Web 2.0 basics: RSS / google reader
Over the past week of seminars, a number of people wanted to know about RSS feeds and how you can make the most out of them.
For my own personal use, I use google reader, but there are others. My google reader account collates news from a variety of sites which I can access in the one place, rather than visiting 10 or 20 different sites.
To explain it however, the simplest thing to do is link into a couple of films which explain it well.
Here is a 90 second film from the google site explaining it all;
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if you’d like a more detailed explanation, this is good;
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I mentioned above that for personal use, I use google reader. In addition you can also use the RSS feature to bring content into your website. Looking at this particular site, you can see on the right hand side of the page that we have live feeds from the Arts Council and from Temple Bar Cultural Trust. These update automatically, so once I bring them into the layout of the site, the updates all happen without me having to do anything.
If you select suitable RSS feeds to come into your site, it can be a win-win feature. On one hand, it allow you as web publisher to offer your visitors information that it up to date and relevant to their interests.
On the other hand, it also can help bring traffic to the websites of other stakeholders (funders, kindred organisations etc), who hopefully in turn will reciprocate with featuring RSS feeds from your site into theirs.
[...] to be kept up to date with the rest of the series – blogging is next – they can subscribe by RSS and [...]