RSS is as easy as Do-Re-Mi! (IPL Things #10: RSS)

Since my last post was about blogs, I felt that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) would be the natural progression. I am familiar with RSS, and use it quite a bit, but there’s always more you can do with it, so I thought it would be good to explore a bit more.

RSS feeds – by themselves – don’t really do much. It looks like a bunch of code. To unlock the true power of RSS, you have to put into a feed reader or some sort. My favorite reader is Google Reader, although I have used others in the past. I like Google Reader because it’s very easy to add, manage, and move around in feeds. For instance, I’m a big gadget lover, and I love keeping up on all things related to Apple. There is a good Apple blog I read called TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog. I have the TUAW feed in Google Reader, tagged as “apple”. I also read another site called iSource, which also talks about Apple products, and is also tagged as “apple”. Since both feeds have the same tag, when in Google Reader, I can just click the “apple” tag/folder and read both feeds together. The items appear in the other that they were posted, as though they were on just one blog. Also, as I scroll past each article, I don’t have to mark it as read – Google figures it out for me.

Since I had some experience with Google Reader, I decided to play with some features I normally ignore. For instance, one such feature is called “Browse for stuff”. It allows you to create a bundle of feeds – similar to what I have already been doing with my Apple feeds. In fact, I was able to easily create an Apple bundle by just dragging my apple folder into the window. The advantage to a bundle is that it is a bit more social than the tag process I described above. For instance, I can e-mail the bundle to friends, create a bundle for my website, or add a link to my website. I can also see what other bundles my friends have created, although, at the time of writing this, I didn’t see any.

Another neat feature is the “Explore” option which contains a feed called “Recommended Items”. As Google puts it, “these are items from the Internet that you might enjoy. Hit the smiley face at the bottom of items that you like -- we'll customize your list to help you discover even more stuff.” Basically, it scans my feeds and, based on what other people are reading, recommends new items that it thinks I would like. By telling it what I do and don’t like, it better customizes the feed. This would be a great way to discover new feeds – although I do admit, I have a hard time keeping up with the feeds I already have.

Also worth noting, I noticed that for the fellow classmate blogs I clicked “Follow” now appear in my Google Reader, since I share the same account. This is very handy and is a good way to keep up to date on what my classmates are doing!


All in all, Google Reader is a very powerful web-based RSS reader. I am still exploring all of the features of it. While I’m not sure how much I will use every single thing, it’s nice to see that they are really trying to bring the social aspect to the RSS feeds. Google Reader would also be great for librarians because it gives them the opportunity to keep up to date with all their feeds in one place, but also has options for exploring new feeds and seeing what other people are interested in.