Producing Participatory Media

Producing Participatory Media
Class 1 - June 27

Topics:

Blogging

RSS

Blogging - The act of writing a "web log" or blog

Weblogs or Blogs are personal content management systems. Blogging rose when content management systems geared for large website management started to be developed for use on personals websites. They allowed people to publish personal content without the need to learn HTML and other related technologies. Blog technology basically allows anyone to publish online with very little cost and with only a small amount of technical know-how.

Standard blogging software has a couple interesting technologies that encourage social behavior.

First of all, blogs come standard with the ability for users to leave comments. This allows for conversation to occur around content.
Second, they generally have something called a trackback. Trackbacks allow another blogger to let another blogger know when they are referencing their post. Basically, they automate referencing other content online.

Both of these things encourage social behavior as well as links between blogs creating a loose network.

Let's look at how this is structured in our blog.

There are a ton of blogging platforms, both self-hosted and as a hosted service. We will generally be dealing with two of more popular self-hosted platforms:

WordPress - Do not confuse with the hosted service at WordPress.com
Movable Type - ITP has a site license

Instructions for setting up a blog (Movable Type) on ITP's Server (courtesy of Dedi).

Wikipedia: Blog

RSS - Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary

RSS is an XML based content syndication format. It became popular due to the possibilities that it opened up in the blogging world. Currently it is in wide use throughout news sites, blogs and other regularly updated web based content sites. It has begun to replace email newsletters as it is on-demand and not susceptible to spam. There are a wide variety of RSS readers or News aggregators for a myriad of devices and plenty of add on services.

Open Directory Project: News Aggregators

A couple of feeds:

Producing Participatory Media Class Blog Feed

Shawn's Little Output Feed

Unmediated.org Feed

or:

Syndic8.com: Search, Browse or otherwise find RSS feeds

Technorati: Blog searching and indexing

You can usually find feeds by looking for a text like this: "Syndicate this site (XML)" or an image link that looks like: