Thursday, March 25, 2010

RSS Following and Feeding

I love RSS feeds. I set up a Bloglines reader account a few years ago and dutifully looked at it every day. I tried to keep up with ever growing list of unread posts. It became depressing as the number of unread posts got larger and larger.

That's when I discovered how I could use Firefox to view RSS feeds. I can create the feeds as drop-down menus on the browser. No more going to a separate reader and no more growing numbers of unread posts. Simplicity is the key advantage of using the browser to follow RSS feeds but you do lose functionality. So I'm keen to explore what Google Reader has to offer.

What about feeding the users from RSS? I'm interested in seeing what can be done with RSS feeds from saved searches and journals. How can we present that information to students and staff - will they find it useful? Some work has been done with Early Childhood journals can that be extended? What is the best place to put the feeds? Could we use the subject guides? What are the alternatives?

Lots of questions

1 comment:

  1. Like you I struggled with unread posts until I installed the Feed Sidebar in Firefox. Now all my feeds are updated automatically, can be searched and sorted easily, and opened with one click.

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