publishers, but also by aggregators such as Atypon <http://www.atypon-link.com/>, Ingenta Connect <http://www.ingentaconnect.com/> and Zetoc <http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/rssjnllist.html>.

In the past, anyone who wanted to be kept informed about such new content needed to get to grips with at least some aspects of RSS. Alternatives are, however, being developed.

One example will result from a new JISC funded project, with which I'm involved, called ticTOCs <http://www.tictocs.ac.uk>. TicTOCs is part of the Users & Innovations: Personalising Technologies (U&I) programme <http://digbig.com/4tgjn> and will utilise RSS in order to make the process of keeping up to date with new journal content much easier for academics and researchers.

TicTOCs is developing a directory of journal Table of Contents RSS feeds, and will provide access to this via a user-friendly website which will enable the display of TOCs, plus the exportation and reuse of items within TOCs and also the TOCs themselves. The name 'ticTOCs' comes from the fact that the process will involve the selective 'ticking' of TOCs at appropriate times, and the intention is that it will only take a tick or two to keep up to date.

There will be a great deal more to the service than that brief explanation above allows, including seamless linking from library journals lists directly to individual journal TOCs. One intention of the project I'd like to flag up is to enable all of this to happen without the need for any user to understand the technical or procedural concepts involved in the process. My hopes are actually that we may not even mention 'RSS' at all on the service website, and that ticTOCs will therefore take the jargon, complexities and confusion out of journal TOC RSS aggregation and use.

Several publishers (SAGE, Emerald, Nature Publishing Group, Institute of Physics, Inderscience and ProQuest) are partners in the project. As ticTOCs will facilitate access to journal literature in the period immediately after publication and before an increasing amount of it becomes freely available from open access repositories, we hope that other publishers will also support the service.

To a great extent, there is little new in the technological solutions to be offered by ticTOCs. For example, many of the functions being developed can currently be performed by existing RSS readers. There are also other tools which allow the aggregation and recombination of feeds, such as afeeda <http://www.afeeda.com/> and Yahoo! Pipes <http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/>. XFruits <http://www.xfruits.com/> provides a number of features, including aggregation of feeds, reuse and conversion to other formats, Feed Digest <http://www.feeddigest.com/> enables feed aggregation and digest creation, and Grazr <http://www.grazr.com/> facilitates the display of RSS feeds on other Web pages. The main difference is that ticTOCs will be concerned solely with journal TOC RSS feeds, and that unlike most of the other tools I have mentioned, no knowledge of RSS will be necessary in order to use it.

For those who may want to know more about possible ways to use RSS, an excellent source of information is Marjolein Hoekstra's RSS Tool Vendors <http://dutchisms.typepad.com/rss_tool_vendors/>, which is part of the CleverClogs blog <http://dutchisms.typepad.com/>. Another source is Phil Bradley's I want to: RSS site <http://www.philb.com/iwantto/rss.htm>. For news about ticTOCs, there is a blog <http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/>.

Cap'n - the engines are overloading!

Whilst RSS is increasingly enabling the delivery of current content of various kinds and from various places direct to the desktop, it is essentially content provider/publisher-driven push technology, and it can result in the delivery of relatively indiscriminate content which may require further time-consuming human filtering.

This is summed up by an amusing cartoon from bLaugh <http://blaugh.com/cartoons/070119_finish_your_RSS.gif> that shows a mother sternly telling her young son, 'You can't go outside to play until you've read all your RSS feeds!' It is certainly true that a trickle of feeds can soon turn into a river of feeds, as more and more potentially relevant sources are found and then added to a feed reader. This can subsequently develop into a veritable flood of information.

Naturally, there are some tools and services which can help. MySyndicaat <http://www.mysyndicaat.com/> allows not only RSS aggregation, but also filtering, using user-defined rules. Blastfeed <http://www.blastfeed.com/> enables filtering of selected feeds, and can notify you of any matching results. There are personalisation tools, such as myFeedz <http://www.myfeedz.com/>, which learn from what you like, and commercial services, such as Newstex BlogAlerts <http://www.museglobal.com/news/press.php?content=2007/20070416.html>, are being developed to generate personalised alerts drawn from the content of millions of blog feeds.

Much more can, and needs to be done in this area, however, to reduce the likelihood of information overload.

RSS has been around for some time now. At first glance it might seem, like Dr McCoy's view from the bridge of the Enterprise, to represent an alien (life)form, but as we get used to it, we find it is evolving into an increasingly friendly and useful tool, and one which is becoming the lynchpin of current awareness.

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