Potluck #56: To Tweet or Not To Tweet...Twitter

I opened a Twitter account a year and a half ago. I hadn't done much with it until this spring, though.

For this exercise, I checked out some of the other folks on Twitter. I even signed up for the Go USA Bid for World Cup. I found this by using the search feature. I've enjoyed keeping up with my friends this way but I think I still have much to learn. Also, thanks to this exercise, I found Product (RED) on Twitter and began following them. This reminds me much of Bloglines.

Week 4 #9 Finding Feeds

Bloglines is not the only RSS feed collector. Various sites offer a myriad of services. On Feedster, I was able to not only search for feeds from blogs, news, etc, I was also able to create and install a widget. This widget brings up any feed that mentions a term the user picks. I selected "Putumayo" because Putumayo produces a lot of kid friendly world music that I like to play at my programs. In order to know what is out there, my widget searches for the term Putumayo. My widget is in the left margin.

I must warn anyone wanting to make a Feedster widget must be using Internet Explorer 7 or my favorite Mozilla Firefox.

Happy Searching!

Week 4: #8 Keep it Really Simple - RSS Feeds

So much to read and so little time. . . this may be the life of the library professional. However, no one should feel put upon to go to many addresses in cyberspace to access the latest posting on their friend's blog or the most current draft pick. There are Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. An RSS feed is an address that grows and changes with the web content of its page. Even better, all these RSS feeds can be saved to one spot. Bloglines is an aggregate or collector of RSS feeds. Users can subscribe to RSS feeds and view the most recent blog postings in one spot. This is like shopping at Super Walmart instead of visiting various stores in that it's one stop shopping. While users must open an account with Bloglines, it is a free service.

I signed up for a Bloglines account and have subscribed to over 50 feeds. This is an attempt for me to keep up with what is going on in the news to my friends and other people participating in iHCPL. I have provided the Bloglines link as well as links to the blogs of other iHCPL participants.