News clippings and RSS: Mother and Daughter ?
In Human history one of the more important fuels of change is information. How it is written and stored has a great impact on civilization. The shift from writing on clay tablets to sheep skin and to paper is a magnificent achievement because it made the information preservable and distributable for a larger audience possible. And more so with the advent of the printing press information or knowledge become more accessible. Can you imagine the impact then of the Internet? Well its not hard to imagine because we are living in it right now. In particular, with the arrival of the RSS Feed and other form of Web feed what impact has it had on the flow and distribution of information.
In particular has RSS and other form of web feeds drastically the news-clipping service? But what is news-clipping service? And why is it important. And the answer could be summarized in two words:
(i) Newspapers
(ll) Libraries
A newspaper or media make an important source of information in the form of news they are because it is the latest, it appears daily and it is fresh. Now libraries and some private businesses recognizing the importance of information collected, collated aND arranged began to provide news clipping service.
Basically a news clipping service is a service that aims to give important news item for topic or subject taken from important national and international Newspapers. They use to literally cut and paste this articles on plain paper. Then file them away or distribute them among people who subscribed to the service.
Today, we can just subscribe to the RSS. Atom or any other form of web feed in order to get the information delivered to our computers. Some of these feeds are subject specific or can be made to do so.
So is the RSS and other form of webfeeds the successor of e news clipping services? Is news clipping services dead?
The answer to first question might probably be yes and for the second question do not count out news clipping services. A quick search for news clipping services will show that there are still a lot of business for news clipping services.
In fact there is a Library Application out called NewsNIC - which was developed by the National Informatics Centre for Libraries & Information Dissemination Agencies of India. The application is used to provide a Web-based full-text news clippings service.
So there is still life in the Old Lady. Why? Perhaps it is the human factor: Or is it because I the service has reinvented itself becoming more specialized and again relying on the human factor.Perhaps the service has re-adapted to the changing times.
Related Stories
POSTED IN: RSS
0 opinions for News clippings and RSS: Mother and Daughter ?
No one has left a comment yet. You know what this means, right? You could be first!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: