Murdoch University Library 23 Things: September 24

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary" and is the basic building block of new web tools. It's a way of making the bits of the web you care about come to your desktop in an easily organised and accessed way - without you having to constantly go to the sites to check for updates.

It can take a while to "get". The best way to understand it is to subscribe to a few feeds and read them daily. It soon makes sense. This video explains the basics, RSS in Plain English. You will need to watch it before you move on to doing this week's Things:

These are some icons you may see to represent RSS.

rss icons

It's not only blogs that have feeds. Many libraries make their new books list available via RSS. You can also subscribe to:

all the photos someone posts to flickr

all bookmarks people have shared about "butterflies" on del.icio.us

all blog posts about "ferraris" on Technorati

all updates to a wiki.

(Just think - in 9 weeks that will make perfect sense :)

This week we are completing:

Thing 6: Learn to use google reader

Thing 7: Subscribe to some feeds

Your blog post: In what cases do you think RSS will be useful? For you? For our users? What makes it different to email ?.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

Subscribers get information immediately.

Subscribers actually WANT your information or they wouldn't subscribe.

You no longer have to check websites for new content.

Feeds come to one place.

You can start or stop a subscription easily.

You can filter your RSS feed by subject (eg. only receive individual feeds from students' blogs that contain the word "library").

Very little spam sent via RSS

Where do I find RSS feeds?

Resources about librarianship

Liszen: a Google Custom Search Engine that indexes around 600 blogs

Libworm it describes itself as a tool to: “Search the Biblioblogosphere and Beyond… the librarian RSS engine….over 1500 RSS feeds go in….exactly what you need comes out!