Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Exploration 4: RSS Feeds, Readers and Keeping Track of Web 2.0

Well, I used to use Bloglines about 4 years ago when I started knitting again. There were all of these knitters who blogged, and I thought it would be great if I could just check all of their blogs all in one place! And it was great, but I quickly fell behind reading and it started to feel like a chore rather than something fun. It was intimidating, seeing all of those posts there that I wanted to read, but really didn't have time to read. I also missed seeing the layout of each blog; Bloglines (and Google Reader, the other aggregator I have experience with) does not display the unique look of each blog. All postings are black text on white background, with no sidebars or other add-ons that the blog might have.

Fast forward to earlier this year: having discovered the wealth of children's lit blogs out in the blogosphere, I was in the same situation I had been in with the knitting blogs. I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if I could just read them all in one place!" I decided to try Google Reader rather than Bloglines to see if the user experience would be any different. Maybe I would keep up with my RSS feeds this time. Dear reader, I think you can guess what happened. I now have a Google Reader full of postings that I haven't read. Sigh.

But fear not, this story is not ALL darkness and gloom! I gathered up my courage and checked my Google Reader last week. Lo and behold, AACPL had added the newest book by one of my favorite YA authors, Scott Westerfeld, to the catalog! I immediately placed a hold and there was much rejoicing. I had forgotten I set up an RSS feed from our catalog to test out how it worked. Apparently, our RSS feeds work quite well! And I can see how they could be really useful to our tech-savvy patrons who use feed aggregators and aren't afraid to check them regularly. They can be notified when their favorite authors' newest works are added to our catalog so that they can get on the wait list ASAP. I can also see it being used for library events (Twitter could work for that too, and probably reach a much wider audience).

Perhaps someday I will have loads and loads of free time, and I can finally keep up with all of my feeds. But I'm not holding my breath. :-)

1 comment:

CheckMeOut said...

I had very much the same experience and reaction. I had so many other feeds I wanted to add, I wasn't even thinking about adding RSS feeds from AquaBrowser. Thanks for the reminder!