Keeping Current on News and Research in Less Time

Camille Andrews & Nathan RuppFebruary 2006

Overview

What is RSS? How to Find and Read Feeds

Bloglines What are Blogs?

How to Find and Read Blogs What is Social Bookmarking?

del.icio.us and Connotea

How many people are using RSS?From the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

“6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators…”

“Five percent of Internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online. This is a first-time measurement from our surveys and is an indicator that this application is gaining an impressive foothold.”

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp

What Is RSS?

Form of XML Not much by itself – need an RSS reader Various versions RSS stands for:

RDF Site Summary Rich Site Summary Really Simple Syndication

See “RSS” in Wikipedia for further information

What RSS looks like: XML

Feed title

Feed description

Feed date

Article titleLink to article

Article description

Author

What RSS looks like: Reader

Feed titleFeed description

Feed dateArticle title/link to article

Articledescription

Author

What You Can Get with RSS

Announcements News headlines Tables of contents New web page content New blog posts

New, frequently updated information

Why You Would Use RSS

If you want an efficient way to monitor lots of sources of information

World news Prof

assoc news

Tech news

Publishers’ news

Library news

Local news

Tables of

contents

Favorite blogs

Higher ed news

Advantages to RSS

Less clicking and more reading! Helps to keep track of frequently AND

infrequently updated sites Little spam or ads (ala TIVO) Information presented how YOU want it—no

reading weird color schemes

Disadvantages to RSS

Some feeds just have a headline or excerpt, no full text

Your favorite site may not yet have RSS—but you can created a feed for the site (more on this later)

You were once clicking to 200 sites a day, now you’re reading 200 RSS feeds!

How You Get RSS

Web based RSS readers Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/ NewsIsFree: http://www.newsisfree.com/ Pluck web edition: http://client.pluck.com/pwe/

Desktop RSS readers infoRSS: http://inforss.mozdev.org/ NewzCrawler: http://www.newzcrawler.com/

Many more – see the RSScompendium at http://www.allrss.com/

Finding Feeds

On the site itself: One of these buttons: Text links that say XML or RSS A link that says “syndicate this site”

Use a feed locator Search Google for specific feeds

site: nsf.gov rss site: npr.org rss

Feed Locators and Search Engines Google Blog Search: http://google.com/blogsearch Feedster: http://www.feedster.com/ NewsIsFree: http://www.newsisfree.com/ Syndic8: http://www.syndic8.com/ 2RSS.com: http://www.2rss.com/ More from the RSS Compendium:

http://allrss.com/rsssearch.html

Your aggregator may have lists…

RSS Panel for Firefoxhttps://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=News%20Reading&id=635

Other Resources

U.S. government feeds: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/rss/ RSS compendium: http://www.allrss.com/ Lockergnome: http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/ RSS tutorial: http://rssgov.com/rssworkshop.html RSS tutorial for content publishers and webmasters:

http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial

Setting up a Bloglines Account http://www.bloglines.com/ Register for an account Pick a couple of subscriptions from their list

just to see how it works Some things you can do with Bloglines:

Clip or email items Organize feeds and clippings into folders Add and delete feeds

What are Blogs?

"Blog/WebLog: a web page containing brief, chronologically arranged items of information. A blog can take the form of a diary, journal, what's new page, or links to other web sites."

Most blogging software produces RSS feeds.

Scott, Peter. (2001) “Blogging: Creating Instant Content for the Web.” Internet Librarian 2001, Pasadena, CA http://library.usask.ca/%7Escottp/il2001/definitions.html

Blog titlePost date (in reverse chrono-logical order) and title

Links, Previous posts, or Blogroll

ArchivesPost and links to other sites/blogs

Comments

What kinds of blogs are there? Pundit, news, and political blogs (“citizen journalists”)

Personal journals and diaries Business/corporate blogs Organizational and project blogs (including blogs for

communities of interest and practice)

For professional development For organizational knowledge management

Not all text-based: Picture, audio (podcasting), and video (screen or vodcasting)

Blogs in science and academia Personal (both research and diary)

http://nuthatch.typepad.com/ba/ http://urbanodes.blogspot.com/

Associations American Society for Enology & Viticulture-http://

asev.dreamhosters.com/

How to Find Them?

Blogging indexes and search engines Feedster-http://www.feedster.com/ Technorati-http://www.technorati.com/ Daypop--any regularly updated current events

http://www.daypop.com/ Blogdex-http://blogdex.net/ Google Blog Search- http://

google.com/blogsearch Your news aggregator (e.g. Bloglines)

How to Find Them?

Blogrolls and Blog Recommendation Pages Blogrolls-Lists of links to other

blogs the author is reading found in the sidebars

Links to other blogs within posts

Blog recommendation pages e.g. Blogging about

Incredible Blogs http://www.incredibleblogs.com/

Factuality and Authority

Blogs should be vetted like other media: books, newspapers, etc.

Blogs trade editorial oversight for timeliness More onus on the reader for critical analysis

Six reasons to read blogs

Current awareness and personal information management

Conversations taking place and subjects being discussed here that aren't elsewhere

Faster updates Easy to explore other fields For fun!

See What Other People Are Reading Bloglines

Another way of tracking. . .

Save what you’re reading See what others are reading and saving

through. . .

Social Bookmarking!

Social Bookmarking: What Is It? (1) Web-based system of bookmarks or favorites Accessible from any Internet-connected

computer No more finding you’ve saved a bookmark you

need on your home computer while you’re at work No more e-mailing links between computers

What Is It? (2)

Added feature: tagging and folksonomies Everyone “tags” saved websites with their

own keywords i.e., I could save Mann Library website with tags

like mann, mannlibrary, library, myjob, etc. Can tag more than websites (indiv. blog

entries, photos, your ambitions and things to do list)

What Is It? (3)

Extra-Special Feature! Collaborative--everyone can see what you bookmarked and how you’ve tagged (though some applications allow privacy)

In looking at what others have tagged with the same or similar words, you can discover other resources

Social bookmarking applications Del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us/ Popular general social bookmarking site Main features:

Page Title Description (optional) URL Tags

Other social bookmarking applications Connotea-http://www.connotea.org/

for scientists (developed by Nature Publishing Group) difference between tagging by general community and

specialist community Better bibliographic tools and finer control

Indication of co-author status Ability to add more notes and comments and see those of

others Auto-import of bibliographic data from certain databases and

publications Better tag control Import/export in RIS (readable in most citation management

programs) OpenURL support

Connotea auto imports info from: Nature.com PubMed PubMed Central Science Supported EPrints repositories Supported Highwire Press publications Blackwell Synergy Wiley Interscience Amazon HubMed D-Lib Magazine

Other social bookmarking applications Furl-http://www.furl.net/index.jsp

General service like del.icio.us but also saves page and allows comments, rating of pages

Citeulike-http://www.citeulike.org/ for academics (allows academic citation info, export into

BibTex format, notes, includes lots of biological and medical papers)

Scuttle/Scuttledu-http://scuttle.org/ -for educators (allows notes on grade level, subject area)

Not just web bookmarks

Flickr-http://www.flickr.com/ Photos

43 Things-http://www.43things.com/ Things to do

LiveJournal, Technorati Blog posts

Which one?

Social Bookmarking Comparison Toolhttp://www.consultantcommons.org/node/239

Not limited to just one Multiple bookmarklet tool

http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/marklet_maker.php

Why is it useful?

Can access your bookmarks from any location

No transferring to multiple folders and allows multiple categorizations and uses

Easier to save things bookmarklets slightly more automated than Endnote and

Refworks (and some give you notes fields and export features)

Why is it useful?

Another method of discovery—see what others have found interesting or useful similar to Google’s Page Rank easier to find ‘long tail’ in that few people have to

link with similar words to cross your path Communities of users, tracking terms and

trends especially useful in specialized communities like

Connotea and Citeulike

Problems with tagging

Everyone calls everything something different (blogs, blog, blogging; tagging, folksonomy, del.icio.us, social bookmarking)

Can’t ever be sure of finding everything on a subject

Synonyms and multilingual issues (rose- pink in French, flower in English)

Perspective (me, toread, torec)

Problems with tagging

Tyranny of the commons (better with trusted network/ranking system a la Slashdot)

“Unacceptable” meanings (MLK) Hard to represent hierarchies Privacy issues-what if you don’t want to share? Not on your server. What if it goes down? Free for now but later? Spamming and gaming the system

Tagging is good for

browsing finding other people’s opinions and interests catching latest trends, triangulating terms and concepts

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/

new things, things that change over time

Keeping current with RSSGeneral RSS resources:

• RSS compendium: http://allrss.com/ • Lockergnome: http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/• RSS tutorial: http://rssgov.com/rssworkshop.html• RSS tutorial for content publishers and webmasters:

http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/

And many many more…

More information on blogs

The Internet Courses: Weblogs-Dr. L. Anne Clyde, Professor, Faculty of Social Science, The University of Iceland--http://www.hi.is/~anne/weblogs.html

Weblogs Compendium—Peter Scotthttp://www.lights.com/weblogs/

“Blogging 101”-Jenny Levine (The Shifted Librarian), http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2005/ola-blogging.pdf

More social bookmarking resources April 2005 issue of DLib magazine

“Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Overview” - Tony Hammond, et al. (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html)

“Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study – Connotea” - Ben Lund, et al. (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html)

del.icious bookmarks for this workshop http://del.icio.us/tag/genevaRSS