On RSS & Newsreaders

Firstly, I have to 'fess up. Every morning - while I have my first coffee of the day I have a look at the Sydney Morning Herald - at work. If I am ever asked to justify the time spent. I guess I can say it's to keep up to date with current issues which may convert themselves into reference requests at the service counter. However, the truth is I like doing it.

Now a much better use of my time might be logging on to Google Reader and having a glance at the targeted information that the web has grabbed and brought to my computer for me. With the time I save I plan to have look at a few feeds I have put in a folder called fun!
So what I like about RSS is that I can easily have a quick glance at information likely to be of interest to me. It sits and waits for me to have a convenient moment.

I selected a range of sites including my beloved Sydney Morning Herald. For fun I subscribed to Snopes - I can't get enough of those Urban Legends! I also subscribed to several promising looking library sites including Unshelved library cartoons. Librarian's Internet Index, Librarian Avenger and Librarian Central. I like the strategy of looking at a few sites and whittling them down the the ones I really like.

As to how we can take advantage of RSS? I guess we can either be users of or creators of. Perhaps we can even be both. I can see a use in pushing out information to staff or customers. An RSS feed could be a very effective 'What's On' type of tool.

As far as being users of we can recommend useful feeds to our colleagues. We might even find it appropriate to recommend some feeds to our customers. An RSS feed of current news would be of interest to many of our customers.

I would like to say I would use RSS feeds on my children's web page. But I would be nervous about recommending any content that I have no control over. I would have to stick with content pushed out from companies and institutions I already trust.

Isn't that the Net all over?