More RSS

I also looked at Gale onefile, it also has an RSS alert. I've used the email alerts from these databases before, but I like that these all go to the same place as the blog feeds, news feeds etc. Its very handy. I find it a bit cumbersome using bloglines, as you have to log in to check. Internet Explorer 7.0 which I use at home has a built in feedreader which is great - and you don't have to cut and paste the feed addresses. For the Explorer 7.0 blogfeed you have to click on the little orange XML button at the bottom of the screen:

RSS and Ebsco

I mangaed to create a feed from Ebsco for the Australian Library Journal. I had to search for the title using the keyword search to get the "create alert" option to show up. Just clicking on the publications tab doesn't work. I guess that makes sense. It's easy enough once you've done that. Once you get your search results the little orange button appears near the top of the screen. Nifty.

Searching for feeds

I liked the interface of Feedster - green is my favourite colour. But I didn't find the results I got very useful. I seemed to get a lot of results from the same blogs. I also found the text unecessarily small.

I found some interesting articles on Topix like this one on Bookmobiles. This is a big issue for us, being a small library in a large shire.

Google blog search was OK, it seemed to throw up relevant results, and it was clear which blogs the posts were from.

I think I liked Technorati the best, because you could search for posts or blogs, and the results were clearly different. I also thought it was useful to see how many subscribers the blogs had. It helps you to see which one might be the more interesting. I found some good links here. I quite like The Blogging Librarian, which I added to my Blog feeds. I found this great article on the Wyoming Libraries marketing campaign through this blog. This is one of their billboard ads.

This is pretty relevant to us here on the edge of Victoria. Plenty of sheep here!

Blogroll please, and a latte, take away.....

Goodness gracious me! This bloglines stuff seems pretty complicated. It has taken me a while but I think I've managed to publish a Bloglines Blog. A blog for the blogs I like to read...the mind bloggles.

My Bloglines page, I hope!

There really are a lot of things you need to sign up for to achieve some of these technological niceties, I think you need to be quite determined sometimes. They're not the sort of thing many people would want to spend an hour or two signing up for just to try out. I guess that's where we come in. Our role could be as a "concierge" for current technology, helping explain to people what some of these things are for, and helping them to determine whether it's going to be useful to them, before even helping them to start out.

It's been fun trying out some of these new things, and I'm starting to feel a bit more 21st century after getting behind on this stuff in the last few years (my little country town only got broadband in the last six months). Yikes!