Push and pull doesn't quite get it

Seth's Blog has a post on push and pull which seems to ignore the fact that you can create feeds from wikis, for example notify me on the Information Fluency wiki. I'm not saying the concept works well, at least from my limited experience (I wasn't terribly impressed by the feed we created from the Library Instruction wiki: spam galore), but it does seem unfair to say that wikis do not allow you to push information. Maybe they don't push information well, but that's another story.

I'm not sure how push would be handled on an Intranet where you may likely need authorization to read content, but wouldn't that be the same issue with blogs?

Blogging survey results, compliments of Meredith Farkas

In her 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere: Blog Demographics, Meredith Farkas provides some interesting blogging figures, including how long respondents have been blogging, to what type of blog(s) they contribute, why they blog, and more. She also provides demographics to accompany these results. Out of 839 respondents, she had 18 from Eastern Canada, 16 from Western Canada, and 20 from Middle of Canada, which gives a tidy Canadian total of 54 "bibliobloggers" (i.e. folks who write library-related blogs). Or to look at in from a slightly different angle, 6.5% of the total number of respondents were people living in Canada. Not bad! Here's the post in which she announced the survey in July 2007. These data are certainly informative regardless of the issues surrounding surveys in general, how the respondents were sought, etc. She's also got an index. Thanks, Meredith! I hope the filtered results will put a regional spin on the blog demographics too...

Bloglines vs Google Reader Update: Can Bloglines Hold On?

Bloglines vs Google Reader Update: Can Bloglines Hold On? Google Reader is catching up, although Bloglines is still ahead of the game. I haven't given up on Bloglines yet. I love their search options and my Google Reader trials over the last year haven't swayed me. But then again, maybe it's just force of habit...

Bloglines' new design in beta

Bloglines Beta - There goes our entire workbook!

CHLA_ABSC_podcasting.pdf (application/pdf Object)

New fact sheet on podcasting from CHLA.

del.icio.us: Pages tagged with "information_literacy" on del.icio.us

You can subscribe to the feed for pages tagged with "information_literacy" on del.icio.us. Nice example of another use of social software! It obviously misses variant tags like infolit and informationliteracy but it's still pretty neat.

Pay Attention

CHLA Conference CE on Social Software

CHLA/ABSC Continuing Education(CE) Course - Social software in health libraries - SLAIS534

Dean Giustini & Eugene Barsky created a Wiki for their CE workshop on social software in health libraries. They cover lots of territory, including RSS/blogging.

The workshop is hands-on, and I'm not sure if this means that participants will sign up for accounts and subscribe to content during the workshop, or will just be encouraged to explore the services and websites.

What an idea though - instead of a workbook/webpage/slide presentation, to use a Wiki to deliver the workshop. Wish I'd though of that!

RSS To Speech Gadget

RSS To Speech Gadget

This product is the Giveaway of the Day for May 1. Seems like an interesting app which opens up new possibilities for RSS.

Also, xFruits, which I've posted about before, offers something similar.

Rothman's Update on EBSCOhost RSS Features

David Rothman has posted an Update on EBSCOhost RSS Features which clears up a lot of the perceived problems he thought the new RSS one-click feature had.

EBSCOhost RSS Feed and Search/Journal Alert Upgrades

EBSCO: EBSCOhost RSS Feed and Search/Journal Alert Upgrades

According to David Rothman, the policy needs some tweaking, as it requires users to "access" the feeds within a week of creation, and they must remain "active" or they will be deleted.

Sadly, this makes no sense, and the people at EBSCO seemed to have missed the point of feeds. I will have to look into this further, especially since I currently have four feeds from EBSCO databases, and would really hate for this to be deleted without warning.

How Much is Our Blog Worth?

Not that much, apparently.

How Much is Your Blog Worth at Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog: "Your blog, infopill.blogspot.com, is worth $3,951.78"

OPML Editor: Create Your Own Reading Lists

Steven Bell used OPML Editor to create his reading lists, which include Higher Education news feeds, Technology feeds, and Google News and Information feeds. He's also got some nice instructions on importing reading lists into Bloglines, as Lorie pointed out.
The reading lists/OPML files are actually housed on http://hosting.opml.org/ (no point in hyperlinking to that: you'll get a message like Directory Listing Denied if you try). You get to choose the name of your directory and filename, e.g. http://hosting.opml.org/literatelibrarian/[name of OPML file here].opml. I'm going to see if I can build an "information literacy" OPML file now.

RSS in Plain English

Video posted on Library Stuff which I came across on Information Literacy Meets Web 2.0

EDUCAUSE | 7 Things You Should Know About RSS

This EDUCAUSE 2-pager might also be useful for our bibliography. An excerpt from the abstract: "RSS is a protocol that lets users subscribe to online content using a "reader" or "aggregator." Internet users tend to settle on preferred information sources. RSS allows users to create a list of those sources in an application that automatically retrieves updates, saving users considerable time and effort."
Very straightforward and it lists Peterson's College and University Feed Directory, which I'll be sure to add to the workbook.

RSS Is Awesome

Web Marketing Watch, Sage Lewis. Oh ya, some political plugs, but a bit of what the guy says could be useful

RSS feeds on the Information Literacy Website

RSS feeds are now available for the latest news and events posted on the Information Literacy Website. Lorie saw this one; I'm just blogging it.

Howard Ross Library Reference & Information

Howard Ross Library Reference & Information

RSS Reader Reviews Revisited

Another review. Based on the blogger's FeedBurner stats and a survey of readers (that is, the blogger asked people to report on aggregators they've used or currently use) so I'd have a lot of trouble generalizing the results of this. Claims "both Rojo and Pluck continue to report high readers counts, but it appears that the majority of their users have abandoned their accounts." No source for that as far as I can tell.

Five Weeks to a Social Library: Online course

Five Weeks to a Social Library | The first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software. This looks great! I saw this in a post on ALA TechSource about how the course was set up. Their requirement was that the course be free, and this is the result. Excellent model imho.

Top 5 online RSS readers

Another Top 5 list, this time from Pandia Search Engine News: Google Reader, Bloglines, Rojo, NewsGator, and FeedShow. Rojo seems to do well based on some of the lists I've seen...

R|mail's faster than RssFwd at converting RSS postings to email but I'm confused about unsubscribing

At least based on my own tests, R|mail is in fact consistently faster than RssFwd. I'd recommend R|mail if you haven't developed the habit of reading RSS feeds via an aggregator or reader and don't mind clogging up your inbox with messages! I'm just glad I can finally unsubscribe from getting postings as emails for this little test: I get enough email already.
RssFwd's advantage over R|mail: it's apparently a lot easier to unsubscribe. I tried the link in the bottom of one of the R|mail emails I received but I didn't get a confirmation that I was unsubscribing, so as a user I'm confused--especially since R|mail doesn't seem to be allowing me to log in with any of the three email addresses I use and I can't remember my password--but maybe I never completed the subscription process? Systems should be as easy to use as possible. Not making it easy to unsubscribe is bad news. Guess I'll find out if I'm still subscribed for emails from either one of these services after I post this (I had subscribed to InfoPill for email alerts).

Justia Blawg Search now has RSS feeds for searches

Justia Blawg Search now allows you to create RSS feeds based on your own search criteria. Saw this one on ResearchBuzz.

Page2RSS on Library Stuff

Steven Cohen reviews Page2RSS, a tool which allows you to track web page updates in an RSS feed. Trouble is it doesn't allow you to only monitor certain sections of a page, which is a problem on our web pages because of our content management system (every day, you end up getting a message that the page has changed, even if what you're interested in hasn't). He goes with WebSite-Watcher. I haven't tried either one (you have to pay for WebSite-Watcher).

YouTube - Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Saw this on Library Zen. Pretty nifty.

Stephen's Lighthouse: RSS Methods

Stephen's Lighthouse: RSS Methods
provides a list of the methods used for reading posts to blogs and other feed-enabled sites. Lorie saw this and thought it might be useful for the workshop.

Google Reader has added Trends

Google Reader

Google reader now keeps track of which of your feeds you actually read. This could be a really useful for information management!