RSS for the Masses, U of M
My friend satadru says:
Imagine netnewswire lite bundled on the blue disk, with preloaded feeds for things like UM News, and the Michigan Daily.
Brilliant! First, the Daily and other U sites need rss feeds. But even five feeds would be a good start. They’d also need a Windows client. Combine this with the idea of giving all students blogs (with easy instructions on how to use the feed reader to follow their blogs and others’) — blam. It’d take off.
Interesting story: The Daily used to have an rss feed and their own, in house CMS (built by Mike Bibik). The now defunct my.umich.edu project even syndicated it, until the Classifieds department freaked out, worried that the my.umich classifieds were going to eat their lunch, and severed all ties. They even had sit down meetings with high-level U administrators about it. Over-reaction, IMO. At least they were driving people to the site. In the end, Craigslist is going to eat the lunch of every classified department. They might as well plan for retirement and write their will.
April 18th, 2005 at 11:11 pm
I like it!
There’s the unnamed (at least to me) ITCS/library blogland project, which might be something worth looking forwards to.
Does anybody know of any actually useful campus RSS feeds? (Beyond http://www.umich.edu/news let’s say.)
I must point out, in truly pedantic style, that it’s the blue disc with a ‘c’ (although the interesting historical angle is that it used to be blue disk with a ‘k’ due since it was actually a short stack of blue floppies). When my office moved in blasted exile ~2 years ago, I found and chucked several complete sets of blue-disks-with-’k’s in my cube.
April 19th, 2005 at 8:13 am
Hey, I hadn’t noticed that umich.edu/news had a feed. Nice!
Not rss, but iCal, is the U of M Academic Calendar, here. Unofficial, though handy.
April 21st, 2005 at 10:57 am
Actually, there is another resource, but I’m not certain it comes close to what you’re looking for in a campus-wide RSS service. If you use CTools (ctools.umich.edu), you can set up your workspace to include News. The campus news feed that Brian notes is the default, I think, but you can change it to be whatever RSS feed you like. I didn’t look to see if there is an easy way to set up multiple feeds on your workspace.
April 23rd, 2005 at 1:16 am
Linda–if there is a way to add more than one feed into your workspace, I couldn’t find it. Thanks for the interesting suggestion, though