Assignment # 4

Was glad to discover what that little orange box with the curvy lines in it is all about. Had seen the symbol but didn't know what it was for. Find the idea of RSS feeds to be intriguing. Parking sites relevant to me so that I can view them all from one place seems like an efficient way to manage one's quest for knowledge. Had some difficulty getting onto bloglines. The first day I tried, I couldn't get on the site at all (tried on and off for about 2 hours). The next time, I was able to get on the site but it repeatedly froze on the 'sign up now' process (again, this was over a period of more than an hour). Found it quite frustrating. Third time was the charm. Set up an account, subscribed to a bunch of feeds. Once I was actually in the site, it was very easy to understand and to use.

With my frustrating introduction to bloglines in mind, I took a bit of time to make changes to my yahoo homepage. I have customized it and added some rss feeds. For me, this is even more efficient than using bloglines. I check my email account numerous times during the day and while I am doing that, I can scan the feeds that I have selected.

Not exactly sure if RSS feeds would be a helpful tool at the library. Perhaps selecting some feeds for the public computers but I think that generally the patrons using those computers have a specific task or web destination in mind. Seeing as a patron's time is often limited to 30 minutes, that's not much time to read the feeds that we have selected for them and then do whatever it is they actually set out to do.

I added a feed from the 'unshelved' comic to the bottom of my blog. This is a comic strip that takes place in a library. Makes me laugh. Was thinking the feed would display the actual comic but it appears as a link. Hope I did it right. If you like the comic, you can also sign up to have it emailed to you daily. Or, feed it into your blog. Enjoy.

Not much time left for my poll. It's too close to call at this point, so if you haven't voted yet, get to it!