Week 5

The articles this week were a very good extension on the ideas presented in the previous readings. I was again struck by just how many uses their are for RSS feeds. As of last week I was starting to accept that they are in fact useful and maybe even that I liked using them. Now I'm being forced to take the next logical step by incorporating this technology with other tools were are being exposed to. I think there is a technical term for amalgamating all your online tools but I'm failing to think of it at the moment.

In any event I really have to say that I liked the idea presented in the McKiernan article that electronic journal vendors use this technology to allow users to receive a feed concerning relevant articles from the selected journals. I believe we saw an example of this in last weeks readings, however I wanted to mention this again as I think this would be very well received by the academic community. The Reichardt article mentions a similar use in public libraries, where LC classification is incorporated into a feed allowing users to be informed when new books from a certain subject arrives. This would be terribly useful and would save me time. I think these new and interesting uses of RSS feeds are only going to increase and in turn as suggested in the Hollenback article be incorporated with other Web services to create terrible powerful and useful tools. On a side note being on top of this kind of thing would be a good way to get noticed starting a new job...

Grant