Nine Down, 18 To Go

OK, I'm feeling the pressure now. I came in to work today with the intent of knocking off several "things" on my list of outstanding things but I'm only at number 9 and, truthfully, I didn't give this one my all, either.

The assignment was to familiarize myself with feeds in general, and to look at feeds from my library, CNN, and some other sites. I was also supposed to give the feeds search at Bloglines a whirl. I did that. I first searched for news feeds using the term "public libraries". Somewhat interesting results. The first feed in the results list was a feed of podcasts from public libraries. I can use that and I might even subscribe to the feed. Next was a feed listing the adult videos at Santa Cruz PL. I don't think that one is what it sounds like but it's kind of funny. There were also a few feeds from the Learning 2.0 projects at several libraries. Overall, I wasn't overwhelmed. Either a didn't use the search correctly or the search doesn't work that well because I know there are more public library-related feeds than those I got on my results.

Next, I tried searching for feeds using the term "public administration" (a personal interest of mine). The results were, this time, a little better but still not terribly enlightening. Mostly, I got feeds from public administration journals monthly tables of contents. This is pretty cool for the avid reader (professors or students, for example) but it is something I about which I was already aware.

What I've done in the past that was a little more useful was to use Google Alerts to compile news stories from across the country on a given topic. Maybe I just constructed a better search that time or maybe Google Alerts works better; I don't know. But I do know that I'm still more inclined to use Google Alerts over a Bloglines feed search if I have a need for such a thing.