Week 4 Reading Response: RSS

Before starting the course I took a few minutes to read the Wikipedia article on RSS, and while it was good, after the readings this week I have to ask, where have the RSS tutorials been all my life?   RSS for job post tracking!  This would have been so useful at the beginning of the summer when my Fiancé was looking for work.  I can’t tell you how many websites we needed to remember to go to regularly to see what was new.  I’m glad I know about it now for the future, I love learning new ways to make my life easier J  Speaking of which the weather tracking from the Weather Channel is pretty sweet too!  Since I’m in London and Toronto we need to check the weather for both places every morning, now I can just get notified!  This would have also been quite useful before our vacation this past summer, we were following the weather in Vegas to see what we needed to pack but each time we needed to check it we had to do a new search, next time we’ll just let the RSS feed do all the work

Turning RSS into email, wow yet another brilliant idea!  I’m so sad that I’m just now getting on the RSS bandwagon!  Over the summer I was in charge of compiling and circulating an Information Management Issues publication.  Essentially I needed to scan the news to see what’s happening on the IM front with respect to Data Breaches, New Data Legislation, and Data Security Issues.  I had to sign up to a million email lists, groups, etc.  It would take the better half of a day to get through everything and it overwhelmed my inbox.  I’ve passed this project onto one of our co-op students for this term but I will certainly be talking with them about the benefits of using an RSS feed in general and turning some of these email groups into RSS feeds through Bloglines.  Even better is the “Prospective” web searching RSS ability.  This publication is going to get easier and easier with each new coop student!  The MSN Search with the RSS subscription option will be so handy, in combination with the Google News for this project and using an aggregator to keep it all straight will easily cut the research portion of the publication to a minimum.

Read on and you shall find the answers!  Cohen’s article or tutorial is a gold mine for advice on the best way to get current news for the project I discussed above.  I’m so excited that I’m getting a chance to use what I’m learning so immediately!  I know I said it before but it is just so exciting when your worlds come together J  Cohen’s other article, “RSS for Non-Techie Librarians”, was really good at explaining everything so easily.  I actually linked to it from the first tutorial I went too and saved it to my del.ic.ious account before I realized, it was also one of this weeks readings.

I really enjoyed Robin Good’s article, particularly the section where he “simplifies your task of evaluating and better understanding RSS”.  He summarized the key positive aspects of RSS feeds for email publishing & distribution.  This will help me build a case for its use in the IM Issues publication I’ve been ranting about this whole post.