My Yahoo Search and Yahoo Next are Launched

"The shift from analog to digital technology is reshaping much of the world around us, perhaps most noticeably in the realm of media. It seems like some of the most profound and transformative product introductions over the last few years are technologies that empower users to consume media how and when they want to, e.g., Tivo (tv), Netflix (home video), ipod (music) and of course blogs (news and information)." [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Today I talked about information shifting to District 1 members of the Indiana Library Federation, and once again someone else saved the tech day. In this case, it was Michael Stephens and his projector and laptop. I had a blast talking to these folks, and I was especially happy to spend some time catching up with Michael. Thanks for inviting me, Dave! And congratulations to the Indiana State Library for leading the way with their blog and accompanying RSS feed! For shame, Illinois, for shame.

Anyway, the above quote is perfect for this topic, so I just had to blog it! And for the attendees, today's presentation is available at http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2004/infoshifting.pdf.

"myy2rss has relaunched! (down since the server was upgraded)

What this does: converts personalized My Yahoo modules into RSS feeds. Currently offered are Stock Quotes, Weather, Movie Listings, and Yahoo Mail . You enter your Yahoo ID and password, and subscribe to the RSS links provided. Your details are encrypted and not stored.

Yes, that's Yahoo Mail in RSS. Like the GMail Atom feeds discovered and disappeared today." [Brain Off]

Way cool! Now you can grab some of the data from a My Yahoo account and view it in your aggregator of choice. Movie listings - sweet!

Should All Sites Syndicate?

"Numerous publishers of scale are now using syndicated feeds to grow their audience. Yet most are not. News site Topix.net reports only 7 percent of the sites it crawls have Web feeds. 'I'd estimate that only a few hundred of the top 3,000 newspapers we crawl have RSS support,' posted Rich Skrenta, Topix.net CEO, on the company's site recently.

For those who are publishing, the feeds are beginning to make impact, however. WSJ Online, Forbes.com and NYTimes.com have all started publishing Web feeds, and the uptake is strong. NYTimes.com, for one, is reporting just under two million monthly page views based on click-throughs from its feeds.

'It's a good way to attract and retain an important user base for us, which is the news hungry audience,' said Christine Mohan, associate director of product development and industry relations at NYTimes.com. 'It's moving out of the early adopter phase. Certainly [the release of] My Yahoo! opens RSS and news feeds to a larger base. And it's a great way for us to drive traffic in a very low-cost efficient mechanism.' " [clickz, via del.icio.us/tag/rss]

Some fascinating statistcs in this article, especially for those NYT numbers. In the rest of the article, big media excecutives like Vin Crosbie go on to illustrate that they still don't get user-based information foraging. They disparage RSS and say it's "giving away content for free," when the truth is that a headline-plus-summary feed pulls people in. I used to read the Chicago Tribune, but now I read the Chicago Sun-Times because there's a scraped feed for their site. Luckily Greg Reinacker helps clue them in towards the end of the article.

For libraries, though, this should be a no-brainer. We're not in this for the eyeballs and the ads. We have the content, and we want as many people as possible to see it and benefit from it. RSS will help libraries disseminate the content we're traditionally so bad at promoting (new items from the catalog, library news, events, etc.). RSSify your library!