RSS

Do you think that RSS feeds ask the user, How can I help you? Or is the user asking RSS, How can you help me?

Feeds that I subscribed to:

Music reviewers who dig up buried treasures: KEXP album reviews and Global Hit on Public Radio International's The World. I've had both sites bookmarked and on Music Selection Resources on the WWW for a while; I'll be comparing links to feeds for ease-of-use.

To locate library-related content, I used Bloglines and Google blog search. Picks: Librarian's Index to the Internet (like Yahoo, but without the commercials) and Union Librarian.

A good test of anything is to use it for something that is difficult to do. So, I used Bloglines, Google blog search, Syndic8 and Feedster to look for content related to the singer Misora Hibari (who was bigger-than-Elvis-huge in Japan--160 films, etc, and astonishing technical mastery, but virtually unknown in the U. S. ...so which country is the island, again?).

What I settled on was adding an RSS feed from YouTube-- looking specifically for the tags Misora Hibari or 美空ひばり. That way, I'll know when new clips with those tags are available. That's genuinely useful to me.

Last of all, I added Bloglines to del.icio.us for a convenient one-stop info shop.