Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Thing 3 - RSS Feeds

I must admit that I've previously been a bit fuzzy on exactly what RSS Feeds are and how they work. After the tutorial on this, I definitely have a better understanding and feel comfortable using the RSS Feed options in both Internet Explorer and Outlook. However, similar to the readers/aggregators I'm not sure that this is a service that will be all that helpful to me personally. I typically don't follow alot of news, choosing to seek out specific sites and pieces of information based on the situation. But I do see how it could be extremely useful to me in the future, as I develop professionally and need to follow more news feeds. It is definitely a handy tool at bringing the information to the user, rather than the user having to seek information. At this point in my life though, I don't feel it would be much of a timesaver. For example, if I go in search of news I do waste time looking for the news that could have been saved had an RSS feed delivered it to me directly. However, because I don't religiously follow any news at this point, I feel that if I subscribed to a feed I would spend just as much time receiving, reviewing and deleting news which I don't want.

I definitely can see how this type of tool can be useful to some people. Additionally, in the world of librarianship I think RSS feeds pose amazing possibilities for providing information to patrons. Rather than having to come to the library to search databases or even log into the library's electronic resources, instead information can be delivered directly to the interested patrons.

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