oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third-party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.

Whilst reading this news earlier today I followed a link to Third Party Applications on the Develop WordPress.com site which currently only lists one application which is “built to work with WordPress.com and enable you to interact with your blog in new ways” – namely Memolane.

I registered with the Memolane service for producing timelines some time ago but the connection with WordPress made me revisit the service. A display of my timeline is illustrated.

I have configured Memolane to include a feed from this blog. In addition to a display of recent blog posts I have also included RSS feeds of areas of work for which several years ago I recognised that RSS could have a significant role to play.  In particular I have included a link to the RSS feeds for my forthcoming  events, previous events (for every year since I started in UKOLN in 1997)  and for my peer-reviews and related papers.

As show in the bottom of the image you can quickly display previous events, so I can find that in the latter part of 2000 I gave a talk on “Externally Hosted Web Services” on 12 October 2000 (well-before the current hype about Cloud Computing!) and a talk on “Approaches To Resource Discovery In The UK HE Community” at the Verity 2000 conference on 30 November 2000.

It seems from this timeline display that life was much more leisurely eleven years ago,  with the record of public engagement suggesting a six week gap between my activities! Of course I will have posted to email lists and written documents, but it is now difficult to see what I was doing back then.

RSS feeds provide a means of keeping a reusable record of activities which can be processed by a variety of applications. This is the reason why I maintain a page of RSS Feeds For UK Web Focus Web Site and provide similar links for the QA Focus project which I was the project director for from 2002-2004.

Despite a number of third party services having withdrawn support for RSS I am still convinced of the benefits of RSS.  Those who make use of WordPress software either as a blogging platform or as a CMS will be able to exploit the feeds provided by the platform and many other services still provide RSS.  The most significant gap in the services I make use of, however, is ePrints which drives our institutional repository service.  Sadly ePrints support for RSS is very limited and so I am forced to maintain my RSS feed for my publications separately :-(  It would be great if ePrints were to support the interoperably provided in a Web 2.0 world by RSS and not just the much smaller Library world based around OAI-PMH.  But, as I asked last year: Is It Too Late To Exploit RSS In Repositories?