Week 4 Case Studies: RSS & the Library

Kansas City Public Library presented their RSS feeds as Subject Guide.  Their list was straight forward and the feeds were broken into a categories so you can select was is most relevant to you.  The Movies & TV Guide was pretty fun.  The How Do I Guide seemed useful but I’m not sure I’d need an RSS feed for all the new How Do I’s that come out.  The standard Libraries Guide section was as always interesting and useful for staying on top of what other libraries are up to, and especially useful for LIS students J

Hennepin County Library’s feeds were pretty good but the layout of the page was a bit confusing. For example the Book Lists feed looked like it would take you to another page before providing the RSS feed but it goes straight to the RSS XML feed, so you’d have to subscribe to the feed before previewing what it offers.  I couldn’t figure out how to subscribe to the Catalogue Search Feed at first.  The description of the feed says you can but I didn’t see the RSS/FEED button at the bottom of the initial search page.  It wasn’t until I clicked on one of the results that you see the RSS button.  This makes sense but it wasn’t intuitive at first and the description didn’t make it clear.

The NHMCCD custom feeds seemed pretty standard, however it was nice that clicking on the link showed you a sample of the current contents of the feed, allowing you to choose from another list of narrowed feeds under the given subject.

Tacoma public library also had pretty standard feeds, upcoming events, broken into children’s events and upcoming events in general.  There were feeds for holiday/closure schedules and new arrival feeds broken into categories so you can get current information about only what you really want.

University of Oklahoma Libraries RSS feeds again seemed to have the standard components on News & Announcements, New Books, and New Electronic Resources.  You were not taken to another page before you clicked the RSS button, which I think would have been kind of nice, but at the same time listing the RSS feeds this way seemed clean and straight forward.  It was also standard in that it had links and explanations of what RSS is and how to use it, and like all the other sites it had links to RSS readers/aggregators.

Western Kentucky University also had a very clean looking presentation of their RSS feeds.  It was very clear from their main page what has and RSS feed and what does not. You can click on links and go to a page on Announcements and view them or you can click on the RSS link and get the RSS subscription URL without going first to the page.

I am really starting to get into and understand RSS feeds, but you can only subscribe to so many before it’s not better than visiting all the sites.  I don’t have very many feeds added to my bloglines account beyond the ones for this course and sometimes I find it hard to keep up!  So I guess you just have to decide what’s appropriate to have as a feed (how often do you need to be updated) and what is appropriate to visit occasionally.  How are you guys deciding what you add as a feed and what you don’t?  I’d love to add feeds like mad but the reality is that I’d never get to read them all!

Rojo VS Netvibes: Netvibes All the Way

I can’t say, after poking around and registering a test/play account with Rojo, I’d make the switch from Bloglines to Rojo as my aggregator.  Now I may be out of the loop and I may have missed out on finding and understanding the “unique” features Rojo boasts, but I found it more difficult and confusing to use than Bloglines.  Adding new feeds beyond the feeds they added for me upon registration, was not an easy task by any means.  Rojo claims to have been selected as the “best of the Web” for blog reading by the Editors of Business Week, but I’m not sure how.  I admit I’m very new to this RSS business but I’d like to think that with some good help screens I’d be able to make it work for me, unfortunately it did not and my vote is that it is user UN-friendly.  Their help menu didn’t have a search option and the bits it offered you were frustrating!  I visited the “Feed Reading 101” section and after clicking the “Subscribing to Feeds” link I was ultimately lead to an Error screen.  Then because I was in the help section I had a terrible time trying to navigate my way back to My Feeds.  When you click on home it doesn’t take you back your Feeds it takes you to a welcome screen prompting you to sign up again, so you don’t know if your still signed in or if you have to log in again!  You have to click on the sub-link under the home link “visit rojo.com” before you can see your feeds again.  Maybe reading the feeds in Rojo is nice but I wouldn’t know I was so frustrated at this point that because I couldn’t add my own feeds that I had no interest reading the feeds they signed me up for.  The display screen looked reasonable but all in all I felt Rojo was a very frustrating experience for me and it would be very unlikely for me to visit it again.  I will now have to find out how to cancel the account if its possible, but I’ll need to leave that for another day when I’m not as aggravated

WOW Netvibes was so different from Rojo.  It was fun to look at, easy to use, and sign up was simple.  You can edit each of the windows right there to show your feed in a news page format that you can click and edit instantly!  Adding a feed took me 2 seconds and I didn’t even have to hunt around in help to figure it out!  Definitely user friendly and I will definitely keep the test account I set up!  You can link your Gmail account, add photos, and so much more haha!  I don’t have as much to say about Netvibes as Rojo but everything I do have to say is positive!  I really enjoyed this one.