July 17th, 2006
Reading through Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog, I spotted an interesting posting (which he attributes to a posting in Steve Rubel’s blog) indicating that Wikipedia now has RSS feeds. This means that if there’s a topic that is (a) sufficiently “mainstream” to be covered by Wikipedia, but (b) sufficiently volatile and dynamic that updates and changes are likely to occur, you can find out automatically, rather than having to remember to check a bookmarked entry periodically.
To use it, click on the “history” link at the top of any Wikipedia page. That will, as the name implies, give you a summarized list of all recent changes and updates to that Wikipedia entry. It also exposes a “toolbox” section on the left side of the page, where you’ll find an “rss” link to subscribe the page to your news reader.
Since I’m trying to keep up with Web 2.0-related developments, I’ve now subscribed to Wikipedia’s page on the topic. Here is the history of changes made to that page; it was interesting to see that there have been 45 changes and updates just during these first two weeks of July 2006 — though most of them were pretty minor.
