"Google is killing Google Reader...What Google has actually done is create a powerful infrastructure. The shape of that infrastructure influences everything that goes online. And it influences the allocation of mental resources of everyone who interacts with the online world. But there isn't much to the real human world that isn't shaped by the mental activity of the people in it! That's a lot of power to put in the hands of a company that now seems interested, mostly, in identifying core mass-market services it can use to maximise its return on investment. Now in the short run, that may mostly be a problem for all of us. To the extent that we become worried about this phenomenon, we may go out and find back-up services or other alternatives. This will be less convenient and more costly, in terms of time and money, but those sufficiently foresighted might feel it's a better option than opening up gmail one day to read that the email service, and the 10-year's worth of communication it holds, will soon be gone."

New Technology Emerges to Archive Web Pages by John Adams

News release: "Customer experience analytics firm ForeSee today released its report on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Quarterly E-Government Satisfaction Index, including an analysis of the state of social media in the federal government. ForeSee’s audit of social media activity in the federal government identified clear themes and best practices, showing that the public sector is learning to communicate with citizens in ways that are not usually associated with government services. ForeSee conducted an expert usability review of the 15 executive department websites in order to gauge how many participate in social media and how they do it. All are participating in the three most popular social platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—and many are using other new media and communications tools, from Flickr and podcasts to email newsletters and RSS feeds."

Privacy Impact Assessment for the Use of Unidirectional Social Media Applications Communications and Outreach, March 8, 2011. Kathleen McShea
Director of New Media and Web Communications, Office of Public Affairs, Department of Homeland Security

How to Hack RSS to Reduce Information Overload, By Dawn Foster: "Last week, I held a session at South by Southwest [SXSW] Interactive titled Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information, where I talked about creative ways to use RSS to manage information overload without using any programming skills. There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data), but most of that information isn’t interesting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you. The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don’t care about. The tools that I talked about in my SXSW session are focused on discarding or de-emphasizing the data you don’t need, while highlighting the data that’s relevant for you."

Privacy Impact Assessment for the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning Haiti Social Media Disaster Monitoring Initiative, January 21, 2010: "The Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS), National Operations Center (NOC), has launched a Haiti Social Media Disaster Monitoring Initiative (Initiative) to assist the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and its components involved in the response, recovery, and rebuilding effort resulting from the recent earthquake and after-effects in Haiti. The NOC is using this vehicle to fulfill its statutory responsibility to provide situational awareness and establish a common operating picture for the federal Government, and for those state, local, and tribal governments, as appropriate, assisting with the response, recovery, and rebuilding effort in Haiti. OPS may also share information with international partners and the private sector where necessary and appropriate for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. The NOC is only monitoring publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards to collect information used in providing situational awareness and to establish a common operating picture....[a partial list] of the types of sites that the NOC is reviewing in order to improve its situational awareness and common operating picture related to Haiti earthquake [is available on last page of document].

Report: Social Networking in Government: Opportunities & Challenges, Human Capital Institute, January 2010

News release: "Several changes have been made to THOMAS for the second session of the 111th Congress. These changes include: Bookmarking and Sharing Widget; Top Five Bills; New RSS feed: Bills Presented to the President; Contacting Members of Congress; Tip of the Week; Bill Text PDFs."

The Government Domain: Tracking Congress 2.0 - With the 111th Congress of the United States reconvening on September 8th, e-gov expert Peggy Garvin highlights new tools and sources that enhance and expand your ability to track and monitor the action.

DoD Web 2.0 Guidance Forum - Value of Web 2.0 Capabilities: "In examining how the Department of Defense should take maximal advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities (including social networking services, social media, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.), we are looking at how Web 2.0 capabilities can be used to improve current and future Department operations. Operations in this sense include both broad business and warfighting processes. Specifically, we are looking for insight from various Defense interest groups and think tanks, including Veterans groups, industry groups and individuals who have insights they can share regarding how Web 2.0 capabilities can be used to transform how the Defense Department operates."

Blackberry Apps for Lawyers: Nicole Black highlights an assortment of Blackberry applications for research, document management, mobile communications, music, dictation and more - all of which would benefit just about any law practice.

GNC.com: "The days of a Web presence being an optional component for agencies are long gone. For most citizens, the primary way of interacting with their government is through Web sites. By and large, agencies have responded to that demand by creating richer, more interactive sites. A lot has changed since Government Computer News created its first list of 10 great government Web sites last year. For one thing, social networking has moved into the mainstream, and to maintain a presence in the communities they serve, the smartest agencies have established footholds on Twitter, Facebook and other such sites." Here is the latest: Great .Gov Web Sites 10 sites that take online government to the next level."

"GovFresh is a live feed of official news from U.S. Government Twitter, YouTube, RSS, Facebook, Flickr accounts and more, all in one place."

"The Congressional Record Daily Digest is now available as the first RSS feed from THOMAS. The Daily Digest from THOMAS is one of five RSS feeds available from the Law Library of Congress as described on our RSS Feeds and Email Delivery http://www.loc.gov/law/news/rss.php page. To see a complete list of RSS feeds and email updates available through the Library of Congress, please visit Library of Congress RSS Feeds and Email Subscriptions. For help with subscribing and suggestions for news readers, please see Library of Congress RSS Feeds http://www.loc.gov/rss/faq.html." [Emily Carr, Legal Reference Specialist, Law Library of Congress]

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide: Sabrina I. Pacifici's completely revised and updated pathfinder focuses on leveraging selected reliable, focused, free and low cost sites and sources to effectively profile and monitor companies, markets, countries, people, and issues. This guide is a "best of list" of web, database and email alert products, services and tools, as well links to content specific sources produced by governments, academia, NGOs, the media and various publishers.

"Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon. You can read more background on the project or just get started: Visualizations / What Are Your Research Ideas? / Keep Up-To-Date with Media Cloud."

Post-Conference Workshop on Competitive Intelligence, April 2, 2009 - 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM, Sabrina I. Pacifici, Law Librarian, & Founder/Editor/Publisher, LLRX.com and beSpacific.com

Collaboration Through Wikis at Hicks Morley - Heather Colman explains how wikis were an ideal KM solution for her law firm. Quick and easy to set up, requiring little IT support, wikis support central data repositories and provide features including search capabilities, email, RSS, and also allow users to create a taxonomy of subject tags to classify information.

"Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov. A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and his new administration officially came to life. One of the first changes is the White House's new website, which will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.

Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future. WhiteHouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement. Just like your new government, WhiteHouse.gov and the rest of the Administration's online programs will put citizens first. Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:

Communication...This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated. Check out the briefing room, keep tabs on the blog (RSS feed) and take a moment to sign up for e-mail updates from the President and his administration so you can be sure to know about major announcements and decisions.

Transparency...The President's executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.

Participation...One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it."

News release: "Vehicle owners across the nation can be instantly informed of a safety recall under a new automated alert system announced today by U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters. The recall alerts can be received via e-mail or RSS-feeds on personal computers, cell phones or PDA devices-automatically and free-of-charge. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are about 600 vehicle recalls each year. Historically, one in four motorists ignore these recalls when they are announced."

"Did you ever want to get a help file for Gmail, Google Docs or for Google Desktop so you can print it or save it on your computer? All Google services have help centers that include information about features, tutorials, troubleshooting guides, but you need to find the information in a complicated hierarchy of topics or use the search box. Fortunately, there's a way to save all the information related to a Google service: append ?fulldump=1 to the address of a Google help center. This doesn't work for all Google services, but here's a list of addresses that dump all the information from a help center (note that the pages are very large and are frequently updated.)"

Workshop 8 – Monitoring & Current Awareness: Mining Blogs & RSS for Research, 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM, Sunday April 6, 2008 - Sabrina I. Pacifici, Law Librarian, Founder/Editor/Publisher, LLRX.com and Author, beSpacific.com.

"Tail Report has launched with the goal to map out how money is made in the blogosphere. Tail Report works by asking users to anonymously submit information about their site's traffic, rank and monthly revenue. In return, the user receives a custom report detailing what other websites are making and how their revenue compares based a number of factors, such as traffic, rank, number of RSS subscribers, age, number of employees, content, and ad networks."

"LibWorm Beta is intended to be a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries. LibWorm collects updates from about 1400 RSS feeds (and growing). The contents of these feeds are then available for searching, and search results can themselves be output as an RSS feed that the user can subscribe to either in his/her favourite aggregator or in LibWorm's built-in aggregator...Each feed searched by LibWorm has been assigned a category, so when you browse by Feed Category, you're seeing all the content from the feeds that have been assigned to that category. Subjects are pre-built searches, usually of greater complexity than the user interface currently supports, for common subjects of interest to libraryfolk." This site is free.

"MedWorm is a medical RSS feed provider as well as a search engine built on data collected from RSS feeds...MedWorm collects updates from over 4000 authoritative data sources (growing each day) via RSS feeds. From the data collected, MedWorm provides new outgoing RSS feeds on various medical categories that you can subscribe to, via the free MedWorm online service, or another RSS reader of your choice, such as Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader or FeedDemon." Users may construct free text key word searches, or search for an exact phrase, and may further specify inclusion of content from the following areas: news, consumer, journals, organizations, info and blogs. This service is free.

Posted on July 19, 2007, By Erin Teeling in Newspaper Study, Bivings, Research (TBG): "We have recently completed the 2007 study of America’s top 100 newspaper websites, entitled American Newspapers and the Internet; Threat or Opportunity? As the newspaper industry continues to suffer declines in readership and circulation, using the Internet to expand a newspaper’s reach is becoming more and more important. While many industry experts fear that the Internet will spell the end of newspapers as we know them, our team here at TBG feels that the Internet presents newspapers with a unique opportunity to make up for lost circulation and readership. This study explores these concepts, as well as the difficulties facing newspapers regarding online advertising, shrinking staffs, and reaching out to consumers...research data is available in Excel format here."

"A new ICMPA study takes a look at the media's use of RSS and concludes that RSS feeds work very poorly for those who use news for more than infotainment. The study looked at 19 of the world's top news sites to see which ones gave the users of their RSS feeds the same number of stories, the same range of news sources, in as timely a fashion as could be gotten if those users went to the individual websites."

Google Reader Blog: "...you can [now] use Google Reader offline...To do this, we've used the newly released Google Gears, a browser plugin that enables offline web applications. Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader."

From the Center for Media and the Public Agenda at University of Maryland, College Park:

Tim Stanley and the Justia team keep rolling out new services for the legal community that assist us in accessing essential government documents via user-friendly websites, with accompanying RSS feeds and customized search capabilities. Today news is about the launch of a free, searchable database of Federal Register Regulations, Proposed Rules and Notices. This site parses the subject and topical content, as well as document type, from each daily Federal Register Index, and allows users to browse the content, and create a custom filter of specific content of interest. The site supports RSS feeds for each agency's respective documents, specific to document type as well.

"RSStalker.com provides RSS feeds to track price changes of Amazon.com products. Generate a feed for a single product or for an entire wishlist. Add it to your favorite aggregator and you will be automatically notified when the price changes. Simply unsubscribe to the feed when you are done...Amazon.com doesn't advertise it, but they have a 30 day price drop policy. If you bought something from them and they lower the price within 30 days, just fill out a form and they'll refund you the difference. See the FAQ for details."

Another terrific project from the Justia team, this database [still under development] of recently filed Federal District Court civil cases allows users to browse by State, Nature of Suit and Cases, as well as seach by Party Name, jurisdiction, type of lawsuit, and within a given date range. According to Tim Stanley, there are currently "over 300,000 case titles since January 1, 2006, and they are updating [the database] daily."

Additional features include:

Links to the RSS feeds are as follows:

List of Library of Congress RSS Feeds
News - A bulletin service of the latest news from the world's preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing resources to Congress and the American people
Upcoming Events - Listing of the dozens of free concerts, lectures, exhibitions, symposia, films and other special programs offered at the Library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
New on the Web - Updates on new collections, features, reference materials and other services available on the Library's award-winning Web site New Webcasts: The latest webcasts and podcasts of lectures and events sponsored by the Library
What's New in Science Reference - new products and services on the subject of science and technology from the Library's Science, Technology & Business Division.

"...for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." [Link]

With a wide range of content formats, from podcasts to RSS and searchable databases, the OYEZ blog is a unique and content richs online resource to locate cases, information on the justices, Listen to or download the official version of recent oral arguments, and read court related news.

Election Night 2006 An Evening in the Life of the American Media, November 27, 2006 - by the Project for Excellence in Journalism: "For the blogosphere, a fairly smooth election night made things something of a disappointment. For top newspaper Web sites, finding the balance between speed and offering a rich narrative still has to be reconciled. For television, slow results and a lack of prepared material tilted coverage toward chatter, especially for the cable networks. Perhaps the destinations best suited to Election Night 2006 were the Web sites of TV news operations, plus one aggregator. They offered a combination of quick access to results plus the ability of users—largely through access to exit poll data or Associated Press material—to plumb a wealth of statistical information on their own. These conclusions—plus five lessons about the media—are among the findings of a widespread review of media outlets on Election Night 2006." [Note that this report profiles only 6 blogs - not a balanced or comprehensive approach in the context of the vast resources available to the broadcast news sites as well as newspaper sites.]

The complete November 2006 issue is available at www.llrx.com

There are 15 new articles in total, so please visit the homepage for links to and abstracts of all this month's content. Many thanks to all the authors, and have a safe and happy holiday.

Press Release, October 18, 2006: "Microsoft Corp. today released to the public Windows® Internet Explorer® 7 for Windows XP, the latest version of the world’s most popular Web browser. Customers can upgrade and browse the Web with confidence knowing that the new browser provides a greater level of security, makes everyday tasks easier, and works well with the Web sites they visit."

Press release: "...the Seventh Circuit is the first federal court of appeals to make RSS feeds of opinions and audio recordings of oral arguments available from its Web site .

"Feed Rinse is an easy to use tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren't interested in. It's like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions."

Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32–44.

Refereed technical papers from 11 research areas are available from the WWW2006 Conference, May 23-26, 2006. Topic areas include: business success, next wave, education and science, security and health.

PandemicFlu.gov: "One-stop access to U.S. Government avian and pandemic flu information. Managed by the Department of Health and Human Services. In the event of a pandemic, this will be the authoritative site for U.S. government information on the pandemic." The site recently added a News Room (updates available via RSS) offering topical news items, news releases, speeches, and testimony.

Related government documents:

Inside Look: Internet Explorer 7, Beta 2, by Wei-Meng Lee

Malware - Future Trends, by Dancho Danchev,10/01/06 (26 pages, PDF).

In 2005, there was alot written about RSS, from the standpoint of marketing, enterprise-wide communications, current awareness monitoring, and as an app that perhaps could significantly diminish the use of email. Interesting, therefore, to note this article, It's time to bury RSS. Will 2006 be the year of aggregated feeds?

As reported by ClickZ News, the Washington Post.com will now provide access to articles for a 60 day period following publication, according to James M. Brady, Executive Editor. Prior to this, articles were archived after 14 days. Extending access to readers, via blogs and RSS, is credited as a key reason for the change.

RSS Aggregation - Part 1: The Partnership

GAA now provides daily updates of reports and testimony via RSS. Just click on the orange RSS button on the front page, for further information. [JoAnna Berry, Reference and Research, Government Accountability Office]

PC World: Microsoft Makes RSS a Two-Way Street - Proposed 'extensions' to specification allow multidirectional synchronization.

Oklahoma Courts Now Offer RSS Newsfeeds: "You can now receive Oklahoma appellate court opinions and Oklahoma Attorney General opinions via RSS newsfeeds at no charge." As Jim indicates, Oklahoma joins two other trailblazing states, West Virginia and Louisiana, who also offer feeds.

Yahoo! White Paper on RSS (12 pages, PDF)

Google launched a beta version of Google Reader, a service that requires users to have a gmail account.

A new service from SurfWax: Scan Top RSS Feeds by Title: (updated hourly; covers past seven days; sorted by date)

From Stateline.org, this RSS feed on Hurricane Katrina provides regular updates on specific efforts underway by states impacted by the disaster, as well as others throught the country that are responding with increased efforts directed toward disaster planning.

A new website was launched by the Congressional information services company Gallerywatch.com, called USCongress.com. The site, whose content and sources will expand in upcoming weeks and months, is already a significant resource for government documents on a wide range of issues associated with Katrina, both before the disaster and its aftermath. The site is focused on providing up-to-date access to essential government documents, including otherwise hard to locate CRS reports, federal agency and state press releases, the text of legislation introduced in response to the disaster, letters to the President from Senate and House leaders, as well as commentary from Congress Daily, the Energy Daily, and transcripts supplied by the Federal News Service. All of this information is available free, currently offers three RSS feeds, and will no doubt be an invaluable monitoring tool for researchers.

GPO's "What's New" website updates which provide links to full-text versions of significant government documents, is now also available via an RSS feed.

The FDA has a website that provides links to all of the agency's RSS feeds, which currently include: press releases, recalls, food safety news and medical device information and news.

"Gartner...released its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, assessing the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 44 technologies and trends over the coming decade." [press release]

How journalists use blogs.

The patent law experts at rethink(ip) have created RSS feeds for all news items and notices released by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Terrific resource, and thanks to Dennis Kennedy for the link.

From Jim Moore's Journal: Reporting on systems evolving, the following posting yesterday provides step by step details on how researchers can easily and effectively leverage RSS: RSS-oriented search engines are appearing, including MSN search, with RSS output and one-click subscriptions to leading news aggregators.

Microsoft exec defends RSS rebranding - Renaming to 'Web feeds' spurs debate among bloggers

From Google: About Feeds and Terms of Use:

What is RSS and Why Should I Care?, presented by Marianne Lenox, Staff Training and Development Coordinator, Huntsville Madison County Public Library, July 2005. [Peter Scott]

Public Awareness of Internet Terms, 7/20/2005: "The average American internet user is not sure what podcasting is, what an RSS feed does, or what the term phishing means." The data memo is 7 pages, PDF.

Driven to distraction by technology: "The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state."

RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, Compared: "People who generate syndication feeds have a choice of feed formats. As of mid-2005, the two most likely candidates will be RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0. The purpose of this page is to summarize, as clearly and simply as possible, the differences between the RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 syndication languages."

Selected PowerPoint presentations of sessions from the Business & Finance Division, Information Technology Division, Military Librarians Division, and Science-Technology Division, from the SLA 2005 Conference, Toronto, Ontario CANADA, June 5-8, 2005 are available free at via this Link.

This New York Times article discusses the growing interest in, and testing of, delivering adverts to consumers via RSS feeds, which may in some measure be an inevitable result of the hype the technology has been receiving from both the blogging and MSM communities. Despite a strong current of opposition in some quarters to using RSS as an e-commerce channel, this may be an unstoppable wave.

The Microsoft Development Center has extensive and detailed documentation on RSS implementation in Longhorn: "This paper describes RSS in the context of a vision for how web content is and will be consumed, explores opportunities enabled by incorporating RSS functionality into applications and outlines the Windows platform services that make this easy."

What is the future for Web sites in a world of RSS? by Matt McAlister, VP & General Manager, Online, InfoWorld. [Micro Persuasion]

Nick Bradbury's May 20 post, RSS, Spam and Spyware, raises significant questions about security and privacy issues arising from the push for RSS ubiquity. Scroll down and read the comments as well.

Follow-up to my April 29, 2005 posting: New Justia Web Site Enables Consumers to Easily Track Auto Recalls:

From FirstGov.gov, this U.S. Government RSS Library webpage aggregates links to a wide range of resources, including news releases, press briefings, transcripts, reports, advisories, statistics and technical documents, in one easy to use location, providing content on the following topical areas:

The current Yahoo! News site has been transformed with this beta that sports a more sophisticated and user-friendly design, layout, and navigation features, using well placed content tabs, as well as more prominent display and organization of sources and time stamp for respective topical news stories. RSS feeds and custom user queries are supported.

"Welcome to the Election Monitor, the BBC News website's campaign weblog. From now until polling day, we will be bringing you first-hand reports from around the country from our team of correspondents, as well as the best of the newspapers, choice morsels from the web, and your e-mails." Also provides an RSS feed.

Syndicating Web Sites with RSS Feeds For Dummies, by Ellen Finkelstein.

From the WSJ's Free Features today, New Web-Watching Tools Pique Interest of Investors.

RSS: Moving Into the Mainstream, by Randy Reichardt, Cameron Science and Technology Library, University of Alberta.

The Google Codewebsite ("Google's place for Open Source software") indicates the launch on March 17 of two RSS feeds: "the updates feed and the featured program feed, in which we pick a great app that uses some Google tool or api."

Press release, February 16, 2005: "Secretary of State Matt Brown today unveiled a groundbreaking web data-sharing initiative, which will give citizens and Rhode Island government agencies real-time, ongoing access to the databases maintained by his office. RSSonate...was developed to provide easy access to constantly updated data, which users can then use to create customized information. For example, users will have constant, real-time access to databases listing such information as who is lobbying at the State House and which businesses have incorporated in the state. At the same time, users will have the power to generate information by combining data from separate databases. For example, users would be able to create a data feed letting them know if there are any lobbyists who incorporated a new business."

"Welcome to the Nooked RSS Directory (beta). You can search for corporate RSS feeds by keyword or browse the categories below. If you publish corporate RSS feeds, you can submit them to our directory." [Moonwatcher]

AP currently has 13 newsfeeds.

There are two feeds available via this Microsoft PressPass RSS Feeds link: Microsoft PressPass - Press Releases and Microsoft PressPass - Top Stories.

The Financial Times and The Economist now provide RSS feeds. The Financial Times requires a subscription to portions of its respective content, so be aware that the newsfeeds will be likewise restricted if you are not a subscriber. The paper is currently offering links to 14 content areas on this webpage. The Economist has two rather limited feeds, one to the print edition table of contents (weekly) and one to stories published by Global Agenda (weekdays). [via NevOn]

From SIDEWALK/theory, a continually updated guide to the RSS feeds provided by national and local newspapers, which currently comprises an alphabetical list of 73 titles.

Always Fresh: Fast Content For Library Web Site with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) [Slides PDF], by Darlene Fichter:

From PubSub, news that they are tracking over 8 million blogs. This represents a huge increase within the past year in the number of blogs now available. Along with this increased visibility, ethical concerns about blog content.

Almost a decade ago, PointCast was a cutting edge "push technology" that streamed updated, cutomized news feeds to your desktop. I sure liked it, although it routinely crashed my PC. Fast forward, and here is new twist on the application, from Yahoo.

Microsoft is done beta testing MSN search, and it is now "offically" live.

New Scientist provides a roster of RSS feeds (in a choice of Atom, RSS, XML and RDF), on breaking news, topical areas including Info-Tech, Health, and Being Human, as well as a range of special reports such as Motoring Technology (my favorite), Electronic Threats, and Climate Change. While you are on the site, take the time to read this fascinating article, Hockney 'was wrong' over art copying claim, which refutes the famous contemporary artist's theory that 17th century masters used optical devices to achieve the realism in their paintings.

News feeds now available include: the magazine's Table of contents (current issue), News Summaries, This Week in Science, Editors' Choice, NetWatch, and ScienceNOW daily headlines. [Link to the complete newsfeeds' list]

"Yahoo! Finance is now offering company news feeds in the RSS format. Using the RSS URL Generator (located on this page), you can construct the URL you'll need to subscribe to news about your favorite companies."

The RSS feed for Food and Drug Administration Recalls, Market Withdrawals and Safety Alerts is http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/rssRecalls.xml.

From Justin Pfister, this new site "Converts News.Google to RSS." Create a search query, indicate the number of entries to return (from 5-100) and see if it works for you.

From Wired, RSS Edges Into the Bureaucracy.

ABC News unveiled a completely new design for its website, which includes the use of XHTML web publishing standards, and enhanced features for users (such as Flash and RSS). The changes are extensively documented in this posting by Mike Davidson, a consultant on the project. A very interesting read. [via Andy Baio's Hot Links]

In his September 27 posting on the Yahoo! Search Blog, Scott Gatz from the My Yahoo! Team details the new RSS features incorporated in the redesigned My Yahoo! beta release.

From WebProNews, via Search Engine Guide, this update that RocketInfo, a terrific news portal, has added a feature allowing users to create RSS feeds for specific searches.

Current DefenseLINK RSS News feeds:

Blogs: The Marketing Killer. This article reviews how major corporates are leveraging blogs and RSS feeds for marketing, collaboration and current awareness monitoring.

Jeremy Wagstaf's briefly annotated list of RSS Readers includes useful reader comments and suggestions about several applications that may be new to you. Take a look.

Tara (Research Buzz) is just terrific. See her posting today on keyword-specific RSS feeds from headlinenews.com. This type of feature is also available from FindForward (formulate a query and choose "Get RSS" from the drop-down menu, and you will be provided with a url to enter into your aggregator), and Topix.net (after you have generated your search query, scroll down to the orange XML icon on the left hand side of the page to obtain the url for your aggregator).

RSS Feeds: NPR News and Information Delivered to Your Desktop

Today's WSJ has another article on blogs (that's two this month!), Law Professor's Web Log Is Jurists' Must-Read

The implementation of RSS by InfoWorld.com has caused a significant increase in hourly traffic to the site which has resulted in "some aggravating scaling issues," according to the site's CTO. [Hot Links]

"Free RSS feeds - Now you can access Alexa's Hot Search Terms, Movers & Shakers, or Top Sites with RSS." [Link]

From the WSJ Personal Technology site, Blogs Can Help You Cope With Data Overload, If You Manage Them, addresses how newsreaders can help blog aficionados stay current with all the latest postings from a burgeoning community of content. Of note, Bloglines will be adding "unobtrusive Google-style ads to bring in revenue." The author also mentions five popular, topical blogs.

Company Plugs RSS as Alternate to E-Mail Marketing

Ben Hammersley created an RSS FedEx Package Tracker.

The New York Times is now providing 28 topical RSS feeds. Examples include Campaign 2004, Circuits, NYTimes.com Home Page, Technology, and Week in Review.

Rss Readers is a wiki on RSS services, tools and technology. It is an expansive, informative guide with current updates. [via Darlene Fichter]

Experimental Listings of Watches, Warnings, and Advisories by State and Territory:

The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) is now providing 22 RSS feeds for its developer centers. [therssweblog]

From Dave Winer, Really Simple Syndication, Everything a non-tech user needs to know about RSS 2.0.

See this page, and scroll down to locate the list of links provided to 9 different feeds, including Top Stories, Election 2004 and the latest work from TIME's columnists.

Google Blogoscoped reported on a useful new service from the search engine FindForward that allows you to enter search terms and then request that results be provided to you via an RSS feed.

J.D. Lasica evaluates a range of news readers and other related productivity enhancing applications, RSS news services, and links to newsfeeds from prominent and reliable sources.

Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?

From the Overview portion of a report issued by the E-government Unit, State Services Commission (New Zealand), A standard for the publication of government news summaries.

"An experimental convertor that takes a Google News search and turns it into RSS" from Julian Bond at Voidstar resulted in a cease and desist response from Google.

The Future Of News: The Digital Information Librarian.

Jenny Levine and Steven Cohen's 110 page pdf presentation, from the 2004 Computers in Libraries conference.

RSSTop55 - Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites

From Dave Winer's blog, this posting proposes a series of talking points on the possible merger of the RSS and Atom syndication formats.

Amazon.com Syndicated Content now provides users with the option of receiving product updates in hundreds of categories on "the top 10 bestsellers in that category," via RSS feeds.

How To Speed-Read the Net - Ditch your browser—RSS makes surfing for news a joy.

How To Speed-Read the Net - Ditch your browser—RSS makes surfing for news a joy.

Find That Feed allows users to located RSS feeds by key word search request, "Search for a feed whose name is like..."

Find That Feed allows users to located RSS feeds by key word search request, "Search for a feed whose name is like..."

From the LA Times, via BizReport, Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing:

From the LA Times, via BizReport, Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing:

Blogger, purchased by Google last year, will implement the Atom syndication publishing format, rather than RSS, the widely known application with a larger user base and significant associated documentation.

From the RSSWinterfest blog, links to some useful resources on RSS:

This wiki-weblog has dozens of annotated resources and links to RSS readers, including those for use on PDAs, Linux, Mac and Windows.

From Declan McCullagh, Spam blockers may wreak e-mail havoc, and a series of informative postings (all available at this one link) at his Politechbot.com site, on spam blacklists/blocklists.

In related news, see also:

Danny Sullivan presents Part II of his review of RSS services and applications that facilitate access to the continuously expanding world of news, blogs and topical information. He recommends several RSS search engines, including Feedster and rssSearch. Part I of his article is available here and lists examples of news aggregators and how to use them effectively.

OCLC Research announcements are now available via RSS 2.0.

RSS: Gateway to News and Blog Content, Part 1
This column examines how content from blogs, news sites, and other sources is distributed via RSS feeds. Feeds are a great way for anyone to receive customized new information from a growing number of sources.

Via Slashdot, here is a new search engine for RSS feeds, whose name was briefly Roogle, but currently remains nameless so as to deflect a trademark issue.

J.D. Lasica, blogger and senior editor for the Online Journalism Review, details the advantages of the increasingly popular free and fee-based news aggregator applications in News That Comes to You. These programs allow researchers who are suffering from information overload to scan headlines chosen from among thousands of news feeds that use RSS (Rich Site Summary) tags.