Are you hip to Really Simple Syndication? If you’re still behind on the adoption curve, May 1st is RSS Awareness Day.

Daniel Socco of DailyBlogTips offers a detailed explanation of where the idea for RSS Awareness Day came from and what it was intended to accomplish. Check out RSSDay.org for more information.

In honor of the occasion, we’ve made RSS our Word of the Day to help get out the word, so to speak.

For more information, check out:

• Dan Bricklin’s article, What is RSS?
• our RSS glossary
• our podcast explaining what you can do with RSS
• our definition for RSS reader
• Google Reader
• WhatIs.com’s RSS feeds, including the Word of the Day, the feed for this blog, the enterprise IT tips feed and the enterprise IT newsfeed
• The video embedded below from Common Cause, RSS in plain English

UPDATE: Dave Winer wished everyone Happy RSS Awareness Day. I’m glad I tweeted him about it, as he hadn’t heard the news.

UPDATE II: Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged up a storm over at ReadWriteWeb, writing an epic Ode to RSS to honor the day and the technology itself. It’s the best blog post on the subject that I’ve read and will, I suspect, a canonical post about RSS for some time to come. As Marshall points out, blogging and podcasting as we know it simply wouldn’t be possible without RSS.

A hearty thanks to the pioneers and early adopters whose dedication, hard work and dogged advocacy have brought the technology to its present state!

Heather Johnson is guest blogging at WhatIs.com this week. Heather is a freelance writer, as well as a monthly contributor for OEDb, a site that helps students select among accredited online schools. She invites comments and freelancing job inquiries at heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

There has been a lot of talk about open source hardware lately and its potential effects on research and education. ETech 2008 showcased many examples of open hardware and offered an insightful presentation [PDF] to those who are new to the emerging technology. Likewise, popular sites like Slashdot and bloggers like Scobleizer have been discussing the growing movement.

The increasing popularity of open source software has already had a tremendous influence on education and the world as a whole. Not only are many schools now making the switch to open source programs, leading universities like UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon are involved with developing large open source software projects.

However, we have yet to see open hardware really take off. Ryan Singel of Wired feels that 2008 could be the year and I second that opinion. Leading the pack seems to be open source robotics, which has been embraced by several major universities.

Just last month, Willow Garage’s Steve Cousins gave a keynote speech at ETech 2008 about open source personal robots, which has brought more attention to the subject. Willow Garage is a privately funded lab that experiments with various robotics platforms.

This open source robotics movement can be felt on many college campuses as well. Carnegie Mellon, which I previously stated is involved with open source software, is also building OS personal robots. The university has recently formed a joint project called the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).

The IPRE is a joint project between Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College, with sponsorship provided by Microsoft Research. Its purpose is to help advance robotics research and computer science education. The IPRE is currently selling open source robot kits, which are geared toward educators and can be integrated with computer education curricula.

Instructions can be found RobotEducation.org if you are interested in building your own educational robot.

[Image credit: RobotEducation.org]

Google’s Matt Cutts has long since become the blogosphere’s “go to guy” for information on SEO and webmaster guidelines. WhatIs.com’s Word of the Day today, phantom page, has a link to his commentary on detecting undetectable webspam, for instance. I like the term “webspam,” incidentally, as it neatly describes spamming the entire web, as opposed to individual inboxes or SMS gateways. The video below features Matt Cutts debunking five different SEO myths. The video is from 2006 but is still quite relevant.

While it’s true that there are many other SEO bloggers and a burgeoning industry in search engine marketing, none are quite so well placed within the search engine giants nor so willing to share best practices and commentary. Thanks for your contributions to the Web community, Matt.

If you’re online for more than 30 hours of non-work surfing every week, experience withdrawal symptoms and find your relationships with friends, family and coworkers suffering, you might be an Internet addict. This video, hosted by Kimberly S. Young, introduces netaddiction.com. Young is the  founder of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery. Take their Internet addiction test to see where your own usage rates.

Today’s Word of the Day, K-scale, or “Korean scale,” is a checklist used for diagnosing and evaluating Internet addiction.

Linking to ITKnowledgeExchange.com could be music to your ears.

Over the course of April, our sister site will be running a promotion whereby anyone that links to them or adds them to a blogroll will be eligible to win an iPod Shuffle.

All you have to do is add ITKE and then send Brent Sheets an email to let him know about it.

Good luck!

One of our newest definitions explains OpenID:

“OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on authentication system for the Internet. The goal of the OpenID initiative is to allow users to log in at websites around the Internet with one ID instead of having to create multiple unique accounts. OpenID was developed using the open source software model to be an interoperable protocol independent from any single organization. (Continued…)”

Activating and using an OpenID is quite easy — I was able to sign up for TravelWiki, for instance, using one from Yahoo!. Activation and setup took about a minute. I’ve embedded three videos below that explain more about how OpenID works and how to use it. Enjoy!

The video below explains more about how to use an OpenID to login, in this case to votay.com:

Here’s another one that explains how to use OpenID with WordPress:

Dave provides a short, clear explanation of OpenID using a whiteboard here:

And finally, in a Google TechTalk, Simon Willison  (co-creator of the Django Web framework) discusses the implications of OpenID and explores the best practices required to take advantage of the new technology while avoiding the potential security pitfalls. This one’s a bit long but excellent. 

CommonCraft.com is already well known in the blogosphere and social media world for creating brilliant, lucid short videos that explain tricky concepts.

The two-person team that make up CommonCraft (Sachi and Lee LeFever) put it simply: they solve explanation problems.

I love that tagline. It’s rather similar sort of thing we try to do here at WhatIs.com. To that point, I’ve embedded three of CommonCraft’s previously released videos on our site, each of which explore and explain a different social media technology:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English

The newest addition to the mix is a video explaining what Twitter is and how it works.

As you may know, Twitter is a popular microblogging service that launched almost exactly one year ago at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. While we’ve blogged about it right afterwards. Due in no small part to the high percentage of geeks and “digerati” at the festival who had the opportunity to try it out and start networking with each other, Twitter really took off. Twitter is now a leader in the “social messaging” category that includes Pownce and Jaiku, spanning the gap between our online and offline worlds. Each allows users to update a microblogging service using SMS messages, a Web interface or a desktop application. (Twitter relies on third party apps for the last based upon its APIs. Try Snitter if you have Adobe Air installed.)

CommonCraft’s video sheds worthwhile additional insight. Watch it below:

There’s plenty of interesting activity going on out there, too. Just check out this mashup of Twitter, Google Maps and live election results for intriguing insights into the 2008 presidential primary season.

And if you’d like to find/follow me on Twitter, head over to http://twitter.com/digiphile.

Yuval Shavit, a triple threat of writer/coder/sarcasm maven over at SearchITChannel.com, turned me on to the xkcd webcomic a few months ago. Today, he pointed out the edition above, an example of DB humor that might just result in coffee-laced chuckles in server rooms worldwide.

xkcd is written by by Randall Munroe, a Christopher Newport University graduate who worked on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia before he began producing xkcd full-time.

These days, his witty, snarky comic is produced three times a week and has found its way into the offline world on prized geeky t-shirts everywhere. Techies who live and breathe acronyms (and challenge themselves to identify them) may be disappointed to learn that xkcd doesn’t actually stand for anything; according to Randall, “It’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation. It stands for the comic and everything the comic stands for!”

What does the comic stand for? Mostly funny pokes at a geek’s challenges, including work, the quest for love, the oddity of daily life and quirks of technology, but that’s probably too narrow. Randall is unapologetically nerdy, honest and manages to inject his sparsely drawn figures with actual pathos, along with a brand of humor that seems to speak directly to the reptile brain of techies everywhere. With subjects ranging from raptors to Red Spider, zeppelins, Vanilla Ice, Mussolini, Guitar Hero and Firefly, xkcd plays on the heart strings of modern geek culture to hilarious effect, though occasionally with a thoughtful note. Cory Doctorow loves it, and so do I.

If you happen to live in Massachussetts, keep an eye out for the next real-world meetup. And if you’re looking for updates, here’s the xkcd RSS feed.

Thanks to the ever-observant Cory Doctorow (whose Eastern Standard Tribe I thoroughly enjoyed last week), I’ve discovered that today is Blog Action Day.

According to the organizers over at blogactionday.com, Blog Action Day is intended to try to elevate a singular issue into a higher place in the world’s consciousness. This year, it’s the environment. All you have to do to participate is to blog about whatever environmental issue you are the most passionate about, contribute the day’s advertising earning to a favorite environmental charity and encourage others to do the same.

Simple and, perhaps, effective. While you may not earn a Nobel for your efforts, you just might help the world become a tad greener today. We’ve blogged here before about ways to e-cycle, a new way to think green (carbon footprints) and even podcasted about greenwashing.

Here’s one more hot (or cold) concept to add to the list for the server geeks out there: green data centers. My colleague over at SearchDataCenter.com, the intrepid Matt Stansberry, has been hard at work writing “The Green Data Center: Energy Efficient Computing in the 21st Century.”

Learn more about the forces driving IT energy consumption, why you should care and how you can make a business case to do something about it. It’s well-written, it’s downloadable and, best of all, it’s free.

Go read it.  For that matter, go read Matt’s post today posted today about how green computing is driving both better collaboration and faster product advancement.

In the meantime… it’s time to start practicing green computing!

Don’t forget to turn off your PC and unplug your chargers before you go home tonight.

Consider switching to a laptop and telecommuting more while flying less.

Ride your bicycle wherever possible and look into the slow food movement.

Adjust your PC’s hibernation settings to use the least amount of energy.

Consolidate some servers through virtualization.

Use LCDs, not CRTs.

And don’t forget to e-cycle!

Go green!

Sometimes, Internet memes are just too powerful to ignore. Especially for a blog that delves into online humor at times. Witness the rise of the LOLcats.

For me, the tipping point may have been when a fellow editor emailed the WhatIs team a Schrodinger’s LOLcat.

For those unschooled in quantum theory, Schrodinger’s Cat is a famous illustration of the principle of superposition, proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Our definition of the concept also happens to be one of the most popular pages on WhatIs.com, as you’ll often see on our recently added/updated page.

As pictured on the right, it’s just darn funny.

GeekFriendly.org tells the story of how the Schrodinger’s LOLcat was created, if you’re intrigued. Credit goes there for the image, naturally.

It’s just one of the latest creations (albeit one more thought-provoking than some) to emerge from the minds of punchy technologists and quirky geeks.

So what is an LOLcat?

Put simply, an it’s an image of a cat with text on top of it.

As usual, there’s considerably more history to the etymology of the word.

Adam Koford, in fact, believes that the idea is much older, going alllll the way back to the early past of last century, where a cartoonist (his great-grandfather, Aloysius “Gorilla” Koford) he produced a comic strip entitled “the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.”

Whether you believe the modern phenomenon is based upon that or not, LOLcats are in many ways a throwback to the early days of the Internet, where Usenet posters would use image macros to insert an appropriate image behind text captions to make a more emphatic point.

And, in fact, that concept fully fleshes out an more accurate definition for LOLcat, an image macro where humorous, idiosyncratic or insightful text is pasted as a caption onto an image of a cat that’s engaged in some sort of funny activity.

Call them “cat macros” for short.

For once, we might be “chasing the tail” of deadtree media, as TIME Magazine wrote about the LOLcat phenomenon recently, bringing this element of Internet culture out of the blogosphere and into mass culture.

While the fervor over LOLcats has subsided a bit over the past few months as netizens hit the beaches, these furry funnies are still popping up everywhere, not just encyclopedia entries over at Wikipedia, UrbanDictionary, Encyclopedia Dramatica or Answers.com.

And, lest you think this is just about “kittybloggers,” BoingBoing has been blogging up a storm about LOLcats.

Witness this tremendous post that dives deep into the etymology of the LOLcat (alluded to above.)
Or this one, where Xeni alternately praises, with tongue firmly in cheek, a “pedantic overanalyzation” of LOLcat history.

Personally, I rather admired how the author, David McRaney, offered such a thorough discussion of leetspeak and Internet slang.

BoingBoing and David aren’t the only commentators on the phenomenon, of course. Anil Dash, of SixApart fame, made a thoughtful post about LOLcat grammar and Internet pidgin languages.

Mahalo also has a great LOLcat roundup.

If you just want your LOLcat fix, however, Xeni also linked to two huge archives of LOLcat pictures, here and here. You can find more at LOLcat.com, LOLcats.com and ICanHasCheeseburger.com.

If that still isn’t enough, you can sort through images and pages tagged with lolcat at Flickr, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and WordPress. (This relatively new phenomenon of being able to link to tag aggregations on social bookmarking sites as useful reference material is, by the way, one of my favorite outcomes of the Web 2.0 movement.)

If those reams of LOLcats still don’t slake your thirst for cat macros, you can always make your own at either of two great LOLcat generators, LOLcatr.com or kscakes.com.

If you want to extend the LOL meme beyond cats, you can also roll your own LOL at laughingsquid.com.

Above is a personal favorite, to round out the post for those of you who love a good unexplained paper jam.

(Credit: ljg)

Hard to believe, but the White Stripes are playing my sleepy little home town, Charlottetown, PEI. It would be hard to believe, that is, if I didn’t know about their Canadian tour, ocean to permafrost.

And from ocean to ocean, and all the way to the permafrost, the Stripes are setting new standards of cool on this tour, especially with their secret shows. Unscheduled pre-concert gigs are a tradition for many big acts. However, as you might expect, the Stripes are doing it a little differently. On the flash mob model, Jack & Meg have been getting the word out to fans — via texting, forum posts and WOM buzz — about free appearances where no band has gone before:

They played an inner city youth centre in Edmonton

They played a transit bus in Winnipeg

The Stripes also played a little backup for a local busker in Winnipeg. (See video.)

They played a bowling alley in Saskatoon

They played for 40 seriously ill kids at the Bronson Center in Ottawa.

Occasionally, I become a little disenchanted with technology, and daydream about going incommunicado on some remote desert island. But tech is constantly expanding our ability to connect, and making events like that secret show possible. And — really — how cool is that?

~ Ivy Wigmore

In honor of International Weblog Day today, the Word of the Day from WhatIs.com is Pepys’ diary. A weblog, put most simply, is a series of entries arranged in reverse chronological order on a Web page. The term itself is related to Web log, a shortened form of Web server log or access log, the list of all the requests for individual files that people have requested from a Web site.

To learn more about the history of weblogging, make sure to review Rebecca Blood’s excellent essay exploring the origins and early forays into the form and Wikipedia’s entry for blog, which has a timeline of the evolution of the form.

Now, of course, weblogging, or its far more common synonym, blogging, is an international occupation shared by tens of millions. In fact, these days more blogs are in Chinese and Japanese than in English, reflecting the shifting demographics online. Language, of course, isn’t the only way that blogs are now differentiated.

There are photoblogs, videoblogs, podcast blogs for syndication, kittyblogs, moblogs updated from cell phones and laptop-toting coffeehouse workers, anonoblogs that become online phenomena (like PostSecret), CEOblogs (see Jonathan Schwartz) and faux-CEOblogs (like the infamous and hilarious Fake Steve Jobs). Political blogs, of course, dominate the landscape, though sportblogs can incite similar passions (way to go, Curt!), along with milblogs, until recent DoD decisions to curtail that portion of the blogosphere.

The list, in many ways, defies categorization. Of course, we’ve tried anyway. You can find all of WhatIs.com’s favorite technology blogs here. As the weeks go by, look for all of them to show up in our blogroll, categorized according to the focus of the blogger or bloggers.

We also compiled a comprehensive glossary of blogging terms you’ll find online, which we debuted last year. We add to our “bloglossary” every now and again, especially when you write in to let us know about new or missing terms.

While most of the more than 71 million blogs that Technorati is currently tracking are personal, as the various blogging platforms have matured and become both easier and more professionally rewarding, technology professionals have entered the blogosphere seriously.

These days, you can read about what’s happening with wikis from Ross, online video with Jeremy, SEO with Matt, fine hypertext products from Jason, tech PR from Steve, productivity from Merlin, marketing from Seth, Web 2.O from Mike, storage from Jon, security from Bruce, a little bit of everything from Scoble and, of course, endless wonderful things from Xeni, Cory, John, Mark and David.

For a list of many other blogs that focus on data centers, storage, enterprise Linux, Oracle, security, the