Weekly Reading 1: Chapters 1-3

Chapter 1: Managing the flow of Information: A Crucial Skill
RSS and Atom are all about information, most specfically about information flows. The processing of information is undergoing a parasigm shift with progessively wider adoption of RSS in its various versions and the emerging of the Atom format. The existence of automated information flows is changing fundamentally how we access and use information.

Essentially, RSS and Atom are tools that enable developers to provide better access to information for users. RSS and Atom provide a new metaphor of access to web-based information---instead of browsing to multiple websites to gather information, the user can access all sorts of feeds at once using an aggregator.

Chapter 2: Where Did Information Feeds Start?
While the exact date can be argused, information feeds essentially started with the 'My Netscape Portal.' Which aggregated content from many sources in a portal that could be customized by the user. My Netscape Portal just didn't come out of the blue, it was a blending of various technologies and factors that were required to be in place for the customization of content to be possible.

Information feeds use the Internet protocols such as HTTP and TCP/IP. There are several versions of RSS. The first version RSS 0.9 or RDF Site Summary, in version 0.91 it was changed to RSS or Real Simple Syndication. There are a a few versions of RSS, but the most used today are 0.91, and RSS 2.0.

Chapter 3: The Content Provider Viewpoint
Why would a business want to create content? This is the most important question before diving into information feeds. What impact are they going to have on the organzation. Don't solve problems that have solutions, but don't have any value.

So why do want to give your content away?

* Good Advertising
* Everyone else is doing it, if you don't do it you'll be at a compettive disadvantage.
* It can increase flow of traffic to your site (good or bad depending on the site)
* It can increase awareness of your company, product or web-site
* The existence of information feeds can influence search engine rankings.

What content do you include in a feed?

* What parts of information on your site, blog do you feel is most important to your users? For example, real-time news feeds or emails
* Another important think to know when producing feeds is the importance of item titles. If you look at it from the viewpoint of the user, the more enticing the title the more likely the user will navigate to your page.
* Feeds should tailtor to your intented audience

hi

my first blog.........