Skills day: Paul Hollins and Sarah Holyfield: RSS
Sarah: Brian has set the context. After listening to him I remembered that been involved in IT and education since the 80s and was teaching hypertext and for people involved in hypertext the web offered incredible possibilities but then it seemed to become constraining but now with web 2.0 all those possibilities seem to be opening up again…
Communication strategies and the role of RSS:
What do you want to achieve?
- audience
- message
- tools and activities etc
RSS is a standard of way of representing what’s on a website - provides a newsfeed and is regularly updated, a user uses a news reader and scans on a regular basis - can be a tool for managing content - for publishers it’s a way to distribute and to exploit what it has to offer
JISC CETIS - was a well-known site primarily managed by a journalist, developed an authoritative site - new models of journalism was emerging, meritocracy emerged with blogs etc - CETIS wanted to exoplore the new model by getting more people writing
New JISC CETIS site exploits RSS ‘under the bonnet’
One idea was to get staff writing blogs and the site that exists now aggregates these blogs and published them on the front page. One problem with automated aggregation was quantity and filtering for quality. Editorial filter can be human but we also have tool developed for CETIS. Things on the internet which is brought onto CTIS also goes through the filter. Domain front pages also draw on the staff blogs and things from the rest of the web. More complex model is being developed to merge blogs, news, features etc.
Issues and questions
What are we trying to communicate?
What do we expect from our audience
Do they want push or pull - email or RSS?
How do we maintain an authortaitive voice but also get community to feed in?
Design issues
Relationship between human control and automation
Some tensions
Paul: site was considered to be an authority - just been through feedback and some people are worried that no longer so authoritative - editorial policy - who controls it - thought tagging would get over that bit it has also created problems - some people comfortable with blogging, others less so - protected authority of the service, why isn’t my post good enough for the front page of the site? whose authority decides that? feedback has been mixed which doesn’t mean our strategy is a failure but it is a learning process - also questions of how we navigate through it
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Could the editorial tool demonstrated during this session be made available for JISC services to use?
Sarah said that RSS takes away the need to visit the web site for information – does this present a problem in terms of introducing new information areas for which they may not have signed up to an RSS feed?