RSS Part Two

In reading more in depth about RSS Feeds this week, I gained a greater appreciation for the technology that was created. It seems like this fairly simple technology has changed the way that people today are accessing the internet. Instead of having to seek out web pages for new and updated content this is brought to users with very little effort of their part, except for getting the aggregator and subscribing to the feed. 

it is interesting the wide variety of websites that are using this technology. Almost any website that updates regularly has the option for users of an RSS feed. This course has shows me the huge quantity of sites that have this, before I may have noticed RSS as part of the sire, but never delved further to see what this could mean or how it could enhance my experience of the web.

I really like that many libraries are beginning to use this technology to enhance services. As I had mentioned in last weeks entry, promoting services is really essential for the library and if they are able to use RSS to give patrons who may not come into the physical space of the library a way to access this information. By offering patrons a way to find out when their favourite book is coming into the library or even particular programs that may interest them, may actually get these patrons who don't come into the library to come in.

I thought it was interesting in the article: Weblogs and RSS feeds in information work, how they author thought that libraries should lead users to relevant weblogs. I'm not sure if the author is saying that during a reference question, as part of helping patrons giving them weblogs as a source. Or if they mean that the library should have on their website have a list of popular weblogs. I'm not sure what they meant by this comment. I can see a weblog being helpful on topics, but since in may cases, blogs are more personal opinions on topics I can see an issue of authority arising from this. In the other case, I see having a list also problematic, for there are countless numbers of blogs, which ones are chosen?

The article that had the brief discussion on del.icio.us to be extremely helpful. I had been still somewhat unclear what it did. I found that this gave me the information that I needed to fully understand it application outside of this course. I can see this application to be extremely helpful to many people who are using more than one computer and need to keep their bookmarks in one place that they can access from anywhere. I have just recently switched computers and I found it to be extremely annoying to have to recreate my bookmarks from one to another. If I had known about this program beforehand, would have been really nice. :P 

In looking at the Feed2Js, I am still somewhat confused about what exactly it does. My understanding is that it will create an RSS feed for your website. This just wasn't made clear to me from the websites explanation. I can see the benefit of this for many website creators, because they would not have to know all the coding that would be necessary to  create this feature for their website. And it being a free website, I can see many creators using this without having to pay others to do it for them. Though I could be completely wrong on what this website does. :P