A world of widgets, wikis and mashups

RSS
RSS (Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication) is just a simple XML schema suitable for publishing news feeds, with elements including title, author, content description, and a link back to the source web page.

The simplicity of RSS makes it easy both to generate and consume. In its early days it was used for aggregating news feeds.

People then used it to create their own personal news feeds and called them blogs. With a little adaption RSS became a vehicle for personal broadcasting, in the form of podcasts – multimedia content that you can download to a PC or portable player.

Now RSS is moving on again. Most blog feeds have a single URL, but some websites have realised that by appending arguments to that URL they can use RSS to deliver a simple form of software as a service. The Ebay RSS API is an example, letting you use RSS to track auction listings that interest you. Yahoo is now taking RSS into mashup territory with Yahoo Pipes. Despite its simplicity, RSS is showing no sign of running out of steam.

Most people are aware they can easily author a blog by signing up for one of the free services, such as Google’s Blogger or Microsoft’s Live Spaces. In addition, some have discovered that the most advanced blogging systems are effective content management tools, allowing users to manage an entire website. Wordpress is a good example. By installing this free software on your own website, you can author hierarchically linked pages as well as traditional blog entries, and apply themes so that your site looks different from all the other Wordpress sites out there.

The other key feature of RSS is the number of different ways you can receive feeds. Anyone with the latest Internet Explorer or Firefox already has a blog reader. In IE7 they are called feeds, and in Firefox live bookmarks. There are also some excellent online blog aggregators, so called because they bring numerous feeds together in one place.

Online aggregators work from anywhere with an internet connection, and don’t suffer the synchronisation issues that afflict users with more than one computer. Two good ones are bloglines and Google Reader.

Ajax and Office 2.0
Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) is a technique for retrieving web content in the background and feeding the data into an existing web page, instead of navigating to a new one.

That’s the technology; the result for users is smoother, richer browser applications. The classic example is Google Maps. You can click on a map and drag it around with the mouse without any irritating page refreshes.

The significance of Ajax is that it suddenly dawned on developers that Javascript running in the browser is a potent programming platform, with the benefit of zero deployment for the user. The downside is the extra effort it takes to code Javascript to work in all the leading browsers.

Fortunately, new code libraries for PHP, ASP.Net and Java hide most of these problems. As these libraries mature, users benefit from browser-based applications that are richer and more usable. Ajax is therefore one of the drivers of ‘Office 2.0’, the appearance of online productivity applications that are an alternative to desktop suites, such as Microsoft Office or Open Office.

Currently, online applications such as Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets remain, functionally, short of traditional Office applications. On the other hand, they are improving rapidly, enough to make their inherent advantages compelling.

The beauty of Office 2.0 applications is that your data is always available, and sharing a document with others just needs a change of permissions. If you’ve ever lost data to hard drive corruption, or left a document you need on your desktop when out with a laptop, you’ll appreciate these services even more.