Publishing Your Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 304

many RSS feeds for wikis require having the user name and password within
the RSS feed's URL; this is not the best idea for security reasons and should
be used very carefully, and not with an information-sensitive wiki. And for
mailing lists and providers, it depends on the provider you're using; Google
Groups and Yahoo Groups have no problem with providing RSS feeds, while
it's less available in the paid services.
If you've got an RSS feed built into the solution you're using, you've got one
big thing to decide and one big thing to do. If you don't have an RSS feed,
I'll give you a quick tutorial on creating one.
choosing between full or abbreviated
RSS feeds are marked by the “full or abbreviated?” controversy. A “full”
RSS feed means that it reproduces in its entirety the contents of a Web site.
A blog, for example, that posted all of its entries in an RSS feed would have
a full RSS feed. An abbreviated RSS feed is a feed that only contains an over-
view of the changes to the site—story summaries or, more oten, the irst 20
(or 30 or 50) words of a story. ResearchBuzz is an example of a site whose
feed contains only snippets of stories that have been posted to the Web site,
while Gary Price's ResourceShelf has a full feed.
Feelings run high about this. Some people think that full RSS feeds are
absolutely the way to go and it's not fair to RSS feed users to use anything
else. Other people are more concerned about what making full RSS feeds
available would do to the distribution of their content. As you'll see in a
moment, it's very easy to repurpose the content of an RSS feed and make
it available on other Web sites. In other words, if you made the content of
your Web site fully available via your RSS feed, it's possible (even likely,
depending on your content) that someone would use your RSS feed to put
your content on their site! Why? To have fresh content. To generate pages
on which to put advertising. here are lots of reasons.
Now maybe your research is nonproit or just a hobby and you don't care
if your content gets repurposed to other sites. Or maybe you'd welcome the
reuse of it as long as it got the word out there about your research. hat's ine;
publishing a full-content RSS feed would be the right step for you. (It does
have its value for your readers, including the ability to keep up with your site
without visiting it directly and passing on the full content of useful site addi-
tions to friends and interested parties.) However, if you're concerned about