Citegeist

Week 2: Social Networking and Facebook
Week 3: Photos and Images
Week 4: RSS and Newsreaders
Week 5: Play Week
Week 6: Tagging, Folksonomies and Technorati
Week 7: Wikis
Week 8: Online Applications & Tools
Week 9: Podcasts, Video and Downloadable Audio
Week 10: Play week 2: Mashups

Yay, I’m done!

[Another post for the Learning 2.0 program at my library!]

Those of you who came to last week’s Learning 2.0 brownbag session heard me talk a lot about library blogs that I read via Google Reader–and it probably wasn’t the first time you heard me talk about library blogs, either! As Nicole pointed out with the list of feeds she provided at the end of Discovery Exercise #3, there are a lot of non-library sites with feeds. Here are a few of the non-library things I subscribe to:

The Poor Man Institute of Lazy Co-Bloggers [RSS] – the author William Gibson mentioned this far-left-leaning political blog on his own blog several months ago.

Lifehacker [RSS] posts dozens of computer productivity tips and tricks a week. See also the similar Lifehack.org [RSS].

WWdN: in Exile. The frequently-updated blog of an erstwhile Star Trek actor and fellow geek, Wil Wheaton.

On finding feeds: I typically identify feeds to which I want to subscribe by reading other feeds. Blogs generally link to other blogs and so are a good place to identify other writers whose work I like. If I read a post I like, I will take a gander at the rest of the blog, then add the feed to Google Reader if I like what I see. NB: sometimes, Google Reader forever loads when I try to add a feed. I usually have to quit my browser and try again.

Taking Emily Clasper’s post about keeping up to heart (thanks, Cindy), I have been taking time over the last few days to read feeds. Having spent a few hours this week, I’m wondering:

Why aren’t there RSS feeds for listservs? Further, it seems nearly impossible to use a service like page2RSS to create one out of the web archive. NGC4LIB, for example, requires authentication before the web archive can be viewed or searched. WEB4LIB’s archives, by necessity I suppose, are linked to chronologically, by date, thread, author. I suppose I could point page2RSS at the by date thread, but I’d have to change that feed every time the first of the month rolls around. DIGLIB archives require the viewer to press the “I am not a spammer” button, so (though I haven’t tried it), page2RSS probably won’t work there either.

While I’m complaining, it would be really great to be able to get Facebook updates via RSS, and what the aych eee double hockey sticks is wrong with Twitter today?? At least the SecondLife grid came up during my lunch break.

Signing off for today. Sigh.