"I hate to have too much cross-posting, but I haven't seen this on other library weblogs yet. Karen Schneider and crew over at LII have started an "official" RSS Feed. This deserves both a Hip Hip Hooray and a Suhweeeeeeet!. They also put together a nice tutorial on RSS using Bloglines." [Library Stuff]

Tag and Scan

"Tag and Scan is another location based service, somewhat similar to Urban Tapestries and Dodgeball. With Tag and Scan, users can tag geographic places (in London) with pictures and text for other users to find when they do a scan of that area. The application can be downloaded and installed on any Java capable mobile, and users buy credits to spend on tagging and scanning.

I'm really hot for this idea, and have been for awhile. To me it's a kind of digital graffiti that enables people to be even more informed while mobile -an evolutionary milestone I call Hi-Fidelity Nomad. Because we will depend on handheld devices to find this information, I sometimes call these devices Digital Divining Rods." [Cool Hunting]

I'm intrigued by these types of applications and what libraries could do with them. Specifically, it would be an interesting new format for our digitized history collections. Dang, I need another guinea pig in SLS....

A hearty welcome to readers of Eric Zorn's Notebook! Since you've stopped by, let me note that February is Library Lovers' Month. Have you hugged your libraran today?

We now return to our regularly shifted programming....

"We are pleased to announce the beta version of Bloglines optimized for connected PDAs. Simply go to www.bloglines.com using your Palm or Windows CE powered PDA, and you will automatically be transferred to the optimized version of Bloglines. You can also access the PDA version directly by going to http://www.bloglines.com/mobile. The optimized version of Bloglines contains fewer graphics and simpler pages for fast loading and easier navigation on PDAs. Now it's easy to stay up to date with your Bloglines subscriptions while away from your computer." [Aggregators Yahoo! Group]

Testing it now! Have my prayers been answered???

Update: yes and no. Bloglines on my Treo 600 is fab-u-lous! I started out by testing five feeds, and it looked goooood. Next I loaded my current list of subscriptions from Radio and displayed all 244 of them in the desktop version. Just as I was going to view them on my handheld, though, the BlogLines server went down. I'll try it again later and post another update, although this does point out one of the problems with relying on a hosted aggregator that is out of your control.  :-

Of course I'll be paring that list down quite a bit to show only the more important ones on my T600, but so far I'm quite happy with my original test of five feeds. The screens are as efficient as those in Hand/RSS in terms of usage of screen real estate.

I'll have to play with this some more, but label me verily impressed! Two problems stop me from completely switching to Bloglines, though. The first is that I don't see a way to do a chronological view of feeds on my handheld, and the second is that there is no way for me to post to my blog from within BL, a feature that is critical to my ability to maintain my site. If those two features were added, I would switch aggregators in a heartbeat!

Another update: after playing with Bloglines some more, I've narrowed down my subscription list in it to just 52 feeds. I guess you could say they're the ones I consider most essential if I'm away from my main aggregator for a stretch of time. So until I find the perfect solution that works on my desktop, remote computers, and Treo 600, I guess I'm maintaining two blogrolls now. View my Treo 600 subscriptions here.