Forbes

The RSS Weblog mentioned Forbes' new list of feeds. This is another one in the "we have lots of feeds but we're not going to make it easy for you to find them" category. IMO, this is just as bad as not having the feeds at all.

Forbes now has over 40 feeds. Most of them fall into broad categories: business, personal finance, work, technology and lifestyle. There are also feeds for latest headlines, news from the markets, columnists and investment newsletters.

RSSCalendar.com

This is one of those new, nifty tools that I'd love to try out, but honestly do not have the time to do so. You can create a calendar of events, from an individual to an organization, and then create an RSS feed for that calendar.

Wikies 101

In the new LLRX.com, Chris Hayes offers a nice introduction to Wikies.

We used an internal Wiki last year to write up our self-study report for the library's administrative review. Since there were six of us, we decided it would be easier to have the report online (in a password-protected location) where we could all update it without e-mailing drafts back and forth. The experience wasn't bad, but as far as I know the Wiki been abandoned for now. We moved to a content management system this year, so we're using the CMS to write, share and update documents. We're using it for everything from literature review lists to policy drafts like the Blog Style Manual, and two librarians recently placed a copy of their article in the CMS so they could work on it. Considering how many times Doug and I sent copies of the two articles back and forth while we were writing and editing them, this last idea makes a lot of sense. The CMS has become our de-facto Wiki, even though it's missing features like the ability to track editing changes to the document.

Computer Company Feeds

I took at a look at Web sites of computer hardward and software companies to see what they're offering in terms of newsfeeds.

Observations
None of the sites make their feeds available from their home page.  I ended up searching their sites or searching Google (limiting the searches by domain name).  If I did find a page of feeds, it was often difficult or impossible to find a clear naviagional path back to the homepage.

Apple: More than 40 feeds at this time, including 10 for iTunes and 26 for OS X downloads.  They also have feeds for "hot news" and new Mac products.

Sun Microsystems: 4 feeds for information about Sun's developer content. Sun has also set up a site for their employee blogs.

Macromedia: 16 product notification feeds

Microsoft:  So far, I haven't been able to find a single page of all of their feeds. Microsoft Research has 3 feeds: news/headlines, downloads and publications. MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) has 23 feeds for products (Longhorn, Office) and issues (Security) . Microsoft also has a employee blogging community.

Oracle: The Oracle Technology Network has 6 feeds. There are also links to external, Oracle development-related blogs.

No feeds or blogs, as far as I could tell: Dell, HP, Intel

RSS: News You Choose

CNET at Work has just put up their own "RSS 101" page, which includes a glossary and reviews of 5 newsreaders (Pluck is their choice). There's also a nifty little video (3:30 min.)  of one of the CNET.com editors giving a brief overview of RSS and how to use it.

Blogging Best Practices

As I mentioned last week, I called together a meeting of the library bloggers to discuss a set of standards that we would not only put in place, but could publicize internally (for future library bloggers)  as well as externally for interested parties outside the library. I attended an SLA workshop on blogging as a guest speaker, and several people asked about standards among the many blogs we have.
 
When we started this service, we wanted as few restrictions as possible so the librarians would be encouraged to blog. Doug and I had talked several times during the spring about getting everyone together to talk about a set of uniform practices, but we never got to it. The workshop was a good impetus to get us moving.
 
We met and discussed what we'd want in a style manual. Doug and I took notes and I incorporated those into an existing draft in our library's Web manual. Here's a link to our draft. The original is on the library intranet, so I just copied it here.

More Nature Feeds

Nature has just doubled the number of available feeds, including 7 for the Nature Reviews journals. There's also the ToC feed for the main journal, and the Nature Science Update feed is now called News@nature.com. This is their new "premium" site, so I'm not sure if there's going to be a separate feed for that content or if the feed will be a mix of headlines to free and subscription articles. If it's the latter, I'll have the Nature feed removed from Science News so patrons aren't trying to access the so-called premium articles and getting blocked.

I'll mention this to the Nature rep who recently contacted me about their feeds and this new news site.

Comics RSS Feeds

I have comics (or graphic novels or graphic literature) on the brain right now because I'm giving a presentation and show-and-tell for a local library group later today. Here are two good feeds if you're interested:

Comics Worth Reading is site of reviews and recommendations by Johanna Carlson (feed). Comics2Film is a resource for news about movies and television shows with ties to comics (feed).

GSU Library Blog Expansion

Last week, I called a meeting of the library bloggers so we could discuss some issues, including standards (or "best practices") and suggestions for technical and interface improvements.

Thanks to our Web Development Librarian and Web Programmer, the major changes we wanted have already gone into effect.

Previously, our main news page consisted of PR announcements and was infrequently updated, while a list of the five most recently posted items on the specialized blogs was buried in the descriptive information in the right margin. The page has been reconfigured to emphasize the specialized blogs by displaying the headlines of the items posted on all of the blogs. Essentially, it's a feed for the library blogs. Each headline has a timestamp and the name of the librarian and link to their blog.

The other major change is that the Social Sciences News blog is gone, which I figured would happen eventually. This was started up by five librarians who were initially concerned they wouldn't have enough to post on their own. Not surprisingly, they became the most prolific bloggers of the bunch. However, I am concerned about some of the divisions. Two of the librarians have each opted for three blogs, one for each of their subject areas. This brings up two issues: posting frequency and overlap due to posting the same item in more than one blog. We'll see how it goes; I'm pretty sure some of the blogs can be "reconstituted" at a later date Meanwhile, the two education librarians will have their own space, while the behavioral sciences librarian has opted for one blog for her three areas.

ListGarden: RSS Feed Generator Program

ListGarden is a new program that will allow you to create your own RSS feeds (knowledge of XML or RSS not necessary). You can not only create feeds for blogs, but also as "update notices" for non-blog Web sites. According to the information on the page, feeds can also be generated for use within firewalls for corporate intranets.