The Shifted Librarian - Shifting Libraries at the speed of byte
 Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Addendum to Our RSS Presentation

A quick note for those who attended yesterday's presentation about RSS. Unfortunately, when Steven and I were putting together the presentation, we lost a slide, perhaps the most important slide - the one that told you how to get started. We didn't realize this until it was too late, so in an attempt to rectify this omission, here is what you should do now that RSS is on your radar.

  1. Go to BlogLines at http://www.bloglines.com/
     
  2. Sign up for a free account.
     
  3. Find 5-6 feeds that interest you and subscribe to them in BlogLines. If you're looking for library feeds to help you stay current, try LISFeeds, Peter Scott's List of Library Weblogs, LIS Blogsource, or the ODP List of Library Weblogs. If you're looking for the fun, non-library feeds (cats, knitting, recipes, etc.), try typing in a subject at Syndic8 or NewsIsFree. You can also try this at Technorati and Feedster, but they don't specifically highlight RSS feeds so you'll probably have to go to the blog itself to get that once you find a blog you like.
     
  4. Once you've found a couple of blogs you'd like to read regularly, find the link to the RSS feed on their home page and subscribe to them in BlogLines.
     
  5. Track a handful of sites in BlogLines to get a sense of how RSS and aggregators work. If you get to a point where you need a more powerful aggregator with more features, then you can start looking at some of the other ones we highlighted during the presentation

And I would second Liz Lawley's method of reading magazines in a news aggregator (like BlogLines). Keep up with Salon, Wired News, etc. this way instead of going to their web sites every day looking for new content. And as always, if you have questions about any of this, please don't hesitate to contact Steven or me.

11:24:28 AM  |   Permanent link here  |    |   Trackback [] | Google It!