Techfun

Since today is RSS Awareness Day I thought I’d link back to an older post of mine where I discussed merging RSS and E-mail to ensure that I did not miss feed based content the way I did when I used an aggregator.

That post was Dr. Strangefeed or How I Came to Love RSS and for me, not much has changed since then. However, in the time since I wrote that, Google Reader has become the number one RSS Reader by a comfortable margin. Google Reader does such a good job that I now use a combination of rss2email and Google Reader to handle my RSS feeds. I still want the most important stuff to come into my e-mail inbox in real time but other – less time sensitive – feeds end up in Google Reader where I can scan through them at my convenience.

Last fall I was out in Monterrey, CA working IT for the Internet Librarian 2007 conference. IL2007’s theme was “2.0: INFO PROS, LIBRARY COMMUNITIES, & WEB TOOLS”. The myriad uses for RSS played a big role in many of the conference sessions. One of the cool things about the IL conferences is that the many of the speaker’s presentations are made available online after the show. If you’d like to take a closer look at how information professionals use Web 2.0 technology and see the direction they see things headed, you can browse on over to the IL2007 Presentations page.

One of the most exciting presenters to watch when he gets going on RSS is Steven M. Cohen. Steven is Senior Librarian for Law Library Management, Inc. and the man behind the Library Stuff blog. Steven is a tireless ball of energy and really got the attendees excited at IL2007 and more recently, Computers in Libraries 2008 in Washington DC last month. His presentation last fall on RSS is available at http://stevenmcohen.pbwiki.com/rssatschools2007.