Monday, January 21, 2008

Hungry for Feeds

I'm basically of the opinion that if I want something, I'll search for it myself. This is one of the many reasons why I hate telemarketers, televangelists, and bestseller book lists. I know what I like, and generally don't care what others want to foist upon me. Hence, any page that wastes lots of space trying to sell me on the latest political or celebrity blog will do a pretty good job of turning me away. It should be no surprise, then, that my favorite of the feed searches was the Google Blog Search. It gave me exactly what I wanted: an empty space for me to enter what I was looking for. No muss, no fuss. Syndic8 was also very useful, and had even more of the blogs that I was interested in than Google.

My first choice for finding feeds will probably always be just subscribing to sites I've found on my own, but even I will admit that discovering over 100 entries when I typed "Firefly" in the Syndic8 search gave me a little geek thrill.

As far as using RSS in libraries, I believe it would be a great tool for librarians since so many patrons want only the most up to date information. I'm not so sure patrons would be interested in, or get much use from, library RSS feeds for themselves, however. In my (limited) experience, patrons want their information handed to them and are not so overly fond if they have to do any actual work themselves. *insert snark* That's what librarians are for, isn't it?

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