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€
Jill Brinton from the Office of the Webmaster at the University of Utah answered these questions last March.
1) Your institution offers a lot of RSS feeds. What were the main reasons to play the RSS card at the University of Utah? When did you start to experiment with RSS? Was it an initiative driven by IT or Communication/Marketing?
The initiative was a joint effort between University Marketing and Communications and the Office of IT.
We first decided to use RSS feeds when we developed our University Calendar of Events. We wanted a method for people to subscribe to events. We initially looked at creating an opt-in e-mail subscription service but were un-easy about the following:
– We have many events categories by type (e.g. dance, music) and by organization (e.g., Hinckley Institute of Politics, School of Fine Arts). We would have to build an interface for selecting/de-selecting events categories.
– Even though it was an “opt-in†service, we found that students/faculty/staff were concerned about privacy and were getting more reluctant to provide their e-mail addresses.
– Students on average have 3 e-mail addresses and change them frequently. We anticipated having a high number of bounce backs.
– We wanted people to get immediate updates and not send out an e-mail each time a new event was added.
We felt using RSS feeds was a better solution for a subscription service – it was easy to implement, eliminated the privacy issue and the content (events) would be updated as it became available. We also felt it made the event information more available as a “consumable†that people could put in their news readers, portals, and on their department webpages. After we found how easy it was to put our events into RSS, we soon followed up with putting many of our news publications into RSS.
We also wanted to integrate events into our student portal “my.utah.eduâ€. Students have always told us they don’t know what’s going on around campus. We have an RSS portlet on our portal called “My Event Calendarâ€. This allows students to build their own event calendar using RSS feeds. They can select the categories they are interested in (such as sports, academic deadlines, music, etc.) and since it’s in RSS they’ll get immediate updates as to what’s going on around campus.
You can see the News & Events page we created at http://www.events.utah.edu/html/rssfeeds.html
2) Do you know if some of your academic departments use your RSS feeds to publish news about the institution on their departmental websites? Besides delivering content to subscribers, how do you use RSS?
Most of our University publications and news releases are now in RSS feeds. Academic Departments have begun to use RSS feeds for news. We have provided training to our webmasters on how to create RSS feeds in order to encourage more departments to move forward with it. University Marketing and Communications provides and maintains a central webpage where all University departments can contribute their feeds.
We are currently in the process of creating Podcasts (which uses RSS) of lectures and special events. We will also be looking at implementing student blogs in the future.
3) 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 channels (website, email, etc.)?
Right now, we are not tracking our traffic. It’s something we plan on doing in the near future.
We also haven’t measured how it performs compared to other communication channels. However, we have received very positive feedback from students on the RSS portlets used for news and events on the student portal. Students feel like they are getting information they would previously only get by chance or by having to check multiple websites each day.
4) In your opinion, what’s the future of RSS-enabled communication in higher education?
I check other University sites quite frequently and I see RSS being used more and more for news publications. I’ve also seen an increase in Podcasts and blogs.
The barrier to implement RSS is very low – the technology is fairly easy for most webmasters (there’s many low cost or open source utilities to use to create RSS feeds even if they don’t know XML). It’s a great way for users to personalize and aggregate information and it eliminates many privacy concerns, so I think more Universities will continue to adapt it. And since RSS can be used to display discrete items (in other words it’s not just for news items) I think more Universities will start using it for notifications (such as new book lists in a library, academic deadlines, etc.)
To implement RSS as an effective communication tool, I believe you need to integrate it with a technology students/faculty/staff use on a frequent basis – portals, department websites/intranets, and even e-mail. We’ve done it on websites and portals – but we haven’t experimented with e-mail yet.