As expected, the Librarians are on the cutting edge. The Merlin feed is an orange RSS icon at the bottom of their main page (subscribed). There's lots of other good stuff there on-site, including a fine set of learning links that can serve as a great 23 things starting point.
Crew Merlin aren't the only librarians sharing their love of the techy goodness. There are a number of Library blogs considering these issues in challenging and provocative ways. One must-see blog (I'm not kidding... this should be thing 24) is John Tropea's LibraryClips. This is like 23 Things on Steroids (but in a good way!). All the new "Web 2.0" technologies reviewed, dissected and reassembled in interesting new ways. John has been all over Rollyo (Thing #12) since 2005, and now that we're hip to RSS (thing #8), John can tell you how to pimp up Google Reader with 15 Firefox hacks. Can't go wrong at LibraryClips! (Man, I hope I'm not the only 23-thinger to use the word "pimp" in a post...Quick, someone else use it!)
In the same vein, (2.0 tech, not the p-word!) check out Nicole Engard's What I Learned Today, where there are pointers to some great discussions around Web 2.0, Libraries and Technology. One of Nicole's current discussions addresses the Librarian 2.0 manifesto by Laura Cohen. The manifesto can be read as either inspirational or somewhat depressing... as a charter for change or an admission of prevailing stuck-in-the-mud-ness. Nicole concurs with Tyler Cohen at Library Garden , who eloquently laments the fact that such a 2.0 manifesto should need to be written, & believes that we should consistently keep current with technology because that's just who we are. Is it new? Is it hip? Do the people want it? Then I'd better understand it too.....
An interesting debate.
These aren't the only Librarians in the Blogosphere. There are lots of other Library bloggers too. To find one that you like, check out Libdex's list of US Library blogs. Not exhaustive, but a good place to start...
So. Have set up a Bloglines account to track the blogs of my colleagues, & added some news sites there too, mostly having to do with the Rugby World Cup in France this September. England are the defending champions, but they're not at all likely to defend their title, sadly. The open against the USA on September 8th in Lens. Keep track of their performance on the IRB official World Cup site.
17-all in the 2nd period of overtime, & the ball comes back to Johnny Wilkinson, the man with the golden boot, and the rest is history... "They'll be dancing in the streets of insert hometown here tonight."
OK. Bloglines... After some wrasslin' I've been able to put my Bloglines blogroll into the sidebar of this blog. (See "My Colleagues" in the sidebar.) Putting the javascript blogroll in the sidebar was a bit tricky because the username I selected on Bloglines John-23 was not legal in the javascript inside Blogger, and so the blogroll wouldn't display. It took me a while to figure it out, but now that my username is John23, we're all set!
I'm not a huge fan of Bloglines. I prefer "river of news" style readers that deliver stories from multiple sources ordered by recency instead of clustered by source. I had a feed-crammed Kinja account for a long while. Google Reader provides a similar "stack" of stories from multiple sources with the most recent on the top. That way you can see the new goodies right away, without having to go into each site. Another great "halfway house" for learning about RSS is an e-mail subscription service like R-mail, that takes new feed entries, formats them as e-mail, and delivers them to your inbox. My feeling is that the "river" format maximises the benefits of RSS, especially if you're following a group of sites that respond to one another or a fast-breaking news story.
Anyhow. That's thing #8. Bloglines explored and accounted for.... Go England!
Here's the Feed settings page on Blogger, under Settings > Site Feed.
I'm building a 23 things blog, & I'm going to explore RSS as Thing 8. This blog already has a great set of feeds attached to it, though, and so for my "interesting" free post Thing 7, I'm going to explore the feed options offered by Blogger, and run the default feed through Feedburner so that I can collect subscriber stats and add extra goodies to the feed.
If you want to leave your feed as-is, Blogger offers 3 feed options:
1. The posts feed, which can either be "full" or "short". A full feed includes the whole text of the post. A short feed only includes part of the post and encourages readers to click-through to your site to see the rest of your article.
2. A comment feed, which allows readers to subscribe and keep track of any new comments that are sent.
3. A per-post comment feed, which allows a commenter to subscribe to the comments thread of a given post (perhaps one that they've commented on) so that any replies show up in their reader.
Blogger also includes the option to redirect the post feed through an external third-party service such as Feedburner. This new option is introduced on the Feedburner blog. Previously making this change was a big deal and involved a lot of template editing. Now it seems pretty straightforward, & is well worth it.
If you're interested in "burning your feed," check out the Feedburner Blogger Quickstart. It's all very straightforward:
1. On the Feedburner front page, type your blog URL in the "Start Feedburning Now" box:
2. Some sites offer feeds in multiple formats. Select which feed you want to burn. It doesn't matter which one you pick for our purposes:
3a. Choose a title and Feedburner address for your feed.
3b. Set up a Feedburner account for yourself (username, e-mail and password is all that is required.)
Keep a note of the Feed address that is assigned to your feed. We'll need that for step 6.
4. You're mostly done in Feedburner... "Skip directly to feed management" to see your stats, unless you want to get into some of Feedburner's extra goodies. If you do, click "Next"
5. Choose which additional stats tracking services you'd like to activate
After you click "next" at this point, you'll get into some detailed Feed options. Your feed stats will be under the "analyze" tab. There are other useful tools under "optimize" and "publicize."
6. One more step. Go back into your Blogger account under Settings> Site Feed. Type or paste your Feedburner Feed Address (from step 3) into the "Post Feed Redirect URL" box, and save your settings. Now Blogger knows that you want your subscribers to access your feed after it has had the Feedburner treatment, and not before.
You're all set! Now you'll have stats and the option to add feedflare. A burned feed is a wonderful "thing #7", and a great addition to a 23 Things blog!
