Web 2.0: the nuts and bolts

Problems of information handling

"Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant." Mitchell Kapor
"One of the Internet's strengths is its ability to help consumers find the right needle in a digital haystack of data." Jared Sandberg

Spend a few minutes with other delegates considering how you work at the moment, considering what works well within your organisation and what doesn't. The following is a list of pointers to give you something to think about:

Given the amount of information available on the Internet - what is the best way of finding, collating and presenting that information?
What are advantages and disadvantages of using email?
How else can you provide this data to your clients?
What works, and what doesn't work?
How long does it take?
Are the methods that you use effective?
How do you find out what colleagues are doing?
How much reinventing the wheel takes place?
How much does your technical staff help or hinder?

Introduction to weblogs for information

Criteria for weblogs - what makes a weblog?

Take a look at some (but not all!) of the following weblogs, and make a note of any particular characteristics that they have; what makes them different to other webpages?

The first place to go should be the UK library weblogs wiki at http://uklibraryblogs.pbwiki.com/
Gary Price – ResourceShelf at http://www.resourceshelf.com/
Phil Bradley's weblog at http://www.philbradley.typepad.com/
My 'I want to...' weblog at http://philbradley.typepad.com/i_want_to/
Freedom of information blog at http://foia.blogspot.com/
Tom Roper's weblog at http://tomroper.typepad.com/
Karen Blakeman's blog at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/
Ian Snowley's weblog at http://snowley.typepad.com/ian_snowleys_weblog/
The Information Overlord at http://www.informationoverlord.co.uk/
UK School Librarians Unite! http://ukschoollibrarians.blogspot.com/ (this has now died, but worth a look)
The librarians tangents at http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/kercal/
SLA weblog at http://www.sla.org.uk/sla-blog.php
Google group for British librarian bloggers at http://groups.google.com/group/britlibblogs
There are also dozens more at http://www.pageflakes.com/philipbradley.ashx?page=4541261

Reporting back - what characteristics and criteria did you spot that makes these weblogs? How could you use these weblogs?

Creating your own weblogs

Diarist at http://www.diarist.net/ is more for people who want a diary type weblog
LiveJournal at http://www.livejournal.com/ is very highly regarded
Xanga at http://www.xanga.com/ is an easy to use blogging tool
Blogger at http://www.blogger.com is the package that I used to use, and it's owned by Google, so is integrated into the Google Toolbar
MSN Spaces at http://spaces.msn.com/ is Microsoft's offering for blogging. Again it's easy to use and simple to set up.
WordPress at http://wordpress.org/ is blogging software that you download onto your own system or you can use their system to host your weblog
TypePad at http://www.typepad.com/ is the system that hosts my current weblog, but it is a commercial product.
Vox at http://www.vox.com/ is a new package, still at the requesting an invitation stage, but it's free and for personal weblogs, from Sixapart, who brought us TypePad.
MySpace at http://www.myspace.com/ is widely used in the United States, often by teenagers.

Creating a weblog

For this exercise we'll start by using Blogger. Visit the website at http://www.blogger.com.
Click on 'Create your own blog'
Choose a user name - usually your own, or if you're writing one for your organisation, perhaps that instead.
Set a password and confirm it.
Choose the display name, which is the name that will come up on blog entries - this will probably be your own name, or perhaps if you wish to remain slightly anonymous, your title or position.
Add an email address.
Click to accept terms of use.

Give your weblog a name.
Choose an address for the weblog (unless you host it on your own site)
Verify your choice

Choose a template - don't worry about this, since Blogger takes care of everything - just go with something you like, because you can always change it later. Congratulations - you've just created your own weblog!

Enhancing a weblog

Google has created a whole wealth of different gadgets that work both on webpages and on weblogs. A list of them is available here: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open

Introduction to RSS

First of all, RSS is really simple - it has to be, it's used widely by a lot of different resources for a lot of different purposes by a lot of different people, and if it was complicated it would have failed miserably. RSS is an acronym, but depending on who you ask and what version of RSS you are speaking about, it may stand for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, Read Some Storiesor a variation on one of those. None of that matters to you anyway; you don't really need to know that stuff.

RSS is a text-based format, a type of XML. You only need to be aware of the as RSS files are often labeled as XML. RSS version 1.0 is also RDF (whatever), which, again, is important only because an RSS file may be labeled as RDF. RSS files (which are also called RSS feeds or channels) simply contain a list of items. Usually, each item contains a title, summary, and a link to a URL (e.g. a web page). Other information, such as the date, creator’s name, etc., may also be available. The most common use for RSS files is for news and other reverse-chronologically ordered websites like blogs.

When a website has an RSS feed, it is said to be “syndicated.” There are various other syndication formats besides RSS (such as Atom), but RSS is by far the most widely used and supported today. RSS files do not have a common file extension, although they frequently end in one of .xml, .rss, or .rdf (note that other extensions may be used also). The term “scraping” refers to creating an RSS feed for a website that doesn’t provide one itself (i.e. scraping the text off of the page). That is, scraped feeds are not created by the same people who created the content within the feed. Scraped RSS feeds may stop working if the page changes its layout.

My weblog is at http://www.philbradley.typepad.com/ and it's the version that human beings look at. The syndicated version is at http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/index.rdf which is absolutely meaningless. However, this is used to create a different type of data set on my own website at http://www.philb.com.

Using RSS

To be clear; YOU do not use RSS directly. You use a resource that uses RSS to deliver information to you, or to allow you to do something else with it, such as putting a feed onto a website (as with my site), or to use a news aggregator to allow you to read weblogs and news feeds more quickly and effectively.
Get news as it happens, using RSS mix at http://rssmix.com/ or from the BBC at http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml
Collect email from your email (GMail) account using the link "https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom" or try out http://www.mailbucket.org/
http://www.rssauction.com/ allows you to keep up to date with eBay auctions
Get ticker feeds from Yahoo! http://edit.ticker.yahoo.com/config/slv4_page?.p=ticker
Check the weather for the UK, or indeed anywhere else at http://www.rssweather.com/dir/Europe/UK/
See what people are saying about you or your company using PubSub at http://www.pubsub.com or Technorati at http://www.technorati.com/
Music, radio and tv clips from Podcast Alley at http://www.podcastalley.com/
Create a calendar so that people can keep up to date with what you're doing via RSS at http://www.rsscalendar.com/rss/
Find out what other people are looking at using Del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us/, Feedmarker at http://feedmarker.com/, FURL at http://www.furl.net/index.jsp or Wists at http://wists.com/
Keep up to date with software downloads and updates at http://www.download.com/
See if people are adding any interesting photographs to Flickr groups: http://www.flickr.com/groups/librariesandlibrarians/
Keep current with searches from Live.com at http://www.live.com/
Create Google searches that you can turn into RSS feeds with Feedmysearch at http://feedmysearch.com/

All of this is done using utilities often known as:

News Aggregators

For anyone that reads a half dozen or more pages that have RSS feeds, an aggregator is a necessity. RSS aggregators are set up to periodically check for new items in the feeds you are subscibed to, commonly once every hour. In other words, the news comes to you, rather than you having to go to the news. This saves a tremendous amount of time. Or conversely, you can read many more feeds in the same ammount of time. Many people read several hundred feeds. That just wouldn’t be feasible without an RSS aggregator. Additionally, you avoid all the non-new information on a web page, including the ads, menus, etc.

Bloglines at http://www.bloglines.com Bloglines is a web based service that is fast, efficient and effective. My personal favourite.
Google RSS Reader at http://www.google.com/reader/view/
AmphetaDesk at http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/ is software that you download onto your own machine.
NewsIsFree at http://www.newsisfree.com/ allows you to set up an aggregator for keeping up to date with current news
NewsMonster at http://www.newsmonster.org/ is software you can download that runs in your browser.
Syndirella at http://yole.ru/projects/syndirella/ is also a software download.
Wildgrape NewsDesk at http://www.wildgrape.net/ is yet another software download
PubSub at http://www.pubsub.com/ is an excellent resource for finding new information for you.

Creating your own newsreader or RSS aggregator

The package we will use for this is Bloglines at http://www.bloglines.com. Please see the second handout for screenshots. If for some reason you are unable to use Bloglines, I would suggest exploring Google RSS Reader instead.

Some examples of what libraries are already doing

The following are some examples of how libraries are using RSS to promote their own activities. This is a step beyond where we're going today, but it illustrates what can easily be done with RSS feeds.
Events offered by Hennepin County Library at http://www.hclib.org/pub/events/. Choose your library and program-type (or run a search) and a personalized feed will be displayed along with the information.
Reference queries from KLS Reference Blog at http://blog.case.edu/orgs/ksl/reference/ and they also have an RSS feed for new services at http://blog.case.edu/orgs/ksl/services/.
RIT Library Feeds at http://wally.rit.edu/feeds/ for their new book acquisitions, including one for 14 day books, which is an interesting use of catalog data.
University of Oklahoma at http://libraries.ou.edu/rss/ has feeds for new announcements and resources. Not only do they have a new databases feed, but their new book feeds (broken down by subject classification) is searchable.
CILIP at http://www.cilip.org.uk/AboutRSS/ also has RSS for news.
US Government feeds at http://www.firstgov.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Libraries/RSS_Library.shtml
Use of weblogs in educational environments at http://www.weblogg-ed.com/best_practices
Sandaig Otters Primary School http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/PIVOT/index.php
Hope CE School weblog http://hopeblog.ethink.org.uk/

RSS and Search Engines

Yahoo! provides content for a variety of services in RSS format at http://developer.yahoo.net/rss/
IceRocket has an RSS builder and it provides a simple interface that lets you add topics, links and content, and then publish the RSS (v2.0) feed to your web server with one click! http://rss.icerocket.com/
Google alert generates RSS feeds for Google http://www.googlealert.com/
My Live at http://my.live.com/ looks like a standard MSN search until you click on the "show" link over on the left. The show link expands an interface to read RSS feeds. The feeds are divided up over several tabs, including business, entertainment, news (hey, Yahoo News is at the top), and health.You can add your own feeds as well, either importing an OPML file, or adding feeds individually. Your information is saved via cookie or you can get a specialized URL which will work from any computer and contain your saved configuration.
MSN Search weblog at http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/default.aspx
Google weblog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Yahoo! Weblog at http://ysearchblog.com/
Ask weblog at http://blog.ask.com/

Creating your own search engine feeds

Live Search from Microsoft: Run your search at http://www.live.com and then append &format=rss to the URL and that'll give you a feed.
Feedmysearch at http://feedmysearch.com/ allows you to turn a Google search into an RSS search. Nothing new in that of course, since you can do that at Google anyway, but this makes things a little bit easier and gives you a lot of different ways in which you can save your search - to Pageflakes, Bloglines and so on.
Delicious RSS feeds information at http://delicious.com/help/rss
Google Searchs - Start at Google News http://news.google.com/ and run a search. Click on the RSS link on the left bottom of the menu and subscribe.

Start Pages

A start page is a utility that you can use to create a page (indeed several interlinked pages) that contains a variety of modules, such as links to preferred resources, RSS feeds, a notepad, to-do list and so on. Since the page resides on the internet it's exactly the same wherever you are, which is useful for continuity. Examples of these are: Pageflakes at http://www.pageflakes.com, Netvibes at http://www.netvibes.com, iGoogle at http://www.google.com/ig. There are dozens of these utilities and a more complete list is at http://www.philb.com/iwantto/startpages.htm

Gathering data using newsfeeds and aggregators

Syndic8 at http://www.syndic8.com/ is very comprehensive and provides data in a variety of different ways, including categories
Blawg search at http://www.blawg.com/ covers legal weblogs
Technorati at http://www.technorati.com/help/using-technorati.html is another of the major search engines, highly regarded.
Intelliseek's BlogPulse at http://www.blogpulse.com/ is a search tool, but also keeps you up to date with various trends.
Blogdigger at http://www.blogdigger.com/index.html provides access to weblogs
RDF Ticker at http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/findchannels.php assists in finding weblogs in subject areas that are of interest
Globe of Blogs at http://www.globeofblogs.com/ lists and indexes 23,000+ blogs.
Library weblogs at http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html covers exactly what you'd expect
Blogarama at http://www.blogarama.com/ has a good collection of weblogs, arranged by category
Blog Search Engine at http://www.blogsearchengine.com/ does what you'd expect, really!
MindBranch at http://www.mindbranch.com/catalog/rssfeeds.jsp has feeds for market research
Daily Rotation at http://www.dailyrotation.com/ is an excellent way of keeping up to date with information.

Tools

Searching the blogsphere at http://www.alpern.org/weblog/php/blogsearch/writeup.html. This tool allows you to put your own feeds onto a weblog page.
2RSS at http://www.2rss.com/ is a complete solution.
Feedroll at http://www.feedroll.com/rssviewer/ is a service to provide feeds to a webpage
Active Web Reader at http://www.deskshare.com/awrc.aspx allows you to distribute an RSS reader yourself, complete with your own feed
Firefox at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ is an excellent tool for getting the most out of RSS feeds.
Nextaris at http://www.nextaris.com/ is another resource to share webpages and information.
Yahoo! My web at myweb2.search.yahoo.com/ is a new venture from Yahoo! Details on the advantages of it at http://myweb.search.yahoo.com/myresults/benefits
More interesting things that you can do with RSS is on my website at http://www.philb.com/iwantto/rss.htm

Extra material

The following resources are not part of this course, and will not be covered. However, they are closely associated with weblogs and RSS feeds and you may find it interesting to take a look at them if you have a few minutes to spare. It is not essential reading however.

Wikis

A wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. A good example of the software is TWiki at http://www.twiki.org/, with another example being the WordPress version at http://wiki.wordpress.org/. The Wikipedia is a good example of how these things work, and you can find it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and a collection of public wikis is located at http://www.worldwidewiki.net/wiki/SwitchWiki. A good introduction to how to create and use a wiki is at http://distance.uaf.edu/dls/resources/present/cc-aug-04/wiki/index.cfm. Essential characteristics of a wiki are that:

They are collectively authored
Material is generally made available immediately, without requiring prior approval
Pages/items/articles are highly linked, both to each other and to other resources
The text is structured, but without a need to understand HTML coding
Each page/entry is referred to as a 'wiki page' and the entire thing is called a 'wiki'
Most offer search functionality
They practice the philosophy of easy correction of errors or inaccuracies
Pages are tracked on a regular basis

Some examples of how a wiki could be used internally by an organisation are:

A company notice board
Logging new, updated software, general reminders regarding computers
Information on new forms and procedures
New information

If you are interested in starting your own wiki there are some good instructions and advice at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science:How_to_start_a_Wiki
Mediawiki at http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/ is a software package you can download to create your own.

Storage services

Increasingly these days simply storing pages in a list of favourites or bookmarks is of limited value. There are a lot of other resources that allow you to catalogue and file data on external servers and allow access to them by others. A good example of this type of site is FURL at http://www.furl.net. Details on using FURL will be given during the day, but a useful page on adding a FURL icon to your toolbar is at http://www.furl.net/buttonHelp.jsp
There's a nice article about some of the things you can do with FURL at http://blog.contentious.com/archives/2004/06/22/10-cool-things-to-do-with-furl
My FURL collection is at http://www.furl.net/members/Philb

There are other resources that you can use, such as Del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us/
SPURL at http://www.spurl.net/ which is very similar to FURL, but also has access to a useful search engine
Surfsave is a commercial product at http://www.surfsaver.com/
Connotea is a similar service, designed for scientists at http://www.connotea.org/. There is more on Connotea at http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/05/16/connotea-academic-bookmarks/
My Bookmarks at http://www.mybookmarks.com/ also allows you to store bookmarks and Backflip at http://www.backflip.com/login.ihtml allows you to store and share bookmarks.
Another good listing of bookmarking services is at http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_bookmarks.htm
Net Snippets at http://www.netsnippets.com/basic/index.htm is a free tool (there are commercial versions available) that you can download and use to save and share webpages that you find.

There are various image saving resources as well - probably the best known is Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/, and a UK resource that works in a similar way is at Fotopic at http://my.fotopic.net/. You can see my (small and boring) collection of photographs at http://philbradley.fotopic.net/

Search engines can help as well!

There are a number of search engines that allow you to share search results, one way or another. Eurekster at http://www.eurekster.com/ allows for group work. (More details on it can be found at http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3301481). Google now has a service where you can log in and save your searches; if a number of people used the same login it may allow joint usage, though I've not tried this myself.