1. Blogging & RSS: Applications & Technology
Technology Track 1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Blogging & RSS: Applications & Technology
Darlene Fichter
University of Saskatchewan
June 16, 2005

2. Overview Overview of weblogs Harnessing the power of weblogs
Public Library applications
Academic Library applications
Keeping up professionally
RSS – What is it and applications on library web sites
Roundtable
Questions

3. Panelists
Darlene Fichter, Data Library Co-ordinator, University of Saskatchewan
Stephen Cohen, PubSub Concepts
Randy Reichardt, Information Services Librarian (Engineering), Science & Technology, University of Alberta
Aaron Schmidt, Reference Librarian, Thomas Ford Memorial Public Library

4. How many of you …
Have a external library weblog for marketing and promotion?
Have a internal weblogs to support some type of knowledge sharing?
Are planning to start a new weblog?
Not sure, just exploring

5. How many of you read weblogs?
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Occasionally
Never

6. What is it? A blog / weblog is
A web page containing brief entries arranged chronologically
Can be like
A journal or diary
A ‘What’s New’ page
A page of interesting links
“To me, the blog concept is about three things: Frequency, Brevity, and Personality.”
Evan Williams (creator of Blogger)

7. Weblogs are more
They have been called personal web publishing communities*
Weblogs don’t stand alone
Relate / link to other blogs and the world
Connect people together with a common interest
*Dave Winer

8. David Sifry, founder, Technorati
“… the Web we've come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don't change much.”
“Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute.”
Blogs Will Change Your Business. BusinessWeek, May 2,

9. Terminology Blogger – person who maintains a blog
Blogging – the act of creating a blog
Blogrolling – moving from blog to blog
Blogrolodex – a listing of other blogs
Blogorrhea – hundreds of posts per day about anything
Blawgs, Klogs …

10. Blogosphere – Pew Internet and Life
8 million American adults say they have created blogs
Blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users
The State of Blogging 1/2/2005

11. How many blogs are there?
Doubling in size about every ~5 months.

12. Why was there such an explosion?
“Push button publishing”
No need to know HTML
No need to know FTP
Add / edit content anywhere, anytime
Dozens of features – dynamic, quick and easy to develop
Trivia: Can you guess the most popular word searched on the Merriam-Webster dictionary site in 2004?

13. Why have library weblogs?
Easy to publish
Simple from an IT standpoint
Help solve real problems:
overload
Personal knowledge management
Discover/uncover expertise
Information discovery
Collaborate
Keep up professionally

14. How easy is it to publish?
1. Login
2. Type your entry
3. Publish it!

16. Simple
Formatting
Options
Push and Publish It!

17. Blog posts as part of
another page

18. 10 Second Tour

19. 1. Promotion
Robert E. Turner Library/LRC

20. 2. News
Civic Media Center - News

21. 3. Internal communications
University of Minnesota Information Commons Staff Blog

22. 4. Create knowledge repository
Best practices – “know-how”
U of S – Data Library Internal Blog

23. 5. Project / Committee Blogs

24. 6. Professional / personal development
SLA News Division - NewsliBlog

25. 7. Get interactive

26. 8. Light weight publishing
Christian Science Monitor - Liblog

27. 9. Get a RSS feed
Blog + Feed

28. RSS to the campus portal
Library
Headlines
From RSS

29. 10. Community leader

30. Library weblogs Hundreds of library and librarian weblogs
Sites that Help You Find Library Weblogs

31. Resources
Susan Herzog’s BlogBib - An Annotated Bibliography on Weblogs and Blogging, with a Focus on Library/Librarian Blogs...

32. Questions ?

33. Part 2: RSS in a Nutshell What is RSS? RSS Versions
Library Examples and RSS
Tools to Publish RSS

34. How many of you subscribe to RSS feeds?

35. RSS Definitions “A “machine readable file” in XML format
Rich Site Summary
Really Simple Syndication
RDF Site Summary
Feeds
News feed
“A “machine readable file” in XML format

36. RSS Makes Syndication Available to Everyone
Before RSS
Few wire services and a few channels
Writers worked for traditional media outlets
With RSS
Everyone can be a “news” publisher
Everyone can be a “news” writer/producer

37. For Machines to Repurpose, Not For People
Behind the orange button

38. RSS Flavours
.91
.92
2.0
Atom
0.9
1.0

39. RSS is Powerful Easy way to Publishers to syndicate news headlines
Readers to get automated updates of new info

40. RSS for the Publisher Cheap and easy to do
Updates automatically as blog or web site changes

41. One or More RSS Buttons

42. Who “consumes” RSS feeds?
Individuals with an RSS Newsreader
Webmasters who want to publish feeds on their site (fresh food)
News aggregators
5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators (Pew Internet and Life)

43. One Click to Rule Them All
Yahoo Search
BBC
Medscape Specialty
Scitech lib question
NYT
RSS News Readers / Aggregators
MSN Search
Gov News
My.PubMeb
BaRf*
Nature
BMJ

44. RSS News Readers
Desktop
Clients
Web (hosted)
Bloglines

45. What Can I Do for My Users?
Beyond the individual
Important role just educating people about RSS
Powerful tool for creating new services
Look at some examples and applications

46. Reaching Beyond Our Normal Audience
Karen Schneider, Free Range Librarian
“Donning my lii.org hat, we had a remarkable education when we added RSS feeds. Now people find us through the blog-finding agents. Librarians, including me, suck at marketing, but by adding RSS feeds, we stumbled onto a way for the audience to find us, instead of the glacially slow process of dissemination through our existing readership.”
[my emphasis]

47. Be Seen: Campus/Corporate Portal

48. Create New Content/Services
1000’s of journals that provide table of contents and other information as RSS feeds

49. U of S Libraries Electronic Journal Pages
Adding RSS to E-Journal Pages -- Brainchild of Peter Scott & Darryl Friesen at the U of S

50. Browse by Publisher/Source

51. Custom Feed2JS (locally)
Make it easy for your users.
Set up cut and paste utilities to add feeds to their web sites.

52. Hennepin County Library

53. Read the Fine Print: Copyright
Institute of Physics

54. Some Tools to Display RSS as HTML
RSS Digest (hosted)
RSS2HTML (hosted)
Feed2JS (hosted or installed)

55. Building Powerful Applications
Dozens to hundreds of feeds
Harvest
Build a range of products

56. Questions ?