Thing 7 - FEEDback on RSS

I've happily subcribed to WBUR, BBC World, TEDTalks, YouTube Most Discussed, and other RSS feeds in Google Reader. My favorite so far is the Joke of the Day from Comedy Central. I am also following the blogs of my fellows from the 26.2 Things in Boston course. It is nice to have all news in one place, my two frustrations have been: 1) it is often difficult to find the correct RSS url for a particular service - you have to go from page to page to find how they break their RSS feeds; and 2) too many too broad chunks, e.g. there is Most Popular and Most Discussed categories on YouTube, but no categories for News & Politics and such. I guess I will get better at it, once I start using tags, but coming up with the subject relevant to each news service is time consuming, as they are not always consistent. I could not subcribe to Library Journal - Google Reader not finding a perfectly valid RSS url for some reason. I wonder if there are alternatives to Google Reader, something more intuitive (regular Google finds RSS pages way better than Reader does).

There is certainly a place for RSS on every library web page: local news, library events, storytelling, new aquisitions, a newsletter, blogs could all be made into RSS alerts. Perhaps there is even a way to deliver the titles for the most discussed or most circulated books and articles to patrons. With the archives collections being more static than regular library ones, I can't quite see the same service for archives. Unless we push professional news, blogs, and newsletter items onto readers. There is always a danger to become too agressive with your customers - we have all come not to appreciate SPAM, but still... No reason no to have a Reader-like subcription page for a library or archive, set up with subjects and readings relevant to your audience.