RSS Smarts

This week I had my regular Monday night LIS701 class and have 2 guest lectures scheduled as well. I’m talking Web 2.0/L2 and one of my points, of course, is that LIS students need an aggregator and some feeds. Starting in school sets the stage for using tools such as RSS to stay in the know. This morning, into my Safari-flavored aggregator comes this ultra hot post from Library Clips:

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/11/29/rss-smarts/

I’ve found RSS is addictive, sometimes you have to let go and drop feeds, you can’t be aware of everything.
I’ve found RSS content is overwhelming, sometimes you have to learn methods to overcome the overload.

Most of all I find RSS enlightening, as I can now be aware of so much that is happening like never before.

Recap of tools/methods to speed/reduce/spread feed content:

– Try to avoid general search feeds, social bookmark tag feeds (Find blogs that cover this stuff)
– Reduce feed subscriptions if another feed already covers the topic or posts from that feed
– River of News
– Personalised Reading Behaviour (Relevancy)
– Rank frequently read feeds
– Auto-delete feeds
– Auto memetracking/collating similar posts
– Test folder
– Smart feeds (search feed across your subscriptions/OPML)
– Machine tags (by machine topic)
– Splice/Filter/De-dupe
– Search feed within a blog, even a blog category
– Personalised Memetracker (read content from your OPML based on popularity/relevancy)
– Start page
– RSS to email, RSS to IM, RSS to SMS
– System tray, sidebar, browser, cursor trail, real desktop widget, etc…
– Phone (mobile device) email or RSS Reader
– RSS to audio file
– Audio RSS Reader
– RSS to mobile audio
– RSS audio streamed to mobile
– Choose your RSS Reader carefully, Google Reader is hot at the moment!

I’d point all the Dominican GSLIS students to these tips as well as anyone interested in harnessing RSS. Thanks Library Clips!