Activity One - Newsflash!
My thoughts on RSS:
RSS is more of a standard of software communication than a specific technology. It provides a method to publish updates of various elements on a website in a form readable by many different types of software. I think the key to its importance is in interoperability between website and web services, desktop applications and other websites. Take the blogroll on this site for example: without RSS the software that runs my blog, BlogEngine.NET, wouldn't be able to fetch the latest articles on similar blogs and provide them to my readers, and vice versa.
Readings
I was discussing this topic with a friend in America. He agrees with me that Web 2.0 is just a buzz word applied to the evolution of the Web and the popularity of social networking sites. Web developers shouldn't be trying to make their sites Web 2.0 because it's cool, but look at their target audience for inspiration. Just because something is popular doesn't make it right for everyone. If a website doesn't offer user contributions or collaboration does that mean it's in the stone ages and people won't visit? Absolutely not. Applying version numbers such as Web 1.0 to 2.0 to websites to define their success is like stereotyping designers as nerds because they use a computer for their work; (I use that example from my own experience).
Another misconception is popularity. A website's popularity doesn't define if it's a success either; for many it does but not all. Every website on the Web should have a goal deeper than traffic. A web page can receive a lot of traffic yet not be efficient at it's underlying goal. Bringing in customers and business is the target for most small to medium business websites and if the visitors are coming from an unrelated search term or other source the turnover and effectiveness for the site is not there.
Someone's personal website for sharing thoughts, opinions and information with friends and family. An independent contractor's site as an information source for interested employers. An academics web page as a teaching resource. All of these forms of online media do not necessarily need to be Web 2.0 or popular to be a success.
I agree with this article. Digg has members who are very influential and control the majority of content. When I tried it I found the experience very down putting. I remember someone or myself saying "This place is full of arrogant (people) who are all trying to one up each other".
The valid contributions get buried under a pile of duplicate entries and crude jokes made by power users all trying to be on top. I quickly found the articles appearing on top to be a waste of time and stopped bothering to read them or use Digg at all.
Activity Two - Creating a Delicious Account
I like the idea behind Delicious, but I haven't found I really use it. I prefer to use the bookmarking functionality provided by Firefox with the help of Read It Later; an add-on for creating temporary bookmarks for pages that interest you yet would rather read later.