Adventures in Radio UserLand Lincoln Cushing, UC Berkeley Institute of Industrial Relations Library

Librarians use technology to better reach their patrons

From your desktop to the Web Public Web (“Cloud”) RSS news sources Local sources Your computer UserLand Server

RSS RSS (Rich Site Summary, or also known as "Really Simple Syndication,") is a lightweight XML (e X tensible M arkup L anguage) format designed for sharing Web content. An RSS file encodes data (such as a list of headlines, or article titles, or events) so it can be easily used by another program called a "news aggregator" or "news reader.“ These programs allow end users to read headlines or events from dozens or hundreds of aggregated news sites at one time. It is a "pull" rather than a "push" technology.

RSS and XML RSS defines an XML grammar (a set of HTML-like tags) for sharing news. Each RSS text file contains both static information about your site, plus dynamic information about your new stories, all surrounded by matching start and end tags. Each story is defined by an tag, which contains a headline TITLE, URL, and DESCRIPTION.

Public homepage Title and source Description Internal navigation (“Categories”) News items Stories Archive External links

Lincoln’s public UserLand page as displayed on his own desktop

Lincoln’s “working” homepage on desktop

Features of the working homepage Publishing tool links Composing and editing screen RadioLand links Categories selector

Posting a news item Steps: 1.Enter content 2.Edit, add local information 3.Assign to category 4.Post Compose manually-just type in text Cut-and-paste from other sources Post from RSS news feed

Posting an RSS-fed item Step 1: look through aggregator, select item Radio's news aggregator automatically reads news feeds you're subscribed to and posts the headlines to a single page.

News item Item as shown on NYT link “printer-friendly” version (better for cutting and pasting)

Step 2: Edit posted news items

Step 3: Add local data

Final news item as posted

Commentaries (or Stories) The title of each story is a link to the story. Also listed is the date the story was created.

Choices for Blog software

Blogger Radio UserLand Movable Type $40 a year, includes 40 mb server space Files reside on your machine, upstream to hosting server Allows posting by Allows posting pictures Receives and broadcasts RSS news feeds Free service Web-based text entry No RSS capabilities Free to individuals and nonprofits Less user-friendly for novices – requires some programming skills (Perl-based) XML-based templates No RSS capabilities

Plug-ins and Desktop Clients Plug-ins ThemeTool by evectors that lets you easily edit your Radio based weblog's theme using your favorite WYSIWYG html editor, including Macromedia Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive. RssDistiller extracts RSS feeds from most html pages, letting you be always updated without leaving your personal news aggregator. A desktop client is an application that resides on your computer and allows you to view and send . Radioland’s news2mail automatically sends messages containing the most recent stories from the channels you've subscribed to. Messages can be sent in either or both of two formats, Batch or Individual.

Blogs and library outreach Blogs can be an easy way to harvest and publish news content relevant to your patron community. Blogs allow for painless Web-posting of timely commentary and information. Blogs can help build community through comment dialogue and persistent news archiving. End of presentation Lincoln Cushing