Jennifer's Blog - Using the Weblog. Weblog: Jennifer's Blog
Source: Using the Weblog
Link: http://vision.unco.edu/blog/jennifer/archives/000045.html
Subscription: "distance education"

Welcome to our course weblog! We're going to step out to the fringes of what's new in distance education by using this weblog to develop our community instead of using chats and discussion boards. Several times each week, I'll be... [PubSub: "distance education"]

Worth keeping an eye on to see how this develops.

6:24:49 PM    comment []  

It occurred to me today that I hadn't seen an update from Evan Williams in quite some time, so I went to his weblog to see if he had been udpating, and sure enough, he had. I guess they stopped maintaining his RSS feed. In doing a bit of checking for the Peters piece, above, I came across this concern: "...programs will express compatibility in terms of products, not formats. Then you'd have to use one aggregator to read BBC feeds, for example, and another to read SF Chronicle feeds." Well I guess we didn't have to wait too long for that to happen. [Scripting News]

This raises an important and potentially deal stopping issue: the need to support multiple standards to get newsfeeds.  A quick survey of aggregators I have handy indicate that Radio, Manila, and Geeklog don't know what to do with an Atom feed.  The MyYahoo aggragetor says it recognizes it, but it hasn't shown me anything yet.  I don't want to have to use multiple aggregators to read feeds.  I really hate that. 

So the question is, why is Atom there?  Well, the short answer is here.  In a nut shell, the developers behind Atom decided that weblogs needed a better specification for syndicating and interacting with their content.  Fair enough.  But it really just looks like, on the sydication end, they took RSS added a few bits and renamed some more.  It ain't that different.  I don't get it.  I mean why bother?  It would have made more sense to do Atom as a seperate XML namespace for blogs that could be included in RSS.  That way no aggregators get broken and XML is used like it is supposed to be: as a series of modules.

Bonus concern:  What about non-bloggers?  I'm rolling out a series of feeds for a non-blog site, so what do I care about all that blog specifc stuff?  Nothing.  With RSS I just don't use it and I can still get picked up by most aggragetors out there.  If I want extensions, I'll use xml namespace to add stuff and I may (hey, I've already written my own LDAP elements).  But I won't run out and create a new specification for syndicating non-blog website.

4:51:01 PM    comment []