In some of my posts, in which I’ll be referring to legal issues relevant to governmental and other organisational social media sites, I’ll use the phrase “social media sites and tools” quite often. As such, I thought it best to explain, up front, what I mean. I’ve already done this in another context so it’s no drama to reproduce my thoughts here. For many, what follows will be a statement of the obvious, but for others at least some of it may be new.
When I use the phrase “social media sites and tools” I’m referring to the likes of blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking sites, RSS feed manipulation and parsing tools, feed creation tools and embeddable multimedia; in essence, all manner of sites and tools that enable and facilitate online interaction, sharing and collaboration.
In what follows I’ll briefly describe each category that I’ve just mentioned. From my legal corner, it’s moderately important to do so because, in my view, it’s not until one understands these newish technologies that one can fully grasp both their utility and the legal implications to which they give rise. Similarly, lawyers and others advising clients and colleagues on how to deal with the likes of a nefarious blogger need to appreciate both the changing technological landscape and the online cultures it is generating, as the advent of new tools like RSS and the potential for an army of armchair commentators to wreak reputational damage to a client online may have a bearing on the appropriate response.
Blogs
A blog is a kind of website which typically consists of regularly updated postings of content, usually organised chronologically and often by category, is comparatively easy to set up, is easy to update and, these days invariably, enables the automatic creation of an RSS or Atom feed. Common Craft have created a useful video explaining, and entitled, Blogs in Plain English.
Wikis
A wiki is a kind of website that allows users to create, edit, and link web pages easily. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. They are also being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective intranets and for knowledge management. Common Craft have created another useful video explaining, and entitled, Wikis in Plain English.
RSS
RSS, most commonly said to stand for Really Simple Syndication, is simply a file format which, among other things, allows you to keep track of changes to website content, automatically, without visiting the websites themselves. The BBC puts it well in saying that, “in effect, bits of [those] sites come to you instead”. Atom is a competing file format allowing you to do the same thing. A generic name you may see given to RSS feeds and Atom feeds is “webfeed” or simply “feed”.
RSS feeds have their own URL (or internet address). While not all websites have RSS feeds, they are becoming increasingly prevalent. When a website with an RSS feed is updated, so is its RSS feed. The update to the feed will usually be either a headline, a summary of the new content or the content in its entirety, depending on how the feed is set up.
Knowing an RSS feed’s URL is only half the story because, as a consumer of information, you need to subscribe to it in an application called a news reader, feed reader or news aggregator (or you could use a personalised homepage or a modern browser like Firefox). If you’re not familiar with these, you can think of them as a bit like an email application, such as Outlook. There are significant differences between email and RSS - most notably that, whereas people with your email address send you email, you choose whether to subscribe and unsubscribe from RSS feeds - but the analogy helps to understand what we’re talking about (indeed, it’s even possible to read feeds within industry standard email applications like Outlook).
There are numerous news readers on the market, a good number of which are free. There are two main varieties. The first variety is the web-based news reader which you access with an internet browser and the second is a downloadable application which resides on your desktop computer. Web-based news readers can be helpful for employees whose companies or firms have not yet installed news readers across the board, as all you need to do to get started is create a free online account with the provider; you do not have to install anything on your desktop. If you are interested in utilising a web-based news reader, you could try one of the following: Bloglines, Newsgator, My Yahoo!, Rojo.
Once you have a news reader, the task of subscribing to a feed is fairly simple. There are various ways of doing so, but one of the most common is to copy the feed URL and paste it into an “Add feed” or similar area of the news reader. If you see a small graphic - usually orange - stating “RSS”, “Feed”, “Atom”, “Webfeed” or the like, clicking on it will usually take you to the RSS feed itself and you’ll be able to see the feed’s URL at the top of the screen.It is also becoming common to find, sitting alongside an RSS button or within the feed itself (if the feed has been made “browser friendly”), graphical links representing major name web-based news readers, a mouse-click on which automatically takes you to your news reader account and pastes the feed into it for you.For those who like video, once again, Common Craft have created a useful video explaining, and entitled, RSS in Plain English.
Social bookmarking sites
At their simplest, social bookmarking sites can be conceptualised as an online equivalent to the bookmarking of favourite or commonly visited sites or links that most people are familiar with when using their internet browser of choice. In Internet Explorer, for example, one can add links to such sites under the “favourites” tab in the browser’s menu. In Firefox, the term “bookmarks” is used.With a social bookmarking site, one first creates a free account and adds bookmarking buttons (or “bookmarklets”) to one’s browser. These buttons, or bookmarklets, provide an easy and intuitive way to add links to your account from any web page. Once you have installed a button/bookmarklet, you are ready to post links to your social bookmarking account. The usual process of doing so involves navigating to the web page (or item on a webpage) to which you wish to link and clicking on the button/bookmarklet. A small screen will usually pop up and you’ll be able to enter the page’s URL, name and any notes and tags you wish to give to your link. Usually the URL and name of the webpage will have been automatically entered for you, but you can change them if you wish. Here is an example of such a link entry screen from the mother of all social bookmarking sites, del.icio.us:
The most obvious benefit of saving links to such sites (or items on sites) to a social bookmarking site, as opposed to within one’s browser, is that one’s collection of links, or favourite sites, is no longer limited to a single computer. Those links can be accessed from any computer with internet access. But the benefits of social bookmarking sites go way beyond this convenience factor. For example:
- because you can add tags (or subject attributes) to your links, you can quickly create your own folksonomy, or filing system, which makes finding your links easier in future;
- some social bookmarking sites enable other users to save links for you which you can then decide whether to accept into your collection of links; if you don a yellow hat for a moment, you’ll quickly appreciate how useful this can be;
- most decent social bookmarking sites produce RSS feeds for both your entire collection of links, as well as for your individual tags and (in some cases) combinations of tags; this enables your link collection, or if you wish subsets of it, to be readily transportable; for example, other people can subscribe to your growing links collection in their feed readers or you can use the feeds to populate a blog, wiki or other website; and
- it is also possible to obtain a feed not only of your own tags, but of tags which all users of the social bookmarking site use; so, for example, you can subscribe to a site-wide feed for, say, “socialmedia” or “participation” or “[thenameofyourorganisation]“; again, don that yellow hat for a moment, bearing in mind the potential utility of being able to subscribe to an RSS feed of a unique tag which large or otherwise significant numbers of people use to categorise their links.
Those interested in a visual explanation of social bookmarking sites may be pleased to know that Common Craft have, yes again, produced a great video explaining, and entitled, Social Bookmarking in Plain English.
RSS feed manipulation and parsing tools
Given both the utility and versatility of RSS feeds, it’s not surprising that numerous tools have cropped up to manipulate them and enable them to be refashioned for use on other websites. I reckon four of the best of the many such services out there are FeedBurner, Yahoo! Pipes, FeedDigest and MySyndicaat. Without getting into the differences between and the detail of these four services, it suffices to say that they enable you, among other things, to:
- create duplicate feeds;
- aggregate multiple feeds into single feeds;
- splice links into a feed from the likes of social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia.com;
- splice photos into a feed from the likes of Flickr;
- alter a feed’s title and description;
- create podcast feeds;
- limit the content of feed items and provide a generic summary for all items in a feed;
- modify a feed from the likes of Upcoming or Google Calendar to put the items in event date order; and
- add a prefix or suffix to all item titles in a feed.
Turning to RSS parsing tools, these enable you to take one or more RSS feeds from one source and populate a website with that feed’s or those feeds’ content. The more powerful of these tools even enable you to pull in the category attributes or tags given to the feed items of the incoming feeds by those feeds’ creator(s), so that the feed items that are populating the target site are categorised/tagged. Users of WordPress can do precisely this with the excellent parsing tool FeedWordPress. The many other available options include FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost service (which, when activated from within your FeedBurner account, provides you wish some simple javascript to insert into your site) and FeedDigest’s parsing tool.
Feed creation tools
Although adoption of RSS is steadily increasing, it is certainly not the case that all sites have RSS feeds. Not to be put off by and indeed to exploit this state of affairs, services have sprung up which enable people to create so-called “scraped” feeds from web pages that do not have feeds. Some examples are Feedfire, FeedYes, Ponyfish, Feedity and Feed43. But be careful in using these, as scraping without consent can give rise to some interesting intellectual property law issues.
Embeddable multimedia
Numerous multimedia services today enable users to embed multimedia files, posted to those services, into their own sites. YouTube and SlideShare are good examples. By pasting snippets of code provided by these services into pages on your own site, videos and slideshows from these services appear on your site. The videos and slideshows can be played on your own site, notwithstanding that the data is streamed across from the host services, such asYouTube and SlideShare (which, incidentally, saves you precious bandwidth and can reduce your operating costs).
