RSS-sssssssssss feeds

As the news came in last week that snake numbers are declining worldwide, I couldn't resist making my blog title reference this!

I have used RSS feeds before, having set myself up a Google Reader account a few months ago. This was mostly to scan for stories about libraries in the news and following interesting librarian blogs before my library school interviews so that I could keep an eye on any news stories they might ask me about.

I particularly liked the way you could make an RSS feed of keyword searches on the BBC news website, which is a brilliantly lazy way of looking out for interesting news stories. I love that little orange square! Although when I went to have a play for 23 Things I noticed that the BBC search doesn't support this any more. If there are any wonderfully teccy people who know how to save keyword searches on sites that don't have the magic orange square I'd be really pleased to know about it.

Since going to my interviews I have to say that I haven't looked at Reader that often. I find that it is easy to organise different feeds and look at the ones of interest on Google Reader so I can just dip in and out. I was excited that I could subscribe to all of the Cambridge 23 Things blogs at once though - thanks to Girl in the Moon! I really like being able to scan all the blogs and being able to see which ones I have looked at although I'm unfortunately not going to have anywhere near enough time to read them all properly!

My instinct is that RSS feeds could be usefully utilised within libraries, in certain situations. I like the feature to be able to create a feed and then share it with others - this could be of use for collecting relevant feeds together for researchers, although obviously they would have to happy to get a RSS reader (or iGoogle or similar of course) themselves. It is essentially a very logical way of collecting together information which will be of use and/or interest on the net. This won't replace actively searching for information, or browsing, which can throw up unexpected items of interest, but is a useful addition to other research methods.

iGoogle, I get distracted

I had used iGoogle before - I assume the nice little button saying either 'try' and/or 'new' caught me in the right mood. Never having logged in again since my initial play I felt I should give a bit of time to explore it properly.

So I created a general homepage adding Twitter, Facebook, email, news headlines as well as retaining some of the standard gadgets like Google Maps.

I was also a little bit too excited on discovering that the theme I'd selected (of penguins) could be complimented by little animated penguins on the main page. I felt this was a good thing even though I can't really explain why.

I think this may be the problem for me of using iGoogle, it seems very high tech and convenient to be able to check social media and email in one space, but, for similar reasons as why I don't Tweet on my phone, I don't actually like that level of permanent distraction.

I also felt the gadgets themselves didn't work that well - I haven't been able to remove the 'dark shadow' (which sounds lovely and Gothic) off the Facebook gadget. Clicking through from the gadget sends you to the mobile interface, which isn't as clear as the regular Facebook display, so I would then just log into regular Facebook to see whatever it was that caught my attention, which rather defeats the point. The Twitter gadget worked a lot better although, as Library Wanderer points out, the delay in updates still makes the main Twitter site the best way to follow what's happening.

Although I didn't like using iGoogle at home, I felt having a launch page at work might be more useful. I really liked the ability to create multiple landing pages so set up a 'Library' tab. To this I added the COPAC search box, as suggested by 23 things and which I wouldn't have though of searching for myself, a currency converter, a few RSS feeds and Google Translate. This seems to make more sense than the glowing lava lamp of distraction that is my main page, as having these things on one page should save time.


Again though I had problems with the gadget on iGoogle not working as well as the main page - looking something up on the map gadget, for example, you couldn't click through to Google Streetview. I found this quite annoying and again sent me back to Google maps proper, as I love being able to see where I'm supposed to be going as well as having the map.

I think perhaps I'd be more inclined to carry on using iGoogle at work if some of the gadgets were improved, on the whole though, moving penguins on my homepage are a stage too far for me!