Thursday, January 31, 2008

Understanding RSS, Right-Brain Style

If a segment of the Library public is like me, (right-brained) understanding RSS and effectively subscribing and managing it could be a challenge. Signing up for Bloglines was extrememy easy, but grasping the relationships of choosing and managing feeds can be a little abstract. I'm also still learing how you share your RSS without necessarily sharing ALL your feeds with people who visit your blog. The Palinet tutorial mentions using feeds to keep up on where the cheapest gas is being sold. This is one of the most concrete uses of feed that I can imagine, given how much we talk about the price of gas, and how much time we can spend in gas lines when prices are jumping around. Other uses might be less immediately useful. It is so intimately tied to individual interests, and also how urgently you want information and how timely it must be to be satisfactory for you. I guess it would help to know just what percentage of library patrons use and depend on RSS feeds now, what portion of them would love the convenience if they could be encouraged to embrace the concept and how many are absolutely not interested. Also, what would it take to approach a real non-tech-minded patron and interest them in the concept just because we ourselves think it's a wonderful tool. Maybe if staff members were able to describe various real-world conveniences they themselves love, it would be contagious.

Being a visual learner, I love this site devoted to creating visual representations of the Periodic Table of Elements. In school, this was the bane of my existence, but this site simplifies such technical material by linking each element to a visual cue (Tungsten is represented by an image of a wolf with his tongue hanging out). We need something similar to make it more intuitive to use new technologies, if we are in that group who don't instinctively begin to talk in 2.0 lingo the minute we lay eyes on it. In a case like this, being less tech-savvy can be a distinct advantage by putting ourselves squarely in the camp of those who need to take it slow and have some illustratative element to their learning experience. Comments?

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