- Related Stories
-
Blogging comes to Harvard
February 25, 2003 -
Dialing for bloggers
February 24, 2003 -
Netscape debuts program to increase traffic
March 15, 1999
Read more about blogs
The paper was able to send out notices to its readers thanks to a technology known as RSS, or
"A regular reader of the Web site might not have thought to check in (after the shuttle crash), but RSS gave us a way to let people know that we had done something in response to the story," said Joel Abrams, partnership development specialist at the Christian Science Monitor. "This is a way of getting people to see more stories."
RSS was originally developed by Netscape Communications as a way to deliver news headlines to its
But it was too late. Although Netscape no longer had much use for RSS, the technology had been picked up by Web site developers, who found it extremely useful for delivering information about new updates to interested parties.
As the buzz grows around RSS, a handful of programmers have begun to play with business applications based on the technology, which they say provides a simple and useful notification tool for any kind of frequent and unscheduled updates.
One researcher has written an RSS application that
"RSS is proving to be a nice, robust and easily used tool for moving data...not just news headlines, but everything--from orders and inventory to whether or not the servers are up," said Ben Hammersley, a journalist who has written a soon-to-be-published book on RSS. "Thanks to the tools the RSS development community has made these past few years, it has a great future in the enterprise."
RSS does pretty much what its name says. It summarizes a Web site, distributing data about what is there. Just about any information that can be transmitted using
RSS is a natural blend with Web logs, which were becoming more and more popular around the time that Netscape was testing out the technology. Web logs--or blogs, as they're often known--are essentially
"The real nice thing about RSS is that it provides a standardized format. It makes it really easy to aggregate data from a huge number of sources and manipulate it in new and useful ways," Mike Krus, who runs NewsisFree, wrote in an e-mail interview.
News others can use
The idea of syndication is certainly not unfamiliar to news organizations. Many major papers, such as The New York Times, distribute their stories to other newspapers through syndication agreements. News wires like the Associated Press and Reuters operate in a similar way, sending a constant stream of headlines, stories and updates to their members throughout the day and night.
RSS ups the ante by allowing news sites to update their readers directly. The distribution is multiplied when those readers also happen to publish personal Web sites that display RSS data.
The Christian Science Monitor launched its RSS feed in November 2002, and has seen traffic from the feed grow repeatedly each month since then, although executives did not have specific figures. It was one of the first news organizations to set up an RSS feed online and has since been joined by sites including The New York Times, Salon.com, Wired Digital and
For the New York Times, the RSS feed was a way to make it easier for Web sites to do what they were doing anyway--namely, linking to the publication's stories.
"The bloggers were going to a number of different news sites and referencing
About a year ago, the New York Times signed a deal with Radio Userland, a content management software developer that produces a news aggregator, which allowed that organization to distribute RSS feeds.
"With these feeds, we can allow bloggers to post these links that allow them to bypass our registration page, so it's a better experience," Levene said. "From a user perspective, it made a lot of sense; it's driving page views and access."
Many of the bloggers, meanwhile, see what they are doing as the future of journalism. And for their purposes, sending updates to individual readers is exactly what they want.
"It's very, very easy now to create a Web page with the latest information...People are starting to use them inside their companies, and they produce RSS feeds," said RSS author Hammersley. "It's a no-brainer to tie them together."
