Disseminating News Within Your Organisation Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY UKOLN is supported by: URL

Session Aims This session Includes hands-on exercises and group discussions By the end of the session you should: Be aware of the potential of automated new feeds within an institutional context Be aware of current standards for news feeds Have made use of RSS viewers and authoring tools Have a feeling for the different models for managing news Be in a position to make recommendations on local approaches to the provision of news feeds

3 Timetable 11:00:Start of workshop Introduction Current Approaches To News Feeds And Their Limitations Approaches to Automated News Feeds Standards For News Feeds Creating Your Own News Feed Deployment Issues Conclusions 12:00

4 Exercise 1 In small groups briefly discuss the following 1.1What is your background? 1.2Review news services within your institution 1.3Describe the limitations of existing news services within your institution E Try not to spend too long on this exercise (3 mins)

5 Use Of News News alerts newsletters Hybrid paper / newsletters Web pages Posters Newsletters Message of the day Login notices Usenet News

6 Issues Timeliness Cost Relevance Need to login Information overload Information desert Personalisation Maintenance Reuse No single solution

An Architecture Institutions are beginning to develop richer architectures for managing and disseminating news News database Automated expiry, … Web site Paper A better approach, but there is a need to do this in a standard way in order to: Allow others to use our news Allow us to include news from 3 rd parties Allow us to use off- the-shelf authoring tools and readers

8 RSS RSS: Originally (v 0.9) stood for Rich Site Summary A popular lightweight XML standard for distributing news feeds and syndication Now an RDF application – RDF Site Summary DOM Level 3 Events Working Draft Published 10 April 2001: The DOM Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of …. DOM Level 3 Events Working Draft Published 10 April 2001: The DOM Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of …. Now try the exercises in order to gain experiences in using and creating RSS H

9 Parsing RSS W3C’s news information is available as an RSS file

10 Creating RSS RSSxpress is an example of a Web- based tool which can be used to create an RSS file This tool was developed by UKOLN Other tools are available to create RSS, and expect to see them in a CMS (Zope already does this). See Other tools are available to create RSS, and expect to see them in a CMS (Zope already does this). See

11 Converting XHTML Use the Syndicate Your Page service by: Adding some simple tags Use Syndicate Your Page to transform your (lightly-structured) page to RSS The output can then be processed by an RSS parser

12 Approaches To Viewing UKOLN has two RSS parsers: RSSxpress: A CGI program Requires SysAdmin to install locally and configure Works with any browser RSSxpress-lite: JavaScript solution which can be used by HTML authors Browser must support JavaScript Need style sheet to improve appearance of news feeds See and

13 Other Parsers (1) RSS was originally developed to enable published to provide resources which could be can be processed by My.Netscape.com NOTE My.Netscape made use of RSS 0.9, not RSS 1.0. Netscape appear to no longer be developing RSS NOTE My.Netscape made use of RSS 0.9, not RSS 1.0. Netscape appear to no longer be developing RSS

14 Other Parsers (2) The Redland RSS 1.0 Viewer is an open source Web service allowing you to take RSS 1.0 feeds and format them as HTML. It was developed by Dave Beckett, ILRT, University of Bristol.

15 Moreover provide a free tickertape application See Other Parsers (3) Headline Viewer is an MS Windows application that lets you see news headlines from a configurable list of Headline providers See

16 Other Parsers (4) A final example of a news reader is Feedreader.

17 Deployment Issues Before deployment of news services in your institution: What management issues need to be addressed? What technical issues need to be addressed? In addition: Who should be providing news feeds which would be of use to your institution? D

18 Technical Issues Issues: Security and performance Creation tools Management tools Information Flow Models …

19 Management Issues Issues: Justification Resource implications Quality of information (automated deletion, etc.) Duplication of information Inappropriate information …

20 Who Should be Doing This? Which institutions should be providing news feed which would benefit institutions? Funding bodies (e.g. JISC, HEFCE, EU, etc.) so that news of new funding calls will be available within institutional Web sites automatically National services (e.g. JISC services, LTSNs, etc.) so that information about news services, events, etc. can be provided in an automated way …

21 Further Developments Creating and viewing news feeds is relatively simple. Possible enhancements include: Personalised interfaces to news feeds Searching news feeds Management models for news feeds Integration with Content Management Systems

22 Personalised Feeds SOSIG’s My.SOSIG service allows users to choose their preferred news feeds, including: Commercial news HE feeds (JISCMail) Note that the JISCMail feed makes use of an  RSS conversion filter

23 Searching News Feeds The RDN has a Behind the Headlines service Small number of today’s news items are chosen and used as a search string to the RDN hubs Because the search results are in RSS format, they can be processed by any RSS parser

24 Searching News Feeds You can provide pages containing “canned” searches of news feeds For example: Your Research & Grants Unit could provide results of a search for “funding” from news feeds provided by JISC, HEFCE and the EU. The Careers Department could provide results of a search for “funding”

25 Models Good For User The end user can choose her news feeds, including local news, news from JISC services and news from third parties Good For Service The service can chose its own information flow model. Its news is disseminated automatically. Good For User The end user can choose her news feeds, including local news, news from JISC services and news from third parties Good For Service The service can chose its own information flow model. Its news is disseminated automatically. RSS Institution (e.g. Bath) RSS Community (e.g. MIDAS) RSS External (e.g. BBC) Local News.. JISC News.. National News XHTML converted to RSS Structured database converted to RSS Zope CMS outputs to RSS & XHTML

26 Conclusions What conclusions have we reached: On the potential for use of news feeds by our institution On our institutional policies on providing news feeds for use by others On technical approaches we could be using On managerial issues which need to be addressed