What’s the Beef?

Blogs! Wikis! Podcasts! Aggregators! Web 2.0!

In a salute to the great Wendy’s slogan of the 80’s, the “beef” of current trends in technology are NOT those things listed above. Those items (except for Web 2.0 which is a general label for all of the latest technology trends on the web) are awesome products of the real beef:

RSS and tagging

or more simply put,

subscriptions and keywords.

Those 2 items alone are the core of the current fury in technology. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows one to electronically subscribe to anyhing that they want to read, hear, or watch (provided whomever creates the work offers an RSS feed). Tagging, or assigning keywords, allows one to search or create content (text, audio, video) by topic.

These 2 pieces form the foundation of how blogs, podcasts, aggregators and the like become powerful tools. By subscribing and keyword searching, you can create an extremely personalized and extraordinary web of information and learning.

Thanks go to recent posts by David Warlick and Will Richardson to help push my thinking on this.


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