What’s Hot in RSS & Social Software
by: Steven Cohen

tinyurl.com/ILwhatshot

Readers:
Not much new for readers
Being advanced, added some things, but no new readers

Feedly:
add-on to Google Reader
added stuff on, different format to feeds
can tweet right from the reader

Firefox reader: just didn’t work out

Google Reader and Bloglines are the two big readers

Google Reader is becoming the more popular reader now
Notes feature–can share feed with others and a note who subscribes to your shared items
Email feature too
Trends feature: fun statistics, can see how much reading done on the mobile, “most obscure”=what you subscribe to and no one else does
Search your reader items–pretty cool, like searching your own little newspaper
Can also read off-line through Google Gears

Cool stuff now: Lifestreaming
Bringing it all together
Tumblr
can RSS the feed from Tublr, allows you to use any URL you own in addition to using a tumblr domain

friendfeed
made by same person who did Gmail (rock on!)
another lifestream application

RSS Tools
Feed Sidebar (Firefox extension: reader on the left side of your browser)
Libworm (database of library oriented feeds, blogs–so cool! can get the feed of your search)
Techmeme
YouTube (can RSS to feeds from YouTube; good to see how libraries are marketing themselves)
Twitter Search (can RSS the feed too–IL2008 is on the top of twitter search right now)
OpenCongress (track any federal legislation, congressmen, etc. through RSS)
JustiaDockets (can see federal filings, anytime a company is sued get through RSS–push it out to your clients)
Ebay (use a third party site to get RSS feed)
delicious (subscribe to tags, other users) follow tag “tools”
Google Blogs Search (can run your blog URL through it)

No RSS? Get a feed from a page
Page 2 RSS (use to get an RSS from any page–really any static page–rock on, only updates once a day)
Update Scanner (Firefox extension, allows you to keep up to date with any page, will scan for updates (you set the scanning settings) highlights new stuff–cool!)

Use RSS to let people in organization know that you are around

Staying Current
WWWhatsnew (keep up, but in Spanish–can get it translated)
Database RSS feeds for your search (I love these)

Know who your FLOs are (Friends of the Library): they are the best marketing for your library

Screengrab (Firefox extension–screencap only part of the screen that you want)

Missing Auctions (now at Invisible-Auctions.com–looks for all the misspellings of a word on ebay)

Note: This was a totally fun session. Great presenter and very funny! People videoing it and twittering it live!

Take Home Message:
RSS can be used for more than you think! Check out some of these cool tools that you can use in your work and for fun!