Keeping Current on News and Research in Less Time

1. Keeping Current on News and Research in Less Time Camille Andrews & Nathan RuppFebruary 2006

2. Overview • What is RSS? • How to Find and Read Feeds • Bloglines • What are Blogs? • How to Find and Read Blogs • What is Social Bookmarking? • del.icio.us and Connotea

3. How many people are using RSS? From the Pew Internet & American Life Project: “6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators…” “Five percent of Internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online. This is a first-time measurement from our surveys and is an indicator that this application is gaining an impressive foothold.” http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp

4. What Is RSS? • Form of XML • Not much by itself – need an RSS reader • Various versions • RSS stands for: • RDF Site Summary • Rich Site Summary • Really Simple Syndication See “RSS” in Wikipedia for further information

5. What RSS looks like: XML Feed title Feed description Feed date Article title Link to article Article description Author

6. What RSS looks like: Reader Feed title Feed description Feed date Article title/ link to article Author Article description

7. What You Can Get with RSS • Announcements • News headlines • Tables of contents • New web page content • New blog posts New, frequently updated information

8. Why You Would Use RSS If you want an efficient way to monitor lots of sources of information World news Prof assoc news Local news Favorite blogs Higher ed news Library news Tables of contents Publishers’ news Tech news

9. Advantages to RSS • Less clicking and more reading! • Helps to keep track of frequently AND infrequently updated sites • Little spam or ads (ala TIVO) • Information presented how YOU want it—no reading weird color schemes

10. Disadvantages to RSS • Some feeds just have a headline or excerpt, no full text • Your favorite site may not yet have RSS—but you can created a feed for the site (more on this later) • You were once clicking to 200 sites a day, now you’re reading 200 RSS feeds!

11. How You Get RSS • Web based RSS readers • Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/ • NewsIsFree: http://www.newsisfree.com/ • Pluck web edition: http://client.pluck.com/pwe/ • Desktop RSS readers • infoRSS: http://inforss.mozdev.org/ • NewzCrawler: http://www.newzcrawler.com/ Many more – see the RSS compendium at http://www.allrss.com/

12. Finding Feeds • On the site itself: • One of these buttons: • Text links that say XML or RSS • A link that says “syndicate this site” • Use a feed locator • Search Google for specific feeds • site: nsf.gov rss • site: npr.org rss

13. Feed Locators and Search Engines • Google Blog Search: http://google.com/blogsearch • Feedster: http://www.feedster.com/ • NewsIsFree: http://www.newsisfree.com/ • Syndic8: http://www.syndic8.com/ • 2RSS.com: http://www.2rss.com/ • More from the RSS Compendium: http://allrss.com/rsssearch.html Your aggregator may have lists…

14. RSS Panel for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=News%20Reading&id=635

15. Other Resources • U.S. government feeds: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/rss/ • RSS compendium: http://www.allrss.com/ • Lockergnome: http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/ • RSS tutorial: http://rssgov.com/rssworkshop.html • RSS tutorial for content publishers and webmasters: http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial

16. Setting up a Bloglines Account • http://www.bloglines.com/ • Register for an account • Pick a couple of subscriptions from their list just to see how it works • Some things you can do with Bloglines: • Clip or email items • Organize feeds and clippings into folders • Add and delete feeds

17. What are Blogs? • "Blog/WebLog: a web page containing brief, chronologically arranged items of information. A blog can take the form of a diary, journal, what's new page, or links to other web sites." • Most blogging software produces RSS feeds. Scott, Peter. (2001) “Blogging: Creating Instant Content for the Web.” Internet Librarian 2001, Pasadena, CA http://library.usask.ca/%7Escottp/il2001/definitions.html

18. Blog title Post date (in reverse chrono-logical order) and title Links, Previous posts, or Blogroll Post and links to other sites/blogs Comments Archives

19. What kinds of blogs are there? • Pundit, news, and political blogs (“citizen journalists”) • Personal journals and diaries • Business/corporate blogs • Organizational and project blogs (including blogs for communities of interest and practice) • For professional development • For organizational knowledge management • Not all text-based: Picture, audio (podcasting), and video (screen or vodcasting)

20. Blogs in science and academia • Personal (both research and diary) • http://nuthatch.typepad.com/ba/ • http://urbanodes.blogspot.com/ • Associations • American Society for Enology & Viticulture-http://asev.dreamhosters.com/

21. How to Find Them? • Blogging indexes and search engines • Feedster-http://www.feedster.com/ • Technorati-http://www.technorati.com/ • Daypop--any regularly updated current events http://www.daypop.com/ • Blogdex-http://blogdex.net/ • Google Blog Search-http://google.com/blogsearch • Your news aggregator (e.g. Bloglines)

22. How to Find Them? • Blogrolls and Blog Recommendation Pages • Blogrolls-Lists of links to other blogs the author is reading found in the sidebars • Links to other blogs within posts • Blog recommendation pages • e.g. Blogging about Incredible Blogs http://www.incredibleblogs.com/

23. Factuality and Authority • Blogs should be vetted like other media: books, newspapers, etc. • Blogs trade editorial oversight for timeliness • More onus on the reader for critical analysis

24. Six reasons to read blogs • Current awareness and personal information management • Conversations taking place and subjects being discussed here that aren't elsewhere • Faster updates • Easy to explore other fields • For fun!

25. See What Other People Are Reading Bloglines

26. Another way of tracking. . . • Save what you’re reading • See what others are reading and saving through. . . Social Bookmarking!

27. Social Bookmarking: What Is It? (1) • Web-based system of bookmarks or favorites • Accessible from any Internet-connected computer • No more finding you’ve saved a bookmark you need on your home computer while you’re at work • No more e-mailing links between computers

28. What Is It? (2) • Added feature: tagging and folksonomies • Everyone “tags” saved websites with their own keywords • i.e., I could save Mann Library website with tags like mann, mannlibrary, library, myjob, etc. • Can tag more than websites (indiv. blog entries, photos, your ambitions and things to do list)

29. What Is It? (3) • Extra-Special Feature! Collaborative--everyone can see what you bookmarked and how you’ve tagged (though some applications allow privacy) • In looking at what others have tagged with the same or similar words, you can discover other resources

30. Social bookmarking applications • Del.icio.ushttp://del.icio.us/ • Popular general social bookmarking site • Main features: • Page Title • Description (optional) • URL • Tags

31. Other social bookmarking applications • Connotea-http://www.connotea.org/ • for scientists (developed by Nature Publishing Group) • difference between tagging by general community and specialist community • Better bibliographic tools and finer control • Indication of co-author status • Ability to add more notes and comments and see those of others • Auto-import of bibliographic data from certain databases and publications • Better tag control • Import/export in RIS (readable in most citation management programs) • OpenURL support

32. Connotea auto imports info from: • Nature.com • PubMed • PubMed Central • Science • Supported EPrints repositories • Supported Highwire Press publications • Blackwell Synergy • Wiley Interscience • Amazon • HubMed • D-Lib Magazine

33. Other social bookmarking applications • Furl-http://www.furl.net/index.jsp • General service like del.icio.us but also saves page and allows comments, rating of pages • Citeulike-http://www.citeulike.org/ • for academics (allows academic citation info, export into BibTex format, notes, includes lots of biological and medical papers) • Scuttle/Scuttledu-http://scuttle.org/ • -for educators (allows notes on grade level, subject area)

34. Not just web bookmarks • Flickr-http://www.flickr.com/ • Photos • 43 Things-http://www.43things.com/ • Things to do • LiveJournal, Technorati • Blog posts

35. Which one? • Social Bookmarking Comparison Toolhttp://www.consultantcommons.org/node/239 • Not limited to just one • Multiple bookmarklet toolhttp://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/marklet_maker.php

36. Why is it useful? • Can access your bookmarks from any location • No transferring to multiple folders and allows multiple categorizations and uses • Easier to save things • bookmarklets • slightly more automated than Endnote and Refworks (and some give you notes fields and export features)

37. Why is it useful? • Another method of discovery—see what others have found interesting or useful • similar to Google’s Page Rank • easier to find ‘long tail’ in that few people have to link with similar words to cross your path • Communities of users, tracking terms and trends • especially useful in specialized communities like Connotea and Citeulike

38. Problems with tagging • Everyone calls everything something different (blogs, blog, blogging; tagging, folksonomy, del.icio.us, social bookmarking) • Can’t ever be sure of finding everything on a subject • Synonyms and multilingual issues (rose- pink in French, flower in English) • Perspective (me, toread, torec)

39. Problems with tagging • Tyranny of the commons (better with trusted network/ranking system a la Slashdot) • “Unacceptable” meanings (MLK) • Hard to represent hierarchies • Privacy issues-what if you don’t want to share? • Not on your server. What if it goes down? • Free for now but later? • Spamming and gaming the system

40. Tagging is good for • browsing • finding other people’s opinions and interests • catching latest trends, • triangulating terms and concepts http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/ • new things, things that change over time

41. Keeping current with RSS General RSS resources: RSS compendium: http://allrss.com/ Lockergnome: http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/ RSS tutorial: http://rssgov.com/rssworkshop.html RSS tutorial for content publishers and webmasters: http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/ And many many more…

42. More information on blogs • The Internet Courses: Weblogs-Dr. L. Anne Clyde, Professor, Faculty of Social Science, The University of Iceland--http://www.hi.is/~anne/weblogs.html • Weblogs Compendium—Peter Scotthttp://www.lights.com/weblogs/ • “Blogging 101”-Jenny Levine (The Shifted Librarian), http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2005/ola-blogging.pdf

43. More social bookmarking resources • April 2005 issue of DLib magazine • “Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Overview” - Tony Hammond, et al. (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html) • “Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study – Connotea” - Ben Lund, et al. (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html) • del.icious bookmarks for this workshop • http://del.icio.us/tag/genevaRSS