I've pondered the use of an RSS feed in the RedLightGreen environment. I can imagine someone wanting to "syndicate" the RedLightGreen "Your List" of records in a courseware interface or a syllabus on the web -- really just pulling the more or less static list into an HTML presentation. That seems to be a good enough justification. Having the list as a subscription in one's newsreader might be preferred by some users to having a bookmark in a web browser; that's a slightly less compelling motivation. I imagine a group working on a project together, sharing their reading lists -- but how often would these lists change? I know that there will be clever uses for it if we make a feed available, so I'll probably urge a trial at some point during the pilot.
I find myself more ambivalent after finding Dan Gillmor's note that "Amazon.com Syndicated Content" is now available. Amazon writes, "Selected categories, subcategories and search results in Amazon.com stores now have RSS feeds associated with them, delivering a headline-view of the top 10 bestsellers in that category or set of search results." It is, perhaps, that there are no little orange XML blocks anywhere to be seen that frustrates me. And perhaps i should celebrate: if i can't simply subscribe to the wish list of all my friends at Amazon, it means there's room for RedLightGreen to grow there.
Posted by judielaine at July 28, 2003 04:14 PM | TrackBack