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RSS Circ Article March 2009
RSS Circ Article March 2009
Information
Paul Webster, NAVCA – Regional ICT Support and
Development Officer, explains how RSS and other social media
tools can make your organisation become more effective.
We all like to keep up with RSS feed. You then just need to click on that
current news and find out logo to add it to the collection of websites you
about events that interest us. want to keep up to date with. You will need a
For some it may be catching Feed Reader (sometimes called News Reader)
the headlines of the 10 o’clock program which arranges your selection of
news, others the back page of The Metro, or for websites, but these are free to obtain and use.
others reading the celebrity gossip magazines. Probably the easiest one to get started with is
‘Reader’ which is built into the Google web
But what about keeping up with information on browser (just open up www.google.co.uk and
the Internet related to our work? There are click on ‘Reader’ – which is part of the ‘more’
changes in government policy to keep up to date menu list – to set up a free account).
with, useful conferences to attend and general
news from other organisations in the sector Spreading your news
similar to ourselves that we really should know It is also possible for your own website to send
about. How is it possible to know about all this out an RSS feed containing your organisation’s
information … and still be efficient at doing our latest news stories and updates. This is a little
job! RSS is one way of helping in this process. trickier to set up – however if you talk to the
people who provide or host your organisation’s
Really Simple … website they should be able to add RSS and
There are a number of definitions for what RSS show you how new content will be picked up by
stands for, the most popular being Really Simple the feed.
Syndication, or in other words a really
straightforward way for you to have access to the RSS is part of the family of web 2.0 internet
latest updates and new content that many resources. Web 2.0 is simply a marketing term
websites make available on the Internet. for the many new ways it is possible to use the
internet in an interactive and collaborative way.
RSS is really useful as it removes the need for Rather than traditional websites that were very
you to constantly re-visit each of the websites ‘top-down’, just presenting pages of static
that you are interested in to check for news and information for you to read, the new web
updates. Instead, if you see that the website (or positively encourages these social media
your browser toolbar) has the RSS icon showing conversations to take place, giving you more
(often denoted with the orange coloured symbol chance to participate and to shape content and
shown above), it means the website publishes an discussions. For example, websites (such as