Take me to your (RSS Feed) Reader...

I can't remember how long I've been using RSS feeds. My first exposure to them was the My Yahoo! website, where I would enter various sites that I was interested in and get new news or sport information.



At some stage I made the move to igoogle. Technologically it was leaps and bounds ahead of My Yahoo. I still had website headlines so I could see what was happening and only visit a site if I were interested in a particular story, but there's also little applets that do things like display the weather radar or allow you to convert between currencies. The vast majority of the web surfing that I do starts off from clicking on a link from one of the feeds in my IGoogle page. (I also couldn't survive my daily commute without the podcasts that arrive in Itunes via, you guessed it, an RSS feed).



Onto the actual lesson. I signed up for bloglines and picked a few of the suggested feeds to get started. As luck would have it one of the first ones I came across was for a site called the Shifted Librarian, though some of the posts were a bit too long for my taste (yes, I realise that I'm the pot and the Shifted Librarian is the kettle in this scenario). I also added the OPAL training blog, read about how Skype is adding screen sharing, and got excited in a way that only a guy/gal with two technologically parents halfway around the world can appreciate.

I can see a few uses for the library here. For example if the major publishers have a website and with an RSS feed that lists new titles available for purchase, an acquisitions librarian could potentially save a lot of time by having all of the feeds in a feed reader than remembering to check all of the sites to see if there's anything new and of interest.

It's also an easy source of additional content for a library. If there's a site that regularly publishes content that's relevant to your audience, some web publishing platforms allow you to publish that RSS feed on your website. That's a great way of adding more useful information to your site without having to do much (or anything) to maintain or update it.

In my role I work with online departmental documents. It'd be really handy to use an RSS type setup to have a "New documents" feature somewhere on my area of the intranet.