Pamela told a story she'd heard about a woman in Oregon who read a newspaper article about ALA's Banned Books Week. The woman was quite surprised to learn that the American Library Association would be in favor of banning books.

Hmmmm... maybe we should rename it Don't Ban Books Week?

What is a News Aggregator?

"The key point is that I don't have to visit each of these sites to find out what's new. My computer, running aggregator software, does it for me, every hour, automatically. The information is formatted in XML, but I am barely aware of that, as with all compelling apps, the technical details are tucked out of the way. Like all open formats, it's easy to figure out what's going on." [Scripting News]

Here's another basic explanation of what news aggregators do. If you're still on the fence, give an aggregator a whirl and see if it works for you. I'm betting it will.

In other news, Steven Cohen and I will be doing a presentation about RSS and news aggregators at the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington D.C. in March. Hope to see you there.