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(c)   Blogs, podcasting and RSS

‘

Blogs

’ (introduced in Chapter 2) give an easy method of regularly publishing web pages 

which are best described as online journals, diaries or news or events listings. They may 

include feedback (traceback) comments from other sites or contributors to the site. Frequency 

can be hourly, daily, weekly or less frequently, but daily updates are typical.

Podcasts

 are related to blogs since they can potentially be generated by individuals or 

organisations to voice an opinion either as audio (typically MP3) or video. They have been 

successfully used by media organisations like the BBC, which has used them for popular 

programmes such as film reviews or discussions and for live recording such as the Beethoven 

symphonies that received over 600,000 downloads in June 2005 alone. A big challenge for 

achieving visibility for podcasts is that contents can only currently be recognised by tags 

and it is difficult to assess quality without listening to the start of a podcast. Podcasts have 

decreased in popularity with the growth of streamed media services from media publishers 

such as the BBC iPlayer. Likewise the use of RSS feeds (chapter 2) has descreased with the 

growth in social media updates.