Notes from AppleTree on 1.17.2006
Blogs
The term “blog” is short for “web log”, which is simply an online journal. Often, blogs are organized by topic, location, or organization. For instance, MUSC has a blogging site for those affiliated with the university.
Wikis
A Wiki is a group of web pages that are editable by either a group or the general public (I'll call them users). Users can also create pages. A Wiki is essentially a persistent, shared white board. There are generally shortcuts for formatting text and organizing content so that users do not have to know HTML.
RSS
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. Rather than the content provider (the web site maintainer) having to alert everyone when new content is available, a new entry is merely appended to the end of a virtual table of contents. This table of contents (a “feed”) has a list of all the recent updates and where they can be found (links instead of page numbers). Feeds are formatted for machines to read (in XML) and require a “Feed Reader” (also “Feed Aggregator”) for humans to read them. There are many reader software clients as well as websites available for free. Atom feeds are another type of syndicated feed and accomplish the same results.
Podcasting
First, podcasting has nothing to do with iPods. Podcasts uses RSS, but instead of containing links to new web pages (in the virtual “table of contents”) there are links to audio files (mp3 files, usually). You can use the same tools listed above to receive podcast updates. You can, if you wish, download the audio files to your iPod and listen to them from there (if you wish to be an iPodder purist), or you can simply listen to them on your computer.