Friday, November 27, 2009

#9 Finding Feeds

“Finding Feeds” builds upon the RSS technology to help users locate the information they need on a continual basis. Once a free account has been set up for a newsreader (i.e. bloglines.com), users can then proceed to search for the information that is most useful to them.

Given the (rising) popularity of news feeds, specific web sites such as feedster.com can be used to search newsfeeds in news, blogs and podcasts. Technorati.com allows users to search both web blogs and web postings on the more than 50 million web sites and blogs it tracks every day.

For my purposes, I am interested in setting up some newsfeeds for the regular sites that I go to and a new feed or two to check out. A search function already exists in my bloglines account so I put in search terms for my favorite sites. Once I’ve found the feed I want, I click on the “subscribe to feed” button and I am all set! Some of my feeds include Joel Stein’s column from the Los Angeles Times, world headlines from the BBC, and E! Online. This really is super easy!

Now, to check out a new feed. I entered yoga as a search term and came across Hillary’s Yoga Practice Podcast. Sounds interesting!

Professionally, I am looking for well-regarded blogs and/or feeds regarding libraries and the library profession. I am looking to check out some of the specific search sites and it looks like Feedster.com is no longer active. Technorati.com is my next choice. I am now subscribed to the popular “Annoyed Librarian” blog, as well as “ResourceShelf” a blog “where dedicated librarians and researchers share the results of their directed (and occasionally quirky) web searches for resources and information,” and “LibraryChronicles.”

Even though this was my first time searching and subscribing to newsfeeds, I have to say that the process is pretty painless. Once I was on technorati.com, it took a couple of seconds to realize that the search brought up a preview of the site and that I had to click onto the actual link to subscribe, the RSS logo was easily found. Two of the sites even had a “subscribe through bloglines” button. It doesn’t get much easier than this…

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