Thursday, December 02, 2004

Rather Super Sexy (RSS)

Well no RSS doesn’t mean that at all it actually means .... well it’s rather complicated. Timo Hannay, Associate Director, Nature Publishing Group gave us the rundown on RSS at todays Online-Information conference in London. The reason for the confusion over the acronym RSS is that in its first version (0.9) it meant Rich Site Summary. Later developers labelled version 2.0 Really Simple Syndication. With version 1.0 came the integration of another acronym - RDF (Resource Description Framework), and so we now have RDF Site Syndication. Version 2.0 of RSS seems to have less functionality than version 1.0. Confused?

furthermore...

The presentation by Timo Hannay was only the start of what turned out to be one the most interesting sessions for me. The RSS 'feed' (get it?) was followed by Anne Clyde from Iceland University on how blogs are used in libraries around the world. The final talk by Adriana Cronin-Lukas frombigblog.net/ was actually a late entry and not billed in the programme so it was a nice surprise, this one. Adriana gave a splendid talk on the use of blogs in enterprise. Interesting examples from Disney, Google and InfoWorld were given and it was good to hear ExpressionEngine mentioned and recommended. Yours truly nervously asked a couple of questions.