The Hindu Business Line : New buzzwords in the networked world

IF "share to develop" is the command for managing Internet content in the open source era, "Wiki" is the direction to go and "RSS", your protocol of choice.

We're talking about two separate content sharing and management concepts that have taken the networked world by storm in recent times.

While "Wiki" (Hawaii, an equivalent for being quick) develops Web content though cooperative development and ownership, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) makes it easy for Web sites to share headlines and stories from other sites.

Delivering a talk on "Electronic content management - RSS and Wiki" hosted by the Institution of Engineers here, Mr Amarnath Raja, Chief Executive Officer, InApp Information Technologies, said syndication has become popular with many sites, not just news portals and RSS is the most popular tool for syndication.

"Today, we can get syndicated content on weather information, today's quotes, joke sites and cartoon sites," he said.

RSS originated as an XML tool for content aggregation at Web sites such as myNetscape and myYahoo. These sites provide customised news, events and cartoons for members.

"News aggregation clients are available on all platforms from Linux and other Unixes to MS Windows platforms, where news and other syndicated information is brought to your desktop," Mr Raja said.

Newspaper managers have realised that if they could use articles and stories from other newspapers, they could garner more readers with the wider area that would be covered. This is an example of how syndication can work in print.

Online, there are potentially millions of authors writing on millions of topics each day. It can be very difficult to keep track of them without some type of automated system. And that's where RSS comes in.

On the other hand, with Wiki, anybody can easily create/alter Web pages, albeit moderately in some cases. Thisprinciple is very similar to the open source message of cooperative development, where many people contribute and improve a common property resource.

Wiki's applications range from simple content development to brainstorming over the Internet and knowledge management in the corporate world.

The largest Wiki in existence is the Encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

At 18 GB, its content has exceeded the size of Britannica and other Encyclopaedias by several folds already. This has led many to wonder if they were seeing the emergence of the "Encyclopaedia Galactica" proposed by Asimov in his science fiction.