Week 2-1:Tiny Orange Icon
At the very beginning of J.D. Lasica’s article, he points out a common question for all Netizens that “As the number of blogs and niche news sites continue to soar, how do you keep on top of everything?” In fact, heaving under the weight of billions of web pages, it’s really a chore for modern people to keep up with the internet. But a tiny orange icon— RSS and “newsreaders” such as Yahoo reader, Google reader, virtually solve the problem.
Since 1999, the RSS was firstly issued to the Netizens, today most websites have RSS feeds function for readers to subscribe their contents, and more and more people enjoy convenient reading from RSS feeds and newsreaders software. But different websites get different flavors when they make use of the feeds.
To me, NYtime.com has a clear and complete RSS feeds section. Besides the homepage RSS feeds, it offers several RSS feeds for use in news readers and blogs. The section is divided into two parts News and Features, and there are several subdivisions for each of the two roots, including business, education, health, international, book reviews, arts, fashion and so on. Some of the subdivisions have their branch RSS feeds, for instance, “international” is divided into: Asia news, Europe news, Middle East news, etc. Thus readers can choose different RSS feeds according to what we like to read.
The BBC feed factory also does a good job in this part. It has two main parts “our top feed” and “entertainment”. “Our top feed” subscribers will get latest promos from the homepages and “entertainment” offers latest collective site features. So in sum, BBC and NYtime.com basically have the same concept in offering feeds. They both generally divide those “feeds” into two parts and make it more selective for readers. Personally, it’s a warm design for subscribers.
The Standard Hong Kong takes a more simple way in using RSS. A very small blue icon is in the left category of its homepage and it’s the unique icon for Standard’s subscription. Although it is not as detailed as NYtime.com, for me, it’s really simple and convenient for readers to handle. Just one action, we can get the latest news from Standard.
The South China Morning Post is an interesting website which hides the feeds in its technology section. You can click the technology button (if you have the password to login) and then click the flash icon marked with “click here” and then you will get a page named “Podcasts”. Podcasts are audio files - typically MP3s - available for download over the internet, that is to say, we can subscribe the audio files via Podcasts as subscribe articles and blogs via RSS. I do think it is a trend that Netizens could subscribe all types of files such as audio ,video as well as words but I just find out the Podcasts feeds from SCMP and I am not quite sure whether it has RSS feeds for other files or not.
RSS is really a good tool for people to manage time and make our surfing on internet efficiently. Besides the well known advantages that clearly listed in the article Feed 101, to me, RSS feeds make reading online become more individual. As World Wide Web worked by one man, Tim Berners-Lee(by the way,he is really a great person), in the age of personality, Netizens today enjoy the individual reading experience. People read in their own way and focus on the subjects that they are interested in without interruption by ads or other articles. We don’t need to wait for a long time and just get our favorite words, photos and even videos, and what’s more we don’t need to find the articles and latest news which we spent a lot of time to search from fancy websites pages, but the news come to us as J.D. Lasica said.
It indeed changes the reading habit and the way of getting information on the web. Apart from the strong points it brings to readers, RSS feeds and Newsreaders also have some weak points for reading online. As for me, I started to use RSS feeds to subscribe the news from last year, after that, it become seldom for me to go surfing to websites, on the other words, it’s seldom for me to read the articles that the feeds don’t provide to me. I missed many other things that in the websites pages which might have drew my attention and only focus on few parts of the “www”. Secondly, because most of the RSS feeds only take the content of articles without comments, personally, the communication and sharing function of internet is weakened by Newsreaders to a degree. And I strongly agree with one of our classmates says in his blog that “If readers choose only to read news on the browser without going to the websites of the organisations, opportunity of earning revenues from advertisements will certainly be reduced.…for news organizations, it might be a risk”. No ads are really benefited for the readers but for news organizations and the IT companies, it might be not that optimistic.
All in all, I enjoy the tiny orange icons which bring joys to readers and challenges to the newspeople. Anyway, it has already become a part of our lives.
Thank you for your comment. However, I have just discovered that I made a grammartical mistake in that sentence and therefore also appearing on your article. Could you correct it? Thanks!
Adrian — February 12, 2007 @ 2:00 pm
Nice synthesis of the different ways that different news organizations use feeds. My assignment to find the SCMP feeds was kind of a trick, since they have only a podcast feed and nothing else! One thing to keep in mind: actually many news feeds only provide a headline and summary of the article, so you have to go to the original site to read the whole thing (and see the ads). There are also services that enable you to put ads in feeds (I will show an example in class - I didn’t tell you guys about those and you weren’t expected to know about feed ads independently). Also, you mention that feeds bring challenges to journalists but you didn’t specify - how do you think the existence of feeds will change the way journalists work?
Rebecca MacKinnon — February 15, 2007 @ 3:13 am
[…] A third rich vien of common thought on newsfeeds/ RSS/ readers which permeated the class blogs was a sense of empowerment over the control of content on the reader. Joyce sums it up when she said it makes reading the news a more individual pursuit. Cui puts it another way when she says the feed can only bring the news you have chosen to you, and Ken puts it very succinctly when he says you can use your reader to get specific news content delivered. There seems to be a feeling of cutting out the middleman. You can get what information you want without having to be subjected to all the other paraphernalia that surrounds it. […]
Peter’s MJ page » Kathy, Tamara and Peter- Week 2 Presentation/Summary Blog — February 15, 2007 @ 7:18 pm
[…] or TV programmes they are interested in, and have a tailor-made newspaper especially for them. Joyce says that news feed makes online news-reading more individual. Ken suggests that it provides the […]
2.3 Summary of Presentation « Adrian’s JMSC blog — March 1, 2007 @ 12:31 am