Disseminating News Within Your Organisation

1
Disseminating News Within Your Organisation

• Brian Kelly
• UKOLN
• University of Bath
• Bath, BA2 7AY

Email B.Kelly_at_ukoln.ac.uk URL http//www.ukoln.ac.
uk/
UKOLN is supported by
2
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

• 1100 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
• 1200

4
Exercise 1
E

• In small groups briefly discuss the following
• 1.1 What is your background?
• 1.2 Review news services within your institution
• 1.3 Describe the limitations of existing news
  services within your institution

Try not to spend too long on this exercise(3
mins)
5
Use Of News
Email alerts
Web pages
Email newsletters
News
Message of the day
Hybrid paper / email newsletters
Login notices
Usenet News
Posters
Newsletters
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Issues
No single solution
Reuse
Timeliness
Relevance
Cost
Issues
Personalisation
Need to login
Information overload
Maintenance
Information desert
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An Architecture

• Institutions are beginning to develop richer
  architectures for managing and disseminating news

• 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 3rd parties
• Allow us to use off-the-shelf authoring tools and
  readers

Web site
Newsdatabase
Email
Automated expiry,
Paper
8
RSS
H

• 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

ltitem rdfabout"http//www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-DOM-
Level-3-Events-20010410/"gt lttitlegtDOM Level 3
Events Working Draft Publishedlt/titlegt
ltdescriptiongt10 April 2001 The DOM Working
Group has published an updated Working Draft of
.lt/descriptiongt ltlinkgthttp//www.w3.org/TR/2001/
WD-DOM-Level-3-Events-20010410/lt/linkgt lt/itemgt
Now try the exercises in order to gain
experiences in using and creating RSS
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Parsing RSS

• W3Cs 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 createan 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 lthttp//www.blogspace.com/rss/gt
11
Converting XHTML

• Use the Syndicate Your Page service by
• Adding some simple ltspangt tags
• Use Syndicate Your Page to transform your
  (lightly-structured) page to RSS

The output can then be processed by an RSS parser
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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 lthttp//rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/gt and
lthttp//rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/lite/gt
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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
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Other Parsers (2)
http//www.redland.opensource.ac.uk/rss/

• 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.

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Other Parsers (3)
See lthttp//www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer/gt

• Headline Viewer is an MS Windows application that
  lets you see news headlines from a configurable
  list of Headline providers

Moreover provide a free tickertape
application See lthttp//w.moreover.com/dev/ticker
.htmlgt
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Other Parsers (4)
lthttp//www.feedreader.com/gt

• A final example of a news reader is Feedreader.

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Deployment Issues
D

• 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?

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Technical Issues

• Issues
• Security and performance
• Creation tools
• Management tools
• Information Flow Models

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Management Issues

• Issues
• Justification
• Resource implications
• Quality of information (automated deletion, etc.)
• Duplication of information
• Inappropriate information

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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

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Personalised Feeds

• SOSIGs 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
  email?RSS conversion filter

http//www.sosig.ac.uk/grapevine/User
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Searching News Feeds

• The RDN has a Behind the Headlines service
• Small number of todays news items are chosen and
  used as a search string to the RDN hubs

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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

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Models
RSS
Community(e.g. MIDAS)
RSS
Institution (e.g. Bath)
Zope CMS outputs to RSS XHTML

• 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.

XHTML converted to RSS
RSS
External(e.g. BBC)
Structured database converted to RSS
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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