Bart Stidham
Bart Stidham has worked as a chief technology officer, chief information officer and enterprise architect for over 15 years. He has been an external consultant to numerous large international NGOs as well as some of the largest companies on Earth. During the dot.com boom he was CTO of one of the five largest multi-national communications corporations on Earth. After that he was a senior executive at Accenture in the Enterprise Architecture practice. He now lives in Washington DC when he is not travelling.
NGO Tech Talk: Making the most of AlertNet RSS feeds
AlertNet has an amazing and little know feature that allows users to create custom RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is a web-based standardized format for publishing information in real time. It is a "pull" technology because you have to subscribe to it and you need some piece of software to regularly go to the site publishing the information and ask for it. Most web browsers can do this but RSS feeds are becoming very pervasive and many Internet-capable devices now include this feature, including Internet-enabled televisions, radios and game consoles. For instance the Wii game console gets its news and weather information using this technology. In my job it is important to stay current on global news so it was logical that I would replace the long absent PointCast newsfeed that used to run as my screensaver (over 10 years ago) with the current technology equivalent. For those of you who don't remember, PointCast was the first software package released that went "viral" and reeked havoc on corporate networks. PointCast was not a virus but it was viewed as one by most corporate IT departments because it was free, users loved it and it gobbled up bandwidth at a time when corporate IT departments had just heard of the Internet. It really laid the groundwork for later software such as Skype and other social media systems that require local software to be installed. ...
