Government of Canada RSS Feeds

The Canada.gc.ca site has organized its RSS feeds by department, audience and province/territory. This is great news showing me that someone at the Canada site cares about making up to date information available in an easy to find and use format.

Of course the offering would be much stronger if more than 25% of the departmental feeds had any content.

Take a look, just don't expect actual news releases or anything.
Choose Your News

15 things you can do with RSS

15 things you can do with RSS (it was supposed to be 10, but I got carried away) - Tim Yang's Geek Blog

More great examples of RSS in action. Why is this interesting? I appreciate any tool that makes it easier to filter out needed information. With an overwhelming amount of data accessible, the signal to noise ratio becomes very important. RSS through my aggregator allows me to scan and evaluate a lot of information quickly without loading and browsing web pages.

Coming soon - the best RSS feeds around.

Peter Scott's Library Blogs

Some of you may remember Peter Scott of the University of Saskatchewan Library as the developer of the first hypertext index of Internet resources, Hytelnet, first released in 1991. What you may not know is that Peter maintains a couple of library blogs that may be of interest to the library and IM community.

You can find Peter Scott's blog at http://blog.xrefer.com and Library Weblogs at http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html

2004 - Year in Review

OK, a bit late into the new year but here's a quick review of some of the online trends and milestones of the past year...

Google Zeitgeist - The 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and trends as reflected in the billions of searches conducted by Google users. Should I be surprised at learning that pop culture icons like Paris Hilton, Avril Lavigne and Britney Spears represent the focus of our cultural consciousness?

Rich Internet Applications - Bloglines, Flickr, Gmail, 43 Things.... online services are demonstrating that online applications can rival their desktop counterparts... and do some interesting things to get users interacting and communicating.

iPod, iTunes and all things Apple - what can I say? What a resurgence by what was a company struggling to find its place in the market not too long ago. Kudos to Mr. Jobs.

Blogging and RSS - The move towards online blogging grew by leaps and bounds. The ease with which non-technical users can now set up blogs and publish to the Internet through applications like Moveable Type has truly moved the web concept of "everyone a publisher" closer to reality. And of course, RSS has begun to hit its stride. Looker for greater adoption of RSS in 2005.

Firefox - With tens of millions of downloads since November, we have a solid contender in the browser war, rapidly gaining marketshare on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Check your web metrics to see how many of your users are coming in with this browser.

Advergaming - The popularity of video games and the rise of both online poker and increased television viewership (especially among younger audiences) of programs dedicated to amateur and professional poker tournaments has given rise to ad placements in online and offline gaming. (Can we blame the NHL hockey strike?) Termed "advergaming" watch for increased product placements in these areas.

Online First Marketing Strategies - Companies are thinking first about the web and other medium secondly for their marketing strategies. Online ad banner revenue has experienced an increased rate of growth again after a lull. Watch for online advertising to lead further trends in offline advertising for 2005.

How Really Simple Syndication delivers just the Web sites you want

Here is a short article that sums up one of the best points of blogs and other sources of information that can be delivered as RSS.

There are RSS feeds of everything from U.S. State Department headlines organized by geography to the latest reviews of networking hardware to Government of Canada news releases.

Soon you will be saving so much time looking at RSS feeds that you may never get anything else done.

On-line communities

I have been hearing about building communities on-line for a while now. While I understand the advantages of building a vibrant community of interest or community of practice there are more examples of failed on-line communities (newsgroups destroyed by trolls, blog comments turned off due to spamming) than there are successful on-line communities. The Daily Kos is a successful political site because it is made up of individuals within a fairly narrow political stripe. While discussions may be lively, the participants by and large share a great deal of common ground and common assumptions.

Kuroo5hin, another blog/online community interested in building a more vibrant community, has A Simple Plan to address some of these issues.

Welcome to the new and improved XIST web site

Welcome to the new and improved XIST web site. We are now using web log ("blog") technology as a main component of our web site, to better manage content and as a means of offering an ongoing dialogue on topics in our area of interest and expertise: information management (IM). As information managers we have found blogs to be informative, entertaining, and mildly addictive. I'm sure we will be linking to some of our favourites over time. We hope that this site becomes a place to communicate new ideas, rehash older assumptions and generally learn from each other. Our comments are open. Please let us know what you think.

We first became interested in blogs as a way to keep up with what friends and others were thinking. One of the great things about blogs is that you get insight into what the blogger reads and finds of interest. Following the links from blog to blog and from site to site reminds us of the early days of the web: even in an electronic world of infinite information there was a feeling that within a community of practice, or a field of interest, you could get to know the key people and their ideas. We hope to provide you with some ideas in the area of information management and the application of new technologies to IM practices.

Blog technology also offers a fast and efficient way to publish content to the web. At its essence, blog software is simply an easy-to-use but sophisticated content management system. The software allows contributors to worry about the content of their message not the technical details of packaging and managing it. Blogs are certainly helping to realize the concept that on the web everyone's a publisher.

Another key development in our interest in blogs was the ability of most of the software used to blog to produce RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS allows automatic syndication of content to disperse locations, different software applications, and different digital appliances. It's a new take on the concept of pushing information to your audience. RSS [http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html] is an XML based format that can be read by an RSS reader. RSS readers can be built into web browsers (I use Sage with Firefox), stand alone or available as a web application. (Bloglines is a well designed, free web based RSS reader that has become very popular). With a RSS reader I can monitor many blogs and other RSS services. I can get updates without my e-mail inbox getting jammed or having to remember to check a series of bookmarks in my web browser.

For a good overview of RSS take a look at http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com a site set-up by Dave Winer to expose people to the possibilities of RSS.

Over the next few weeks XIST will be developing our blog roll (or list of blogs we like and use). If you are interested in jumping into the world of RSS take a look at the 221,512 feeds at http://www.syndic8.com. Bloglines maintains a list of popular feeds at http://bloglines.com/topblogs.

XIST currently has a few feeds going. If you want to subscribe to our main blog the feed is available at http://www.xist.com/01/index.xml. You should keep an eye out for the little orange XML box. This is a standard way to link to an RSS feed. Once you are looking for them you will notice many sites have them.

We hope you enjoy the ideas we share on our blog and share a few of your own with us. Interested in writing in our blog? E-mail us.

XIST Management and Staff

XIST is not alone

I wrote the post below around this time last year. At that point Technorati was tracking an amazing 3 million weblogs. The post was never published so I thought I would see if David Sifry has updated his count recently.

As of last month Technorati was tracking 10 million blogs! Time to get reading.

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000356.html

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000312.html