by Derek Morrison, 17 July 2009
I’ve adjusted Auricle’s appearance and functionality a little. The main changes have been to use RSS feeds to highlight information and news being published by thought leaders, ‘e’-oriented organisations, or researchers/rsearch teams elsewhere on the web. Each RSS feed I have chosen displays a set of four items within Auricle. These are tasters for many more items available on the sites publishing their feed so the idea is that you go there as well as Auricle.
I have also resurrected a technique I used in a earlier iteration of Auricle called the “RSS Dispenser” which is to use a drop down menu to select one of the RSS feeds for processing and viewing within Auricle. You can then decide whether you want to follow the links in the summary. The RSS Dispenser can be found by scrolling to the very bottom of Auricle. In the ‘Meta’ section of the menu I have also included a link for obtaining the RSS of whatever page is displayed at the time. So how is that different from the standard RSS published by a blog? In summary, this technique enables the capture of the RSS of a single posting. Tony Hirst’s tutorial offers an excellent description of the mechanics of achieving this “object” creation technique. Arguably, being able to isolate an individual posting in RSS (xml) format in this way brings such postings into learning object/information object territory.
What would be really useful would be to get full RSS feeds rather than the summaries.
Thanks for your comment Alan; it makes a very important point. I have no control over the scope of the RSS feeds provided by other sites. By definition RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication etc) are meant to be summaries of more extensive content produced by external sites. They are usually produced automatically by blog, wikis, or social network sites, not humans; the extent of the information provided is either decided by the underlying software platform driving the target web site or is configured by the user. All we users of this RSS information have is the web address where we can find the syndication file. You will notice if you browse through the list of syndications provided in my RSS Dispenser that some RSS providers choose to provide more information than others. A major purpose of syndication is to provide just enough information to stimulate readers to visit their own sites rather than the site where the summary is offered. A few sites may release a full text RSS but most would avoid this because that would enable other sites to use their complete content for their own purposes . Personally, I find the ‘meta’ information provided by such summaries really useful since it helps me decide what paths of enquiry I wish to follow to prevent me drowning in a sea of albeit exciting information. If I had to read everything before making this decision it would be a good reason not to revisit a site. Thanks again for your comment and I hope this explanation is useful .