Blog blog blog

When I originally logged into my Google account at the start of 23 things, I had a brief moment of panic where I decided the internet is definitely a BAD THING whose purpose is to hold embarrassing information to be rediscovered later in life. And not just those photos on Facebook that make my face look 'squishy' in the words of one of my friends. I found a blog I kept back in the day, otherwise known as around 2004. I don't think it's quite as bad as The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, but I still wanted to make sure I had removed all trace of teenage confessions from public view before releasing more of my 'blogging' on the world.

My old blog pretty much had the purpose of a diary - a way of keeping up with friends, sharing photographs etc. before Facebook made all that easy. Writing a blog for 23 Things - which should have some sort of point and content rather than just musings - is hopefully going to be more useful (and also hopefully won't, in six years time, be hideously embarrassing, although there is still time!).

I find Blogger fairly user friendly, especially when just writing posts: automatically saving drafts every so often is a brilliant feature which anyone who has ever lost a long email through a bad internet connection or accidental page refresh will appreciate. I also love the new template designer, which allows lovely background images - there is no rhyme or reason why I chose cliffs, except I like them and having a picture of the tweed library suit from the Mighty Boosh would have been a bit too psychedelic for me! The template designer also makes it easier to change things like post layout and where the gadgets display on the page.

I now just need to start this blogging malarkey properly and get up to date with the things!

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.