Week 8 - RSS & Newsreaders

Thing 13 - RSS Feeds and Newsreaders



RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. You may have seen the little orange RSS icon on a blog you were reading. This icon shows that you can easily keep track of that particular web page by subscribing to it. This is really handy for websites such as blogs and newsfeeds that get updated with new content regularly. Instead of checking back to see if anything new has been posted the new content will be sent to you just like the paper magazines or newspapers you subscribe to. The only thing you need is a place for your subscriptions to come in like a virtual mailbox. While some email programs will allow you to manage your subscriptions a more advanced option is offered through Bloglines.

Thing 13 Learning 2.0 Tasks
1. Read so you will understand what Bloglines is.
2. Create a Bloglines account.
3. Add our learning 2.0 blog as a feed. Note that there is no RSS icon but all the way at the bottom you'll find a subscribe link. Click that and change the subscribe to this feed to Bloglines.
4. You can also subscribe to news about specific topics. Go to Google news and create a search on something you find interesting. For example ~library. At the bottom of your results you'll find the RSS icon. Click that to make this query into a so called standing query and receive news items on this topic whenever they come up. Add a news feed to your Bloglines account. This might take a few tries to work in some cases.
5. Remember Flickr? You can also subscribe to people's photographs so every time they post new photos you'll get them automatically! Add a photo feed to your Bloglines account.



Thing 14 - Finding library blogs and news feeds

Blogs and news feeds are a great way to stay up to date professionally without doing any of the legwork yourself. There are good librarians out there who will blog about issues pertinent to our profession or point you to technology to try or articles you simply must read. Blogs are a great way to stay in touch with the profession and you can count reading them as working on your professional development. A great blog to subscribe to for this class would be Points of Reference which is a blog about reference sources and trends in reference (thanks Tammy!).



Now that you have created a single place to check your news and (professional) blogs (i.e. your Bloglines account) it is time to learn where to find good blogs so you can add them to your list. There are three easy ways to find additional blogs: 1) look at the blog rolls of your favorite blogs to see if there are any blogs among the list of blogs that your blogger is following; 2) use a blog search engine; or 3) find lists of top blogs on a certain topics.

Here I'll provide you with a list of blog search engines and a few lists for you to peruse.

Blog search engines

Perhaps the best known among the blog search engines and my favorite is Technorati which allows you to search for blogs (feeds) on certain topics as well as specific blog posts. You already met Technorati during week 7 of learning 2.0 of course. Bloglines also offers a blog search with those features. Google has a blog search as well but only the advanced blog search lets you specify exactly what you are looking for. Syndic8.com and topix.net are search engines for user submitted RSS feeds and news feeds respectively.

Here are a few fun lists for you to check out: 100 Best Blogs for School Librarians, Top 25 Librarian Bloggers, Top 10 Non-Librarian Blogs To Read in 2008 (and probably still in 2010), and 10 librarian blogs to read in 2010. It is probably a good sign for a blog to appear on multiple lists!

Thing 14 Learning 2.0 Tasks

1. Try out a blog or feed search engine or two and find additional blogs to subscribe to.
2. Explore one of the lists to see if they point you to additional blogs.
3. Create a blog post on your personal blog about your RSS feed search and subscription experience. Be specific about what you tried to find blogs. What did you like, what didn't you like. Also describe two blogs that you plan on following. Describe the blogs and share why you think they are important.