RSS: What’s the big deal?
Written April 19th, 2007 by Aaron HolbrookBy now, it’s probably safe to assume you’ve heard one of the newer jargon words that keeps getting thrown around: RSS. But what is it, and what place does it have in a hospital website?
What is RSS?
As taken from good ol’ wikipedia:
bq. RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.
Great, but what does that really mean? [Those of you who are already versed in the delightful benefits of RSS, please bear with me for just a short while longer]
This really opens up a whole new thought process for us webizens. Instead of having to visit your oft-visited sites every day to check up what they’ve been up to, you can instead have their content delivered straight to your computer. Imagine that for every single website that you check on a regular basis. You immediately become more efficient in your daily news-collection process, and from there can expand your horizons to sites or communities you might not have normally become a part of. The implications of this are astounding and have already started to alter the way people get their information on the internet.
So what does that mean for my hospital’s website?
Although this technology is still on the newer side, I truly believe now is the time to start building the foundation for a couple reasons:
- It allows easy syndication for those already collecting web feeds.
- By laying the groundwork now, not only will we be ready for when RSS becomes mainstream and it’s faux pas not to have a web feed, but we will have the opportunity to help promote its adoption.
Has your website implemented RSS? If so, what were some of the major issues or holdups? If not, what’s stopping you? Put your response in the comments.
April 20th, 2007 at 7:51 am
We plan to implement RSS soon. We’ll be able to post news and upcoming events to our RSS feed.
We also plan to use RSS as a project management communication tool. The idea is we post project management notes to the wiki. All the stakeholders in the project can subscribe to an RSS feed to see when new content is posted. This isn’t a hard or expensive thing to do. In fact, you can go to wikispace.com and build your own wiki for free. They have a built in RSS function. There’s a small monthly fee if you want password protection. In any case, the RSS feed from the wiki is handy… everyone can quickly see any and all new activity/information. Sure beats e-mails and meetings.
April 20th, 2007 at 8:39 am
@swanie:
Good luck w/ the implementation into your site, who was responsible for making that decision in the end, and was it hard convincing them it was a worthwhile project?
In response to your project management communication tool: that’s a great idea! Like you said, it wouldn’t be too difficult or expensive to set up, however you might run into some trouble with adoption (unless it’s a directive for people to take the time to learn it, I’ve found most people don’t like changing their tried and true methods).
Besides Wikispaces, Basecamp (created by 37 signals) also looks promising (although the group version costs a little bit more).
I’d be really interested to hear how it ends up turning out, what’s your timeline for the project; when do you hope to have it implemented?
April 20th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Back @ Aaron:
Thanks. The entire news and events application is a custom development project. It’s currently taking a second place in the cue to opening a new hospital. But it looks like we can get it developed before the year is out. The wiki idea came from our lead developer. IS, Marketing, and our decentralized web authors are all over the place. So, the wiki works well for a centralized think bank while simple to use and set up.
Yes, it’s going to take a little effort to get people on board with RSS… but once I show them, they’re hooked. They love it. They can’t believe it’s that easy. And they MUCH prefer it to group e-mails.
The other nice part of the wiki is that a new person to the team can instantly get up to speed (without wasting my time). And when I get the passing-in-the-hallway question, “what are we doing with web?,” I can hand them the URL and password to the wiki on the back of my business card and they can get all the information they’d ever care to know. Meanwhile, I can get work done.
Thanks for the basecamp tip… I’ll have to check that out.
April 20th, 2007 at 9:02 am
@swanie:
That really sounds exciting swanie; I didn’t even think about the possibility of being able to easily update people with what’s new with the website just by handing them access to your project log. It’s also encouraging to hear that you’re having success with introducing people to RSS and the benefits it has to offer.
There are a ton of group collaboration solutions out there - some you can download and set up on your own server, and some are pre-hosted. Good idea for a post swanie, thanks
April 27th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
We are looking at adding RSS for our hospital board meetings page. It’s not enough for us to post the meeting and agenda info anymore. Our community wants us to notify them about special meetings or remind them when we are having regular meetings. Rather than start an e-mail list we are thinking RSS might be the perfect thing. It also allows the public to avoid having to surrender their e-mail to yet another list.
Getting it implemented on our site is another trick though…we are hosted by MedSeek - anyone out there using the MedSeek solution for RSS? I would love to hear your experience. Also anyone using RSS for meeting/class info at your hospital?