A Million Little Feeds

I had heard of RSS technology before this class but I had never taken advantage of it, mainly because I figured that I didn't read enough blogs or websites to warrant the use of it, and/or the websites I were reading were not using RSS.  Once I get proper, steady Internet access again (Saturday! HUZZAH!), I'll start taking full advantage of it!

In the meantime, while I did know about RSS, I was happy to read all of the introductory materials.  I'm always intrigued by your selection of readings, Amanda: they are good introductions, but there are always at least a couple that are from a couple of years ago, and so much has changed in a short period of time.  Those writers writing about blogs a couple of years ago were right to predict that they would take off; has RSS become the same force-of-nature (or technology :P) that blogs are?  I'm not so sure.  I don't know anyone in my circle of friends and family who do use it, and who use it on a regular basis.  Furthermore, not every website or blog uses RSS, and those that do are not always the most regularly-updated websites.  I see it as very useful for frequently-updated blogs and sites, and for those sites that cover a wide range of topics.  News sites, for example, are sites that I think can and should (and typically do) take full advantage of RSS because not everyone is interested in all of the news areas covered by a news site (I'm not interested in sports or business, but entertainment and world news does interest me).  Hence, I can see the great potential of RSS there.

But library blogs are a different matter.  As we have seen over the past two weeks, they are not always updated and maintained despite good intentions.  Are RSS feeds necessary for those sites?  I would be very curious to see statistics as to how many people actually visit library blogs, and how many more subscribe to the feeds in order to assess their actual usefulness.

Robin Good's article was very interesting because of the look-back-in-time effect I alluded to before.  I had forgotten that email really was once a way for people to receive newsletters on a regular basis in addition to a much quicker alternative to snail mail.  Email is still used to some extent today as a way to receive regular updates from companies and organizations, but I wonder if "E-marketing through RSS" has taken off as Good predicted in his list of cons of RSS.  I've certainly never heard about it in the news the way we still hear about spam, mailing lists, phone lists, and so on; I haven't heard people complain about too much junk in their aggregators yet!

My perception (and perhaps it's only because I'm not operating within the right circles of society for my perception to change) is that RSS is an under-used, under-promoted technology.  I feel like it has suddenly appeared and no one knows what to make of those orange buttons on the side of web pages.  The closest thing many people may have to RSS aggregators are the news feeds and regular emails from Facebook and its various applications.  I could safely say that that's all I had really experienced in terms of a regular feed of information and updates prior to this class.