Week 2, Thing 3: RSS feeds

On to week 2! Now you've got your blog set up and have registered it with us, we're going to explore how to gather all of the blogs and news sites you want to keep track of into one place.

RSS (commonly known as Really Simple Syndication) allows you to view new content from web sites, blog entries, etc in one place, without having to visit the individual sites. This obviously makes following library news and developments a lot easier, as all the news comes to you!

The first step you need to take when subscribing to RSS feeds is to sign up for a feed reader. There are many available but for the purposes of this programme we will use Google Reader as you have already created an account with Google. As an example of how to subscribe to a feed, let's get you subscribed to the Cam23 2.0 blog. In the right sidebar of this blog there is a "Subscribe to..." box. Click on the arrow next to "Posts", and click "Add to Google". This should take you to your Google Reader (you may need to sign in with your Google account) and you can then subscribe to this feed. From now on, whenever we post something new it will come straight to your Reader, eliminating the need to keep checking the site. You can subscribe to other blogs and news sites in a similar way, even if they don't have a subscribe button embedded in their site, most web browsers will have an RSS button - this may be up by the address bar, or in Firefox 4 this is in the bookmarks menu.

We have added all the registered Cam23 2.0 blogs to the "blogroll" in the left sidebar, so spend some time this week reading a few of the blogs, and then subscribe to your favourites, or click here to subscribe to all the Cam23 2.0 blogs in one go.

In addition to the Cam23 2.0 blogs, here are a few other library-related blogs which I find useful:

• Phil Bradley's weblog - "where librarians and the internet meet" - search engines, web 2.0 technologies
• The Wikiman - library advocacy and marketing, social media
• Librarian by Day - US librarian writing about (amongst other things) transliteracy and digital library services
• Tower Project Blog - ever wanted to know more about what was in the UL tower? This is the blog for you!
• Rarely Sited - special collections and outreach blog set up by Cambridge's very own Naomi Herbert
• Mashable - social media and technology news

For some more suggestions of library blogs to subscribe to, the 2011 Salem Library Blog Award winners were announced a couple of weeks ago, giving us another source of outstanding library blogs to add to our feed readers.

Where do you get your library news and information from? When you blog about this Thing, please share any useful blogs you have come across!

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