I follow hundreds of feeds so I’m always looking for ways to get through them all. Here’s how Robert Scoble does it. I don’t do everything he does but my style is very similar.
Especially with the events relating to the attempted change to the OCLC terms-of-services over the past several months, librarians are sensitive to TOS changes. For those interested in what’s going on with TOSs for online services such as Amazon.com and Apple, and other technology companies such as Verizon and Comcast, the EFF now has TOSBack, the terms-of-service tracker. Every time one of more than 50 services changes their TOS, the changes are posted and highlighted on the site. Additionally, an RSS feed is available for easy notification.
I must admit that I don’t completely see the point of this service as I see feeds as a replacement for e-mail but.
Let’s say you’ve got that one person that has mastered e-mail but there’s no way you’re ever going to get them to use a feed aggregator. If you can get them set up with feedmyinbox you can have them benefit from feeds but have them delivered to their inbox as e-mail.
Just enter the URL of the feed then your e-mail address and click Submit. Within minutes you’ll receive a confirmation e-mail. Once you’ve confirmed your e-mail address, you’ll receive one e-mail per day containing all of the new posts from that feed.
In all my years of using, publishing, teaching, and writing about RSS I have yet to be impressed with an RSS search engine. Sure, there’s always been Technorati, Syndic8, and the search built into Bloglines but they’ve all had their individual problems. This lack of excitement ended with my discovery of feedmil.
Head on over and enter a topic but, before you click search, adjust how much you’d like your results to be surprising vs. well known. At first, I’ll just leave that setting at the default for a search on quilting. I’ve received 1351 results, all RSS feeds.
Clicking on the first result you’ll get a boat-load of information about that feed including a screenshot, feed & site URLs, feed type, popularity, update frequency, description, and a tag cloud.
I headed back to the results screen and adjusted my results to more surprising. You can see that my results have significantly changed.
Don’t forget to take a look at the additional sliders down the right of the results page which will allow you to increase or decrease the significance of other keywords that appear in your results.
I’ve got a folder on a network drive into which other NLC staff put audio files that I need to produce for the NCompass Podcast. (You are a listener right?) In the past they’ve needed to e-mail me whenever they’ve left a file for me. Now, I’m notified via RSS of new files using the little program Folder-RSS. Just download the .exe file and remember where you put it. Then, create a scheduled task in windows to run this program as often as you’d like. (I’ve set mine to run whenever I log in.) You’ll also need to set the location of the folder you wish to monitor and the location and name of the RSS file you want created. This last bit might be the kicker for most people. You need to make sure that the RSS file is saved to a location that can be accessed via the Web. (In my case, that’s a mapped network drive that is a folder on our Web server.) Lastly, just point your RSS reader at the RSS file and subscribe. Now, whenever a new file is added to that folder you’ll receive a notification. How sweet is that? (Additional commands are available and can been viewed by just running the .exe file.)
