The Library Geek

Part 1 of 2

RSS is another example of how Web 2.0 technologies are changing how we gather and share information. Farkas in her book, Social software in libraries, provided a brief background of what RSS is all about. She traced its origin from Netscape’s tool of gathering content in 1999 and informs us that the acronym stands for either Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. It is a technology based on XML, a computer language used by programmers to write code (ugh), and to put it simply, it does what its acronym says – it gives you a feed of information, piecemeal, but updated automatically.  As Lee Lefever puts it in his video, RSS in plain English, it changes the dynamics of how information flows to the user. Web 1.0 has you, the user, requesting the information by going to sites to check what’s new, but now, with RSS, it is the information that comes knocking at your door through the magic of syndication. Think of it as the Web maturing from the hunting and gathering stage to your groceries delivered to you on a scheduled basis.

Any information available in the World Wide Web can be syndicated, with most sites already offering that option to the user by a click of a small orange icon located within the site. And those sites that have not discovered the benefits of offering feeds can still be syndicated using software tools like Page2RSS or Feed43.com. The obvious advantages of subscribing to RSS feeds is the convenience and time-saving benefits of having the information you want to read under one page, freshly updated and ready when you want it. Another advantage of it is the social aspect of the software, you enjoy the use of tools with one click of a button to tag, email, and comment upon the information that you are reading or even share your entire feeds to others.

This week, our LIBR 246 class, under Debbie Faires, glut ourselves with learning all about RSS, ways to subscribe to it, examples of information centers providing feeds, constructing a page with imported feeds, creating an RSS feed and identifying its value for information professionals in a library setting. The discussion board was very active with support questions, thoughtful observations, and great examples of libraries and other sites that offer feeds. I decided to start early on this assignment as it has several parts to it, preparing for it by listening to the introduction prepared by Prof. Faires, reading the Farkas chapter on RSS, and listening or watching video presentations posted at the Common Craft site, Sirsi Dynix Institute site and the resources gathered by medical librarian David Rothman.  Rothman’s advice of organizing feeds into folders, to my mind, makes sense not only from the perspective of not being overwhelmed with information overload, but also in a very human way of how we respond to information. It is very human to create meaning and order by categorizing and labeling. And come to think of it the great grandfather of RSS, the newspaper, also presents information in an organized way with political news in one section, and cartoons in another. Of course, if your sense of humor is of the black variety, you might find the former’s content more hilarious than the latter. But I digress.

I am no stranger to RSS feeds as I’ve had instances in the past of subscribing to content and having it delivered to my email desktop application. Even earlier than that, having use some form of connected personal digital assistants for the last 10 years or so, I have had the occasion to install and use some early form of subscribed feeds that you download and then read offline, one of them is Journal Bar by Omega One that serves as a portal for delivered content like news, the weather, and sports news. Although out of habit I find it faster or probably satisfying to surf the Web and go to the sites directly and hunt for content I feel like reading for that day.

With this week’s assignment, the following are the deliverables: subscribe to feeds via a RSS aggregator, create a simple web page and import feeds from your local library, and create an information resource guide from RSS feeds.

1.      Subscribe to RSS feeds using a RSS aggregator.

The choices to use as aggregators were Bloglines or Google Reader, and I decided to go with the former only because I am not familiar with it and want to check it out. Creating an account was a breeze and I was on my way to collect feeds. I also decided to organize the feeds according to categories, namely: My blog feeds, which would have the entries and comments feeds from my own blog, LIBR 246 Chrome group blog feeds, library-related feeds, local library feeds, and interesting stuff. Subscribing to my classmates’ blog entries did not present any difficulty since their blogs already had the RSS icon. The same thing was true with my local library, Palo Alto City Library. PACL has four blogs available that offers content to specific demographic of its users. Under library-related feeds, I tried the services of the site Libworm, it’s About page describing the site as a search engine for librarians for professional development and as a resource and information tool and provides access to an impressive 1,500 feeds of library-related topics. Libworm required registration, which to their credit is also easy to delete, but most of the feeds available on the Web does not require it. I was impressed with Libworm as a resource guide so I decided to get the feed and display it as a widget on my blog. Pretty cool; useful content without the sweat.

The only problem I encountered with this part of the exercise is with my own blog’s comments feed. Like the others it has a button or link that I clicked and subscribed to. The link started with the blog URL and ended with /?feeds=comments-rss2. It worked fine for several days but yesterday when I was about to sit down and write the blog post for this assignment, it just stopped working. The feed just displayed this blank page with the title of the blog. I tried to subscribe to it using live bookmarking and Google Reader and still nothing. Live bookmarking provided the cryptic message that the link is not valid.

(Continued on Part 2)