Health And Safety

According the the Associated Press(AP), "e-mail is crippled, concussed by an irrepressible spam stream. Web surfing can be equally confounding, a wobbly wade through bursts of pop-ups and loudmouthed video ads.

And that may explain the excitement these days over a somewhat crude but nifty software tool that automatically delivers updated information to your computer directly from your favorite Web sites.

Enthusiasts see these Web feeds as sketching the outline of the next Net revolution.

The technology behind them is called RSS and I rely on it daily to consult The New York Times, the BBC, CNET News, Slashdot and a few dozen other Web sites that employ RSS to make the very latest news stories or bits of commentary available for the plucking."

The RSS (aka newsfeeds) is catching on everywhere. The AP article points out that information generators of all sorts - big media, government and non-profits alike - are embracing them. A popular newsfeed site Syndicat8.com, added 7,326 in January - its biggest monthly jump - to its collection of more than 53,000 information streams.

It is predicted that 2004 will be the year the technology goes mainstream.

Find out more:

AP Article

Introduction to RSS

RSS Tutorial for Publishers & Webmasters

In a  project funded by the National Science Foundation's Ethics and Values Studies Program, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has conducted a project that addresses the effects of anonymous and pseudonymous communications on the Internet.

Freedom vs Evil
This is an interesting debate since most people believe that anonymous communications are responsible for spam, viruses and fraudulent  transactions on the Internet.

There are a number of case examples to highlight the issues.
Here is the document with recommendations from the AAAS

Thanks to Joi Ito for this info