"I remember the early days of the push technologies on the Internet. It was only a few years ago but looking back I viewed them as one of those great ideas that failed due to poor marketing and implementation....

Today we have RSS and aggregators. This XML language and its associated client software allow you to 'subscribe' to a feed and then receive the updates whenever they occur. Almost every presentation that mentioned RSS at this year's Computer's in Libraries conference (and there were many of them that did,) described this as a 'push' technology. I beg to differ on this description. It may seem like push but is it really?...

Here's my question. When teaching people about RSS and aggregators, should we be describing it as a push technology when it really isn't? (Yes Jenny, I'm expecting a comment from you on this.)" [Me. Like It or Not]

I don't think it's important to classify RSS as push or pull, although if forced to I would say it's a push technology that the user pulls. (How's that for straddling the fence!)

I think the best context in which to describe it is customization and filtering; in other words, I get to pull in what I want, and hopefully 2004 will be the year when I can fully customize that experience (*cough* metadata *cough*).

"Michael Sauers and I had the honor of adding an RSS feed to conference chair Jane Dysart's wonderful blog on the Dysart & Jones Associates web site. Granted, Ms. Dysart already has an ATOM feed automatically generated by Blogger, but that didn't take anything away from our sense of contribution." [LIS Blogsource]

I think Greg's exact count to achieve this was "five minutes," and Jane was beaming when she told me about it.

"So as for your 'I want this' list re:RSS goodness and libraries:

'An RSS feed of new additions from a library's digital collection, whether it be for images, audio, or video.'

..is already done at the Internet Archive, albeit on a collection-centric basis - examples include:

http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php [everything!]
http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php?mediatype=audio&;collection=monotonik [music label Monotonik!]
http://www.archive.org/services/collection-rss.php?mediatype=movies&;collection=feature_films [feature films - which is an excellent new collection, btw.]

Oh, on a related note, with the help of Andrew Grumet at MIT, we just added an RSS feed which has BitTorrent enclosures to our BitTorrent site LegalTorrents.com, which you featured in December. Information on getting (complicated!) Beta version working with Radio Userland is here:

http://grumet.net/rssBitTorrentIntegration/radioClient.html

LegalTorrents is here: http://www.legaltorrents.com

This is very cool cos it paves the way for people to automatically download the latest additions to a collection using RSS + BitTorrent, every x hours/days." [From Simon Carless]

Excellent - this is very much what I want to do with library digital collections! Thanks, Simon!

Congruntulations, Part 1

"The most telling moment of the whole conference came during the question-and-answer portion of this session. After all of the discussion by both Steven and Gary about RSS, an audience member stands up and asks "What is RSS?" And I'll be darned if half the audience didn't applaud at someone asking a question that they all had harboring the whole time. Wow. It's easy to forget that not everyone librarian lives and dies by the same set of technologies. Those who are thoroughly acquainted with OpenURL may never have seen an aggregator before and vice versa. And similarly, you can't assume that just because you've presented introductory material on a topic any number of times, that there won't be new faces in your crowd. I learned more in that moment about technology in libraries than in any other single instance at the conference."  [Open Stacks]