Wordpress, RSS & Twitter: A brief intro and overview

Wordpress.Com =Weblog hosting provider owned by Automattic opened to the public in Nov. 2005. Powered by open source WordPress software. Financially supported via paid upgrades, "VIP" services and limited Google Adsense advertising.

13.9 million individual blogs with the service as of September 2010.

RSS

RSS (most commonly expanded as "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.

Statistics on RSS use

2008 Forrester Research study

Quotes on RSS

Certainly things like Google Reader and NewsGator are designed for those who want to maximize their ability to scan a great deal of news sources in a short amount of time.-- A longtime blogger, podcaster, and self-dubbed "Freelance Project Manager", Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins in a 2008 Mashable.Com column 

Let me say right up front that I’m not the most technically savvy guy going around – but even I can use RSS. At first I found it a little strange to make the change from bookmarking to RSS but I found that when I started that I just couldn’t stop. --Darren Rowse, Founder, ProBlogger.Com

Twitter: An overview

Website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on a user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers.

First prototype used in 2006, begins to take off in 2007.

Estimated190 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.

Creating a Wordpress.com account

Posting to DailyCollegeLife, our class Wordpress.Com site

Setting up RSS feeds using Google ReaderGoogle Reader: A RSS Reader

The ‘Fine Art’ of Tweeting: A Brief How To

Homework: Follow ALL classmates on Twitter AND do 1st Tweet of a link to interesting story about college life Add a Photo Icon to Your Wordpress.Com Profile Bring a Camera with Video Shooting capability AND your USB wire to class on Monday! READINGSVan, Buskir, E. (2010, May). 5-Year-Old YouTube Tops Networks’ Primetime With 2 Billion Views. Wired.Com http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/five-year-old-youtube-tops-networks-primetime-with-2-billion-views/ Seidenberg, S. (2010). Copyright in the age of YouTube. ABA Journal. http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/copyright_in_the_age_of_youtube/  Optional How-To Videos - How to Set Up Your YouTube Channel (watch from 1:58 on): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_95jIdwMr0