Nudge: Improving Decisions About RSS Usage

The ‘Nudge’ Phenomenum

Saturday’s Guardian has an article on ‘Nudge’, an idea developed by US economist Richard Thaler and other behavioural economists who “want to highlight the best option, while still leaving all the bad ones open“. This approach can be applied to social and economic areas such as healthy eating and pension schemes, but rather than the state mandating solutions which aim to bring about positive benefits to society or to individuals, people are made aware of the benefits of the preferred option, but are left free to make their own decisions. An example of this approach which David Cameron is exploring in the Conservative party return to power is a proposal that electricity bills should contain details of whether you are using more or less energy than other households in the area.  This subtle use of peer pressure is felt to encourage households to use energy more efficiently.

WebWatch Surveys

This has similarities with approach I’ve taken over the past ten years or so. A project called “WebWatch” ran a number of automated benchmarking surveys across a number of Web communities in 1998-9. After the funding had ceased the approach continued for a number of years, providing, for example, documented evidence of conformance with WCAG guidelines for institutional home pages based on use of an automated checking tool.  The approach was not intended to act as a league table, but to observe patterns across the community, identify and learn from best practices and also to discuss the limitations of the survey methodology (in this case it led me to a much better understanding of the flaws in the WAI model for addressing accessibility issues).

Survey of RSS Usage on Scottish University Home Pages

With the forthcoming IWMW 2008 taking place in the University of Aberdeen on 22-24^thJuly 2008 it is timely to revisit the WebWatch approach across the Scottish higher educational sector, this time to monitor takeup of RSS which are embedded on institutional home pages.

The approach taken has been to visit Scottish institutes of higher education (based on the table provided on the Scottish Web Folk blog) using the FireFox browser. The RSS Panel extension will detect any embedded links to RSS files and the numbers of RSS links recorded.

The Findings

The findings are given in the following table.

	Institution	No. of RSS Feeds	Thumbnail	Comments	RSS Feed
1	University of Aberdeen	0		No autodetect, but manual link to RSS news feed on home page	Events feed
2	University of Abertay	0		No autodetect, but manual link to RSS news feed on home page	News feed
3	Bell College	0
4	University of Dundee	0
5	University of Edinburgh	0
6	Edinburgh College of Art	0
7	University of Glasgow	2		Two comprehensive news feeds, one of current news and one of an archive of news items dating back to October 2007	News - University in the news
8	Glasgow Caledonian University	0
8	Heriot-Watt University	0		Manual link to RSS page, containing links to two RSS feeds, together with help information	News - Events
9	Napier University	0	(Thumbnail not available)
10	University of the West of Scotland	0
11	Queen Margaret University College	0
12	Robert Gordon University	2		Two RSS feeds, one of current news and one of events	News - Events
13	Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama	0
14	Scottish Agricultural College	6		Seven RSS feeds on news and events, farm diversification, crop issues this week, research funding bids (internal use only), student recruitment news, undergraduate and postgraduate courses and training courses	News and events - Crop issues this week - Farm diversification - Research funding bids (internal only) - Student recruitment news - Undergraduate and postgraduate courses - Training courses
15	University of St. Andrews	2		Two RSS feeds, one of current news and one of events	News - Events
16	University of Stirling	0
17	University of Strathclyde	1		RSS feed of press releases	Press releases
18	UHI Millennium Institute	0
19	University of the West of Scotland	0

Discussion

It is perhaps disappointing to find that several Scottish institutions do not appear to be providing RSS feeds which can be found from the home page. A number of them do provide a feed, which is displayed using one of the conventional orange RSS icons to indicate its role, but do not provide an autodetect mechanism, which can enable software to process the RSS file in some way.  An example of how the Intenrnet Explorer browser provides access to RSS feeds which have been autodetected is shown below.

The mechanism for providing such auto-detection is use of a single <meta> tag for each RSS feed. In the case of Robert Gordon University they used the following:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”http://www.rgu.ac.uk/common/xml/rssfeed.cfm” title=”RGU News RSS Feed”>
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”http://www.rgu.ac.uk/common/xml/rsseventfeed.cfm” title=”RGU Events RSS Feed”>

Why, I wonder, aren’t all the institutions which have an RSS feed doing likewise? After all this approach can not only benefit end users, it also allows other automated tools, such as indexing robots, to find the feeds – and I suspect most institutions will want their news feeds and details of their events to be found.

Perhaps the reason for not doing this is a lack of awareness – in which case I hope that this post has addressed that issue. But it may be that changes to the content of the home page have to be approved by a committee – and suggestions for “inclusion of an autodetect link for RSS feeds” might be regarded as technobabble.  In which case show them the business benefits and show how other institutions are using this.

My final comment on the findings of this survey is to note how the Scottish Agricultural College (SAC) have included links to seven RSS feeds, including not only the conventional lists of news and events but also various other feeds for content which is directly related to their agricultural interests.  Here SAC is making use of RSS as a syndication service in addition to an alerting service.

An image showing how these feeds can be displ;ayed using the RSS Panel tool in FireFox.  I should hasten to add that on arriving at a page which has autodetectable RSS feeds the panel is displayed as a small transparent floating window – you need to open up the window in order to display the feeds as shown.

How usable this particular tool may be for processing more than one or two feeds may be open to question – I tend to just have one or two RSS feeds on my various Web sites, and have a dedicated RSS page which provides access to a full range of feeds. But I do think that the approach taken by the Scottish Agricultural College, of providing a number of structured resources (using RSS) is one to be welcomed. And I wonder why the Scottish Agricultural College seems to be ahead of the game. The talk I gave on Web 2.0: The Potential Of RSS and Location Based Services in Edinburgh in September 2006 didn’t have anything to do with this, did it?

Acknowledgement

The thumbnails of the institutional home pages were created by the Thumbshots thumbnails service.

RSS Training For Remote Workers (And Remote Users)

We have a number of remote workers at UKOLN, with staff based in the south west, south east and north of England and Scotland. We are making increasing use of networked technologies to support the remote workers – with a workshop session on “Embracing Web 2.0 Technologies to Grease the Wheels of Team Cohesion” being given by my colleague Marieke Guy together with Andy Ramsden, head of the e-learning unit at the University of Bath at this year’s IWMW 2008 event.

When preparing for a recent training course on “An Introduction To RSS Readers: Google Reader and Netvibes” I thought this would provide a useful opportunity to explore the potential of screencasting, which is described in Wikipedia as “digital recording of computer screen output“. In my case I used the Camtasia software to record the screen display together with my accompanying audio description of what I was doing. I had also created an accompanying PowerPoint presentation which acted as my script. I had intended to also sync the sound with the PowerPoint slides to create a Slidecast on the Slideshare service, but didn’t get round to doing this, this time.

Initially I had intended to make this available just for colleagues at UKOLN (the remote workers and office-based workers who couldn’t attend the session). But it strikes me that the screencast may be useful to others – and, indeed, a colleague of mine commented that “I found it useful to have the seminar available in this version (I was on holiday on the day of the seminar). As a remote worker, I would welcome similar initiatives for future seminars.” So although it isn’t as polished as a professionally made video I thought I would share it with readers of this blog.

A question I would have is should we encourage the production and sharing of such screencasts more widely? Would you be willing to do this for training sessions you may give? And, if you’ve watched it, how useful have you found this screencast?

Note: via Phil Bradley’s blog I came across a post on Common Craft and Google Reader which provides “a new short video just over a minute long demonstrating Google Reader“.  [This note added on 1 Sep 2008].

RSS For Events

Over the past few years UKOLN has made use of RSS to support its annual Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) series. Initially RSS was used to provide access to news about the event, allowing delegates to be alerted to updates about the event without needing to visit the Web site, thus allowing users the choice of avoiding the intrusiveness of email.

But as more applications and Web-based services became available which exploited RSS, we started to appreciate the wider ranges of potential uses for RSS. Since 2006 we have used RSS to syndicate structured data for the event, including, as can be seen for this year’s event, lists of the plenary talks, workshops sessions, speakers and workshop facilitators. This frees the data from the constraints of the event’s Web site allowing the data to be accessed by users in more varied ways including the user’s preferred RSS reader, PDAs, mobile phones and even, using an RSS iPod Reader, having this data conveniently available on a iPod.

More recently we have made use of geo-located RSS data to enable the locations of the IWMW events to be displayed on a map. This then led to a geo-located RSS feed of the host institution for plenary speakers at all twelve of the IWMW events (including this year’s event, to be held at the University of Aberdeen on 22-24 July 2008). This provides the event organisers with a management tool which can help to visualise the participation at the event on a geographical basis – have we, for example, provided opportunities for plenary speakers from throughout the UK? I’m pleased to say that we do seem to have a broad representation throughout the UK, will speakers from as far north as Aberdeen, as far south as Southampton, as far east as Norwich and as far west as Belfast. In addition, if you zoom out from the UK you will discover that there have been a number of speakers from overseas including the Republic of Ireland and Australia.

In a recent post on RSS For Your Project Web Site I cited Stephen Downdes’ comment that failing to provide RSS is unsocial. But a couple of people posted comments and argued that RSS only has a role to play in specific cases. I disagree, as I feel that providing RSS feeds for structured data can allow the data to be used in interesting, and perhaps unexpected ways. Let’s make much more use of RSS generally, I would say. But how else can it be used to enhance events, I wonder? And are there any developers reading this post who might be in a position to submit an entry to the IWMW 2008 Innovation Competition which makes use of this data?

RSS For Your Project Web Site

Stephen Downes has recently suggestedthat use of RSS and blogs “should be basic and fundamental information, and in my view, projects without this sort of informational support are just being anti-social.” I think Stephen’s right – although, as a Brit, I’d probably be more circumspect (perhaps along the lines of a Sir Humphrey Appleby “Is really it wise not to have a RSS feed“). Stephen’s direct North American approach is to be applauded, I feel.

And Stephen linked to a blog post on RSS injects edu with accuracy, freshness, and cool stuffwhich gives an example of how RSS can be used.

My own use of RSS to enhance access to project deliverables was for the JISC-funbded QA Focus project. In this case RSS filesprovided for the project’s key deliverables including briefing documents, case studies, papers and presentations. In addition OPML fileswere also created which enabled the RSS files to be integrated in a variety of ways.

Stephen’s right – if you’re not doing this you are “just being anti-social“.

Revisiting Web Usage Metrics

I recently wrote a post on The UK Government and Web Metrics in which I described potential ambiguities in reporting on the usage of Government Web sites. In a comment on the post Phil Wilson oberved that

This extract from Hansard only really tells me one thing: there isn’t a government-wide standardised hit-tracking/visitor analysis scheme. 

That’s true – and the temptation would be to recommend the adoption of an industry standard, such as that provided by ABCE. As this page says:

The ABC international standards working party (IFABC, International Federation of Audit Bureaux, http://www.ifabc.org/) has developed a set of rules and definitions that are the effective world-wide standard for Web audits. Definitions and rules specific to the internet industry in the UK and Ireland are controlled and developed by JICWEBS, the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards. ALL current Industry agreed metrics are listed below (in alphabetical order):

Great, we have a standard which can be used for measuring Web usage.

The problem is, what if the content of a Web site is syndicated? What if users don’t visit the Web site to read the information, but expect the information to come to them, via their preferred RSS reader? 

This struck me when I viewed the usage statistics for my initial post on The UK Government and Web Metrics. At one stage all I could view via the administrators interface on the WordPress.com service was the overall hits on pages on my blog. But some time ago WordPress provided a display of syndicated accesses to blog posts, as can be seen in the image.

Now what would I report on the day the post was published if I was making use of the ABCE’s standard for Web site usage? Less than 40 page views on the day the post was published, and a drop in views after that.  The statistics showing the much higher syndicated views of the post would fail to be reported.

OK, so the usage data is flawed – but everyone knows that.  The danger, of course, if usage data becomes competitive, with services failing to be funded if the usage levels as recorded by Web site visits doesn’t reach acceptable levels. And what will providing RSS feeds to services do – it may provide a richer and more personalised ervice for the end user, but the Web usage figures as reported by tools which comply with the ABCE standard will drop.

Here’s an example of how use of an agreed international can potentially result in a failure to develop richer service for the user community.  Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have an agreed baseline for usage statistics. Rather the Web site usage needs to be analysed in conjunction with an understanding of alternative ways in which users may access the data.  And I don’t know if there’s a standard available for this. 

Use of Yahoo Pipes with IWMW 2007 RSS Feeds

The third submission to the IWMW 2007 Innovation Competition was also from a colleague at UKOLN. As I’ve commented previously Julie Allison made use of the software to process various RSS feeds associated with the IWMW 2007 event.

As I’ve described Julie’s submission previously, I’ll not repeat it. What I would say, though, is that the description of Julie’s work clearly inspired one reader, with AJCann (a frequent contributor to this blog) subsequently announcing that he is a Pipes Virgin No More. For me this is a good example of one of the aims of the competition – encouraging others that it may be worth ‘just trying it’.

(Note this post is one of a series which describes submissions to the Innovation Competition at the IWMW 2007 event, to be held at the University of York on 16-18 July 2007. Further information about the series of posts is available in a post published previously.)

Being Informed Of New Comments

When a new comment is made on this blog I receive an email alert. And details of the last 5 comments are included in the sidebar widget. But how can readers of this blog find out about new comments made to postings of particular interest, especially if they miss the information in the sidebar (which can happen if several comments are made in quick succession, if they don’t visit the blog site regularly or, indeed, if they use an RSS reader, email delivery of postings, etc.

This occurred to me after receiving a comment on the FireFox – The Researchers Favourite Application? posting from Peter Miller, in which he mentioned that Mike Kaply, the Firefox Operator guy, is blogging on enterprise deployment. There has been a fair amount of interest in this topic (indeed the post is in the list of top postings in this blog) so it would be unfortunate if people missed this useful link on developments in this area.

WordPress does provide an RSS feed for new comments. Perhaps I should provide a link to the feed in the sidebar. But, as has been discussed previously, many users don’t know what to do with RSS feeds, so should I provide a link to an email delivery of RSS feeds? But won’t this be confusing – what will receiving notification of a comment mean without the context? Or do they applications provide information about the context? And do RSS readers solve this in any case, so there’s no need for me to make any changes (and to add more clutter to the sidebar)?

What do you think?

Outlook 2007 – A User-Friendly Interface To RSS?

I recently suggested that services, such as R-info, which provide an email delivery service for RSS feeds could be a useful way of maximising access for users who are not comfortable using a dedicated RSS reader.

However having noticed Michael Webb’s posting on Outlook 2007 – the killer RSS application? perhaps the much-needed simple interface will become more widely available as MS Office 2007 becomes more widely deployed.

As can be seen from the accompanying screen image (taken from Michael’s blog) Outlook 2007 seems to provide an interface which will be familiar to users who make use of folders to organise their blog postings.

Email Subscription Service For This Blog

Roddy MacLeod recently pointed out the difficulties end users may have in understanding how to add RSS feeds to RSS viewers. I think Roddy is right – and we do need to make interfaces much easier to use, especially for users who make use of email and Web browsers, but don’t understand RSS readers.

In response to this I recently subscribed to three services which deliver RSS feeds using email. The services were R-Mail, RSSfwd and Feedblitz.

At the delivery end, the services seem similar: with all of them I received a HTML-formatted email, with embedded images.

The Feedblitz subscription service seems to be the most sophisticated, allowing the delivery to be suspended (perhaps when going away on holiday) together with a host of other options which can be accessed from the dashboard, as illustrated.

However as the aim of this service is to provide an interface which is very easy to use, especially for the inexperienced user, I have chosen the R-Mail service, and provided an interface to this at at the top of the right-hand sidebar widget.

RSS And The Hero Portal

I recently received a copy of “Hero Headlines” which contains news from Hero Ltd, “the company behind the UK’s official online gateway to higher education and research opportunities“.

The newsletter included an article about the new-look HERO Web site, which was relaunched in November 2006.

The article mentioned that the Web site now makes use of RSS. Looking at the What is RSS? page I was pleased to find that RSS is being used not only for news, but also for syndication of feature articles and press releases. In addition the Web site explains what RSS is and provides helpful advice on using RSS readers.

Well done, Hero. I think a national portal to UK Universities, such as Hero, helps to maximise awareness of and access to information about the sector. (I should disclose, BTW, that I was a member of a Hero Technical Advisory Group, several years ago).
But what else could a national portal such as Hero provide? How about:

• An RSS feed for search results
• Direct access to RSS feeds from individual institutions
• Geographical metadata for pages about individual institutions
• A Google Maps mashup providing additional information about the institutions
• An OPML feed which aggregates the various RSS feeds

I’ll talk some more about these issues in future postings – but for now I’d be interested in what you might like to see from a national portal.

Technorati Tags: RSS

Validators Don’t Always Work

Background

A standard of much interest to us at UKOLN is RSS. We came across RSS in its very early days: I gave a workshop session on Automated News Feeds at the national Institutional Web Management Workshop back in June 2001 and Andy Powell, a former colleague, included RSS is the JISC Information Environment technical architecture.

Problem

I recently discovered that UKOLN RSS feed did not validate, according to the Feed validation service hosted at the W3C. The error appeared to be with the <taxo> modul, but a colleague was convinced that the feed was fine and the problem was with the RSS validator. I was sceptical (surely an open source validation service, hosted at W3C, can’t have a bug in such a fundamental area) and raised this issue on the web-support JISCMail list. Sebastian Rahtz pointed out errors in the examples given in the RSS specification, which made me wonder whether the specification itself was flawed. When I found out that our news feed was created by the RSS::XML module, I wondered if the error could possibly be in this module.

Solution

I raised this issue on the W3C’s QA list, asking whether the problem was with (a) our RSS feed; (b) the RSS specification; (c) the application used to generated the feed or (d) the RSS validator. I received a prompt response from Olivier Thereaux (first thing the following morning) which confirmed that our feed was fine; that there were errors in the RSS specification (in particular in an example included in the spec) but that the fundamental error was due to a bug in the validator. This was reported to Sam Ruby, the developer of the validator who, a few hours later, implemented a patch and released this on the main Feed Validator site.

Discussion

I was very impressed with the speed with which this problem was addressed and a solution deployed. Many thanks to Olivier and Sam for this.

I was, though, also very shocked that a validator for such a widely deployed standard (RSS 1.0) had such bugs (I bet a colleague a pint, later raised to a gallon, that the validator was fine – luckily he didn’t take me up on this!). I had assumed that:

• The development process would have spotted this bug (through use of test cases, code walk-throughs, schema validation, etc.)
• The development community would have spotted bugs in an open source applications, through the ‘many eyes make all bugs shallow’ principle.
• The W3C QA processes would have detected this problem prior to the installation of the service on the W3C Web site.

A colleague pointed out that software developers (which I am not) tend not to have so much faith in validators, and many important and widely deployed applications have bugs.

I am not the only person to have concerns over the lack or resources allocated to this important area: Bjoern Hoehrmann left the W3C QA in July 2006, sending a message to the public-qa-dev list giving his reasons for leaving the group.

Where, then, does this leave me? How can I advise others of the importance of validation and of systematic QA processes if such processes don’t seem to be in place with the W3C? Should I stop writing and giving talks on this (I suspect people’s eyes do glaze over when they hear me harping on about this issue).

But on the other hand, if digital library development programmes are being funded on the assumption that the data and formats are ‘clean’ aren’t services going to break, if this isn’t the case?

And perhaps I’m being over-dramatic over this one incident – the problem may have been an obscure one and at least the bug detected a false negative (it reported that a valid RSS file was invalid) rather than a false positive. And, as I said, the bug was fixed very speedily. So maybe I should continue to promote the importance of compliance with standards – but the wider development community should help to validate the validators. And for formats owned (or, as in the case of RSS 1.0, closely affiliated with) W3C, the W3C QA Interest Group has demonstrated that concerns don’t disappear down a black hole.

Technorai tags: validators validation