Thing 4: RSS Feeds

I am beginning to feel like a broken record; I was skeptical of RSS feeds - it wasn't so much that I didn't trust them, just that I didn't see the need for them. They were explained to me as a place to keep all of your sites that you frequently check so that you don't need to go check them individually.

But I have bookmarks and favorites lists in my web browsers. And I only work part-time - I've got time to check my favorite sites. But then I started using Netvibes, and now I can't stop adding widgets. It's fun. And it is convenient to see so many sites I normally read anyway all at once.

I have several categories of widgets that I added -- news: global and national; weather; cooking blogs; entertainment blogs; library publications and sites; and miscellaneous other sites. I added these in various ways. Some, I simply visited the site and looked for the feed icon. Some I searched within Netvibes itself. I found that some of the feeds I subscribed to had the option of linking right to Netvibes and others went into a feeds folder in Internet Explorer, but I did figure out how to export these feeds as an OPML file and then they appeared with the rest of my feeds on my Netvibes page.

I clicked on some of my headlines in my RSS feeds and had the option of having reader view or webpage view. Generally, I preferred the more graphics-heavy webpage view. I added several library organization and news feeds, and I can see how this would be useful professionally. First of all, I have access to many sources for book reviews as soon as they're published online and can see them all simply by visiting my Netvibes Dashboard. From there, it is easy to make decisions about which books to purchase, as selecting audiobooks from Overdrive for the Capital Region BOCES Union Catalog is one of my job duties.

Because my job also entails training and technical support for our users within Destiny Follett, I can see adding resources and how-to's from the web to a specialized dashboard that is more job-focused than the personal dashboard I created for this activity. I could also see sharing links to resources with other librarians on specific topics that they are working on with their students.

I was hoping to add an RSS feed from my local public library, but there didn't seem to be a feed available. I did manage to add an RSS widget to this blog (I think! Hopefully it is working right!) and then subscribed to the feed, which will be added to my Netvibes dashboard soon.