Week 4: RSS

RSS or Real Simple Syndication. You may have heard the term before, but did you know what the letters stood for? RSS is a powerful tool that can help bring information to you. Take a look at this YouTube introduction to RSS.

The video mentions the following RSS aggregators or feed readers

• Google reader
• Bloglines
• My Yahoo
• NewsGator

You should already have a gmail account. You will be using it in the following activity.

Discover: Go to Bloglines and create a free account. Once your account is created, add at least 5 RSS feeds to your account. Make sure that one of them is the Powerhouse Museum’s picture of the day blog.

Some others you might consider are
ABS for librarians
Fine books
Librarian in black
Victoria and Albert Museum blog

Hint: To search for blogs use blogs or rss in the search term, or use Google blog search to find blogs on your favourite topic

Explore: In your blog, create an entry that reflects on what you searched for and what you found. If you are stuck, you can use these questions to help start you out:

What do you like about RSS and newsreaders?

What sites did you select for your RSS reader?

How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your work?
How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this new technology?

Did you find any good examples of other library blogs? Remember to take a moment and share your thoughts and comments on someone else’s blog.

Adventure: - (remember this is an OPTIONAL activity) Follow the tutorial on Yahoo pipes and create a Pipe and share it. This is a difficult challenge and may take an additional 20-30 minutes of time.