Wednesday, April 15, 2009

#4 RSS Feeds

Here's a link to my Bloglines public subscriptions:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/firstgentrekkie

I've been using an RSS reader for about 3 years now, ever since I got my first Gmail account. RSS is the only sane way to keep up with the amount of information coming from the "biblioblogosphere"—the legions of librarian bloggers: Jessamyn West, the Librarian in Black, Michael Stephens, Jennie Levine, and Meredith Farkas, just to name a handful of the many who write about Library 2.0, Web 2.0, and other technology issues. Then there are all the libraries that are blogging: Danbury Public Library, New Canaan Library, Cheshire Public Library, just to mention three that are of particular interest to me. If it weren't for RSS, I would have to visit a dozen websites each morning, besides the New York Times, to find out everything that's happening.

Libraries that have blogs, like New Canaan, already have RSS feeds for their blogs—that's usually built into the blogging platform. Blogs like Events of the Week are a great way to publicize events at little or no cost. One of the challenges is making patrons in that intermediate level—the ones who are comfortable with email and using a browser—aware of RSS feeds and showing them how to use them.

1 comment:

  1. Those are some of the blogs I follow as well! Librarian in Black is great.
    Blogs are a inexpensive easy way to communicate with people-- the thing about RSS is that many people are already using it, without even knowing it!

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