RSS Feeds

I had before this course what RSS feeds were and what they did, but had not experience with them before this. At first I found the experience to be somewhat overwhelming and I could not figure out what was what. But after exploring the Google Reader and the tutorial that came with it, I found that it was relatively painless experience to subscribe to RSS feeds. In doing the readings on the feeds, i found them to be informative in how they work and how they began. I had not realized that I had probably already been using RSS feeds to some extent without ever knowing it by just subscribing to some websites. 

In the last couple weeks in learning about blogs I have realized through the readings from those weeks that RSS feeds and blogs are inextricable tied together. Where in order for many people to stay on top of the blogs that they read, they need to use an RSS aggregator that tells them when these are updated. That because time is so precious because of the many demands in our lives, we need to iimit the time that we waste in checking each website to see if there was an update. I particularly find RSS feeds now useful to me in telling me when my web comics update so that I do not have to always check each website every day, which can take up a good chunk of my morning routince.

 Some of the problems and issues that were raised in some of the readings make a good point. You cannot fully depend on RSS feeds to tell you everything you need to know about website that have been subscribed too. One example was when there was an RSS feed for a online journal, where it would tell you a new article had been posted but you could not gain full text of this if you weren't a subscriber to the journal. As well, the authors also pointed out a number of times that not all websites will be available with an RSS feed, because they either do not update as a blog or a web comic might but would be more static. Or, the web creator just doesn't want an RSS feeds, and if a web user is wholly dependent on their RSS aggregator to give them the information that they want, they may miss a great deal of highly useful information because it is not available with an RSS feed. I think this may be the biggest draw back of the RSS feed, you can;t become too dependent upon it to give you everything, that actual surfing of the web has to be done in order to make sure that you have all the useful information. 

The case studies were also really interesting to examine. I found them to be somewhat confusing when first examining them because they throw a lot of information at you at one, but upon further examining them they give some highly useful information to interested subscribers. I thought it was interesting the way that libraries were using the RSS feeds, that people could subscribe to them to gain update information on events at the library. I think more libraries should use this function because many people do not have the time to examine the libraries website in order to find out if there are any events or programs that they would be interested in. If this information could be given to them through an RSS feed I think that it could possibly draw more people to event and programs.