Al Macintyre's Radio Weblog : Al's random interests while learning what can be done with Weblogging, and perhaps what ought to be done.

 

Home
Al Categories
Al Essays
Blog Links
Organica

Subscribe to "Al Macintyre's Radio Weblog" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

 
 

Understand Radio News Aggregation

I have been attempting to do several stories like this (see chart at very end of this story), to try to explain elements of this technology to my e-friends who are not yet bloggers, but who are having as hard a time grasping my claims, as I did before I started using this stuff. 

A lot of people have a hard time understanding News Aggregation, as did I at first.  I think the terminology is part of the problem, because Internet technology is being used in these new ways.  But some of the new ways are almost unimaginable to people using older Internet capabilities.

I use several analogies here to try to clarify the picture.  Initially, I am more concerned with making sure we understand the concepts than the technical details of how it is accomplished.  The links at the bottom can get you to technical details if you want them.

  • I think Radio Userland is called Radio because we are broadcasting to the Internet, but there are competing Blog Software systems.
    • We are also listening to other broadcasts, in different formats, which I will get to explaining presently after this introduction.
    • Think about web sites you like to visit regularly. 
      • Do you ever go to some web site and find that nothing has changed since the last time you were there, so you feel like your time has been wasted?
      • Do you ever go to some web site and find that since the last time you were there, there has been immense activity, and you wish you had gone there sooner since your last visit?
      • Well with the ability to subscribe to a web site, what you get are copies of the new and updated posts.  You see when something changed.  You see exactly what is new on the site.  You can then choose to read it and forget it, add a link to it for your future Internet surfing pleasure, or contribute in some way to the discussion initiated by the site that changed.
    • We decide which Radio channels we want to tune into.   Some people just want to watch interesting Internet TV, in which this tool is a way to get at interesting broadcasts, while other people wish to engage in a discussion with other broadcasters.
    • Some broadcasts tell us about other channels that sound interesting enough to sample.
    • There are directories of places by topic and some reviews to help us select places to go.  We can create our own broadcast channels, then we need to tell the world about them, using something like a TV Guide, so that our potential audience finds out what's worth tuning into. 
      • For places you can register what you are doing for other people to find out about what you have to offer, check:
      • my "Search Engine Tips";
      • my Link Services;
      • and State of Utah RSS workshop examples of types of channels available.
    • And of course, as Internet broadcasters, we'd like to know if anyone is tuning into us.  This is called tracking the traffic to our site.  Check my stories on Understand Radio Referers and "Search Engine Tips" for figuring out this nuance.
    • We can talk back to some other broadcasters, like phoning talk shows on real Radio or TV. 
  • As people make additions and changes to their websites, this is news, new information.
    • I think that is where the word News comes from in News Aggregation.
    • When we subscribe to several Radio Channels, or web sites, the arrange the new information for our reading pleasure, we are in effect aggregating like our own personalized newspaper.  I think that's where the word Aggregation comes from.
  • If you are new to weblogs in general and would like to see what kinds of weblogs are out there, try this RandomFreshBlog developed by [Philringnalda].
  • We can subscribe to the new postings, of those Radio channels of interest to us.
    • This information is grouped, by default with my current settings, with the most recent news on top, but I can also select a particular radio channel and group together all the new information from that one web site.
      • Radio channels are simple for Radio users to subscribe to, just click on the coffee cup mug on the Radio site.
      • If it is not Radio software (there are at least 100 vendors of competing  Blog Software but not all of them support this feature) try the home page with /rss.xml tacked on the end.
        • If that does not work, check out this FAQ, and the ones that immediately follow it.
      • IBM enthusiasts should check out my post on how to Radio Subscribe to Midrange List Archives, since this does not use the Radio standard of rss.xml, but rather the RDF standard.
  • What is the difference between the RSS standard and the RDF standard?
  • Do you ever turn to CNN or one of the other TV News Channels, where they have headlines running across the bottom of the screen?  There's the main stories they are giving 5-20 minute presentations about, and there are these headlines which pass so rapidly that it is a bit difficult to grasp all the stories that are out there.  Think of this reality as an analogy to different kinds of Internet News Broadcasts that we can subscribe to.
    • RSS, for the end user, works very much like the detail TV news story that we view by sticking around on the same TV channel until the commercial break.  RSS is like a newspaper delivering articles, each often can have a summary headline in front, depending on the skill and Blog Software used by the author.
      • I invite you to click on the link on upper left of this page to Al Categories, select one of my categories whose topic content interests you, then click on the coffee cup XML icon to subscribe to that category.  (Your Radio application needs to be running when you do this).  You can subscribe to more than one if you like.  Now select from Top Command Menu, the News, and you can see my data in RSS format.  You can cancel the subscription later.  This exercise was just to show you what RSS format looks like, for comparison with RDF in the next exercise.
    • RDF is just the headline.  On TV news we see headlines for a moment and then they are gone from view, with RDF we see a chart of headlines, and we can click on any one of them to get to the detail story.  RDF broadcasts the headlines only, but they are also links to the detail stories. 
      • If you follow the instructions in my post on how to Radio Subscribe to Midrange List Archives, what you will get will be an RDF headlines feed.  You are probably not interested in the technical details of the Midrange discussion groups, but I am suggesting you subscribe long enough to see how the RDF format differs from the RSS format for the end users.
  • What is the difference between RSS (or RDF) and News Aggregation?
    • RSS (or RDF) is the transmission of the signal that people will be listening to.  What is the format of the signal that the Radio or TV station sending out (RSS or RDF) and what is the content of the signal?
    • News Aggregation is our listening to many such signals, and organizing what arrives, like we organize pages of a newspaper, or flip TV channels.
  • Consider the value of this News Aggregation concept when you are in a group of people working on a common project, be it academic or professional. 
    • Each person would have a category intended to be read by other people in the group, and everyone subscribe to everyone else feeds of this shared category. 
      • Think corporate hierarchy.  What are you doing / saying that needs to be communicated to co-workers, immediate supervisor, other departments?  Both up and down the supervisory structure, and across projects.  As each new project is announced or started, there would be an internal communication with respect to the category naming for people who want to get involved in the project, or in seeing its progress, and also for announcements of what new RSS feeds have been started that people can subscribe to.
    • This means that no member of the group need go to the extra effort that Don Strickland does in dws.Radio.FAQ, but then you lose the consolidation of FAQ that we get there.  Thus in selecting which route to take, the group needs to understand the pros and cons of the two approaches, relative to their needs. 
    • Don't forget that you can put a person's output into Radio Outliner format on your site, which is another topic to explore in a later essay of my Understand this or that series.
  • When I am looking at an element of news, new information replicated from a web site that I am subscribing to, over on the right there is a button called POST.  If I click on that, it copy pastes that whole chunk of info to our home screen editing area, and adds in square brackets, the link to the place that we are quoting from.  We can then use our style of quoting, slim down what we actually want to quote, add our own annotation, put this on a story like this, our home page, or a special category.
  • Beside the POST button, for some channel feeds there is an illustration of a PENCIL.  This is for us to make a COMMENT on the individual story, that ends up on the site of the original story.  See Enhanced Radio Tools for links to alternate comment systems available.

For other explanations and documentation from other people, on the general topic of the feature of Radio Userland called News Aggregation, and the methods of delivering this to us through RSS or RDF, see:

[Scripting News] QUOTE in October 2002

A picture named bondssmall.gifLast night a new feature in Radio, comments in RSS feeds. If you have comments turned on in your weblog, when Radio generates your RSS feed, it includes the new (in 2.0) comments element, that links to the comments for the item. It works both ways. When Radio reads an RSS feed that contains links to comments, it shows them on the News page, so if you read something there and want to comment (and the site supports them) you can just click on the Comments link and you're there. Jake added the feature last night. That's the reason we did all the fussing with the new 2.0 format, so we could bring new features to the users.

UNQUOTE [Scripting News]

On Comments, check out what I said in my Enhanced Radio Tools about why some people use alternative systems, and your actual choices.  Combined with the above information, you can see that there are serious trade-offs in selecting which is best for you.

[Radio Userland Announcement] QUOTE in October 2002

Here's the scenario. You've just moved your weblog or news site, and the RSS feed has moved too. You want people who are subscribed to your RSS feed to automatically start reading the feed at its new location. This document explains how to do that.

UNQUOTE [Radio Userland Announcement]

This document, on redirecting an RSS feed, gives us alternative ways to accomplish this new art.

There are other articles and outlines that Al Macintyre has written that try to explain the basics in the same way as this one, or should be helpful to beginners transitioning to getting comfortable with how to use this software, and other folks who like Al's style of documenting.

Sometimes a link to one of my stories gets inexplicably broken, and I cannot figure out how to fix it on a timely basis.  Use this directory of my stories as a backup if need be.  http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/


© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.
Last update: 11/12/2002; 1:58:27 PM.

Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.