Week 4: RSS Feeds

I am always online when I am at home, so I had heard of rss feeds before but didn't really know what they were or had any experience with them. This week's thing was very educational because it taught me about rss feeds-what they are, how I can use them, etc. And I was also introduced to bloglines, which is a website I had never heard of before. Now I know what an rss feed is in case someone were to ask me, and I am also able to recomment bloglines to patrons and friends, whereas before I wouldn't have even known that such a thing existed.

I will answer some questions suggested for week 4 of 23 things:

What do you like about RSS and newsreaders?

The thing that I like about RSS and newsreaders is that they are short and sweet. If you have limited time to go online you can just go to bloglines, log into your account, and read through the feeds that interest you instead of having to go to the individual sites that you want to visit, waiting for the site to load, etc. It reduces a lot of time because you don't have to surf around or wait for pictures to load. Instead you have everything that you want in one concise, quick loading (because of no images) location. It's a real timesaver.

How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your work or personal life?

I can subscribe to feeds that interest me and that way I don't have to go through the trouble of remembering different website addresses, and I can cut down on the time that it would take me to visit each location and read up on what I'm looking for.

How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this new technology?

Libraries can benefit by creating accounts, if they choose to do so and subscribe to different things that they think may benefit staff or be of interest to them. That way they can have all of the news in one location and it makes it faster for staff to look up news and information. It would also be smart for a library to have an rss feed because more patrons would be willing to receive snippets of information with their other news than to visit the library's website and spend valuable time reading a lengthier article.

And to end this blog I just thought I'd mention that surprisingly I found myself having fun while browsing through bloglines and signing up for feeds that looked fun. Before this week's exercise I would have never thought to do that. Good job 23 things team in finding fun new things to learn and enjoy!