Exercise 8.4: Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

a) RSS is an XML application needed for aggregation and syndication, often called a Web 'feed'. What is RSS and explain what aggregation and syndication are and how they have changed the nature of the Web. How do you subscribe to an RSS feed? Try some of these RSS enabled sites such as itunes.com and the notions of "swarm" and "stack" at digg.com

RSS (most commonly translated as "Really Simple Syndication" but sometimes "Rich Site Summary") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS In general internet terms, a news aggregation website is a website where headlines are collected, usually manually, by the website owner. Examples of this sort of website are the Drudge Report, The Political Simpleton and the Huffington Post. There are also websites like Google News, where aggregation is entirely automatic, using algorithms which carry out contextual analysis and group similar stories together. In computing, a feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader, news reader or simply aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregator syndication Hide links within definitionsDefinitionSupply of content (articles, cartoons, stories, etc.) orinformation (business and economic data, news stories, etc.) on a subscription basis to marketers or media (periodicals, radio and television, websites). http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/syndication.html

What is Digg?

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.How do we do this? Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see.

Swarm and Stack

The best information about Swarm and Stack can be found at http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/17/digg-to-add-sports-swarm-stack/. It shows its good visualisations but probably the best information is on the blog that accompanies the page. Lots of pros and cons about s&s. Basically s&s is about presenting lists of links grouped into categories. The list items are prioritised according to how many people have accessed the link. It's meant to keep you up to date with 'what's happenning' i.e become part of the 'swarm' by consuming what's at the top of the 'stack' you are most interested in.

b) del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. What does this mean and what are the advantages for workgroups? Discuss how del.icio.us uses the term 'tag' in a different context to what Web publishers would be familiar.

del.icio.us aggregates bookmarks according to category and allow sophisticated searching to further define topics. The topics are 'tagged'. A tag is simply a word you can use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders, you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the Web. A tag cloud is list of tags where size reflects popularity.http://delicious.com/tag/

Web developers use tags (ie metatags) to 'seed' web pages so that search engines will put them high in the list if search engine results. Their choice of words for metatags does not always match the tags athat are given to pages by Delicious users because the motives for tagging are different.

c) How do you see services such as those provided at the GoToWeb20.net site as changing the way that YOU and your future workgroups operate?When I went to GoToWeb20.net, I thought the idea of aggregating web2 tools very appealing. I'm frustrated because there are so many tools and they are located all over the web. GoToWeb20.net is a directory and as such is not really responsible for the content. I found the content to be pretty thin on the ground when you visited the sites. Most of the applications were either very basic or poor versions of more successful web 2 tools. I personally do not think the world needs more services, it needs now to use the current services more effectively. Much of the quality of the sites depends on the amount of traffic/content. Increasing the number of services decreases the potential traffic (and potentially content) for each service. iTunes is successful because of the enormous amount of content and traffic. The very intelligent tagging system in delicious is great for research and staying in touch via the RSS feeds. d) Explain how the Elgg social engine works on a Web site where it is installed? Is this the type of application you want on your Web server in the workplace?

Once installed, the Elgg social engine is able to collect user data based on their interaction with the suite of web 2 tools implicit in Elgg. The data can be used to influence the behaviour and opinion of users through pushing information (that may have been collected from other users within the same group). To me this sounds a bit like mind control depending on how intelligent, broadminded and 'well read' users are and how 'honourable the administrators are. In a business entity, I think this could be used in a very negative way and seems to go beyond the level of privacy normally expected in countries like Australia. Potentially, prospective employees could be asked (or not) whether they would consent to having the app installed on their computer. They possibly could be refused employment if they did not consent to the app.

The Elgg feature set can be found at http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Features