Helping people find your content
May 23, 2007
Congratulations to the Arts Council of Ireland for being the first of the National Cultural Institutions to install an RSS feed on its re-designed website. The feed doesn’t appear to be working at present but hopefully that’s a minor technical hitch. I hope it’s not going to be too long before the rest of the members of the CNCI follow suit – some of the websites of these major institutions are very poorly designed and I gave up trying to navigate through the National Library’s site in an effort to find out more about their series of talks (I saw a printed brochure about them) but there’s nothing on the site for an interested ticket buyer or if there is, it’s buried somewhere very secret. Look instead at the New York Public Library’s site with 8 different feeds for various areas of its activities…A quick scan of many of the websites of smaller Irish arts and cultural organisations reveals the same thing … all this great activity going on, in secret, buried in the bowels of dusty websites … let’s not make it so difficult for interested people to spend their money on what you have to offer!
And for those of you who aren’t sure what I’m talking about here’s a brilliant explanation of RSS in Simple English from Common Craft.
There’s a transcript of the video here
Pic credit
It’s stuff like this that Tom Raftery has covered on his blog training course through IT@cork. But this short video is wonderfully clear.
Since I found out about RSS feeders, my blogging experience is a lot better. Now I feel I’m much more in control of what I want to see. So I’m a convert. Oh for a library of such videos on each key aspect of blogging, integrated onto a DVD and distributed free by one of the social networking magazines that I’ve not yet heard of.
that’s precisely the conversation that’s going on over at Common Craft – but who needs dvd when you have Videojug?
Videojug Live explained – online!