The Web Top

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Users of RSS content use programs called feed "readers" or "aggregators": the user subscribes to a feed by supplying to his or her reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user. The initials "RSS" are variously used to refer to the following standards: Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed," "webfeed," "RSS stream," or "RSS channel".

A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites. Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. A content management system may support the following features: Import and creation of documents and multimedia material Identification of all key users and their content management roles The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types. Definition of the content workflow tasks, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content. The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content. The ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content. Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval. Some content management systems allow the textual aspect of content to be separated to some extent from formatting. For example the CMS may automatically set default colour, fonts, or layout.

This 'Introduction to Online Communities' has been written to give an overview of the different types of online community, what makes an online community, and the various community tools. Every community is unique and it is difficult to give a guaranteed recipe for success, but I will cover common factors found in every good online community. It is also worth remembering that as in real life communities take time to grow, and will continually evolve. This is the challenge of online Community Management.

K-Log guru and advocate John Robb presents the benefits of K-Logs as:1) Answers. K-Logs make it easy for people to find answers to problems they need to solve. A simple search of K-Log archives will quickly find an answer if available.2) Experts. Because K-Logs organize knowledge and information byindividual, it is easy to find people with the expertise you need. They can be found via search, cross linking from other K-Loggers, or community tools.3) Organized archive. K-Logs provide a permanent archive of all posted knowledge. Employees may come and go, but their knowledge remains.He sells the economic benefit of K-Logs as:1) Shorter time to find. Giving you faster, more accurate responses to customer inquiries, etc. 2) More accurate decision making. Use of experts, revealed by K-Logs, will improve the quality of corporate decision making. Improved knowledge transfer will expose wasteful projects and inaccurate assumptions. It will also unlock hidden knowledge resources within the company.3) Faster training for new employees. New employees can quickly find the information, context, and insight they need to become productive quickly. A new team member can synch up quickly with an ongoing project by reading the team's K-Logs.4) Simplified management and improved corporate control. The elimination of what is that person doing (?) or how is that project progressing (?) questions that plague managers.

K Log noun. See: Knowledge Log. Also: Klog, K-Blog. K-logs are usually internal blogs (i.e. on an intranet and not visible to the general public) and are used as highly effective knowledge management systems and/or internal company communication systems (such as project blogs, for example).

If you are blogging with your students, or you are thinking of blogging with your students, I encourage you to not think of blogs as a writing assignment, but instead to look at them as conversations. Conversations that can give you both feedback about a lesson, or continue a conversation well after a lesson has ended. Blogging brings a new dimension to the classroom. You cannot blog and not change the structure of your classroom.

Lifelong learning is the concept that "It's never too soon or too late for learning", a philosophy that has taken root in a whole host of different organizations. Lifelong learning is attitudinal; that one can and should be open to new ideas, decisions, skills or behaviors. Lifelong learning throws the axiom "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" out the door. Lifelong learning sees citizens provided with learning opportunities at all ages and in numerous contexts: at work, at home and through leisure activities, not just through formal channels such as school and higher education. Lifelong education is a form of pedagogy often accomplished through distance learning or e-learning, continuing education, homeschooling or correspondence courses. It also includes postgraduate programs for those who want to improve their qualification, bring their skills up to date or retrain for a new line of work. Internal corporate training has similar goals, with the concept of lifelong learning used by organisations to promote a more dynamic employee base, better able to react in an agile manner to a rapidly changing climate. In later life, especially in retirement, continued learning takes diverse forms, crossing traditional academic bounds and including recreational activities. One of the reasons why lifelong education has become so important is the acceleration of scientific and technological progress. Despite the increased duration of primary, secondary and university education (14-18 years depending on the country), the knowledge and skills acquired there are usually not sufficient for a professional career spanning three or four decades. Contents

Craftster is a forum for people who love to make things but who are not inspired by cross-stitched home sweet home plaques and wooden boxes with ducks in bonnets painted on... If you've been known to run with scissors, you can break the rules of crafting with your fellow rebel DIY'ers here!

"It has a sensibility that's not exactly homespun... Call it open-source crafting..." - Time Magazine

n 1998, a group of individuals advocated that the term free software be replaced by open source software (OSS) as an expression which is less ambiguous and more comfortable for the corporate world.[2] Software developers may want to publish their software with an open source software license, so that anybody may also develop the same software or understand how it works. Open source software generally allows anybody to make a new version of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it. The aim of open source is to let the product be more understandable, modifiable, duplicatable, reliable or simply accessible, while it is still marketable. The Open Source Definition, notably, presents an open-source philosophy, and further defines a boundary on the usage, modification and redistribution of open-source software. Software licenses grant rights to users which would otherwise be prohibited by copyright. These include rights on usage, modification and redistribution. Several open-source software licenses have qualified within the boundary of the Open Source Definition. The most prominent example is the popular GNU General Public License (GPL). While open source presents a way to broadly make the sources of a product publicly accessible, the open-source licenses allow the authors to fine tune such access.

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.