RSS musings

RSS is one of those things I have been aware of and tinkered with but have not really used a great deal. For personal rather than professional use I can't really see myself using it at all. I guess I can kind of see the appeal of going to one location to see if your regular online haunts have been updated rather than having to visit them individually but don’t really care about that. I can see it as saving a little time but not all that much time unless you really do have a lot of websites you feel the need to visit regularly and feel the need to be up to speed. Personally I'm probably going to be content to visit what sites I visit on an irregular basis and come across the new stuff when I do and I don't really feel like I'm wasting a great deal of time when I spend a few seconds to go to one of my book marked sites and see that no there isn't any new content. If it's a site I frequent with any degree of regularity I have a pretty good idea on how often it is likely to be updated in general and go there accordingly depending on my level of interest. I'll check on a website when I'm interested in checking on it and if there is new content that's good and if there isn't so be it. Ultimately I'm probably a fairly lackadaisical internet user and the main advantages of RSS it seems to me are keeping up to date and (To a limited extent) saving time.

As a work tool I can see RSS feeds having far greater value. In the workplace saving that extra little bit of time might be worthwhile and being as up to date as possible on whatever information source you need to know about could clearly be useful especially if one of your tasks is to provide said information to your clients. Probably something that would be of more use in a special or possibly an academic library rather than a public library where I now work. In fact the only time I had ever used RSS before this course was when I was briefly working at The State Library and needed to keep up to date on the release of a number of electronic publications. In a situation like that having one stop where you can quickly see what has been updated and go straight to it is a more efficient way of working.

Musing 2: Electric Boogaloo aka. The Flickring

Better late than never I have taken a look Flickr and in lieu of anything imaginative to do I did the thing that everyone does sooner or later on the internet be it just on google or wherever and did a search for my own name to see what would come up. I found a whole of photos of people sharing my name or one of my names, photos of places taken by people with my name or one of my names, quite a lot of inside shots of hospitals, some paintings by a 19th century artist with my name and even some photos of school named after someone sharing my name, along with truly random pictures of things such as typewriters and mallards.

If I were to paint a horse it wouldn't be quite as good as the one my 19th century namesake did...

Musing 1

Welcome to my first blog posting. It's not exactly rocket surgery but it is still good to learn these things and the odds are that I would never have bothered to learn with signing up for the Web 2.0 course. I'll probably get around to posting something more substantial when I can think of something to say.

Actually I'm a impressed at the way blogger keeps saving my draft every thirty seconds or so even if I do find the movement at the bottom of the screen a little disconcerting.