untangling_the_web

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Weblogs & RSS Feeds
Weblogs (more often known simply as blogs) are web pages that are usually
defined as online journals or diaries but can be many things. "Blog posts are like
instant messages to the web. Many blogs are personal, 'what's on my mind' type
musings. Others are collaborative efforts based on a specific topic or area of mutual
interest. Some blogs are for play. Some are for work. Some are both.,,131 Blogs can
be wonderful sources of news and information, or they can be absolute schlock. I
find blogs most useful as sources of rumors and opinions on particular topics or
breaking news stories. Making blogs useful is tricky, but some of the best ways to
access them are via specialty blog search tools because many search engines do
not offer blog-specific searches. The first major blog search tool was Daypop, an
excellent news search engine that lets users limit a search to blogs or RSS feeds.
Google has a separate blog search engine, Yahoo subsumes blog searches under
its news search, and Live has a "feed" search.
Many-in fact probably most-blogs make their content available in RSS. What is
RSS? RSS stands either for Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary (there is
some dispute about this). "RSS is an XML format for syndicating web content. A
website that wants to allow other sites to publish some of its content creates an RSS
document and registers the document with an RSS publisher. A user that can read
RSS-distributed content can use the content on a different site. Syndicated content
includes such data as news feeds, events listings ... excerpts from discussion forums
or even corporate lnformatlon."!" Look for the RSS/Atom feed icon ~ at websites to
subscribe to a feed.
To add to the confusion, RSS is not the only format used for blogging and
newsfeeds. The other major format is Atom. Here's a good explanation of the
difference:
RSS/XMLlAtom are technologies, but syndication is a process. RSS and
Atom are two flavors of what is more or less the same thing: a 'feed' which is
a wrapper for pieces of regularly and sequentially-updated content, be they
news articles, weblog posts, a series of photographs, and more. For the
purposes of this article, consider the terms interchangeable. XML is the'
base technology both are built on, but that's almost totally irrelevant; the
131 "About Blogger," Blogger.com, (14 November 2006).
132 "RSS," Webopedia, (14 November 2006).
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