8.4: Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

a) RSS is a format for distributing regularly changing web content. With RSS you can get news feeds, events listings, news stories, headlines, project updates, excerpts from discussion forums or even corporate information from the sites you are interested in without having to check the site every day or week. Time is saved by not having to visit each site separately.

Subscribing to an RSS is simple. You first need to get an RSS reader, e.g. http://www.rssreader. When a RSS reader is set up all the user needs to do is put the selected addresses of the RSS feeds into the downloaded reader. This can be done with any source displaying the orange RSS icon.

The term RSS is most frequently used as a name to mean the syndication of Web content. Syndication is the sharing of content among different Web sites. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation. A web feed is also sometimes referred to as a syndicated feed.

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Digg provides a place where people can collectively determine the value of content as the users vote on the best surfaces. Content is displayed in stacks and digs.
Stack
Digg Stack shows diggs occurring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. Diggers fall from above and stack up on popular stories. Brightly colored stories have more Diggs. (dig.com)
Swarm
Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as they're dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and make them grow. Brightly colored stories have more Diggs. (dig.com).

References
http://www.whatisrss.com/
http://www.financial-freedom-informant.com/define-rss.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/syndication.html
http://labs.digg.com/

b) Social bookmarking is a way Internet users are able to reference their favourite sites. On these websites a user can add, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. The benefit of using an online social bookmarking site is that a user’s bookmarked sites can be access at any computer that is connected to the Internet. Also it provides a facility to share bookmarks with others so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else.

When using delicious users can tag a page then once they have bookmarked the page they add tags in order to organize the sites for easy retrieval. Tags are one-word descriptors that a user can assign to their bookmarks. Tags can be described as being like keywords, but the user chooses them.

References
http://delicious.com/help/faq
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

c) GoToWeb20.net is amazing, I couldn’t have imagined that there were so many web applications available. I have bookmarked the blogging apps (in delicious of course) to have a try when I come for air in a few weeks. ScreenToaster and Speedtile look interesting too. I am starting to understand more and more that we will all get very used to having our desktop online which will mean all our personal settings and applications will be available anywhere, anytime. This will no doubt make working life more efficient.

Reference
http://www.go2web20.net/