RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great tool for keeping up with professional or personal interests. Subscribing to blogs, news sites, and more and having the updates fed to you saves time. Here are some tools that can help make your RSS use more efficient and useful.
Alerts
Set up alerts. There may be things which you want to find out about on a regular basis, it could be a subject of interest, or you might want to find out what people are saying about your organisation or town. You can use Google alerts to have specific searches of interest repeated over and over again.
You can obtain information the topic you wish to monitor and receive by e-mail or rss feed. Note to receive the alert by rss feed you will have to edit your alter once you have set it up.
Try setting up an alert.
Filter Your RSS
Filtering allows you to focus on those items you are most interested and eliminate a lot of the noise that accumulates in your reader. These services will reduce the number of posts you get based on by tag, keyword, or other parameters you set.
FeedRinse
FilterMyRSS
FeedSifter-filters in by keyword
You can have your rss feeds sent to a variety of places
FeedMyInbox--Forward to email
Spoken Text--Text to speech RSS
RSS to Twitter--Send RSS feed to Twitter
Be More Efficient with RSS
Beyond reading blogs and news, you can use RSS for keeping up on other things:
ReminderFeed--Send reminder messages to your RSS
Share Your Feeds
RSS has become more social. Google Reader lets you recommend or share feeds with others. Another way to share is to publish/print your feeds using a site like Tabbloid.
1. How have you been using your RSS reader? Do you read it regularly?
2. How have you organized your feeds? Does that help you keep up?
3. Which of the above tools did you try? What did you like about them?
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Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
The original New South Wales public libraries Learning 2.0 program was based on the work of our colleagues at The Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County who developed the first Learning 2.0 program, Orange County Library System, King County Library System, Minnesota’s seven multicounty multitype library systems and the State Library of NSW.
8 comments:
My work based RSS reader is checked about once a week. I haev about 6 sites on it - I haven't organised them in any particluar fashion. I looked at Feed rinse and I think these are a wonderful idea. I suppose I have been selective in the sites I have chosen so I don't feel I need to sign up. I can see if you subscribe to a blog that has lots of personal info as well as library info it would be useful!
I agree with Superchicken's comments. These new tools look to be very useful - particularly the filters for your RSS feeds. I do check out my google reader, but not always regularly and am sometimes swamped with new articles to read!
I have to say I don't check my feeds that often and haven't seen big advantage of it. Everyday there is so much to read - Info exlosion, even don't have enough time to read books, so give up, more or less. However they are useful tools and good for something particular that I want to read, eg, news.
I admit to not reading my RSS feeds all that often but I do have heaps of them (using GoogleReader) organised into broad subject groups - IT, emerging technologies, library management, libraries, reference, ra, etc - around my various interest areas.
Whilst I don't view them all that often I find them extremely useful when I'm trying to hunt down particular info or am wondering about a particular subject and if someone has written something interesting about it and then I go and troll through the relevant ones.
I used to have more feeds but it was simply too much. I go through them roughly every 6 months and weed them out, plus add new ones as I come across them.
Yeah, I'm with CatyJ on this one! I'm totally swamped by my RSS feeds, but I use them as a kind of catch-all for those times when I'm looking for specific info. There was a lot of hard work that went into finding those websites!
I have a Google Reader for general news but I never look at it because I also have a news app on my iGoogle page. Nevertheless I think these would be useful to keep up with Library blogs and get feeds about book award winners etc. I just need to remember to set up an RSS feed when I see a good blog. I think you can also set them up in EBSCO to received feeds about new articles on your specified search terms.
i have attached a rss onto my google account. I find I am being swamped with all the news, it seems to be a lot of reading, but at least this way i can pick and choose what I want to read without having to google it evey time I want to find out what is happening in my area of interest. Good tool.
Just getting a refresher on RSS feeds. They're good, but from experience, you just have to learn not to over subscribe or it's information overload!
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