I am one of the lucky four who collaborated on this week’s group presentation on RSS. Please leave us some comments!
At school today I was chatting (in person!) with Shauna-Lee, our Menno Girl. We were discussing the job search (gulp!) and how great it would be to get one RSS feed with all the Canadian library jobs. It would be even better to get them in categories, such as Academic vs. Public or BC vs. Ontario. It’s a shame that neither CLA nor OLA offer RSS feeds for their job postings. This UK job site offers RSS feeds for Information Management and Librarianship, and what a great thing!
I’ve been subscribing to RSS through Bloglines since the beginning of the summer and am definitely a fan. I can scan through the headlines pretty quick now and ferret out articles of interest to me. *BUT* it has turned into a time-waster rather than a time-saver for me because I am constantly looking for new feeds to try out & therefore have way too many new articles daily to ever get through. My Bloglines account currently has 72 feeds, and it is only this low because I have been working hard lately at deleting the ones that don’t capture my interest at least on a weekly basis. Are there any other feed junkies out there? What is your culling policy?
This week I got a great article out of one of my Bloglines feeds – it’s called How to explain RSS the Oprah Way, and in it the author (Back in Skinny Jeans) calls RSS “I’m Ready for Some Stories”. How cute. So if you don’t get RSS yet, check out this article and you really can’t not get it. Or, maybe send it to your mother/father. But if you want to stay away from the cute, I really liked this article from IBM when I was working on an RSS project for my co-op employer. It demonstrates how some RSS providers are providing aggregator-specific icons on their webpages that will plunk the RSS feed directly into your reader (Bloglines, My Yahoo! or Pluck, in the case of IBM) at the click of the button.
Another random thought on RSS: in our group presentation we mention that RSS feeds can come to your email and I posted a cheeky little comment “(but who wants more email?)”. I stand by that comment. In one of this weeks’ readings you’ll see that “5) RSS can be fully integrated fully in your email. Yes, no one forbids the final user from using new services and tools which do allow perfect integration and receipt of RSS feeds inside your email Inbox.” I’m glad this author is on my side – are you?
Hi Heather,
I agree, one stop shopping for job postings would be fantastic – especially with a feed. I hope you don’t mind if I quote you for my web usability class. You’ve given me some great ideas.
Thanks for the link to How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way. Sometimes people have a hard time wrapping their brains around the idea. The article has a particularly strong visual.
Hi Heather. I loved the article and was very intrigued by it when it popped up on bloglines. I too have a bit of over-enthusiasm for RSS, though I forge to check my aggregator and then end up with A LOT of reading to do! It hasn’t yet become as natural as checking my email but making it a habit should do the trick. As for jobs, I subscribe to the feed for lisjobs.com which is really useful. Anything to make the job search easier!
Hey Heather, any word yet on whether we can make our jobsearching dreams come true and CREATE an RSS feed for those jobsites still in the dark ages? What about feedyes.com? I tried it briefly with the U of T jobsite but couldn’t get it to work.
Hi Shauna-Lee and all intersted in Job feeds, I just tried out FeedYes.com for the UWO FIMS LIS-Canadian Jobs page and it appears to work! My created feed has a url of http://www.feedyes.com/feed.php?f=stAIq4h2H914672j
Feel free to try it out with me!
Thank you so much for that url. I have been looking everywhere for a Canadian job postings feed and all I was able to come up with was the Foothills Library Association which isn’t really geographically helpful for me. I can’t believe that there is no feed for CLA job postings!