rss feeds--lessons 7 & 8

so i did the bare minimum of subscribing to various rss feeds, not because i feel like slacking, although, that's what seems to be happening considering how far behind i am currently, but rather, because i don't find them particularly useful. i only say this because the sites i tend to frequent add new info daily, and because i don't check them every day, there's always something new to see when i finally get there. this type of thing seems more useful for someone who has many websites that he/she needs to keep up on. i don't have very many that i need to visit every day, so like i said, having an rss feed hardly seems worth it to me.

i feel like the only place i'll need to use this is if a patron has a question about it. at least i'll have some sort of indication about what they're talking about. as far as the library using this technology, it might be a neat thing to use for book alerts or something of that sort. on one of the sites that i subscribed to in bloglines, they had many different areas/categories to choose from, so that you didn't get too much information at one time. makes sense when you're only interested in one particular thing on a website, and since the kcls website doesn't change too often, barring the different events on the home page, i just thought that something as dynamic as the changes occuring in our catalog might be a place where this would be useful.

as far as using the search tools, i didn't find them any better than doing a google search and taking my chances. i did a search for pacific northwest gardening and among the sites that i wasn't interested in anyway, there were also ones that had nothing to do with gardening in the pacific northwest coming up because of the keywords in the articles. anyway, i don't think i'd use this tool often or at all since it isn't any better than what i usually do. it's just easier going to the sites i like than using the search tool.