RSS4Lib

Putting a Creative Commons License in Your Feeds

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:44:14 -0500

Did you know you that it's easy to add a creative commons license to your RSS and Atom feeds -- not just to your blog's web site? Here are brief instructions for adding your Creative Commons license to RSS and Atom feeds:

RSS 2.0

You need to make two small edits to the RSS 2.0 template your blog software uses.

Change the line that reads to . This is probably the second line in the RSS file. The addition of the "xmlns..." bit sets up the second item you'll edit, pointing to the web page that defines an extension to the standard RSS 2.0 field set.
Then add the URL to the Creative Commons license you've selected at the Creative Commons web site. This bit goes anywhere between the and the tags. For example, RSS4Lib has an "attribution non-commercial" license, version 3.0. So I've added this code to my RSS feed: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

Atom

It is even easier to add a Creative Commons license to an Atom feed. There's just one line to add to the Atom template. For RSS4Lib, this is: . Again, this assumes you've picked an "attribution non-commercial" license. Whatever the Creative Commons license URL, add "rdf" to the end. And that's it.

So What?

I suppose that putting the license on the web site alone is enough, from a strict legal standpoint. However, as we all know, RSS feeds have a habit of wandering off almost on their own power. Adding the license to the feeds themselves gives you an extra bit of protection -- the consumer of the feed cannot say they were unaware the content was licensed.

Creative Commons and Blogging

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:59:49 -0500

Copyright and RSS frequently appear to be ill-suited bedfellows. On one side we have the author's desire to have one's content distributed as widely as possible. On the other, we have the publisher's desire to control the way one's content is used -- out of the concern for losing control over one's work, perceived or real financial loss, or simple desire to be properly attributed. Where in traditional media, publisher and author are usually different (and the most common place those two roles intersected was the vanity press), in "new media," the same person frequently takes on both roles. Copyright is often seen as complicated, and for good reason. In the United States, anyway, a work is copyrighted at the moment it is created and may not be reproduced with explicit permission. (The legal concept of "Fair use," in the United States, is at best murky. It's a right that does not readily extend to other legal domains. And, it almost certainly does not apply to the wholesale reproduction of items from an RSS feed. But I'm no lawyer.) At the other extreme, the author can explicitly waive copyright -- a choice that few authors or publishers would opt for. In the middle ground is licensing the use of content for various uses. This is the sensible middle ground, for most bloggers: some uses of my content are fine while others are not. However, the challenge arises in setting the language of that license and defining the kinds of use to allow. Doing so in a legally defensible way is complicated (again, I'm no lawyer). So what should the blogger to do? Use Creative Commons. Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit foundation that has written legally valid and clearly understandable licenses that anyone may use. By applying one of CC's licenses to blog content, the blogger can state clearly what uses of that content are allowed. Can it be reused wholesale? Reused only if the person using it does not make any money from it? Reused only if attribution is given and no changes are made to the original? There are many permutations. (Unfortunately, there's no standard way to license content in an RSS feed.) RSS4Lib is now licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States license. (Look toward the bottom of the sidebar.) If you want to learn more about using content -- including RSS4Lib -- that has a Creative Commons license, I highly recommend CC HowTo #1: How to Attribute a Creative Commons licensed work at my colleague Molly Kleinman's blog. The first in her planned series of posts is excellent, and I look forward to future installments.

Read RSS in Your Language

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:53:52 -0500

In the category of being so obvious it's a wonder it took this long for someone to do it (with a subcategory of "D'oh! I wish I'd done it first") is Mloovi. Mloovi takes a web page or an RSS feed, runs it through Google's translation tool, and gives you a permalink for the translated output. Mloovi also gets my vote for best Web 2.0 site subtitle: "beta (if it ain't beta it ain't web 2.0)". I think I'll adopt that as my personal motto. So, if you've been dying to read RSS4Lib in French, Russian, Arabic, or Hindi, here's your opportunity. (Mloovi offers translations between any pair of these languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. This tool will be very handy for me to keep up with the biblioblogging world that doesn't happen to write in a language that I can read. I can also see it useful as a way to get publishers' notifications, etc., where they are offered via RSS but inconveniently not in the language that the bibliographer speaks. Having permanent URLs for the translation, whether for a web page or a feed, is exceptionally handy. The feeds, I should note, have advertisements added as new items, noted with "ADVERT" as a prefix. Mloovi also offers an iframe widget code; however, it only allows a single translation, not a choice for your users -- unless you want to clutter up your interface with lots of buttons. Here, as an example, is the English-to-German translation of RSS4Lib's feed: Oh, and a note about the name: "mloovi" (actually, "mlooví," with a long "í" -- something impossible to render in a domain name) is the Czech 3rd person singular -- he, she, or it speaks. Addendum (12 August 08): Mike from mloovi.com pointed out in the comments that multiple languages can be selected in the widget -- for example:

Bloglines Succumbs to Advertising

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:08:08 -0500

It was just a matter of time, but Bloglines has added advertisements to their site. When I went to read my feeds this morning, there was an ad for T-Mobile right on the starting page:

I've long wondered just where Bloglines was getting revenue to support itself -- it didn't make sense to me that IAC Search & Media, its owner, was keeping Bloglines running to make my blogreading life easier. So far, I haven't noticed advertisements on individual post or folder pages. Could those be far behind? Interestingly, the advertisement I was shown was managed by.... DoubleClick. Which Google acquired in March 2008. Now, it seems, whether you use Google Reader or Bloglines, you're putting advertising dollars into the Big G's pocket.

RSS: The Shipping Container of the Internet

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:27:00 -0500

Not too long ago, I read a fascinating book about international shipping. No, I'm serious: Marc Levinson's The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, published in 2006 (which happens to have been the 50th anniversary of that ubiquitous part of the global economy, the shipping container).

Photo by NeonMan

In a nutshell, the standardized shipping container revolutionized international trade by vastly speeding up the loading and unloading of ships. The cargo that had been brought to the wharf, unloaded from a truck into a pile on the dock, moved piece by piece into cargo netting to be hoisted by crane into the hold of a ship, so that it could be removed the cargo net and then shoved in the corner of a hold, was now as complicated as building a stack of bricks. OK, a bit more complicated, since loading and unloading containers is really an art, the ship needs to be properly balanced, and so forth -- but basically, a crane operator and few others can load a ship. Turnaround times at pier -- when large, expensive, freighters were just sitting there -- were reduced dramatically.

Photo by anaulin

What does this have to do with RSS? Quite a bit, actually. RSS is the box into which any old thing can be packed, for uniform shipping from producer to consumer. A paragraph of text, an audio podcast, a video podcast, a Word document... If you can be put it online, you can shove it a container (the RSS item), give it a bill of lading (the RSS channel), pre-clear it for customs (tags, authors, keywords, etc.), and send it on its merry way on a conveyance (the RSS feed). Nobody has to touch the contents between shipper and receiver -- just once to pack it, once to unpack it.

The feed is empty.... Fill it!

Photo by James Good

Addendum (10AM 5 August 08): Another similarity pointed out to me (thanks Cindi) is that RSS and shipping containers both lack security and authentication. The ramifications of this problem are a bit more serious for shipping containers than for feeds. Still, not really knowing who might have mucked with a feed between origin and destination, or having any real knowledge of who published it in the first place once the feed items are scattered around the Internet, can be a problem. Feeds, once set free, can have a life of their own.

New Pew Survey on Blogging and Blog Readership

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:59:55 -0500

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a summary of a spring survey on bloggers and blog readers: New Numbers for Blogging and Blog Readership. Although the full report is not presented, some summary information is. These points are of note in the report's discussion about blog readership:

"33% of internet users (the equivalent of 24% of all adults) say they read blogs, with 11% of internet users doing so on a typical day."
"42% of internet users (representing 32% of all adults)" say they have, at some time, read a blog or online journal.
Men and women in this study are equally likely to say that they currently read other people's blogs (35% for men, 32% for women)
Men are more likely than women to say that they have read other people's blogs at some point in the past (48% vs. 38%). Pew speculates that this difference is because men "are generally heavily represented among the early adopters for most technologies, but women catch up over time."

Items of note in the discussion about blog authorship:

"12% of internet users (representing 9% of all adults) say they ever create or work on their own online journal or blog."
"For a majority of bloggers, working on their blog is not an every-day activity: 5% of internet users blog on a typical day."

If a quarter of all adults say they read blogs on a daily basis, I wonder what additional percentage read blogs without knowing it? I also wonder what percentage of the currently active blog-reading population does so via RSS, and if they realize they're reading a blog when they go to Google Reader or Bloglines.

Via Rich at J's Scratchpad

New Google Wannabe: Cuil

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:23:17 -0500

A new search engine created by ex-Googlers went public today: Cuil, pronounced, the site tells us, "cool;" it's the Gaelic for "knowledge." (And "hazel," which seems less relevant.) The site seems to be suffering a bit from newcomer's paralysis -- the info page is currently not loading and some searches are timing out. Cuil claims to have indexed 120 billion pages, more than Google (which knows about over a trillion, but only indexes a small portion -- though just how small, or large, Google's not saying). At first blush, I like Cuil's layout. It presents results in two or three columns (you decide). Many results come with a small thumbnail image. In some cases, though, the image was of questionable relationship to the search; images were not present on the page you link to in a few cases. How images are applied is a mystery to me.

A search for ""University of Michigan Library"" (a phrase, including the quotes) finds it. It also presents "categories" of results on the right, with nicely bundled results.

However, its currency is a bit poor, at least for low-traffic sites like RSS4Lib. A search at Cuil for RSS4Lib pulls up the main page as the first result, but the text shown dates from October 2007, quite a few posts ago). There's no apparent way to save a search alert (by email or RSS), which is unfortunate, as that seems to me to be just part of doing business. The interface, though, is quite clean and (at least for now) free of advertising. I'll be curious to see how this new search tool develops. For those of you who enjoying poring through your servers log files, Cuil is powered by the "twiceler" crawler you may noticed going through your site.

Search Flickr for Color Schemes

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:36:54 -0500

The Multicolr Search Lab site lets you search through 3 million Flickr images for those that match a particular color. You can pick one or more colors from a swatch on that web page and it will display Flickr image thumbnails that contain the color (or colors) you pick. Assuming the photographer allows use of the images, you could use them to jazz up your web site with color-coordinated graphics. Of course, you still need to find one that suits your content. If you're not satisfied with the 144 colors offered, you can easily customize the tool to add the exact colors on your web page. For example, RSS4Lib uses three main colors: orange (#f1671f), dark blue-gray (#a3b8cc), and light blue-gray (#e6e2f2). By adding these to the site's URL, as in this sample, I can get a customized set of images that match RSS4Lib's color scheme.

This was generated from the following URL: http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/#colors=f1671f,a3b8cc,e6e2f2; If you wanted to use your own colors, simply replace the 6-character color codes (in my example, the bolded f1671f, a3b8cc, and e6e2f2) with the colors you want to use. Add more by separating them with commas (no spaces!). End the list of colors with a semicolon.

Via What I Learned Today.

FeedSifter -- Search Within the Feed

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:55:44 -0500

Do you ever subscribe to RSS feeds that have huge amounts of information, just to get the occasional post that mentions a particular topic or two? Yeah, me too. FeedSifter is just the tool for us. Enter an RSS feed URL and one or more words or phrases, and it will build you a version of the RSS feed that contains only entries matching one or more of your requested words. It allows for basic Boolean searching. Words or phrases entered on one line are joined by "AND"; words or phrases on separate lines are joined by "OR." A few examples:

The resulting page is, itself, an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your aggregator or save as a live bookmark in your browser. Or incorporate the sifted feed into a web page using Google's RSS embedding tool. I can see an obvious use for this tool at the library reference desk. This makes an easy way to set up a quick-and-dirty current awareness feed for patrons, based on news services or journal table of contents, that can tell them when something new has been published in a narrow area.

TinyPaste Offers Short URLs for Long Quotes

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:07:05 -0500

TinyPaste is a tool that does for blocks of text what TinyURL does for URLs: Give you a nice, short, URL to pass along, rather than the full-length one for the page. (A TinyURL example: http://tinyurl.com/3f94fe is much shorter than the full URL for the page you get to.) So TinyPaste lets you copy a block of text, paste it into a form at tinypaste.com, and get a similarly short URL in return. See http://tinypaste.com/5172c -- which is the entire text of this blog post. There is also a Firefox extension that makes TinyPaste available from the right-click menu, so any text you see in your browser can be highlighted and turned into a TinyPaste URL. TinyPaste is handy for getting long blocks of text into services like Twitter or a Facebook status (by putting in the TinyPaste URL rather than the full text), but it comes with several drawbacks. All formatting (other than line breaks) disappears completely. So do links. And most disturbing, to me, is the utter lack of indication of where the original came from. In the web page version it is, of course, possible to manually insert the URL or other attribution into the text before creating the TinyURL. For the Firefox plugin, though, this can -- and I think should -- be automatic.

[Via Lifehacker.]

Code4Lib Journal's Third Issue Available

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:30:03 -0500

Issue 3 of the Code4Lib Journal was published today:

Editorial Introduction (Ron Peterson)
Alternative Solutions for Off-Campus Authentication (Rebekah Kilzer, Elizabeth L. Black and James Muir)
Distributed Version Control and Library Metadata (Galen M. Charlton)
The Planets Testbed: Science for Digital Preservation (Brian Aitken, Petra Helwig, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Lindley, Eleonora Nicchiarelli, Seamus Ross)
Bringing Sheet Music to Life: My Experiences with OMR (Andrew Bullen)
Building an Archival Collections Portal (Terry Catapano, Joanna DiPasquale, and Stuart Marquis)
Developing an Academic Image Collection with Flickr (Jeremy McWilliams)
Making Patron Data Work Harder: User Search Terms as Access Points? (Jason A. Clark)
Collecting Virtual Reference Statistics with an IM Chat-Bot (Mason R.K. Hall)
WordPress as a Content Management System for a Library Web Site: How to Create a Dynamically Generated Subject Guide (Joshua Dodson)

Feedbooks: RSS to PDF for Offline Reading

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:55:39 -0500

Feedbooks is a site that turns an RSS feed -- your own or your favorite daily read -- into a PDF file for offline reading. A sample of Feedbooks' PDF options for RSS4Lib's feed can be found here: . It includes PDF files formatted for A4 paper, the Cybook & Sony Reader, iLiad, and "Custom PDF," which is in this case standard-sized U.S. paper. The tool works quickly, generating a PDF on the fly. First, set up an account at Feedbooks. Then, create a "News" item and enter the RSS feed you wish to subscribe to. The system defaults to A4 paper size; there is not a default 8.5" x 11" size. (You can set the Custom PDF page size to this selecting the "custom settings" link and entering the page size in millimeters: 216 by 279 millimeters.) The resulting PDF file can then be downloaded; a link is provided for bookmarking. Other customizations are font (from a handful of common fonts), font size, and line height. The font choice only applies to the item content, not to the item title. Feeds are displayed one per page, which leaves a lot of white space (a solution I prefer to that used by FeedJournal, which I reviewed in December 2007). The PDF download has a table of contents with page numbers, though the page numbers themselves are not displayed on subsequent pages. I also noticed that some posts in the Feedbooks PDF version lost their paragraphs and were presented as one long block of text. The site seems to reproduce all the items in the RSS feed; the RSS4Lib RSS feed has 15 items, all of which are in the Feedbooks feed.

[Via The Distant Librarian.]

AP, Bloggers, and Fair Use

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:11:25 -0500

The Associated Press has stepped back from its original position on copyright and the blogosphere and will be developing a (hopefully) more nuanced policy. According to an article in the June 16 issue of The New York Times, "The Associated Press ... said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.'s copyright." The recent controversy arose when AP requested that the Drudge Retort (a left-leaning response to Matt Drudge's conservative Drudge Report) remove seven portions of its syndicated news stories from its web site. (I should note that the excerpts varied in length from 39 to 79 words; the excerpt I have in the previous paragraph is a hopefully safe 37 words.) The AP's move to better define fair use when it comes to blogging about news is a welcome one. As I discussed last month, there is a vast gap between what publishers desire and what common practice defines in the realm of copyright. The doctrine of "Fair Use" is "unclear and not easily defined." (This according to the U.S. Copyright office itself!) Fair use is usually decided in the courts, after the fact. Bloggers have taken their stand through their actions -- for better or worse, a significant portion of bloggers view fair use liberally. Publishers have, as fits their economic interest, taken a more restrictive view. It is refreshing to see a major publisher declare its interest in finding a middle ground that it can endorse.

Blogging the Iowa Floods

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:49:48 -0500

The University of Iowa launched a flood blog to inform students, faculty, staff, and the public about the flooding on the Iowa City campus. The University of Iowa Flooding Blog provides a strong example of web technologies to aid in communication during a disaster. Linked from the blog are Flickr photostreams of campus images, a headlines feed from the Iowa City Press-Citizen, and, of course, updates and news about campus, buildings currently flooded or currently at risk, where there is power, what is open, and what is closed.

Google Has an RSS Embedding Tool

rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:35:41 -0500

Paul Pival at The Distant Librarian noted a tool from Google that I had not been aware of: the Dynamic Feed Control Wizard, a JavaScript that you can embed in your web site to pull in RSS headlines and summaries from your favorite sites.

Give it a keyword and it will find matching feeds; pick one, and it gives you the JavaScript to display that code in a vertical or horizontal box on your site. I'm showing a screen shot of the set-up interface here:

This is a very handy tool for grabbing a single feed and placing it on a web page; it could be very useful for libraries that do not have an abundance of technical expertise but have a blog they want to include elsewhere on the site.

One part of Google's interface confused me (odd, as Google is usually so clever at interfaces). When entering a "Feed Expression", Google will not take an RSS feed's URL. It expects you to type keywords describing your feed, and it will figure out the actual feed URL. So entering my feed's URL (http://www.rss4lib.com/index.xml) did nothing; entering simply "RSS4Lib" produced the feed.

Sample

Visit the full text of this entry to see what the code looks like embedded in a web page: Google Has an RSS Embedding Tool.