Staying Current Using Blogs and RSS

...and I have a blog.

This page lives on a part of it.

You're reading it right now!


Daily show on blogs, how I got librarian.net and jessamyn.com, how I saw things change. wireless, once you realize it's an hour and $50 you change the way you look at web publishing.

• "a frequently updated website, with posts arranged in reverse chronological order, so new entries are always on top." [RB]
• others: "what's new" pages, online journal, news/press releases
• read more definitions - from Google
• blogs have most of these things: posts & titles, archives, comments, "blogroll", categories, permalinks, rss feed, often an "about page"

• blogs inform. "most ideas worth sharing aren't finished"
        [Doc Searls read his blog also]
  
  
• "stuff & connectors"
       [Joe Janes in AL this month]
  
  
• "a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web."
        [Michael Gorman, incoming ALA President, in Library Journal]

• formal
• isolated
• static
• newspapers

In general they're a good tool for doing something else, not an end in and of themselves.

• writers: Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Susie Bright, Bruce Sterling
• librarians: Leslie Burger, me, Rochelle Hartman, Karen Schneider, Michael McGrorty
• businesses: Lorcan Dempsey [OCLC], It's All Good [OCLC], WebJunction [OCLC & TGF], Earthlink, Google
• Search for more: daypop, technorati, Feedster [more]
  

Syndication is what turns blogs into publishing. Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication

• read a stripped down version of your favorite sites via the web or a free application
• interfile postings from blogs on similar topics
• why it's easy, why it's complicated
• where does it come from? how does it look?
• learn more [tons of good links]

You'll also need to know about RSS readers: NetNewsWire for Mac, more options from blogspace, from allrss.com

how to learn more

• RSS for non-techie librarians by Steven Cohen
• practice with Yahoo News [help]
• Getting Started with RSS Tutorial by Karen Schneider
• Read Dartmouth's intro with some local feeds
• look for these icons

• weather, jobs, news
• cat photographs
• government: Senator Leahy, copyright office, state department, PubMed [rssgov.com to find more]
• local: NHPR, UNH student paper, Boston Globe regional/sports/etc
• pictures from library conferences? no, I am not joking.

Blogs/Feeds In General

• BlogBib "An Annotated Bibliography on Weblogs and Blogging, with a Focus on Library/Librarian Blogs..."
• Libraries with Blogs
• LISNews
• Dmoz: Library and Info Science weblogs
• More, there's much much more
• You? It's free, easy, and fun. [more]

Blogs/Feeds In Specific

• New Title Announcements from Australian National University
• Library News from McMaster University [shown]
• Library construction news from Urbana Free Library
• Email reminders about overdue books from Library Elf [tech-y discussion]
• Searches performed regularly - from PubMed
• Even listservs like web4lib!

Blogs inform. Blogs tell stories. Blogs personalize.

RSS is quick. RSS is easy. RSS is sensible.

Few things in librarianship are fun, easy, and work-related.

This is for you.

this talk lives at: http://librarian.net/talks/nhlablogs

Comments or Questions?

Jessamyn West is a community tech mentor for AmeriCorps working with the Kimball Library in Randolph Vermont. She runs the weblog librarian.net and is an American Library Association At Large Councilor. She has had a blog since before they were called that. IM her at iamthebestartist.

I got some good ideas for this talk from Steven and Amanda. This presentation was created in HTML using CSS. There was no PowerPoint involved in this presentation except as a nagging bad example. The layout and stylesheet are available to borrow via a share and share alike creative commons license. See source code for details.
slides version | printable version