RSS --> Current Awareness 2.0

Today I sat in on a workshop that David Rothman did on RSS. Over the course of three hours, Dave demonstrated and had us use services that I was familiar with and several that I wasn't.

Dave began by explaining RSS and XML. XML provides a structure that allows information to be interpreted correctly by many tools...and in this case, a variety of RSS readers and tools.

Dave had us create Google Reader accounts, which also meant that we had Gmail accounts. Dave believes that you should use a good reader for RSS and that you should have access to an email account (other than your normal work account) for use with some of the web tools. For example, when registering for Service X, we put in our Gmail account info, rather than our normal email accounts, thus protecting our normal email accounts from possible spam.

While we used Google Reader during the morning, Dave acknowledged that there were other tools we could use. Personally, I'm hooked on Bloglines.

Once we saw how one subscribed to RSS in Google Reader, then we used/saw:

• RSSFWD
• Yahoo Pipes -- powerful, but confusing
• FeedRinse
• PonyFish
• del.icio.us -- I had not seen the "for:" tag before, because I'm not a big del.ico.us user, but that is cool!

What Dave kept emphasizing was that RSS could help these librarians do current awareness for their users. Many database services have RSS as do news services, etc. So a librarian could know what's new before his users do (e.g., medical staff). He even talked about receiving RSS feeds in MS Outlook then using rules to redistribute the information to users automatically! I have received RSS feeds on my client's behalf in the past, then filtered and sent to them what they needed to know. What he demonstrated today would do that much more quickly -- if done properly -- and with much less human interaction. Given the prevalence of RSS now (unlike a couple years ago), I think it would be easy to get users to understand the process and why the materials were sent to them.

So what am I going to do differently now? I have a couple noisy RSS feeds that I'm going run through FeedRinse. That should make them more tolerable. After that, I may have to get more intimate with del.icio.us by uploading most of my bookmarks to the service.

I wonder what the others from this morning will do differently?

BTW Dave started the morning with this video (worth watching)...

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Technorati tag: RSS