RSS and Feedly

This post is my attempt to dig a little more into what RSS is and what it can do.

I thought I'd start with 'Ambient Findability' by Peter Morville. 

He has a pithy definition of RSS, which - '...allows us to subscribe to news feeds, blogs, event calendars, search results and any other type of dynamic web content"(p. 100).

He makes the point that we can now turn the sources that we actively go out and seek on the web into sources that come and find us. In essence it makes life in the WWW easier because instead of having find content, it is collected by our RSS reader (because we initially asked the RSS reader to by subscribing).

Morville again - 'We can selectively opt in to push, so we need not remember (or take the time) to pull" (p. 100). I think this is a really interesting point of the change between push and pull, between having to always actively go out and seek information on the WWW any time we want it, and having it delivered to us whenever we choose to open up our RSS reader. 

The advantages of RSS feeds/readers seems to me to be:

• it allows you to surf the web quickly from one location - ie. your feed. You need not spend time clicking on individual bookmarks in your bookmark folder (or typing blogs, newspapers etc into Google every time I want to view them - that being said I think Chrome is great and makes doing it real easy). Information is pulled into a single feed and the first few sentences appear (at least on Feedly) so that you can scan get an outline of the content and choose to read more if you want.

For instance a few days ago my Feedly had a topical blog post from a New Yorker magazine writer on Margret Thatcher's death and what Meryl Streep (who played her in the film the Iron Lady) has to say on this. 

From the screen shot above you can see that it gives small amount of the articles content but enough to gather the gist of it, when it was published and you can see that 500+ people have approved it.

• It is user centric because each person chooses which websites to include in their RSS aggregators  and you can edit, delete and add websites you find interesting(or uninteresting) and relevant( or no longer relevant) at any time. It is like Twitter in that regard - as your likes and interests shift and grow so too will the websites you subscribe with you RSS reader. 

• It means you don't have to send yourself links to websites you've found interesting which clog up your email account or which you won't ever go back to. The RSS reader does not send emails to you when the content is updated (as with Twitter when someone sends you a Tweet, or Facebook if someone messages you or tags you in a photo etc) so you are not bombarded by emails.

• It keeps you up to date. You can obtain a feed on an unlimited number of topics which you can group together into categories. So that if you only feel like reading about all the gardening websites you're subscribed to you can.

• Your privacy can be maintained because you don't need to sign up to a website's email newsletter.

The disadvantages seem to be:

• You're not wholly immersed in a specific site because you don't visit it - only get the most recent updates/posts. 

• Perhaps I won't be tempted to leave the security of my RSS feeder once I've collected enough to go out and explore the internet, thus preventing myself from a whole range of new things? 

• You do have to spend time collating an RSS feed list and splitting them up into manageable categories which, if you want to do it well, will take thought and time - and then there is always the chance (as we've just seen with Google reader) that your RSS reader might not be around forever and what if you can't migrate your feeds over to a new reader? 

I've become a believer of looking at a few introductory videos to get a grounding in the new Web 2.0 tool I am looking into. Even if I feel I know the bare bones of a tool I generally have missed a part of its functionality or haven't been using it to my full advantage. RSS is no exception so here is an intro video which succinctly show you how to subscribe to web sites, how to give some order to your feeds by grouping them in subjects and how to do things like subscribe to someone's Twitter feed. 

I've decided to go with Feedly. I do/did have Google reader but rarely use it because I didn't initially spend the time adding feeds and didn't really understand the advantages of an RSS reader. This reminds me of my first learning goal...

• to increase my knowledge of, and experience in using, Web 2.0 tools so that I am able to use them competently and effectively

...and how I keep being reminded writing this blog that it is important for me to dedicate some time to learning any Web 2.0 tool. I have a pattern of joining/subscribing/downloading/installing and then not understanding/forgetting. I think that so far this has been the most important thing I've learnt 'personally' from this task. 

Feedly can allow you to import all of your subscriptions from Google reader but I thought that I'd wipe the slate clean and compile my internet explorations anew.

Google Reader will shut down on July 1st 2013 so there is quite a bit of discussion about which RSS reader to go to when it does close. I found an excellent 'RSS reader alternatives to Google reader' table from the Online Journalism Blog that lists what I assume is most of the RSS readers out there in terms of -

• whether it will work with mobile devices
• whether it costs 
• what its features are 
• what its limitations are 

This is great because the link to each reader is provided if you want to know more about a particular reader.

I checked out NewsBlur wich is free. You can try it out using a mocked up account and play around clicking on the different folders and feeds. I thought that while practical and functional, it wasn't very attractive.
It looks like this....

I also looked at Reader for Mac which, as the name suggests, is for Apple products only. Its free, and works well, but compared with Feedly's interface I find it to look colourless and dull.
It looks like this...

This is what Feedly looks like...

It seems important to create proper categories/folders for your feeds so that when you've got a large number of subscriptions you can access them by them (as shown by the video posted above).
This is what my categories are so far (super basic but I want to add to them as I go rather than doing one massive add).

I like that when you add an RSS feed you can tick the 'must read' square so that it will come up in your feed always. That was good for my fellow buddies' blogs so not only have I subscribed to them but that I'll definitely see when they post anything!

If you need help adding new feeds to your Feedly then here are some helpful tips that I found useful.

Given that when I bookmarked pages I didn't even put them into folders there is little wonder why I never/rarely returned to them. Here is a small screen grab for visual proof of how disorganised they were...

Can RSS readers/feeds be used by libraries and other information management professions?

Short answer = yes, they already are. Below is a slide I found that dot points how RSS can be useful for libraries...

I subscribed to Monash University Library blog's RSS feed and also specifically to their library catalogue new titles RSS feed which I think is cool because who knows - I might never have known I wanted to read about 'Bridal-quest epics in medieval Germany'. So you can see that Monash University Library already uses RSS as the dot points above spell out. They have library openings/closings, branch library news, general news and events and new additions to the catalogue.

Monash University gives students and staff (and anyone else interested) the option to choose which aspects of the library's online presence they would like to subscribe to - which I think is quite a clever way to ensure that what you are communicating to your users is relevant to their needs and wants.

The Library of Congress is even more snazzy in its RSS offerings where you can select a category...

and then it offeres you an even more to select from...

To sum up, I LOVE RSS readers. I have definitely come away from this task wanting to create for myself an excellent collection of RSS feeds for my reader and checkin with my RSS reader each day as if it was my own curated window into the WWW.

Also it seems very relevant for libraries to utilize RSS feeds/readers to inform their users on a whole host of different events, services and updates. 

Thanks for reading.

Ellen