Bloglines Update

Bloglines has overhauled their site and added some new features in celebration of their one-year anniversary (press release).

I still prefer NewzCrawler because of the functionality, but the recent changes make Bloglines less clunky, enough so that it'll be worth updating my subscriptions in Bloglines so I can check feeds from home. This is what I have so far.

RSS: Crystallography Journals Online

I checked out eFeeds(sm) for updates, and noticed that Crystallography Journals Online now offers feeds for their 7 journals.

Kudos to the IUCr, not only for making the feeds available, but for also publicizing them so clearly on the Web site.

Each feed provides the current issue's article titles, along with synopses and links to their online version. The feeds are updated whenever a new journal article or issue is published.

B-Feeds(sm): Web Feeds for Books and Monographs

Another feed registry from Gerry McKiernan:

B-Feeds(sm): Web Feeds for Books and Monographs is a categorized registry of site that offer RSS/XML, Atom, or other Web feeds, to compilations, directories, lists, or reviews for academic or scholarly books or monographic works. B-Feeds(sm) is a companion to eFeeds(sm), a registry devoted to electronic journals that offer Web feeds.

RSSfeeds.com

RSSfeeds.com is a RSS directory containing links to RSS feeds. We do not collect the data in the feeds, like some other sites, but we specialize in categorizing the feeds in a directory that is based on Netscape's DMOZ Open directory.

This directory is still very much a WIP. I would pick one of the Top categories, pick one of the subcateorgies, and work my way down until there were no more subcateorgies available. In most of the cases, I got a "There are no feeds in this category." I had mixed success with the Search option, as well.

Each indexed feed has a factsheet that may include additional information like the RSSfeeds directory path and additional feeds from the same host.

New York Times/RSS

RSS feeds for have been available for a while (via Userland), but they're now available directly from the NYT site. As far as I can tell, you can't actually get to the list of feeds from the Times homepage at this time.

Most of the 27 feeds reflect the newspaper's natural divisions: Business, Technology, Books, Science, International, Washington, Editorials/Op-Ed, etc. They have also added some Web-specific feeds like NYTimes.com Home Page and Most E-Mailed Articles.

Survey of RSS Readers

In the July 2004 issue of PC World, Bob Stepno has written a timely and useful article on RSS readers that includes a detailed comparision chart of 18 readers. The chart gives prices, pros, cons and additional comments. Stepno also reviewed another 5 readers that didn't make it into the original article.

I've used Bloglines in presentations, and I use NewzCrawler for my daily reading. I don't have time to try out any others, which is why Stepno's article is so helpful.

RSS: MERLOT

MERLOT has 30 RSS channels. To see the feeds, you'll need to register your name, email and institution. The channels are divided into subject categories: biology, business, information technology, music, etc., and for most of the subjects there are separate channels for recently submitted materials and recently peer reviewed materials. I added the four biology and chemistry feeds to NewzCrawler list.

MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected here along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments.

What's TheFuss With RSS?

A wiki page on RSS and learning objects, from the authors of the MERLOT presentation.

Syndiating Learning Objects with RSS and Trackback

A presentation from the 2003 MERLOT International Conference.

From the abstract:

This presentation will demonstrate how to create RSS views into the collections from different organizations. These views may be aggregated into user defined collections via desktop applications such as Amphetadesk and NetNewsWire, and even allow collections defined by academic subject.

Finally, blogs connected to the RSS feeds might provide a component of object contextuality that is beyond the meta-data. Faculty content developers find objects via RSS feeds coming into their blog site, and use "auto-discovery" tools to provide commentary on how the object might be or is used in an instructional context. "TrackBack" allows objects to record which external sites have blogged on these objects

Each presenter will describe how little effort it took to generate the RSS feeds into existing repositories and demonstrate ease of use of readily available tools for expanding the network of "blogged" objects.

RSS: A Learning Technology

Another article about RSS, but with an emphasis on its potential in the learning environment.