LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Spring 2010)

I was very impressed with the service of the medical librarian in Recap: My notes on RSS for Clinicians linked from this week's lecture. I was impressed for a very special reason: this last week, my wife was admitted to the hospital with dangerously high blood pressure, migraine-level headache, extreme nausea, high intra-cranial fluid pressure, and loss of kidney function.

For this post I took a look at the use of RSS at the Sacramento Public Library website and found an approach to get around the limitations of their feeds.

First I followed the See What's New link to find a page of links to new book lists in various genres. The page currently shows the new book lists for February, 2010. I couldn't find an RSS feed on this page, so I drilled down into some of the lists--still no RSS feed.

While I had a basic understanding of RSS, I was really excited to discover all the different ways to tweak them. While I at one point created a podcast (now lost in the vortex of cyberspace) and had used Feedburner, I normally just used RSS feeds to either subscribe to blogs or import my videos, photo, and calendar streams to my web site. I'd never used other RSS manipulation tools other than RSS to email apps like Feeburner. I'm definitely eager to play with mixing RSS feeds, displaying RSS feeds on a web page, and filtering feeds.

Well I had a hard time finding something new and interesting to say about RSS feeds and libraries.  I was perusing the blog, Read Write Web and found several post by Richard MacManus that discussed RSS feeds and their relevance

Let's be honest, as tech-savvy as I like to think I am, there is a ton that just goes over my head. Even so, I was curious as to the specific differences between RSS and Atom. Here is a wiki that describes the differences in detail if you're interested as well: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared. After reading this, do I know which is better? Nope. But, I now know that they are slightly different structurally. Though I will agree with them that "Escaped HTML is ugly!" :)

Well, i worked all week to find SOME interesting thing you can do with RSS that wasn't mentioned in the readings or the text.  one of the last feeds in my feedreader from "what i learned today".  YAY! .  So i immediately hopped over to feednest.  Which is an application that lets you share your rss feed on twitter. 

Here's my second attempt at sharing a RSS resource with you guys this week.

I have always found it challenging to keep up my Google Reader reading list.  This blog post, 

I have been wanting find an opportunity to have students at my school create an iGoogle page.  I have submitted a course proposal for next year to teach an information and technology class.  This course would focus on teaching students information literacy with an emphasis on utilizing free, cloud computing tools, in particular th

Loertscher, David.  (2008).  “Flip this Library: School Libraries Need a Revolution.”  School Library Journal, http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/artic

How can you envision using some of the tools you explored this week in a library environment?

This week I found the readings to lead me away from my homework because I would want to try something or explore the topic a bit further.