WebReference.com - Part 3 of Chapter 7 from Essential Blogging. From O'Reilly (2/4).

Radio is fundamentally a network application that is always in contact with the Internet. This means that Radio is regularly uploading content, downloading news, and even updating itself with new features over the Internet. This network functionality is also available to your own programs if you want to develop within the UserTalk environment.

As described in Chapter 1, RSS allows you to both accept content and broadcast content (assuming that some users subscribe to your blog). This means that your blog content can get very widely distributed without any additional work on your part. Additionally, your blog can incorporate rich content from a vast number of sources.

By this time, you have seen at least some of Radio's URLs such as:

Radio automatically generates these consistent, permanent URLs for all your blog entries. This makes your blog posts very accessible to search engines because they represent just straight HTML, not complicated CGI URLs. Additional examples of Radio's URLs are covered in the next section.

Web services, SOAP, and XML-RPC are three of the hottest technologies in the computer industry today. A full description of these could take pages, not just a paragraph. In short, not only does Radio let you create web services, those web services are fully standards-based and support both SOAP and XML-RPC (in fact, UserLand software helped define both of these very important standards).

For more on using XML-RPC and SOAP in Radio, please see: [all three links redirect to the "DIY Web Services with Radio 8" article by Dave Winer - Ed.]

Software products from vendors differ in their degree of "open-ness". This is not only their support of an API or a standard, but it's the ability for a user to "get under the hood" of a product and fix it if there is a problem. The single most sophisticated feature in Radio is that its architecture is both open and understandable. It can be a bit inconsistent at times, like all products, but its very, very open. The meaning of this for you, the user, is that Radio doesn't lock you in. If you need to figure out how to do something, you can. If you need control of your blog data, it's available.

For a detailed look underneath the hood of Radio and how a user can examine it, see: