Feedburner reports on the rising use of podcasting:

Podcast listenership may have a long way to go before catching up to the U.S. radio audience, but while radio audience is declining, podcast circulation is consistently growing nearly 20% per month. Today, there are more than 1.6 million aggregate subscribers to FeedBurner-managed podcasts, and this number has more than doubled in the past six months. Since we recently started tracking podcast downloads within feeds, we've also seen the ratio of downloads to subscribers average 2:1, suggesting a significant secondary market for podcast listenership beyond just the feed's subscribers. (For more on this, see "Uncommon Uses" below.)

Audience size runs the gamut. Some podcasts have a very large audience, like NPR's On The Media from WNYC, New York Public Radio, with more than 16,000 loyal subscribers (and as many as 40,000 who download media right from the Web site). Others are more personal podcasts created to keep friends and family up to date. While iTunes is the clear favorite for podcast subscribers, a healthy 43% of the market listens (or watches) their favorite podcasts using other applications. That said, the two most significant jumps in podcast circulation in the past 18 months can both be tied to iTunes: In July, when iTunes 4.9 launched with podcasting support, and the end of last year, when millions of people unwrapped an iPod (Apple sold 14 million iPods in Q4 last year).

At Forever Geek:

Part 1: Preparing the content

Create a script. Unless you’re an experienced talk show host, then you’d need a script or at least an outline to guide your show. Otherwise, you’d have ten minutes of umms, ahhs, and errs which will surely annoy your audience. Some prefer podcasts that are spontaneous, while others prefer clear-cut 'casts with a definite message. But I think it's best if you have at least an outline or a summary of the flow of what you would be discussing.

Here’s a rule of thumb you can follow in creating a ten-minute podcast:

• 10 seconds: Intro music or audio
• 20 seconds: Introduce the podcast. State the title, your name(s), and the purpose of the podcast. Also state the URL where your podcast and the show notes can be found. Introduce your guests, if any.
• 10 seconds: If you have any sponsors, mention them now!
• 20 seconds: Provide a brief outline of your show, if you have a script; if not, state here what you plan to talk about.
• 9 minutes: The main body or discussion
• 20 seconds: Wrap up the discussion, outlining your main points. If you have guests, take this time to thank and acknowledge them.
• 10 seconds: If you have sponsors you’d like to mention again, now’s the time!
• 20 seconds: Introduce the podcast once more. State the title, your name, and the URL of the podcast and show notes.
• 10 seconds: outro music.
• Optional: 3 to 5 minutes: Podcast-safe song or piece from an independent band or artist at the end of your show

From IBM....

By now you know all the regular things you can do with RSS: track news, track packages, put news from other sources on your web site. But here's a whole list of other things you can do too.

...via Cutting Through

Stowe Boyd attends the IDG Syndicate conference:

Am I hearing that the value chain has changed so dramatically -- in the shift to open media -- that much of the old mindset is not only broken but dangerous. I wonder if that will be outed, here.

This is a group that is set and determined to talk about content, who think in terms of page turns, click throughs, and leading the readers by the nose around pages to get to specific ads. Although they talk the talk about good writing (although they call it content), they are not talking about good reading. They are not primarily interested in the activities and goals of the active reader.

From Marnie Webb's Blog:

It's a ridiculously easy way to read the web. So, how many bookmarks do you have in your browser? How many of them have new information? Does it make you sick to your stomach to think of clicking through all of those to discover whether or not the website owners have added new, interesting content? Via RSS, you can subscribe to many websites and very easily find out whether there is new relevant content. My bookmarks no longer scare me. In fact, I rarely use them.

It's ridiculously easy to share the information you get. One of the nice things about RSS is that information comes to you in manageable chunks: a NYTimes headline with a sentence-long article summary; a complete weblog entry; a teaser for a longer weblog entry; the pointer to a newsgroup posting; an email announcement list; events. You can push that information out to communities who may interested -- simply send it via email or put it on your own blog.

Werner Vogels talks about the scalability of feeds and aggregators, which runs into two problems, more interesting feeds than one person can handle and more subscribers than the feed provider can handle:

The increase in the number of feeds will leave many users frustrated, as there is a limit to the number feeds one can scan and read. Current numbers suggest that readers can handle 150-200 feeds without too much stress. But users will want to read more and more as new interesting feeds become available and they run into the limitations of the metaphor of current aggregator applications. The current central abstract of aggregators is that of a feed, and there is a limit to how many individual feeds one can actually handle. Aggregators will need to find ways in which the users can be subscribed to a select set of feeds because they want to read everything that comes from these feeds, but also subscribe to a much larger set of publishers for which the feed abstraction may not be the right metaphor. Aggregation, fusion and selection at the information item level instead of at the feed level seems to be a first abstractions to investigation. Advances in how users can specify what information they would like to see, will be enablers for scalability at the human level.

...via The Shifted Librarian

An article in D-Lib Magazine on The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web:

RSS is increasingly being deployed within science publishing, and the reasons for this are manifold. RSS presents a very simple XML structure for packaging news titles and links, and delivering them down to user desktops and handhelds. Associated as it is with the burgeoning new technologies of blogs and wikis, RSS has received a significant impetus to growth. There is already a general public awareness of RSS, and it is being widely implemented. There is also growing support from browser vendors, and a number of the common browsers now have some degree of built-in RSS functionality. Indeed, it is becoming almost ubiquitous [n17]. It provides a ready B2C channel and can also be used in simpler B2B contexts.

...via Many2Many

Success breeds its own problems. For RSS one of them is bandwidth growth--popular pages get hit constantly by aggregators looking for updates. Glenn Fleishman has started a blog on RSS bandwidth usage (Regular Sucking Schedule).

I can't quite figure out why anyone would want an RSS Screen Saver. And yet, it's kind of intriguing:

One of my favorite features of C# Express is the built-in RSS Screen saver Starter Kit. If you've never built a screensaver before, or if you have never written code that uses RSS, then you'll find the RSS Screen saver a great way to start programming.

In a nutshell, the RSS Screen saver is a screen saver that lets you select and validate an RSS feed, select a background directory for images to loop through, and the screensaver will loop through the items in the RSS feed.

...via The Shifted Librarian

I've been talking up RSS feeds that include the full entry body and how much I like them, particularly for weblogs (versus more 'straight news' sites). And it occurred to me (thanks to a timely comment from Jack Vinson) that, gee, maybe I ought to offer full feeds on this site.

So, now they are here. And also as a link on the main page--'Subscribe to the full feed.'

Online Journalism Review has an article on whether to use RSS feeds or not and whether they drive more traffic. It doesn't say anything particularly new, but it lays out some of the issues people have with RSS and the talk of including ads.

One thing I found noteworthy in the article was this comment:

But there is a downside compared to e-mail. "You don't have much control over how it's presented so you can't feature an article or a package in the same way you can in email and say it's the single most important thing of the day," Bauer said.

In RSS feeds, all headlines look the same and are given equal weight. Some sites are learning to pay particular attention to the blurbs that can accompany headlines knowing that may be the key to enticing readers.

To which I would reply, well...yeah. It'd be nice if content providers would entertain the possibility that some people like that, that we'd prefer to decide for ourselves what news is noteworthy and not have people pushing Scott Peterson or Kobe Bryant or some other not-very-interesting 'number one story' twenty-four hours a day.

Two concerns people who don't use RSS have about using RSS are that people will stop visiting their site and that RSS feeds won't convey the context of the information it's compliing. BusinessLogs addresses this issue in Fear of RSS:

In the worst case scenario when using RSS a reader will never again visit your site. Since I am unable to track usage patterns for all RSS readers I don't know how often this happens, but I can tell you from the statistics from my sites (including this one) the number of visitors goes up monthly even with full content RSS feeds. And even if they do not visit your site again, at least they are still reading your content. This increases the odds that they will link to you from their site or spread the word about your site.

...via The Shifted Librarian

Yahoo has added RSS feeds for Yahooligans Joke of the Day, Ask Earl, Word of the Day, and SAT Tip of the Day.

foe romeo says:

What next? I think there's a lot of potential for giving child-safe news, search and directories the RSS treatment. Many parents only let their children navigate to sites they've already bookmarked together. Perhaps a daily stream of sites recently added to CBBC Search and the Yahooligans directory, combined with quality news sources (National Geographic Kids, CBBC newsround...), would give kids that much more to explore. Combine this with a facility for their parents, teachers and friends to bookmark their own finds (a kind of semi-private del.icio.us), and you've got an information-rich, safe, social space for children.

...via The Shifted Librarian

Dan Bricklin has released ListGarden an RSS feed generator program. Features include:

• Creates and maintains RSS feeds
• Produces both XML and optional human-readable companion HTML
• Runs either on your PC or on a web server Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
• Open source
• Requires no knowledge of XML or the RSS data format
• Tuned for quick manual additions of new items and simple editing

Check out The RSS Wishlist at the RSS Weblog:

It may seem obvious to readers of this particular blog that just about anything on the web that changes, whether frequently or infrequently, should have an associated feed. Readers all over rejoice when a major publication decides to hop onboard the syndication freight train. And beyond your typical publications, there are hundreds of innovative services that are just waiting to be remixed with some RSS flavor.

So, what would you like to read with a feed?

Some info about RSS in Safari and the coming integration of RSS into Microsoft's Longhorn, as well as other stuff.

...via The Shifted Librarian

I've been a bad blogger in not reporting back about the ACE conference where Blair Fannin, Ray Kimsey and I did a couple of panels on weblogs. The first panel was an introduction to RSS--what is it, why use it, how to get started. And the second panel was more technical, covering the history of RSS, web services for content, and how to set up an RSS feed.

We had great attendance for both sessions--more people in the first panel, as expected. We got lots of good questions and generated some interest in using RSS in extension.

Things to remember about RSS: it really is simple, it's free or nearly so to get started, even you can generate an RSS feed for a dynamic web page, it's easy (these days anyway) to setup dynamic web pages.

For more info on the material we covered at ACE, check out the RSS at ACE weblog.

We've posted more resources at the RSS for ACE weblog, including the presentations for both panels. Check it out.

Via Phil Windley's blog, Utah has a Bill Tracking page which also includes an RSS feed. Utah can also create a custom RSS feed for the legislative committees you select. Good stuff.

for marketing, that is.

Alex Barnett provides a list of pros and cons for using email or RSS for marketing and distributing information.

An exercise in clarity: RSS (Signal vs. Noise)

Wired News article on whether RSS Readers will eventually clog the web

ResearchBuzz reports that The University of Arizona and UC Berkeley news sites now have RSS feeds. The Minneapolis Public Library also has an RSS news feed.

Less than a year ago I went out and looked on the news sites of all the major universities in the US and no one had RSS feeds so it's good to see that things are changing.

The State of Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau now has their publications available via RSS Feeds

...via RSS in Government

Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian shares a presentation on RSS, what it is and what it can do for you:

RSS is:

• really hard to describe
• a form of XML
• stands for
  • Rich Site Summary
  • RDF Site Summary
  • Really Simple Syndication
• is best understood when you actually use it!

?blockquote>

Posted by dcoates at 11:21 AM

Dave Winer talks about a plan for merging RSS and Atom.

And if you want to know why Dave says, RSS rules...

Steve Gillmor has a piece at eWeek about Sun's Adoption of RSS:

Sun Microsystems has always been about communities. Those communities early on in the company's existence were probably nowhere near as well connected as they are today, certainly in nowhere near the same real-time mechanism as they are today. And RSS is increasingly becoming the principal means of real-time communication.

If you look now all across Sun and our developer properties, you're seeing RSS feeds--little blogs and wikis--popping up everywhere. That to me is more representative of what needs to be our mainstream strategy rather than the work of a few creative individuals who want to have our big admin portal picked up by people who care about Solaris system administration.

In December on this very blog, I mentioned that Amy Gahran of the Weblog CONTENTIOUS, was running a contest to rename RSS.

Yesterday, Amy left an update in the comments section:

Thanks so much for linking to my contest! I just wanted to update your readers that I've just opened public voting on this contest.

Anyone can vote, through the end of February. The more votes we get, the more likely it is that a worthwhile consensus will emerge. Voters select their favorite out of the 273 new names for "RSS feed" proposed by contest entrants.

Contest info and FAQ, with link to voting page: http://blog.contentious.com/contest.html

- Amy Gahran

So, go ye forth and vote!

From ETCON, Cory Doctorow provides some tantalizing notes on Leveraging RSS at Disney: from Collaboration to Massive Content Delivery:

Had to transition go.com from an expensive portal to a free-to-maintain portal by pulling in newsfeeds over RSS and XSLT-transitioning them to decorated web pages -- made it easy to add new partners to the portal. Made it easy to wpit out to WML for mobiles, and to re-syndicate to the rest of the world.

It took a while to show the powers that giving stuff away didn't mean a net reduction in eyeballs-on-ads.

I also think this is pretty cool:

Internally, we are also leveraging RSS as a means of collaboration and communication for our software engineering teams. All engineers maintain blogs and use NewsAggregators to track tasks, projects, and new technology. In addition, we are tracking changes on our Wiki via RSS.

The World Wide Web Consortium has issued RDF and OWL Recommendations:

Today, the World Wide Web Consortium announced final approval of two key Semantic Web technologies, the revised Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). RDF and OWL are Semantic Web standards that provide a framework for asset management, enterprise integration and the sharing and reuse of data on the Web. These standard formats for data sharing span application, enterprise, and community boundaries - all of these different types of "user" can share the same information, even if they don't share the same software.

...via Floyd (who almost never finds anything before I do, but I was out sick yesterday....)

RSS In Goverment points to Senator Joseph Biden's news releases, which make him the first senator with an RSS feed for official news.

RSS feeds are also in use in several of the presidential campaigns.

At eWeek, Steve Gillmor names his Best and Worst of Messaging & Collaboration in '03,

Among the best are RSS, Technorati, and Sun's licensing model. Among the worst? SCO, lack of IM interoperability, and e-mail.

...via Dan Gillmor

Jon Udell talks about The Social Life of XML [Dec. 23, 2003]:

The really important thing, it seems to me, is the way the XML document can become a shared construct, a tangible thing that processes and people can pass around and interact with. On the one hand, an XML document is the payload of a SOAP message that gets routed around on the Web services network -- a payload that represents, for example, a purchase order. On the other hand, an XML document is the form that somebody uses to submit, or approve, or audit that purchase order. Now, all of a sudden, these two documents are not only made of the same XML stuff, they can literally be the same XML document.

Dan Gillmor says that Nokia gets or is starting to get content syndication.

From the Nokia Content Synidication Program page:

The Nokia Content Syndication Program (NCSP) offers direct links to Nokia documents, toolkits, videos, images, etc., all through standard XML and JavaScript interfaces. Using the links in green below, you can directly access content in RDF, RSS, and JavaScript.

RSS in Government reports on RSS Winterfest 2004, an online discussion of RSS and content syndication:

RSS WinterFest will be a forum to discuss RSS and its future as a technology for use within and outside of the enterprise. Attendees may choose which events they want to attend. They may also contribute by posting to their Weblog or to the wiki. Moderators will highlight Weblogs and the wiki during the Webcast and the intermissions.

Case studies will include those from a media campaign in InfoWorld that distributed advertising through RSS feeds, the Department of Justice and those from companies that have implemented RSS and other Internet content syndication technologies.

If you've every tried to look up information about RSS online and learned that, among other things, it also stands for Royal Statistical Society, Relay Spam Stopper, and received signal strength, then you may want to get behind Rename this contenst:

Amy Gahran, creator of the weblog CONTENTIOUS, is offering a contest to select a catchier name for RSS.

Some of the entries so far include:

• Rssmatass
• Info bite list
• Short Wave Web
• Media Wake
• spin
• Evolvo
• Murphy

The Government of Canada has a new newsroom which includesRSS feeds for a number of categories.

The O'Reilly book, Spidering Hacks, talks about creating an RSS feed for a site that doesn't already have a feed:

Wouldn't it be nice if you could simply visualize what data on a page looks like, explain it in template form to Perl, and not bother with the need for parsers, regular expressions, and other programmatic logic? That's exactly what Template::Extract helps you do.

The Free Range Librarian has a No-Brainer Method for getting started with RSS:

I love RSS (the acronym means various things, but my favorite definition is "Really Simple Syndication"). I can track all kinds of news from new and familiar sources, from Dilbert to the New York Times, without filling up my e-mail box or tying a string around my finger to check various Web sites. The news comes to me as headlines and brief abstracts (with one-click access to the entire article) through my RSS reader (aggregator).

Tapestry offers a list of RSS feeds for online comics

RSS really is for everyone, as evidenced by the number of definiteions for RSS in Google.

...via BoingBoing

The RSS in Government blog has been quiet since this summer, but it's back today with three interesting posts:

1. The use of RSS in the Dutch Ministry of Transportation, Public Works and Management:

   Harro Ranter, Senior Knowledge Consultant for the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management is happy to announce that his agency has recently started a RSS news channel. Wide and immediate dissemination of their news is vital since the agency is responsible for mobility policy in the Netherlands and for protection against floods or falling water tables.

2. The Navy is investigating blogging software for project management:

   Weblogs provide for collaboration between experts on an as needed basis and virtually eliminate the need to send correspondence and documents by e-mail. TeamPage, in particular, allows users to set up a portal for viewing several Weblogs from one page. This faceting capability seems to be the significant feature possibly not available through other less expensive open source alternatives. According to Washington Technology, Traction's server-based enterprise software ranges in price from $5,000 per server to $10,000 per server plus $125 per account, depending on features. A single user version runs for about $250.

3. And, RSS to email notification

Feedroll, which is currently in beta, provides a tool for displaying RSS headlines on your own site.

...via The Shifted Librarian

The Shifted Librarian has a post on using RSS in library catalogs.

Among the things she reports are some excerpts from an upcoming article on integrating internet content:

"At the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Behesda, MD, we have used RSS both to integrate Internet content into the NCI library system and to make content from the library system available on our intranet in the form of RSS news feeds. This new content makes our library system a more useful and timely resource, allowing us to better 'feed' the information appetites of our clients, whose jobs require that they keep up with cancer and healthcare news, events, research, and politics. After the initial investment of time and technology, the information flows without requiring hands-on staff effort....

I'm doing research on RSS for a grant project and I'm going to be posting references here so I can find them later and have a central location to refer people rather than sending them annoying email all the time.

I've also added an 'RSS' category to the left-hand column and reclassified some of my older posts on RSS, so if anyone wants to see other references they're all just one-click away.

Today's RSS references:

Voidstar provides an RSS FAQ which answers such questions as:

• What is it?
• Why should I produce it?
• Which standard should I use for my feed?
• How can I check that my new RSS feed is valid?

Syndicated content: it's more than just some file formats by Paul Miller at UKOLN, discusses basics of RSS and some hints for good practice when implementing RSS:

• Adhere to the standards
• Ensure persistance
• Be brief and to the point...but not too brief!
• Stay current
• Know what your feed isfor
• Market your content
• Remember that content may appear out of context
• Cater--within reason--for different viewers
• Preserve your brand

All About RSS at Fagan Finder covers what RSS is, what you can do with it, and how to find RSS feeds.

I have this blogged elsewhere, but will also mention the State of Utah's comprehensive RSS Workshop.

RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters by Mark Nottingham also provides good information:

Why should I make an RSS feed available?

Your viewers will thank you, and there will be more of them, because RSS allows them to see your site without going out of their way to visit it.

While this seems bad at first glance, it actually improves your site's visibility; by making it easier for your users to keep up with your site - allowing them to see it the way they want to - it's more likely that they'll know when something that interests them is available on your site.

For example, imagine that your company announces a new product or feature every month or two. Without a feed, your viewers have to remember to come to your site and see if they find anything new - if they have time. If you provide a feed for them, they can point their aggregator or other software at it, and it will give them a link and a description of developments at your site almost as soon as they happen.

Stephen's Web provides Edu_RSS , a source for educational technology blog RSS feeds.

Localfeeds.com provides headlines from local news sources organized by city.

Lockergnome reports that the Chronicle of Higher Education now has RSS for their job listings.

...via The Shifted Librarian

Here's a RSS Primer geared toward publishers and content providers:

The main benefits of creating an RSS feeds include;

• RSS is an excellent and cost-effective way of driving traffic to, and increasing brand awareness of, any website that publishes content (e.g news, jobs, events) regularly. Once a publisher produces an RSS file, they are enabling others to syndicate their headlines, without any further work on their part.
• RSS is the dominant format for distributing headline content on the Web.
• RSS allows easy sharing of data between sites. Webmasters can use an RSS file to easily incorporate third party content into their own site.
• Content from RSS feeds can be easily repurposed allowing, for example, cross searching of a number of different feeds at once.
• RSS content can be added to personal desktop news reading applications like Feedreader or AmphetaDesk

It also offers a good summary of key points about RSS:

• The use of RSS benefits everyone involved - for publishers and content providers details of new content can be accessed by a much broader audience, for web site producers new content can be easily integrated into web sites or portals, and for end users easy access to new content is greatly facilitated.
• An RSS file (also known as an RSS feed or RSS channel) consists of a list of items, each of which contains a title, description and a link to a web page. Typically the full content itself is made available separately and can be accessed by the link in the RSS file.
• Utilising an RSS feed is straightforward. Once an RSS file is made available on a web site, interested parties can simply gather the file from the site and reuse the content in a variety of ways.
• There are a number of different versions of RSS. Although this has led to some confusion and debate it is not a major issue as almost all RSS applications can handle any RSS version.
• RSS can stand for 'Rich Site Summary', 'RDF Site Summary' or 'Really Simple Syndication' depending on who you ask and which version they are speaking about.
• RSS is an XML based format. If you already know a bit about HTML and XML then RSS will be a breeze!

...via The Shifted Librarian

Wired News has an article on the rapid adoption of news aggregators.

How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer

...via The Shifted Librarian

NewsGator has published a case study of Triple Point Technology's adoption of weblogs, RSS, and news aggregation to communicate within the organization:

Triple Point started with a simple goal: "The idea is to free some of our content, expose it via easily searchable XML and HTML via HTTP, and reduce the amount of information ‘hunt and peck’ that currently goes on, thus increasing productivity and improving the quality of our work," says Allie. They wanted to leverage the fact that employees already spend significant time using Outlook, and also build upon intranet work they had already done with SharePoint.

The solution was multi-fold: weblogs were created for employees to publish to, business systems were modified to leverage RSS, intranet sites now notify via RSS, and NewsGator delivers the content to the desktops.

...via The Shifted Librarian

Via Dave Winer, the BBC now has 68 new RSS feeds covering all their News indexes.

The Technology Source at Michigan Virtual University has a good article on RSS - The Next Killer App For Education:

Imagine having the news that interests you automatically delivered to your desktop, or being alerted to updates on your favorite Web sites without visiting them first. Picture yourself as a news provider to specific people who share your interests or just appreciate your commentary. Most commonly used to support the publication of weblogs and Internet news sites, RSS is an important development that promises to have a substantial impact on the world of education.

The Shifted Librarian quotes Andy Rhinehart of GoUpstate.com on use of their RSS feeds:

"From March 1-May 31, users accessing our RSS feeds accounted for 7.97 percent of our total traffic. This doesn't include people coming to the site from the various blogs who used the RSS items, but just the number of times our feeds were accessed.

WebMonkey has an informative RSS tutorial:

What is it really for, anyway? Two things: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way for sites to share headlines and stories so that other sites can integrate them into their pages. Additionally, some savvy surfers use special RSS aggregators %u2014 kind of like mini-browsers %u2014 to speedily flip through the latest news and links from dozens of sites.

It includes information on what RSS is, how to get an RSS feed, and what to do with it once you have it.

...via Scripting News

Ray Mathews has a new weblog that's looking at RSS in Government.

He's already got an interesting post about RSS in Government: Four Models for Aggregating and Publishing RSS Headlines:

The State of Utah is reviewing options for creating, aggregating, and publishing news from state agencies. The decision of which technology to use to create RSS feeds can be made independent to the decision regarding a technology for aggregating and publishing (parsing) the feeds. I'll address the later first and write about the creation/CMS end tomorrow. There seems to me to be at least four models for aggregating and publishing RSS headlines. This lengthy article describes these four models with examples of each.....More

Penn State has a section on their portal site telling content providers .how to provide content via RSS generation

So far, RSS and other tools have been used more by individuals, it seems, than organizations. It's interesting to see them begin to be integrated into projects.

Jenny Levine, with the Suburban Library System in Burr Ridge, IL (and who is better known in the blog-o-sphere as The Shifted Librarian ) has a powerpoint presentation on Portals, Blogs, & RSS: why they are your future