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.

Qassia is a search engine like beast in the making.  Search results will contain both normal websearch results like you would get from Google, as well as "Intel" submitted by users.   "Intel" in this context is any bit of knowledge a user wants to share.  I just submitted one about Philadelphia’s Restaurant Week and one about the Google Browser Sync plugin.  One guy has submitted one on how to save money on contact lens maintenance materials.

The intel items can be as lengthy as a Wikipedia article or as short as a single paragraph.  Unlike Wikipedia, your intel items are your own.  Nobody can edit them.  However, before they are visible, at least seven members must screen it.  Any user can screen any available intel by assigning it a grade between A and F.  I think this will be of great use to bloggers who have chosen to work in a tight niche.  If your blog is all about books, but you want to share some info you have about movies, you could go drop that intel at Qassia.

Bloggers can also get some good solid backlinks to their content through the submission of good quality intel.  Any of your intel that shows up in a search result or while users browse the site, that intel will include a link to your website.

Searching will be based on a cascading tag-based directory.  Their FAQ explains it this way:

It’s a directory, but based on cascading tags rather than categories. On the landing page, you have the 20 most popular tags. Click on a tag, and you then get the 20 most popular tags that also have the first tag. And so on.

For example, if you click on "cars" at the landing page, the next page might have a list of secondary tags such as "imported", "used", "classic", "hybrid", etc. Click on "imported" and the subsequent page might have a list of tertiary tags such as "German", "Jaguar", "Lexus", etc.

Matching websites and intel will be displayed on each page: websites first, intel second.

If you have the time, register for an account at http://techfun.qassia.com – yea, I do get a credit for you signing up from my page.  I can’t do anything with the credits right now, but someday maybe I could buy an ad for the TechFun blog on the Qassia homepage.