RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. “Syndication” stands for “putting news in a whole bunch of different places the original author never thought of”. And “news” can stand for blogs, or for new results from a saved search in a database, or the latest earthquake recorded on Geonet.
One place you can put news using RSS is directly in your browser (using the instructions on Camelot).
Another place is a newsreader like Google Reader or Bloglines where you tell it what blogs (or database searches or earthquakes) you want to follow and it shows you all the new posts from those places. Newsreaders are also sometimes called “aggregators” because they bring everything together in one place.
So Thing #8 is to:
- Go to Google Reader and if you don’t already have an account, make one (Tip: use the same username and password as you used for your blog last week)
- In the green bar on the left, click on “Add subscription”, paste in a blog URL, and click the “Add” button. Do this several times – you could add:
- Top Gear news
- The Annoyed Librarian
- Library Stream
- The blogs we shared last week
- Counterculture (unfortunately Camelot won’t work as Google can’t get access to it)
- Explore the different ways you can organise and view the posts: list view vs expanded view; home vs all items vs clicking on individual blog names; try starring things and clicking on “Starred items”.
- Write a quick blog post about: What do you like/not like about using Google Reader? and/or How could you use this in your work or personal life? and/or How can/should/shouldn’t libraries use it?
(Adapted from the original 23 Things programme.)