"Oprah-style" explanation of RSS

Nice diagram on this page that demonstrates how RSS is used to keep up!

Microsoft Max (in Beta)

Microsoft released a feed reader/photo sharing tool in one.

RSS tutorial from a Library

A little text-heavy but great content!

Medical Librarianship Blogs

David Rothman created a little Wiki to keep track of all the Medical Librarianship blogs out there. As soon as it's "complete," he's going to post an OPML file for the whole set.

LibVibe

A 5-minute podcast for library news.

Wikipedia updates via RSS

This makes perfect sense, but I don't think I ever used this feature of Wikipedia. Anyone can subscribe to any entry in the world's most famous Wiki and receive updates when content has changed. Think of the possibilities: subscribe to the page of your favourite band and find out when a new album has been released or when a tour date has been added; subscribe to the page on a topic of interest and see what others are saying about it. This could be useful.

Ning - DIY Social Software

This is really interesting. This website lets you create your own social software tool, and hten immediately share it with others, who can then modify it to create a new tool. It's just amazing to see all the inventive purposes to which people can put this to use.

Collectik

A resource for sharing podcasts. Could be interesting for libraries - perhaps a "Best of Healthcare for the week of ______" type of thing.

Blog Templates

Courtesy of Phil Bradley's column in Library + Information Update (June 2006), here are some useful sites for finding blog templates and tips on designing your own.

Blogplates

About.com

Rocketboom's Post on Net Neutrality

The best and most entertaining explanation I've yet to see.

Creative Commons Add-In for Microsoft Office

This is pretty cool - the add in add a function to the "File" menu that lets the creator of a file in Office to assign a CC license. I'm going to download this on all my PCs!

How libraries are applying blogging, podcasting, and RSS technologies

A short, but maybe useful slideshow. Same goal as our workshop, different approach.

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, Discourages Academic Use of the Encyclopedia

Article in The Chronicle of Higher Education in which it is reported that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, had this to say to students at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania:

“For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

They're thinking of putting together a fact sheet for professors. Too bad they didn't mention librarians (then again, maybe we don't need a fact sheet!)

If Amazon sucked like our OPAC

As an instructor for online information retrieval, I have come to appreciate alternate interfaces for the same underlying database. They allow you to explore the database in different ways, and to hone your retrieval skills.

This example though, is just for fun. If Amazon sucked

Federated tag searching

Tagfetch searches a bunch of social software sites that use tagging to "fetch" related content to your tag search. Sites searched include Flickr, del.icio.us, etc... They also have a blog.

New RSS feed from PubMed

PubMed now has a feed for New/Noteworthy. Mostly for librarians or very keen PubMed users.
PubMed New & Noteworthy

Truthiness vs. truthfulness

This comment by Julia Hobsbawm in The Guardian sort of reminded me of a bunch of press wires I recently came across via PubSub and the whole deal with communication and authority. What exactly is a press release? I don't mean to sound like a complete idiot but I find the concept incredibly bizarre. The press needs to be spoon-fed? Try setting up a matching search in PubSub Press Releases to get an idea of what gets fed through these things.

What does this have to do with blogging and RSS other than the PubSub connection?

Judging by the rise of the commentariat, which blends fact and truth with opinion, and by the rise of blogs which challenge to some extent the notions of trusted truthfulness by "authority" media brands, truth still sells, but not as much as it could or should.

I'm not exactly sure why blogs challenge the notion of trusted truthfulness (credibility is hard to achieve in the blogosphere, and for good reason); and despite the mostly negative comments this comment got (or meta-comments, if you will), I found the piece kind of interesting. But don't take my word for it. [Source: Canuckflack]

Why Technology Negotiations Are Different

Why Technology Negotiations Are Different isn't specifically related to libraries, but I found it somewhat relevant nonetheless. Sort of reminds me of some of the issues we face with integrated library systems, communication problems between techies and non-techies, the temptation to hold onto old ways, etc. I really think we should be exploring the business and marketing literature more than we currently do. [Source: Harvard Business School Working Knowledge]

PubSub lets you 'filter' your feeds

Ok, so Steven Cohen addressed my question (ok, I'm a little embarrassed) about restricting the posts you get from a particular feed to those containing keywords or sentences of your choosing: it can be done in PubSub. I just built 4 subscriptions. Now I just have to wait and see what happens.

PubSub defaults to an OR operator between terms, which is pretty logical here IMHO. I didn't see any mention of truncation (I may have missed it -- I'm kind of impatient) so I just added as many variants of words as I could think of. And they've even set up a group of library weblogs, so happy librarians can filter feeds within their very own circle. Just 'focus your subscription' on 'weblog entries' and check off 'The Librarian List'. Super! There's a 'Comics List', a 'Fashion List' (Lorie?), a 'Law List', a 'PR List', and a 'Real Estate List' too.

More info on PubSub syntax here.

I give up on FeedRinse

FeedRinse is driving me nuts: It promised to answer all my wishes and then stomped all over my dreams of tailored RSS results. I have no idea how it's filtering ResourceShelf, but it's certainly not using the keywords I entered. I thought maybe the keyword 'EPA' was messing it up (perhaps it was picking up any post with words containing those three letters in succession?) but when I removed it, the results were the same: wrong. Plus, it won't let me add any new feeds, so I think it might consider five attempts to set up a feed filter as five filters, regardless of whether those feeds were deleted or not. I was psyched, now I'm annoyed. Guess you get what you pay for... but I'm certainly not upgrading! I'll stick to PubSub. Just wish I could use a matching engine on a specific feed with PubSub... hmm?