"Novell now has a white-on-orange XML button on its Cool Solutions home page." [Scripting News]

Yet another reason I think news aggregators are a killer app. I'd like to see SWAN (my organization's online catalog of holdings at 77 libraries) put up a blog of recent fixes, notices, and tips for the libraries that participate in the catalog. If it had an RSS feed, the posts could appear automatically in the libraries' aggregators, along with information from other SLS service areas, their local newspapers, information from the database vendor (Innovative), and more!

Cool! Molly over at the h₂0boro lib blog figured out how create an RSS feed so the site now sports a spiffy, orange RSS box! Subscription to the site is officially open! AFAIK, this makes the Waterboro Public Library the first public library to syndicate its blog (let alone have one)! Congratulations, Molly!

"Jim Roepcke raises a good point about the Google boxes that are starting to appear on UserLand weblogs and other places: They're going to undercut Google's ability to rank pages, because every box artificially increases the rankings for the links in that box." [Workbench]

Emergent Music is doing a lot of neat things beyond what recommendation engines have offerred up to this point. The latest is a weblog with an RSS feed to which you can subscribe. Why do this? Because then you get new music recommendations right in your news aggregator. Descriptions and comparisons of a particular artist's style is all important in this type of writing.

I'd like to see other media sites expand on this to include book, television, and movie recommendations, too. For example, I'd love recommendations from those librarians I trust, and I'd like Entertainment Weekly's television "What to Watch" highlights each week.

On a side note, has anyone figured out how to dynamically fill in the Radio Googlebox macro with the title of the post? It would be helpful if each artist's recommendation on EM also included a Googlebox of the top ten sites so that you could find out more.

On a further side note, does anyone know if you can make a Googlebox macro into a shortcut? I'd like to have preset Googlebox macros ready to go so that I can throw them into a post without having to remember the macro code. When I paste macro code into the shortcut window though, it disappears. Any ideas? TIA!

"Blogrolling - Link Manager for Your Weblog. "What the heck is Blogrolling.com? This site provides a free, easy to use service to manage your buddy lists on your blog that works with every major blog tool and website. "  If I wasn't already using the similar capability built into 'NIF', I'd definitely put this service to good use.  Several ways to display on your blog site and easy editting are enough to earn a look, but you also get a blog tracker pane util that will give you quick access to your favorite blogs.  Cool! [...useless miscellany]

This is indeed very cool (especially if I can then easily see and aggregate which sites other librarian bloggers are rolling, but what I really want to see aggregated is which sites they deem important enough to add to their news aggregators. I think it would be an interesting survey. And since you can use this service with a regular web site, too, it would be interesting to get libraries in general in on this and see what pageranks come out of the sites they are constantly referring to for current awareness or answering reference questions.