Wednesday, February 28, 2007

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...

Saturday, February 10, 2007

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).

Friday, February 09, 2007

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.



Tuesday, February 06, 2007

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.