Check out the Iread Wiki started by Michele Leininger at the State Library of Iowa and Iowa librarians learning Web 2.0 tools. Better yet, contribute to it (the password is readers)! (Thanks, Roberta!)

I was going to update my previous post about displaying the Nashville Community High School Library and RSS with a link to this press release from NewsGator, but instead I feel the need to note a couple of things here. First, an excerpt from the press release.

NewsGator Partners With Directory Xpress to Help Schools Improve Communications to Parents and Students

"NewsGator Technologies, the leading RSS platform company, today announced a partnership with Directory Xpress, a company that provides schools with tools to help connect teachers and staff with parents and students through personalized information portals....

Directory Xpress' NewsGator-powered RSS system, called MyInfoPage, allows educators to create personalized information pages that are continually updated with school information such as classroom news, homework assignments, syllabi, closures, sports schedules, schedule changes and monthly lunch menus. NewsGator's Private Label Platform allows parents to create personalized spaces and subscribe to relevant information via RSS feeds from the schools' information pages....

Two schools in Jacksonville, Fla., Holy Family Catholic School and Hendricks Avenue Elementary School, debuted the technology at the start of the current school year. Ancillae-Assumpta Academy in Philadelphia, and several more schools will launch in the coming months. Parents have adapted quickly with more than 50 percent of parents at Holy Family using the school's system within two weeks of its implementation.

'It is an invaluable, easy-to-use system that doesn't require a steep learning curve,' said Dawn Huskey, media instructor at Holy Family Catholic School. 'MyInfoPage has enhanced communications between our families and our faculty making us a united force in the educational process for our students....'

'We see this quickly becoming a vital tool for busy parents who can now check up on their children's progress and communicate with teachers online rather than relying on their children to bring home slips of paper or waiting for parent-teacher conferences,' said Directory Xpress CEO Paul Kasinski...."

This is huge, and I wish it was going through the school libraries, but let's still recognize that this is how RSS goes mainstream and users' expectations for information flow change.

And it's not just our users, it's ourselves, too. Another NewsGator press release:

"The Special Libraries Association (SLA) announced today that it has partnered with NewsGator to launch an online service that delivers RSS feeds to the desktops of thousands of information professionals. This exclusive service is free only to members of SLA, and is available at www.sla.org as part of the SLA News Connections.

'Access to online content is nothing new to our community,' said Janice R. Lachance, Chief Executive Officer of SLA. 'Access to real-time RSS feeds, however, is new to the business world, and we saw this as an opportunity to expose our members to a practical solution through their SLA experience....'

SLA News Connections now includes access to open Web content driven by NewsGator’s reader. Members of SLA can access the content through the 'Resources' tab on the SLA home page...."

I'm a little bummed that SLA gets to do this first, because I was really hoping to do something similar for ALA members, but the early bird and all....

One point I want to make, though, is that while NewsGator is doing a phenomenal job of bringing RSS into the business world, you don't have to pay for an RSS solution for your employees or your users. There are plenty of good, free options we can use, and strategic use of OPML files can help with deployment and maintenance of feeds (that's a major piece I really want to investigate through ALA). Yes, NewsGator makes integration into Outlook/Exchange and maintenance of that integration very easy, but you can just as easily teach Bloglines (web-based), BlogBridge (desktop), or other solutions.

There are huge opportunities for libraries and librarians in the world of RSS - IF we want to seize them.