Thing 8-9: RSS my ARSE

Hmmm. Not a very successful day trying to RSS and feed my blog. Once I found one library-related blog, I ended up adding a lot of feeds to my Bloglines account by just clicking onto the "related feeds" tab. It sort of felt like cheating, but I did find a lot of cool library blogs.

I don't know if I'd ever really use the account, but I guess if I wanted to keep track of a lot of blogs it would be useful. I do have a few personal ones I look at occasionally, so maybe it would be worth a try. But for only one or two blogs, it certainly doesn't seem worth the effort.

I did add to my blog the list of Blogline feeds I compiled. Since most of them were chosen fairly randomly, I hope there isn't anything offensive in the mix!

Practical library applications:
Perhaps on a library's website they could have a blog feed of blogs of local people, including local office holders, businesses, clubs, nonprofits, as well as library staff members. I'm not sure how selection would be done--perhaps similarly to how we vet the Community Information database. There would need to be strict guidelines that blogs need to be relevant to the area and also relatively "public" friendly. Once it is all set up, a monthly or bimonthly run through of the blogs to make sure none have gone south would be needed.

Tips for adding feeds to your Blogline account:

Have a few blogs already earmarked to add, otherwise creating feeds is pretty frustrating. You can find interesting blogs by limiting Google to search for blogs and then do a subject search.