#8 - RSS

I didn't have too much trouble with this excercise. I've been a regular user of RSS for sometime although I have preferred Google reader to Bloglines. The really cool thing I discovered was that I could export all my feeds from Google Reader into a file and import them into Bloglines. Too easy.

I then used the share feature to send my blogroll straight into the sidebar of my blog. Unfortunatley it looked fugly as I had far too many feeds there. I decided to trim the list down a bit.

Reading my feeds is a daily activity for me. I follow a number of book and library related blogs as well as technology & web info. I also track some eBay searches and forums with RSS. My list of feeds can seem overwhelming, but I don't always read everything. If I'm too busy I just click "mark all as read" for the feeds that are less important to me.

A simple use of RSS in libraries would be to keep users informed about upcoming events and other useful information.

A brilliant use of RSS by libraries would be to have feeds for new books added to the collection. For example, it would be great if I was able to do a search for "Tim Winton" and on the results page click an RSS button so that I am notified whenever a new Tim Winton book is added to the collection. Simple as that. How cool would it be?