With the number of cellphones and tablets increasing by the day in every country, a major shift to information access is being witnessed.
The Internet and its predecessors, the Bitnet, ARPANET, EARN and list servers, were initially developed for information sharing and searching for reference documents. The researchers at UCLA and SRI – who were the first to connect two networks with the aim of establishing a global interconnected network – could never have foreseen Project Glass, Skype or YouTube. The phone-in-a-watch was known only to Dick Tracy fans who would have themselves chuckled at this impossible notion of gadgetry ever becoming a reality.
Yet, here, we are. We have all this and much more yet lies behind locked doors. Innovative products take up to a couple of years of design and testing under near-draconian secrecy levels before hitting the market. This truly is the Information Age.
On the other hand, the art of reading is fast reducing. Under the deluge of information, no one has time to do more than skip over précis as more, more and yet more new information keeps coming in. It is truly a wonder why the whole Internet and all its users don’t disappear in a puff of smoke.
With the large scale proliferation of mobile devices – smart phones, tablets and such – a number of developed countries are facing a strange shortage: The ether is filling up. That is to say, the frequency spectrum used by transmission technologies such as GPRS and LTE is becoming saturated. But the demand and user base keeps growing.
The major shift hinted to at the start of this discussion is that the focus is no longer on establishing a presence on the Web – that has already been done. Instead, now the focus is on getting information across. It has to be short and to the point, and it has to be delivered quickly as on mobile devices users do not open multiple tabs nor have multiple monitors.
This led to web sites that aggregated content, such as Yahoo and Google News and ultimately to aggregation software. Whichever such application is seen, each has one aim: Get the information to the user.
The original idea of article exchange using a standard XML syntax between websites was developed in 1999 by Netscape but it wasn’t until 2005 that it garnered major support from Microsoft and Opera.
Rich Site Summary, also known as Really Simple Syndication or, simply, RSS, quickly became the de facto standard mainly due to its openness and ease of implementation. The advantage to news and article via RSS quickly became visible to publishers and the RSS logo became one of the first common icons that one could see on most such web sites.
The screen sizes of most current models of smart phones and tablets make these device-owners the perfect target audience. Syndication services and programs pull in feeds from around the world and summarize them into easy to read packages. Two of the most popular programs are Flipboard and Google Currents. Both of these offer similar facilities allowing users to quickly skip and skim thru items at speeds that regular desktop computer users would not have thought they would ever need.
There are two major advantages to generating RSS feeds from sites that deal with articles such as news and magazines. Firstly, for an RSS version, the web site’s programming requires addition not a change. Hence, RSS generation may be added to without affecting the existing functionality of the web site.
Secondly, the standard markup in RSS does not deal with formatting, allowing the syndication service or application to supply its own formatting. This enables the same feed to be formatted for a variety of devices, particularly smart phones where the screen size is limited.
Further options allow syndication programs to store and cache the feed for offline reading for those places without Internet access.
As Internet access is now available in airplanes and hospitals, one wonders how long the caching facility would be needed for.
The Internet and its predecessors, the Bitnet, ARPANET, EARN and list servers, were initially developed for information sharing and searching for reference documents. The researchers at UCLA and SRI – who were the first to connect two networks with the aim of establishing a global interconnected network – could never have foreseen Project Glass, Skype or YouTube. The phone-in-a-watch was known only to Dick Tracy fans who would have themselves chuckled at this impossible notion of gadgetry ever becoming a reality.
Yet, here, we are. We have all this and much more yet lies behind locked doors. Innovative products take up to a couple of years of design and testing under near-draconian secrecy levels before hitting the market. This truly is the Information Age.
On the other hand, the art of reading is fast reducing. Under the deluge of information, no one has time to do more than skip over précis as more, more and yet more new information keeps coming in. It is truly a wonder why the whole Internet and all its users don’t disappear in a puff of smoke.
With the large scale proliferation of mobile devices – smart phones, tablets and such – a number of developed countries are facing a strange shortage: The ether is filling up. That is to say, the frequency spectrum used by transmission technologies such as GPRS and LTE is becoming saturated. But the demand and user base keeps growing.
The major shift hinted to at the start of this discussion is that the focus is no longer on establishing a presence on the Web – that has already been done. Instead, now the focus is on getting information across. It has to be short and to the point, and it has to be delivered quickly as on mobile devices users do not open multiple tabs nor have multiple monitors.
This led to web sites that aggregated content, such as Yahoo and Google News and ultimately to aggregation software. Whichever such application is seen, each has one aim: Get the information to the user.
The original idea of article exchange using a standard XML syntax between websites was developed in 1999 by Netscape but it wasn’t until 2005 that it garnered major support from Microsoft and Opera.
Rich Site Summary, also known as Really Simple Syndication or, simply, RSS, quickly became the de facto standard mainly due to its openness and ease of implementation. The advantage to news and article via RSS quickly became visible to publishers and the RSS logo became one of the first common icons that one could see on most such web sites.
The screen sizes of most current models of smart phones and tablets make these device-owners the perfect target audience. Syndication services and programs pull in feeds from around the world and summarize them into easy to read packages. Two of the most popular programs are Flipboard and Google Currents. Both of these offer similar facilities allowing users to quickly skip and skim thru items at speeds that regular desktop computer users would not have thought they would ever need.
There are two major advantages to generating RSS feeds from sites that deal with articles such as news and magazines. Firstly, for an RSS version, the web site’s programming requires addition not a change. Hence, RSS generation may be added to without affecting the existing functionality of the web site.
Secondly, the standard markup in RSS does not deal with formatting, allowing the syndication service or application to supply its own formatting. This enables the same feed to be formatted for a variety of devices, particularly smart phones where the screen size is limited.
Further options allow syndication programs to store and cache the feed for offline reading for those places without Internet access.
As Internet access is now available in airplanes and hospitals, one wonders how long the caching facility would be needed for.
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