RSS Feeds

When I tried to get a link so that I could find a URL for sharing my Blogline RSS feeds, I found that, as far as I could see, the only way I could do it was to create a user name and add that to a sample URL they provided, so that my URL is:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Vinnieboombots

RSS feeds are particularly useful if you have a longterm subject of continuing interest. For many of us who work in libraries, the most useful sort of RSS feeds would be directly related to libraries themselves. Unless you do have a very specific interest, having an RSS feed is really no better and sometimes worse than just going to your favorite sites. For instance, my Firefox browser comes with an RSS feed of headlines from the BBC. While it does give you a nice list of the current stories, I frankly prefer to just check in on my bookmarked BBC, which has more visual content and prioritizes the news.

The problem with RSS feeds is that you are subscribing to individual sites’ feeds. On my own time, I like:

http://congoo.com/news/news.aspx

While it is mostly news, it allows me to select areas of interest and gives me articles from a wide variety of sources, usually quite up to date, quite fresh. But frankly, there again, I find that I end up usually just checking out my favorite sites.

Recently I have added a few of my friend’s blogs as RSS feeds to my MyYahoo page. Before that, I had a couple of other RSS feeds for other blogs that I happened to come across, but very seldom read.