Blogs, RSS, and Wiki's

Image via Wikipedia

RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs.[1]

While RSS feeds can help keep track of changes to blogs used as project centers, there is another collaborative environment which is more naturally suited for collaborative on-line projects, WikiWikliWeb (wiki wiki is Hawaiian for "quick") or wikis. Like blogs, wikis have been around for some time and are popular among technology buffs. The original WikiWikiWeb project is dedicated to software programming and is quite extensive. Blogs can be highly personal, wikis are intensely collaborative. They feature a loosely structured set of pages, linked in multiple ways to each other and to Internet resources and an open-editing system in which anyone can edit any age (by clicking on the "edit this page" button). No knowledge of HTML is needed, but whereas blogs tend to use a modified WYSIWYG editing environment, Wikis use a simple set of formatting commands.[2]

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 15 million articles (over 3.3 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranked 7th among all websites on Alexa.

Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other projects:[3]

1. Commons
2. Free media repository Wikinews
3. Free-content news Wiktionary
4. Dictionary and thesaurus
5. Wikiquote
6. Collection of quotations Wikibooks
7. Free textbooks and manuals Wikisource
8. Free-content library
9. Wikispecies
10. Directory of species Wikiversity
11. Free learning materials and activities Meta-Wiki
12. Wikimedia project coordination

[1] RSS feeds from Wikipedia
www.ask.com/wiki/RSS
[2] Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration
llt.msu.edu/vol7num2/emerging/default.html
[3] Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org

Relating articles selected Andreea Loffler

The Wall Street Journal Online has an interesting debate between Jimbo Wales of Wikipedia and Dale Hoiberg, editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica.[4]

[4] Will Wikipedia Mean the End Of Traditional Encyclopedias?
Wall Street Journal Online http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115756239753455284-A4hdSU1xZOC9Y9PFhJZV16jFlLM_20070911.html?mod=blogs

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