and another Thing...

Well, I must say, despite seeing the advantages of some of the other Web 2.0 technologies we've tried out thus far, this is the first one that has really transformed my life!

I was certainly aware of "RSS feeds" but I didn't really know what they were. I had some vague idea that they were simplified versions of web pages that could be easily viewed on, say, a mobile phone. Now, of course, I know differently. I followed the steps outlined in the 23 Things Oxford blog and I was thinking, "Yeah, I get it," but by the time I had added a few feeds and I'd had an opportunity to revisit my Google Reader page and see them all lined up with the number of unread posts highlighted, I was hooked!

I have admitted to following blogs at home already, but I've never really kept up with too many of them as it's just too time consuming. Up until now I have simply saved the link in my favourites folder and very occasionally revisited the odd one. Who can really be bothered revisiting every webpage they've bookmarked on a regular basis... one at a time? Well, not me at any rate. But this is brilliant. You can see at a glance what's new and what takes your fancy. I think you could easily manage to follow a high quantity of blogs this way. In fact, this exercise gave me the bug to start hunting down some more of my own.

My favourite library-related feed is Swiss Army Librarian. I was particularly taken with the idea adopted by one Children's Librarian who selected a number of books that she thought were good but had boring covers and had children design their own jackets to wrap around them! We could have some fun doing that in the Bodleian, although it could prove problematic. Anyone fancy having a go at a quirky redesign for the Journal of Urology?