Last March, I conducted several email interviews to prepare my column about Real Simple Syndication (RSS) for the June 2006 issue of University Business: “RSS: The Next Big Thing in University Web Communications.â€
David Jarmul, Associate Vice President of the Duke News and Communications Office, answered these questions last March.
1) In your opinion, how can RSS help improve/promote communications on and off campus?
I’m a fan of RSS. My own home page is a personalized version of Google with 16 RSS feeds that stream in throughout the day along with the local weather. I’ve got two feeds from national news sources, two from local papers, several on personal interests and the rest about Duke. These “Duke feeds†include our top news, police news, sports news, news tips and others. I share these details because I think this is how more and more people are going to get their information, using RSS to create what is essentially a personalized “real time†newspaper they can check at their convenience.
Now, think about the mix of my RSS feeds. I’ve got a few from conventional news sources, like the New York Times. But I’ve also got several from my university. I don’t expect a typical Duke employee or student to take as many Duke feeds as I do, but I bet they’ll take some, especially if the content is fresh and interesting. In other words, instead of hoping they’ll be good university citizens and dutifully check our official site regularly, we can get our information before them on their own terms. That’s powerful, and the same argument essentially applies to Duke alums, basketball fans or others in our broader community.
Perhaps the greatest value of RSS, however, isn’t on this “retail†level. Rather, it’s how the technology facilitates the process of sharing information at the “wholesale†level, such as across Duke websites. We now generate more than twenty feeds, which we share with our professional schools and others, saving a lot of work on their part and promoting greater consistency in Duke’s messages and approaches.
2) Do you measure/track your RSS feeds traffic (subscribers, page views)? Can you give us an idea on how RSS is performing compared to other communication/information channels used at Duke? Do you still use mass emails?
These are great questions and I wish I knew the answers. As I write this, Duke is a few days away from launching a new system that will provide us the data we need to analyze the traffic to guide our decision-making. As for continuing to use email, or printed publications for that matter, the answer is “sure,†at least for the foreseeable future. Different people want to get information in different ways.
3) You’ve recently launched Duke Today, a news portal powered by RSS and fully customizable. What were the main reasons to play the RSS card to keep the Duke community informed?
I encourage your readers to look at Duke Today which uses RSS extensively. The bottom part of the screen is devoted entirely to a series of RSS feeds that people can customize according to their interests – law, medicine, science, etc. We’ve also worked closely with our HR office to create an extensive “News You Can Use†section with daily updates on everything from dining menus to computer security alerts.
We created Duke Today and took a series of related actions after carrying out an extensive study of internal communications at Duke. In a nutshell, we concluded that people at Duke felt simultaneously overloaded with information yet uninformed about what was going on. The solution, we realized, was not to create yet another newsletter or website. Instead, we needed to consolidate the most important information into a smaller number of venues that people would really use. RSS is the engine that’s carrying this information from diverse sources across the campus. It enables us to grab appropriate material for the central Duke Today site and, in turn, push out information that our colleagues elsewhere can use for their purposes.
4) Do you know if some of your academic departments use your RSS feeds to publish news about the institution on their departmental websites?
Yes, and it’s made life easier for many of them. For instance, our police department used to manage its own news site. Now it just points people to an appropriately formatted page that is essentially an RSS feed of our police news. Similarly, our engineering school is pulling in our RSS engineering feed, which it supplements with additional material. The international office grabs our RSS international feed, and so forth. My favorite application is the undergraduate admissions office, which asks applicants to identify their interests and then, every time they return to the site, shows them the latest Duke news in that field. All this happens automatically.
5) In your opinion, what’s the future of RSS-enabled communication in higher education?
More universities are likely to experiment with RSS as a way to syndicate news for different audiences. Our initiative at Duke is just one of many possible approaches, and I’m curious to see what happens elsewhere. My guess is that the biggest impact will not end up being syndication per se. Rather, it will be how RSS affects university news and communications more generally. We’ll probably focus less intensely on asking reporters to bring our information to the people we want to reach. Instead, we’ll increasingly reach those audiences directly, not only through RSS but also through podcasts, blogs and other innovations, as well as through the “social software†trend exemplified by sites like Facebook.