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!

Lifehacker lists Google Reader as one of the best apps of 2006

The best apps of 2006 include Google Reader, according to Lifehacker. Even managed to convert the writer from Bloglines, which is what I've been using for a couple of years now. Includes tagging and will apparently "be second nature" for Gmail users. I have Gmail but I wouldn't consider myself a full-fledged user (I forward my Gmail to my work address). I'm going to try Google Reader anyway. The major improvements took place in September '06.

Google Reader Notifier | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation

Google Reader Notifier | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation. Close, but not the real thing.

LibWorm: Librarianship RSS Search and Current Awareness

LibWorm: Librarianship RSS Search and Current Awareness. I guess this is what we've been waiting for! This is a project by David Rothman and Frankie Dolan.

Productive Strategies: Free Academic Podcasts

Productive Strategies: Free Academic Podcasts is a list of public course lectures available as podcasts (public because they're not restricted to students registered in the courses). Doesn't seem terribly scalable: how far can you go with a list of feeds organized by course title?

RSS Feeds into Images (GIF, JPG, PNG)

Transform your RSS-Feed into an image seems like it could be useful if you're trying to avoid JavaScript in your page (saw this on ResearchBuzz). Not sure how useful this is but it's kind of interesting to follow these tools to see if they catch on--and why. Also not sure about accessibility. Nice that the site talks about respecting copyright: you can't integrate just any old feed out there into your site.

RssFwd: Convert RSS feeds into emails

RssFwd is supposed to work nicely if you're interested in converting RSS feeds into emails. It was mentioned in passing on ResearchBuzz in a post about cyclic RSS feeds (if you can figure out a neat use for that, let me know).

RSSPECT - automatic and free RSS feeds for everyone.

RSSPECT - automatic and free RSS feeds for everyone. Is this the answer we've been looking for. Only 4 free RSS feeds per account.

Justia Blawg Search

Justia Blawg Search is a handy tool for searching law blogs (or blawgs) but unfortunately, as Stephen Cohen points out, you can't create an RSS feed to get notified of future posts relevant to your search. Too bad PubSub seems to have tanked.

RSS and the UN

Check out UN Pulse: RSS feeds from UN bodies if the United Nations interests you: their feeds are nicely rounded up here so you don't have to go hunting around for them. Not sure how the publishers of this list will update it (will they update the post? that doesn't seem ideal), but this is pretty handy.

LISZEN: Search 500 Library Blogs

LISZEN: Search 500 Library Blogs

Should we add this to our online workbook?

5 Reasons Why RSS Feeds are Not Popular | Hiveminds Magazine for web publishers and community builders

5 Reasons Why RSS Feeds are Not Popular, Hiveminds Magazine for web publishers and community builders. Thought some of this was on the mark. It's a little extreme, mind you: even if some feeds "die," there are so many others out there to keep people busy that it hardly seems to be a problem. There is so much information out there that I'm almost relieved when a feed dies or fails...

AcademicBlog

a wiki page listing academic blogs by subject area.