RSS is great!

The concept of RSS can be somewhat difficult to grasp, but this week’s readings do a good job of clarifying. I had only briefly heard of the term before beginning this class and did not really understand how the technology could be useful. I watched the RSS in Plain English clip before attempting to begin with RSS; however, I didn’t really “get it” until I installed an aggregator and subscribed to each student’s blog. When I opened my aggregator the next day, I was surprised and delighted! No more random blog checking for me! Before that point, I had been checking each blog for new posts a few times a day and needless to say, it was getting pretty annoying. So far I am a big fan of RSS. As of yet, I haven’t attempted to subscribe to any feeds other than those for this course. I wasn’t sure which ones I wanted to subscribe to and if I should mix my course stuff with other feeds. However, the Hot! Fresh! Delivered to You! RSS Tutorial made some great suggestions of types of information that you can get via RSS feeds, many of which I had never even considered. My favourites were zipcode-specific weather forecasts from the Weather Channel, custom movie listings and job listings. What great ideas!! I think that I may have to subscribe to some library-related job listings, as I will be graduating in December – scary!!!