Archive for July 24th, 2007

Who’s using RSS?

Published July 24, 2007 Technology 3 Comments

A question came up in a meeting I was at yesterday – to what extent are people actually subscribing to (and presumably reading) RSS (or Atom) feeds?

After casting around a bit all I could find on the web was this post from Feedburner’s blog talking about the use of aggregators (hot news: Google, Yahoo!, and Bloglines are the tops).

The aggregators certainly make it easy to subscribe to feeds, but I wonder if that’s the same thing as saying people are actually using feeds. When Rael Dornfest asked the crowd at O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech Conference in 2006 how many people thought their feed reader was more important than their email client, a significant number of people raised their hands – but that’s a pretty geekily self-selected crowd.

If you’ve got any data on how much you and the people around you are or aren’t using feeds, and how they’re being used, drop a comment to this post or send me an email.

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Update on the file sharing provision in the Higher Ed bill

Published July 24, 2007 Politics , Technology Leave a Comment

Mark Luker from Educause reports that the Reid ammendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Bill was dropped after a groundswell of criticism. Whew. There apparently is some substitute language from Sen. Kennedy being included in the “Manager’s Package” on the bill that asks colleges and universities to inform their students on the following points:

(P) policies and sanctions related to copyright infringement, including –

(i) information which explicitly informs students that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including unauthorized peer to peer file sharing, may subject them to civil and criminal penalties;

(ii) a summary of the penalties for violation of copyright laws under the US Code;

(iii) a description of the institution’s policies with respect to unauthorized peer to peer file sharing including disciplinary actions which are taken against students who engage in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials using the institution’s information technology system; and

(iv) a description of steps that the institution takes to prevent and detect unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material on its information technology system.

That’s all stuff we’re either doing already or working on, so no problems there. This is an important battle won, but it’s not the end of the story by any means.

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Update on the file sharing provision in the Higher Ed bill

Published July 24, 2007 Politics , Technology Leave a Comment

Mark Luker from Educause reports that the Reid ammendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Bill was dropped after a groundswell of criticism. Whew. There apparently is some substitute language from Sen. Kennedy being included in the “Manager’s Package” on the bill that asks colleges and universities to inform their students on the following points:

(P) policies and sanctions related to copyright infringement, including –

(i) information which explicitly informs students that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including unauthorized peer to peer file sharing, may subject them to civil and criminal penalties;

(ii) a summary of the penalties for violation of copyright laws under the US Code;

(iii) a description of the institution’s policies with respect to unauthorized peer to peer file sharing including disciplinary actions which are taken against students who engage in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials using the institution’s information technology system; and

(iv) a description of steps that the institution takes to prevent and detect unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material on its information technology system.

That’s all stuff we’re either doing already or working on, so no problems there. This is an important battle won, but it’s not the end of the story by any means.

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