Week 3 - RSS and Social Bookmarking

This week we delve into RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Social Bookmarking. RSS is the building block that makes Web 2.0 work in a seemless fashion. RSS is what allows us to take content and mkae it appear elsewhere. Social Bookmarking has changed the way people think about labels. Bookmarks or labels can be as strict or loose as you need them to be. They have given people more power over the information they consume.

Objectives This Week

At the end of this week, you should:

understand which breeds of social software create newsfeeds.
recognize and subscribe to a newsfeed.
recognize the various "flavors" of newsfeed format.
know how and why to include newsfeeds on a library web page.
recognize and be comfortable with using social-bookmarking services.
understand how to tag bookmarked links.
understand how tagging creates "folksonomies."

Presentations

RSS In Plain English, Common Craft

G etting up to Speed with RSS Webfeeds - Michele Mizejewski, Electronic Services Specialist Librarian, Redwood City Library

Make your library del.icio.us - Jason Griffey, Head of Library Information Technology, Lupton Library - University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Activities

Set up a feed (RSS) reader account in Bloglines (FAQ for Bloglines) or Google Reader (help pages for Google Reader). Subscribe to 5 things with RSS feeds (blogs, wikis, podcasts, news pages, etc.). Create a folder in your reader for a topic area and add one of your feeds to it. Bloglines or Google Reader may be blocked in some places. Please alert us if this is your situation.
Set up a del.icio.us account. (del.icio.us help) Add five URLs to your account and tag them with the tag fish4info. Look at what other people have added under the fish4info tag and add any sites you like to your list. Add someone from the class to your del.icio.us network.
Write a blog post about your reflections on the usefulness or your experience this week with either tagging or RSS.