RSS and all that

I found the readings this week straightforward. I picked up a few interesting tidbits. For example, Bloglines includes the option of creating an email subscription as a way of managing your mailing lists and other sites that have no RSS feeds, while keeping the information out of your regular email inbox (Reichart).

I was interested in the U. of Alberta libraries’ plans to target grad students and faculty with current awareness feeds. In my summer co-op position I witness a taste of reality that bars taking advantage of RSS feeds. It’s called restricted bandwidth. Although there are feeds available from many periodicals that would be of interest to the researchers serviced by the library, the researchers are not allowed to access these feeds at work. Instead, the library staff provide a current awareness service by scanning the periodicals and emailing the researchers any URLs for articles relevant to their fields. The library also sets up an automatically emailed current awareness service for researchers, using various databases—with searches are set up to be very closely tailored to the researcher’s needs. I was also interested in the U. of A.’s suggestion of RSS feeds for collection development and cataloguing. I can only speculate that these feeds would be for library staff use—perhaps incoming announcements from publishers about new titles; copy cataloguing information from other libraries?

It is interesting to wonder whether students will pay attention to feeds about library instruction. Would these feeds deliver small pieces of information broken down into disconnected pieces, or would they deliver complete lessons?

RSS feeds are great for alerts; but do they quickly become too busy so that the receiver no longers pays attention to them much the problem with an overcrowded inbox on the email account?

Hollenback’s description of how the use of networking aspects of Friendster and Orkut along with Flickr will show you your contacts’ photos as they post them (e.g., from a cameraphone) frankly makes me cringe. I suppose a public library could use this feature for a teen blog. Yes, it is wonderful technology, but I it makes me want to go into a quiet place, away from all this cyber-crowding, just so that I can talk to a person face to face. I feel all this incoming information is crowding out our time, our cyberspace, our lives. I think we need to use these resources with a lot more care—use them to improve the quality of what we do, but not just to jump on a new bandwagon. I like Winship’s comment that identifying blogs of value is hard because the proportion of serious ones is low! I haven’t got time to wade through all the junk. Am I suffering from information overload?

Netvibes and other aggregators

Netvibes offers a personalized page to receive and organize feeds, podcasts, modules (games, clock, etc.), tabs (indexing). The idea of personalizing your feed aggregator seems good—Netvibes fits a lot more on one screen than Google Reader; that’s one problem I have with Google Reader—not enough visible on a screen. But Netvibes is very busy as a result; it also seems very commercial and very American. It seemed to give you the choice of feeds rather than expecting you to go and find feeds you would like--in that way, it is less personalized! I wonder to what extent one could redesign its appearance?

Rojo will be back “zoon” and did not work when I tried it. I looked through the Rss Readers and Aggregators listed on Yahoo! --too much choice out there; but is it really all that distinct?

Receive RSS?--Easy; Create Feeds?--Unsure

It seems that RSS is a hard concept to communicate. Numerous articles and blogs use headlines similar to “So what exactly is RSS?”. This indicates that the concept is still in its infancy, and although many people now use it, a far larger number do not and do not understand it. Perhaps the acronym and the term “syndication” are too mysterious, or perhaps it is just too new.

It seems that receiving feeds through RSS is far easier than setting them up if one is a web publisher. Good’s article balances the pros and cons of RSS well. RSS is secure so far (few Trojans, not often spammable), but I think it will only be a matter of time before there will be problems with RSS feeds as there are currently with incoming email. The emphasis of Good’s article is on RSS feeds replacing e-publishing. In other words, replacing another one-way broadcasting. The RSS feed can replace the newslist or newsletter. The difficulty with RSS is that the broadcaster no longer has a list of mailing addresses and no longer knows the subscribers. For a company this will be solved with fee-based private feeds. Using RSS for broadcasted feeds would free up email for two-way communication and correspondence. I gather that the news aggregator collects information stored inside an auto-generating file that sits next to the web page and that contains updates to that page. I agree with Cohen’s remarks that aggregators need to be smarter—that we need keyword searching so that the feeds do not overload subscribers.

My reaction to this week’s readings is that although I already had a basic understanding of RSS feeds, I feel no closer to being able to create one myself, and remain confused. I found Nottingham’s tutorial full of useful detail, and I can see that using XML correctly is essential for your feed. However, I can’t say that at the end of the readings I know how to approach the XML for RSS. I need to examine examples.