Thing 6

First, let me say that I love the idea of RSS feeds and news aggregators and have for years. The down side is that I do better keeping up with "push" news sources like alerts or even listservs that come to my phone or e-mail. That being said, I often subscribe to blogs because Bloglines is a convenient way to keep the ones I am interested in together, and only showing the posts I haven't seen. When I do have time to look them over, I almost always find something fascinating!

I have used Bloglines for years to organize this info. For purposes of this lesson, I followed the directions (very well-written!) to import my feeds into Google Reader. I haven't really had a chance to explore all its features...maybe it is better than Bloglines in some respect. We'll see. The import process did not seem to pick up all of my feeds, in particular, the new ones I set up with others doing this 23 Things project did not seem to come in. However, since I had already looked at the posts, maybe they will show up when a new item is posted.

I think that RSS feeds hold promise for libraries, and I'm sure have been exploited by libraries that have more technical expertise on staff than we do. I think it would be great, for instance, to be able to incorporate a blog in our website as a container to hold book reviews. I'm not sure how it would work, exactly, but it would be cool if others on the staff or even in the community could be given permissions to contribute using a web-based tool like Blogger, and then have the content display on our site without them having to publish it through Dreamweaver.

Another idea I have had for RSS feeds is to set up a news page on our website with links to a variety of news sources. The neat thing is that it is like a clockwork universe...you can just do the work one time and the headline news would just keep coming in. It would be a nice way of combining news from a number of different sources that folks in the community might not think to search out on their own. Someday!