Second Challenge

I already use Bloglines - I signed up for an account about six months ago. I have my account divided into folders - one for knitting blogs, one for house renovation blogs, one for beauty blogs (I'm addicted to Sephora), and one for library blogs. I can't imagine NOT using an aggregator - it takes much less time to catch up because I don't have to visit each separate blog to see if there's something new. I think that an aggragator is sort of like the TiVo of blogland - it takes care of capturing everyhing I want and I can then catch up at my leisure. Lately, I've become really intrigued with netvibes, which is sort of an RSS feed/portal page. I've set up one for my husband that has all his sports feeds, techie feeds, news feeds - as well as access to his gmail and ebay accounts current weather, etc. This is really cool.

I think that there will be lots of ways for us to use RSS feeds at the library - I would like to see the calendar available as an RSS feed, as well as the news/info. on the home page and the teen and "regular" newsletters as well. I don't see how this could even be possible right now, but wouldn't it be neat if HIP's "my account" info. could be an RSS feed - then you could have your account information (overdues, holds, etc.) served up where you wanted it - perhaps on your own personal portal page.

I actually read or skimmed through all the articles in Suggested Reading because I know I need to become very familiar with RSS - and how to create RSS feeds. I really liked Roy Tennants' (Feed Your Head: Keeping Up with Using RSS) idea for using RSS to create a New Books list. I also enjoyed Stephen Cohen's RSS for Non-Techie Librarians and Using RSS: an Explanation and Guide. I heard Cohen speak at the Internet Librarian conference and enjoyed his presentation about new innovations in social software (that's where I heard about netvibes). He also talked about some different aggregators. At some point, I'm going to try something other than Bloglines - just out of curiosity. Wusteman's RSS: The Latest Feed provides some interesting ideas for RSS in libraries - good food for thought. I was not aware that there were RSS feeds for newsgroups - I frankly wasn't aware that Usenet newsgroups were still heavily used in this era of web-based message boards. Now I need to start reading the articles about how to create feeds...