RSS4Lib http://www.rss4lib.com/ Innovative ways libraries use RSS en Copyright 2009, Ken Varnum http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:47:29 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://www.rss4lib.com/images/RSS4Lib-Logo-sm.jpg RSS4Lib http://www.rss4lib.com/ RSS and Atom Comparison rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) RFC4287. RSS 2.0's specification is less formally reviewed and approved, but is still a standard. If you're curious about how they're structured, here's a page for you: Comparison of RSS 2.0 and Atom. The top of this page shows a schematic of each data format -- showing each element and its children -- and a sample file. This page goes on to a more technical discussion about generating each of these formats with JavaScript, but the schematics are handy and helpful.]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/07/rss_and_atom_comparison.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/07/rss_and_atom_comparison.html Syndication Syndication Atom RSS standards Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:47:29 -0500 Twitter and Librarians in the Classroom rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) U.S. News and World Report ("Twitter Goes to College") talked about how some college faculty and students were using Twitter in their classes send tweets during lectures -- students could ask questions, post "huh?", etc., -- as a way of getting instant feedback on the class in process. Such "backchannel" behavior is common at library and technology conferences, but appears to be rising in academic settings. This could provide another 'in' to the academic process for librarians -- being able to monitor a lecture in process and jump in with tweets of resources that might help the students understand the context of what is being discussed. A single librarian monitoring several classes at once could provide 'on the spot' reference services without needing to be in the classroom or interrupting the flow of the lecture. Are any librarians or libraries providing, or considering offering, such a service to faculty and students?
Via the Kept-Up Academic Librarian.
]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/06/twitter_and_librarians_in_the.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/06/twitter_and_librarians_in_the.html RSS Tools RSS Tools higher education innovation reference tweet Twitter Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:36:21 -0500 JavaScript RSS Box Viewer rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) JavaScript RSS Box Viewer. (See the "related posts" section below for my descriptions of several other similar tools.) RSS Box Viewer gives you a great deal of control over the output of your feeds (you can set the number of items to show, the width of the box, compact/expanded view, colors for the frame around the box, etc., etc.). Here, in fact, is a simple sample of the RSS4Lib feed that shows the most recent 3 headlines: A few minor quibbles... The color palettes are "web safe", which means you can't match exactly the color scheme on the site. The web page where you configure your box doesn't handle wide formats for the box very well -- so if you want to preview your RSS feed wider than about 200 pixels, the preview overlaps the form you fill out (at least, for the Mac versions of Safari and Firefox). And the form requires you to enter an RSS feed's URL, not the URL of the site -- there's no autodiscovery. But in terms of ease of use, this seems as powerful as the hosted version of Feed2JS and as flexible as Google's similar tool.

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]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/javascript_rss_box_viewer.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/javascript_rss_box_viewer.html RSS Tools RSS Tools Reviews embedding JavaScript repurpose reuse RSS tools Thu, 28 May 2009 21:11:22 -0500 Facebook Notes Redirects Your Feeds rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) Facebook page for RSS4Lib (become a fan!). In the process, as I was adding the RSS feed for this blog using the Notes tool, I noticed something more than a little annoying: RSS feeds added to a Facebook page using Facebook's Notes application are rewritten to drive all traffic from that version of the feed to Facebook, not your own site. While clearly in Facebook's financial interest to bring more traffic to Facebook, they do so without explicit permission. When you set up an RSS feed into Facebook notes, you are asked to agree to a brief terms and conditions that says, in its entirety, "By entering a URL, you represent that you have the right to permit us to reproduce this content on the Facebook site and that the content is not obscene or illegal."
Facebook notes terms and conditions
However, Facebook's concept of "reproduce on the Facebook site" and mine are somewhat different. While I fully understood that my blog posts would be presented inside Facebook -- as they are on the RSS4Lib Notes page, I am surprised that the associated RSS feed includes rewritten channel and item data. As an example, take a look at the feed's channel data: 
  <channel>
    <title>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS's Facebook Notes</title>
    <link>http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=81126379633</link>
    <description>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS's Facebook Notes</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <category domain="Facebook">NotesFeed</category>
    <generator>Facebook Syndication</generator><docs>http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification</docs>
    <managingEditor>http://www.facebook.com/pages/RSS4Lib-Innovative-Ways-Libraries-Use-RSS/81126379633</managingEditor>
    <webMaster>webmaster@facebook.com</webMaster>
    ...
  </channel>
The feed's link goes to Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=81126379633). That page provides reproductions of recent posts. Clicking on a post title, within Facebook, brings up that page in another Facebook page. There is a tiny link at the bottom of the page to "View original post". The individual items in the RSS feed are likewise rewritten: 
    <item>
      <guid>http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/feedmil_finds_feeds.html</guid>
      <title>Feedmil Finds Feeds</title>
      <link>http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=82829822943</link>
      <description>Full Text of Post Goes Here</description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2009 16:39:36 +0000</pubDate>
      <author>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS</author>
      <dc:creator>RSS4Lib: Innovative Ways Libraries Use RSS</dc:creator>
      <source url="http://www.rss4lib.com/index.xml">http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/feedmil_finds_feeds.html</source>
    </item>
They rewrite the link. They change the author from what it is in the original post, "rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum)", assign a creator that is not the author cited in the original post, and link to an RSS feed as the source. (Facebook does display the URL of the post, but clicking it goes to the feed. Depending on your web browser, it may not be helpful behavior to get an XML file.) They don't provide attribution for individual posts on the site. The way Facebook is using my content does not fit my understanding of the Creative Commons "Attribution Non Commercial License" I have applied. Among other things, it states that:
  1. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)
  2. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
I'm willing to give on point 2 -- yes, I understand that by reproducing my blog on Facebook's site that I'm contributing to their commercial gain -- but on point 1, I did not waive my right to appropriate attribution as specified in the license on the blog by agreeing to "reproduce" the blog on their site. If this is "remixing," allowed in the Attribution Non Commercial license, requires that the licensee "takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work." This has not been done. This sort of misuse of content happens all the time, of course, but rarely so blatantly.

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]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/facebook_notes_redirects_your.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/facebook_notes_redirects_your.html Syndication Syndication copyright creative commons Facebook rss syndication Tue, 19 May 2009 10:28:20 -0500 Feedmil Finds Feeds rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) Feedmil is a feed-only search engine with some clever interface features to help you narrow down your search. Feedmil's Google-inspired front page asks, "what are you into?" and provides a sliding control so that you can adjust the results from "surprising" to "well known" -- at either end. Want only well known feeds? Move the left end of the slider to the right. As soon as you let go of the slider, your search starts -- keeping you from adjusting both ends. I found it a bit surprising that the search started as soon as I moved a slider.
Feedmil front page
Feedmil gives you many ways to limit or refocus your search once it's presented the initial results. Here are the results of a search for "rss library" (I was hoping to pull up my own blog, which did, though not in the first place that I crave...):
Feedmil front page
There are several filtering options running across the top: Feed type (starts at 'all feeds', but also lets you narrow searches down to blog feeds, microblog feeds, podcasts, public media feeds, and social media feeds); sort options (Feedmil rank, quality, and relevance), and language. On the right, there's a "topic significance" section that lets you select how much weight each of the topics (as determined by Feedmil) should have. Playing with these sliders reorders the search results; as with the front page, as soon as you let go of a slider, the display changes. If you want to restrict results to only one extreme or the other, simply move the slider all the way over. Disturbingly, the results are displayed differently even if you don't move the slider at all. For example, here's the above search before and after clicking (but not moving) the "library catalog" slider:
Feedmil front page
I need to spend some more time using this tool, but I'm favorably impressed with my first look (aside from the odd interface issues noted above).
Via What I Learned Today.
]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/feedmil_finds_feeds.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/05/feedmil_finds_feeds.html RSS Tools Reviews feeds RSS search Wed, 13 May 2009 11:39:36 -0500 Journal Tables of Contents in the Catalog rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) TicTOCs: It's About Time). TicTOCs is a JISC-funded free service that collects RSS feeds for journal table of contents. If you go to the TicTOCs site you can search for journals (by title, ISSN, etc.), and find the RSS feed for that journal's table of contents. They also offer a downloadable list of all the journals in their index, providing title, URL of the RSS feed, and ISSN. This should allow easy importing into a library catalog, federated search tool, or link resolver. At least one library has implemented this feature. Peter van Boheemen, in his blogWebQuery @ Wageningen UR, describes how he added TicTOCs journal feeds to his catalog. A journal with a table of contents listed in TicTOCs has a link on the right side of the display to "Show recent articles" (this example is Die Naturwissenschaften from the Wageningen UR catalog):

Click for Larger Version
Clicking on that link displays the table of contents for the most recent issue of the journal in the lower part of the screen. Each article is linked to the full text (in this particular example, directly to SpringerLink, but it could just as easily go through a library's proxy server or link resolver to find a copy licensed for that library):

Click for Larger Version
Is your library using TicTOCs like this? Share your site in the comments.]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/03/journal_tables_of_contents_in.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/03/journal_tables_of_contents_in.html RSS Tools RSS Tools Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:49:05 -0500 Fair Use and Quoting Commercial Content rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) fair use"? This is the subject of an article in Sunday's New York Times: "Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt." Here's how the Times article sums up the problem:
The legal disputes are emblematic of a larger question that has emerged from the Internet’s link economy. The editors of many Web sites, including ones operated by the Times Company, post excerpts from competitors’ content from time to time. At what point does excerpting from an article become illegal copying? Courts have not provided much of an answer. In the United States, the copyright law provides a four-point definition of fair use, which takes into consideration the purpose (commercial vs. educational) and the substantiality of the excerpt.
[Yes, I'm aware of the irony of quoting an 88-word passage from an article about the dangers of quoting lengthy passages from commercial publications in a blog post.] The concept of Fair Use is a tricky, and slippery one. The courts usually determine what is “fair” after the fact, when someone complains. A short excerpt that doesn't reproduce the heart of the original almost certainly is fair use; a significant excerpt that reproduced the main point of the article probably is not. Reproducing the entire original clearly fails the text. The culture of the blogosphere has been to define fair use quite broadly; the courts have rarely, if ever, had a voice in the matter. Yet. I suspect that, as the economic woes facing the corporate world drag on, commercial sites will increasingly perceive extensive quoting of their content on other sites as an economic problem. Whether such extensive quoting of published content has a real or imagined effect on revenue -- and whether that effect is positive or negative -- remains to be seen.

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]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/03/fair_use_and_quoting_commercia.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/03/fair_use_and_quoting_commercia.html Syndication Syndication Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:08:05 -0500 Research Blogging -- Connecting the Blogosphere to "The Literature" a Link at a Time rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) Research Blogging web site is a nexus for peer-reviewed literature and serious academic blogging about it. (No, that's not a contradiction in terms.) Research Blogging helps readers find critical analysis of scientific reporting by pulling these scholarly blog posts together. Many of these blog posts in reaction to published articles are written by experts in the field and can help you put the article in context. From the Research Blogging site:
Do you like to read about new developments in science and other fields? Are you tired of "science by press release"? ResearchBlogging.org is your place. Research Blogging allows readers to easily find blog posts about serious peer-reviewed research, instead of just news reports and press releases.
While the majority of posts indexed by Research Blogging are in the hard sciences, there are a reasonable number in the area of information and library science, broadly construed. To join the commentary, you must register. Once you've done that, you get a code snippet to include in your posts that are about peer-reviewed articles. Research Blogging then adds your post to its index. Being a scholarly effort, there is peer review of posts indexed by the site -- if other registered research bloggers feel your post does not follow the site's guidelines, it is removed from the index. This keeps the content relevant to the site's mission. ]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/02/research_blogging_connecting_t.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/02/research_blogging_connecting_t.html Syndication Syndication peer review scholarly literature Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:40:55 -0500 Yahoo Pulls Plug on RSS Advertising Tool rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) Yahoo! has announced it will no longer provide advertisements in RSS feeds. Like other wholesalers of online advertising, Yahoo! offered feed creators the chance to put advertisements in their RSS feeds so that they would appear at the end of an item in the feed. Yahoo!'s solution -- unlike, for example, Google's -- did not requre that the feed publisher offer subscriptions through a Yahoo!-controlled server. You kept your RSS feed where it was and used some HTML in the feed template to insert the advertisement. (Google, after purchasing FeedBurner, has content creators redirect their feeds through its servers.) I'm not necessarily upset that a source of ads in feeds is going away. Yahoo! may not be doing well and may be focusing on its serious revenue sources. It's been reported that other long-standing Yahoo! tools (Briefcase, for example) are also going away. Then again, Yahoo!'s retreat from this market might be indicative of how the perceived value of RSS feeds is changing. If there's not sufficient revenue from RSS-based advertising to keep a major, though second-tier, player in the game, what does that mean for publishing via RSS? http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/02/yahoo_pull_plug_on_rss_adverti.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/02/yahoo_pull_plug_on_rss_adverti.html RSS Tools RSS Tools Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:22:10 -0500 Mr. RSS Goes to Washington rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) www.whitehouse.gov? Take a moment and look:
Whitehouse.gov on Inauguration Day
(Click for larger image)
From the tone of the welcome message from the White House's Director of New Media, this blog is intended to be relatively informal. It's clearly a "new media" site -- aimed at an entirely more connected audience than the past version. If you look closely at the image, you'll see a very prominent weblog -- just below the picture, on the left. Not just a blog, but an RSS-enabled blog. And -- this makes my little RSS heart go pitter-pat -- the HTML source of the blog post shows that there is not just one RSS feed, but there are six. Here they are: Now that's a lot of RSS! (Although at the moment, the agenda, press, and video feeds appear to be empty.) And in case you want a single feed, here's the RSS4Lib Whitehouse.gov all-in-one feed, via Yahoo! Pipes.]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/01/mr_rss_goes_to_washington.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2009/01/mr_rss_goes_to_washington.html Public Blogs Public Blogs change government mashup rss white house Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:10:37 -0500 TicTOCs: It's about Time rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) ticTOCS service has been formally launched after a significant trial period. (I first wrote about this service in July 2007.) The ticTOCs service aggregates the tables of contents (TOCs) from 11,470 scholarly journals from 422 publishers, for a total of 296,186 full-text articles. (Of course, you or your institution must have access to the full text of these journals to view them; the table of contents, though, is free.) The idea behind ticTOCs is to make finding and subscribing to table of contents RSS feeds a simple process. This free service is long overdue. Getting lists of tables of contents from journal publishers is time-consuming, if it is possible at all. Being able to pull together feeds across journals in one OPML file will prove helpful to libraries wanting to deliver current awareness services, have more up-to-date subject guides (with a list of recent articles in that topics 'hot' journals), or to augment catalog records. The site lets you identify journals of interest by topic, by title, or by publisher, subscribe to their tables of contents (the "TOCs") by checking ("ticking") a box, and then getting an aggregated feed of articles and abstracts to review. You can add all journals matching a search (subject, title word, or publisher) to your profile with a single click, or add individual titles.
Screen Shot
You can export the subscription list of tables of contents as an OPML file to add to your favorite reader. For example, here is an OPML file of the 25 journals in the Computers — Internet category. TicTOCs display each journal with its title, the standard icon for the RSS feed, and a menu to add that feed to either Bloglines or Google Reader. Articles are shown by title; a link at the top of the display allows you to show the full abstract provided by the publisher. And each article includes a link to add the citation to RefWorks.
Screen Shot
TicTOCs also opens the door to other advanced services. For one example, once you have an OPML file for the RSS feeds for a group of journals, that list of feeds could be run through Yahoo! Pipes or other similar tool to filter for keywords. For another, the OPML file from ticTOCs could be edited to redirect all full-text links through the library's proxy server, allowing that library's users to get to the full text articles without any hassle at all. Future developments I, for one, would like to see include (of course) more publishers -- where's Elsevier -- and a simple way to query ticTOCs with a journal's ISSN or EISSN and get back the canonical RSS feed. Such a service would let libraries more easily add an RSS feed for a journal to that journal's entry in the local library catalog. It would also be helpful, at an institutional level, to have automatic rewriting of full-text URLs in table of contents feeds that included the library's proxy server. This service will save librarians time and, more importantly, save patrons time.

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Correction

There are, in fact, 1870 Elsevier journal titles in ticTOCs -- thanks to Roddy MacLeod for pointing out my error.

Updated 12 Feb 2009

For you programmers out there, ticTOCs now offers a downloadable file of journal titles, ISSNs, and RSS feed URLs. Not quite an API, but a good start. See the ticTOCs news site for details and or get the ticTOCs data set for yourself.]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/tictocs_its_about_time.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/tictocs_its_about_time.html Reviews RSS Tools Reviews Syndication feeds JISC journals rss table of contents Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:43:54 -0500 Code4Lib Journal's Fifth Issue rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) Code4Lib Journal was published this afternoon. And if I do say so myself (as a member of the journal's Editorial Committee, it's another excellent one. Here's the table of contents: ]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/code4lib_journals_fifth_issue.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/code4lib_journals_fifth_issue.html Code4Lib Journal Code4Lib Journal c4lj journals Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:31:13 -0500 Google Chrome: Out of Beta, Still No RSS rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) press release to this effect). As I noted back in September, Chrome had no support for RSS feeds. And it still doesn't -- here's RSS4Lib's RSS 2.0 feed as displayed by Chrome:
RSS Feed as displayed in Google Chrome
RSS Feed as displayed in Google Chrome
Given that Google has a perfectly serviceable RSS reader, and seeing the importance Google has clearly placed on Chrome -- moving it from public beta to supported software in an unheard of three months -- it seems even odder now than in the beta stage that Google has chosen not to make use of it.

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]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/google_chrome_out_of_beta_stil.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/google_chrome_out_of_beta_stil.html Reviews Reviews browser chrome googl Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:25:01 -0500 More than a Quarter-Century On the Net rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) put terminals in Hanover's secondary schools. By the time I moved there a decade later, Dartmouth had also put terminals in the elementary schools. So there I was, in 5th grade, dialing up on a 300-baud acoustic modem with a DEC Writer terminal playing computer games. In middle school, the next year, I was learning BASIC and spending all my free time in the library's computer lab -- where they had a CRT orange-screen terminal in addition to a DEC Writer. I spent far too much much time trying to play a college student on Dartmouth's chat system... Typing "joi xyz" would let me speak to the world, or at least, the world of people online. My conversations, if they were recorded for posterity, would certainly not be worth the cost of the storage media to save them, and I'm sure they didn't fool anybody as to my age. A few years later, in high school, I was still geeking around. By then, I had purchased my first "real" computer, an Atari 800. I wrote simple games (and memorably, a Star Wars trivia test) in BASIC filled with references to GOTO this line number... True spaghetti code. At school, the math lab had several Ohio Scientific PCs where I taught myself the bare basics of Assembler and wrote some simple games and other applications. I wish I still had the 8" floppy disks used to save applications. And I continued my forays into the online world. Thanks to Google's indexing of Usenet, I discovered that I can trace my online presence back to twenty-five years ago today... To a very geeky "warez" post on the net.micro.atari Usenet group asking if anyone had Atari 800 software to trade. I even got some takers -- from England as well as the United States, and early demonstration of the power of the Internet. And then college -- where technology was much less a significant part of my life than it has been at just about anytime in the past 30 years. Grinnell had computer labs and was online, but most of my friends were far less computer-focused than I. I mostly wrote papers and occasionally chatted with another paper-writer in another computer lab on campus, but pretty well left the nascent Internet alone until I got to graduate school in the early 1990s. And that's where my interests and technology came into sync. During my first semester of library school, in 1993, the first graphical web browser, NSCA Mosaic, was released. I jumped on the bandwagon, and haven't fallen off yet. Back when there actually was a reasonably accurate "What's New" service for the Internet -- listing new servers and new sites, day by day, as they came on line -- I was playing around on the library school's web server, posting web pages, and being amazed when things like centering text and tables were added to HTML. Fast forward another decade, and the web is, well, my job -- who would have thought it?]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/more_than_a_quartercentury_on.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/more_than_a_quartercentury_on.html Non Sequiturs Non Sequiturs Mon, 08 Dec 2008 10:42:32 -0500 FeedVis: An RSS Tag Cloud on Steroids rss4lib@gmail.com (Ken Varnum) FeedVis is a word cloud/feed visualization tool. Give it a bunch of RSS feeds (in OPML), it will digest them for you, and present a word frequency chart which you can interact with by selecting date ranges, specific blogs, or both. I selected about 75 RSS- and library-related feeds and generated an OPML file, which I then uploaded to FeedVis. This is what the interface looks like. Across the top is a time scale -- a yellow bar indicates each day in the 30-day window, with the number of posts for each day shown. Beneath that is a word cloud, showing the most common words in the collection of feeds for the selected time period (in this case, all feeds for all 30 days).
FeedVis Word Cloud for All Blogs

If you select a single blog, FeedVis focuses on that blog and redraws the word cloud for you with a slick AJAX effect. The size of the word shows frequency (per thousand words), as you'd expect. The color indicates recent shifts in popularity. If a word has been used more in the selected time period than overall, it shows up as green. If a word has been used less frequently in the selected time period than overall, it's red.

FeedVis Word Cloud for one Blog

You can interact with this data yourself at http://jasonpriem.com/feedvis/index.php?account=varnum. Of course, you can also create your own by exporting an OPML file from your favorite RSS reader (no more than 100 feeds can be imported at once, however).

Thanks to Suz of userslib.com.
]]> http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/feedvis_an_rss_tag_cloud_on_st.html http://www.rss4lib.com/2008/12/feedvis_an_rss_tag_cloud_on_st.html RSS Tools RSS Tools cloud RSS tag visualization Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:18:07 -0500