RSS

Since I took one of my one-week vacations from blogging last week, I'll mention a little on RSS in general at the same time before looking at this week's readings. Like a number of other people have posted, I always thought of RSS as something that was potentially interesting, but before this course I had never gotten around to setting up a reader. The few times that I had clicked on RSS feeds in the past, I ended up with some folder in my Firefox browser that I didn't know what to do with. Since getting Google Reader set up, I'm much more excited about RSS feeds.

The longer I take this course, the more I feel like an old geezer. As a Gen X-er, I always felt like I was pretty "hip" to new trends and scoffed at the notion that Gen-Y-ers or Milennials--or whatever the going term is today--were somehow more adept with technology than me. The further I study the tools in this course, the more I realize how "out of the loop" I really was, and how much this course will benefit me in trying to be a librarian with a fresh perspective on technology.

While I believe RSS feeds are an excellent resource for libraries in general, I am interested in how RSS feeds will be utilized on a wide spread scale and the possible parameters set around their use in the future.

Using RSS feeds as a means of automatically updating library websites is a fantastic time saving resource when staff members are too busy to keep the site current. Also, feeds allow links to relevant news, articles, online journals, books or video reviews, etc.

It has been interesting over the past two weeks to see the many ways RSS technology is being used and I'm curious to see how it will evolve to meet the needs of its users. It's a good idea to use RSS feeds to keep up with your interests online, actively and selectively searching out potential sources. RSS feeds are great for keeping current and they encourage continuous professional learning, something that is important but can be time-consuming.

As Philip J. Hollenback wrote in Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable, RSS readers used to be primarily downloadable software. Users were stuck reading their RSS feeds on one computer unless they took time to sort through and "read" the same articles again.

Once again this week, I was confronted with how great RSS has the potential to be, and how (relatively, given the number of internet users) few people seem to be using it.

I have learned a lot about RSS in the last two weeks, expanding on what I'd already figured out from using feeds in IE7.  I think the most important bits of information I've gleaned are: