RSS

I was actually not familiar with RSS before starting these L2 lessons. I had seen the little orange icon on several of the webpages that I frequently use, but I never knew what it meant. So this meant that every morning, part of my routine was to check my e-mail, navigate to a different website to check the news, navigate to a different website to check the weather, and then navigate to several other websites to check various blogs. (I have several friends who are doing very interesting things all across the world. Many of them don't have regular access to the internet or phones or even a reliable postal service, so the only way that I can keep track of what they're doing is through their blogs. This also means that they don't update their blogs regularly, so even though I check them every day so that I don't miss anything, more often than not, nothing has been posted.) Now that I have my bloglines account set up, it'll take much less time to do all this. I'm not sure yet what I'll do with the extra time--maybe actually read the entire news articles instead of just the headlines.

As thrilled as I am with streamlining my morning routine, I'm not really sure yet how RSS fits in with L2. Oberlin College Library, the library that I worked for while I was in college, has a blog, and I used my bloglines account to link to that blog so that I know what's going on there (mostly notifications about when books are due and new library furniture, etc.). But it seems that in order for RSS to be helpful to us at BPL on a patron rather than personal (i.e., librarian) level, we need to first have a BPL blog and then let patrons know about it and teach them how to use something like bloglines to keep track of the blog. I understand how RSS is Web 2.0, but it seems like we have a few steps before we can use it at BPL2. But I'm certainly pleased with my own new use of RSS!