Special UB column about RSS: Matthew Winkel from The College of New Jersey

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.”

Matthew Winkel, Information Architect and Usability Analyst at The College of New Jersey, answered these questions last March.

1)Your institution has implemented an interesting initiative powered by RSS. Can you tell me a bit more about it? What were the main reasons to play the RSS card? When did you start to experiment with RSS?

We added RSS to our WebAlerts News syndication application in the Summer 2004. We did not begin publicize this offering until Fall 2005 when we released a new design for our News page which features 3 different feeds (e.g. Top Stories, Press Releases, TCNJ In the News). We also added 10 feeds (both internal and external) to our Students page. One the main reasons we initially implemented RSS was to provide feeds to our state-wide media outlets. We also received several requests from members of our TCNJ community that were using RSS aggregators. We anticipate that this demand will grow as social networking software and portal products provide RSS aggregation.

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 channels (website, email, etc.)

Since we display our RSS feeds on our web pages via JavaScript, we can not separate page views from subscribers with external aggregators. However, the page views on these redesigned pages with dynamic RSS feeds have seen significant increases in traffic. This summer we are planning to deploy a web communications survey to determine what vehicles are most effective with our constituents. This survey will include questions on RSS, podcasting, and videocasting.

3) Do you know if some of your academic departments use your RSS feeds to publish news about the institution on their departmental websites?

Just about every academic department and administrative service at TCNJ use RSS feeds to publish news on their Web sites. Our Web Alerts application allows offices to publish announcements on their home page, produce an RSS feed, route news items to the Media and Public Relations staff for consideration as a press release or campus calendar entry. The application also can also display archived items.

4) In your opinion, what’s the future of RSS-enabled communication in higher education?

Web-based content management applications that encourage multiple users to collaborate will produce new kinds of RSS feeds. Multiple TCNJ offices currently produce the “To-Do List” and “This Week @ TCNJ.” By aggregating announcements from multiple offices in one place, our audiences save time navigating to timely resources.
Web Initiatives is currently working on several projects to increase RSS-enabled communication. We would like to add Alumni and Athletics news feeds to our News page. We will need to request this functionality from the outside vendors that we depend on for content management in these areas. We also see the need for other TCNJ systems (i.e. Learning Management System, Student Administration System) to integrate our internal TCNJ feeds. We are currently researching solutions in these areas.
We expect that usage of our WebAlerts application will continue to expand as our audiences look for more dynamic content on TCNJ’s web sites. Since many of our WebAlerts accounts feature events, we anticipate that WebAlerts will need to integrate with other scheduling and calendar tools, so that users can add TCNJ’s events and important dates to their own personal calendars.